The environment around us is changing rapidly--and I'm not talking about global warming. Science and technology are empowering people to radically reshape our mediascape as well as our social and political discourses, the very framework of our society. If you doubt that, just look at the difference between the world today and the world as it was fifty, a hundred, or five-hundred years ago.
Before technology allowed a substantial increase in economic development, the communications, social, and political paradigms in which we currently operate weren't even possible. The lives of our ancestors took place in a context that would seem alien to us if we were to experience it firsthand. What we take for granted as simply "the way things are" isn't as permanent as we often tend to assume from our temporally provincial perspectives.
The lives of college students in Iowa City today are so fantastical in their oddity that our acceptance of them as normal serves to drive home my point about us being generally unable to think outside of our immediate context, beyond the narrow horizons visible from our historical vantage point. Students use the Internet for almost everything--from communicating with their parents back home almost instantaneously and at virtually no cost to reading scholarly papers that would have required days or weeks of effort to obtain only a decade or two ago after only entering a few well-chosen key words in Google Scholar and clicking a mouse button.
Rather than having to struggle for our daily sustenance, we face an epidemic of obesity, brought on by an historically unbelievable bounty of cheap calories. As opposed to learning the skills we need to survive directly from our relatives and passing them on largely unchanged to our descendants, we study new scientific disciplines that our professors have forged for themselves over the course of their careers.
The world we inhabit today would have been scoffed at as implausible science fiction if it had been accurately and in detail described to the average person in 1958, a mere fifty years ago. And it's hard for me to imagine it could have appeared to be anything other than a demented fever dream if it had been foreseen in a vision by an average inhabitant of 1508. Of course these same points are equally valid when applied to the differences between any historical eras.
We have every reason to believe the same will continue to be true in the future. The evidence that the pace of technological/scientific/legal/political/social change has accelerated over time is quite strong--as is the evidence that this acceleration remains ongoing today. Therefore, it likely won't take until 2058 for the world to develop into a place that would seem to us today to belong in a science fiction novel. Likewise, it's unlikely for it to take until 2508 for the world to evolve into a state that we wouldn't be able to accept it as reality even if we could see it.
Consider the following quotation:
"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." — Eric Hoffer
In order to be good writers and journalists, we must cup our hands over our eyes and strain to stare as far into the distance as is possible. Rather than getting bogged down in the banal headlines in the papers today, we need to think long and hard about what will be relevant tomorrow and in the coming years of our lives.
The opinions pieces and columns that will be of interest beyond the week in which they are printed are the ones that will have the biggest impact. And isn't that why we're doing this? If not out of a desire to shape public discourse and policy, then for what purpose do we write?
In order to succeed we need to cultivate our abilities to learn new ideas and skills constantly. If we fail to do so, we will be left behind along with our outdated tools--like spoken-word storytellers whose lessons have been transcribed and thus transcended the need for their originators or bewildered scribes frantically scribbling away as the new printing presses bury them in copy. But those who are able to keep up will not only have the ability to continue to compete in their chosen media market, they will also always have plenty of material to write about, to bring to the attention of everyone else.
A writer's ability to pull coherent, nontrivial insights out of the deluge of data with which the Information Age has flooded our consciousnesses is her most important skill. Mere transcription isn't particularly valuable now that distributing information is so cheap and easy. Analysis is the value we add to our articles--and it's about the only thing we can reasonably expect to get paid for doing as journalists.
Obviously, it's impossible for any one person to keep track of all the important developments going on throughout the world today--they're just coming too hard and too fast. But we do need to pay close enough attention to a sufficiently broad spectrum of information sources to be able to see how developments in the areas in which we are experts interconnect with the world at large. It's the only way to be sure what we write is truly worth reading--the only way to move beyond telling people what happened today and into the realm of making plausible arguments about what those events will mean to people in coming years.
To sum up, it keeps getting easier to find out what's happening now and harder to ascertain what will happen next. Therefore, providing current data will continue to become less valuable as a service whereas analyzing the implications of that data will continue to become more valuable.
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