An event occurred in October 2015 which will cast a long shadow over the work of journalism and the jobs of journalists.  Associated Press (AP) had been testing a piece of software which generated stories from the quarterly reports issued by listed companies.  These reports flood out four times a year and AP wanted a fast method of getting the news on the wires.  It had already implemented a software which can generate pyramid-style stories from this highly structured data; but it had also maintained a further stage in the process whereby human being were called on to check the stories generated by the software.  In October 2015, however, AP ceased taking this extra step. The software would do it all: no human interaction at all.  No salaries; no holidays; no maternity or paternity leave; no sick leave; 24-hours a day the software can produce pyramid stories reporting on the financial results which are seemingly indistinguishable from human output.

Computers take out “computers”

This is not the first time computers have taken over the jobs of humans.  The first time computers took over human jobs was the job of the “computers”, i.e. people who did the thousands of small calculations for scientific or technical applications on hard-cranked calculators.  Computers, the electronic type, could do this faster and more accurately.

In business the first application in the UK was the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) computer in 1951.  LEO did the bakery valuations application.  The application was first run on September 5 and took over the job without manual checking on November 29 1951.  Later other jobs were developed for LEO including the payroll.  Lyons even ran the payroll for other companies such as Ford Motor Company in 1956.  There went the jobs of wages clerks.

The starting point for the application of electronic computers to human jobs was Alan Turing’s 1936 paper. ‘On computable numbers.’  In it Turning devised a theoretical machine to solve a problem in mathematics.  He also showed that any mathematical problem which could be reduced into an algorithm, a series of logical steps, could be loaded onto this theoretical machine.

Theory to practice

Turning turned theory into practice while working at Bletchley, using the Colossus machine to help crack German military codes; then at the National Physical Laboratory and afterwards at Manchester University.

The more computing power there was, the faster algorithms could run and therefore extend the range of jobs for which the computer could be used, tackling more complex jobs which would run in a time to make the application practical.

Leo, Colossus and early computers depended upon the technologies developed by the radio and telecommunications industries.   With the coming of integrated circuits, the computer industry started to replace single transistors with its own technology.

In 1965 Gordon Moore,  a leading integrated circuit engineer,  showed that the integrated circuit industry had doubled the number of integrated transistors on the same area of silicone every year.  Later he revised this to every two years. More components on the same piece of silicone means faster computing: faster computing brings in applications which can be run as long as they have an algorithm and the time in which they run makes them practical.  As the chips get smaller then they need less power until they can be run by battery and be mobile.  As long as the computer can run the algorithm fast enough, it becomes a practical application.

Finite limits

The power of computer technology is not ever-increasing.  There are finite limits to integration: it is just that semiconductor engineers have found ways to achieve Moore’s law, which was not originally a prediction but an observation of what the engineers were able to do in the early days of integration.   There are other types of processor technology now available in the form of quantum mechanics which offer even faster processing speeds than conventional electronics.

As the price of computing fell and continues to fall and the speed increased and continues to increase, so layer after layer of human labour could be transferred to computing: it became practical to do so and, more importantly, profitable.   Employers sought out bottlenecks in production processes and tackled them in turn, starting with simple jobs and going onto the more complex ones as prices fell and speed increased.  The bottleneck in the newspaper industry was the process of composing  in hot metal.  Most journalists looked the other way as the jobs of compositors were automated and the bargaining power of compositors was crushed.  Today journalists cannot look away from the forward march of automation since it is their jobs which are now on the line.

Humans using the tools developed by humans

This is not to say that there is an inevitable technological determination about this process.  It is, after all, humans seeking to improve productivity and/or improve profitability by the application of technologies created by humans.   And not all the applications are successful.  There are many well documented IT disasters in the public sector where the algorithms where not sufficiently robust and/or the processing power fast enough to create a successful application.  There are just as many failures in the private sector, but they mainly remain private. Not so in the financial sector, where there has been a litany of much-publicised IT disasters. For example, a group of academics and traders called Long Term Capital Management thought they had developed a piece of software to play – and beat – the market. But they were wrong-footed, and their fund exploded, when the rules of the financial trading game change after a slump in Russian capital values in 1998.

The steps to computerisation

The process of transferring some aspect of human labour into computing takes several steps.  First it has to be identified as a bottleneck: this is in business applications where consultants come in.  They regularly review the labour process to seek out these bottlenecks.  Then the software has to be created for the application.  This often involves reviewing what the labour process is and transferring it into software.  Often this involves the collaboration of the very human labourers themselves who will eventually be replaced by the application, if successful.

There are always limits to what the software can do.  In the AP application the stories are routinely generated from standardised data contained in company financial reports.   These quarterly reports from publically-listed companies are accompanied by a long document which the US Securities and Exchange Commission requires for every quarterly announcement: it is called the 10Q form.  It includes the structured data of the financial report but also long passages of text which describe and analyse the context behind these financial results.  Software cannot yet drill down into these reports to get exclusive stories: it can only do the mundane task of writing a pyramid story from the numbers.   For some years to come, it will take humans to do the analysis.

We can begin to see, therefore, where journalists as human workers can fit into the new pattern of “content generation.”  Software can do the mundane task of generating stories from highly structured data.  Humans must continue to do the analysis.  For now.

We have seen that the application of computing is not a single event but a process depending on the ability of humans to identify bottlenecks and exploit the technology then available.    What was not (previously) possible to transfer to computers, (eventually) becomes possible.  For example, artificial intelligence (AI) applications can now mimic the reasoning of humans and provide mechanisms for f taking human reasoning into the world of computing.   According to Wired magazine, some financial traders are already using AI to make all of their trades, without human intervention.  This is an area where speed is essential to catch the price at the right level during the trading period.   As early as 2010 researchers at New York University estimated that over 50 percent of all trades on US stock markets were driven by software (Quant Congress).

Associated Press (AP) developed its quarterly reporting system because speed was essential.  The analytical side of the process of reporting, currently left to humans, is not yet so time-critical.  There will come a time when it is, and then it will be a candidate for the application of AI to what remains of the human involvement in financial reporting.  If the many prophets of AI are right then all human intelligence could, at some time in the future with the continued development of computing power, be transferred to algorithms.  These could then be captured in software and then run on hardware.

Does this mean that human journalism is just a long rear guard action of retreat in the face of the computerisation of journalism?

Forty-seven percent of employment at risk

In 2013 Frey and Osborne, two Oxford academics, plotted out the likelihood of jobs being computerised.  They used the US labour market classifications of 702 job titles.  They used a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation of those jobs.  According to their estimates, 47% of total US employment is at risk.  Here is an extract from their full table focusing on the jobs which are in journalism or close to journalism.

Jobs in or close to journalism with their probability of computerisation

Source: Frey and Osborne (2013)

In this table the least likely roles to be computerised are PR and fund raising managers.   The probability of the editor’s job being computerised is 0.055.  Reporters and correspondents are at 0.11.  Court reporters are at 0.5.  Outside of journalism the least likely to be computerised are recreational therapists with a probability of 0.0028.  The most likely to be computerised, say Frey and Osborne, are telemarketers with a probability of 0.99.

Frey and Osborne refer to further research by Goos and Manning (2007), entitled ‘Lousy and Lovely Jobs’, because it “captures the essence of the current trend towards labour market polarization, with growing employment in high-income cognitive jobs and low-income manual occupations, accompanied by a hollowing-out of middle-income routine jobs.”

In other words, don’t be in the middle where computerisation is more likely to take over the job.

Social intelligence

A major factor which stems the march of computerisation is the employment of humans of social intelligence, Frey and Osborne observe.  They do not define social intelligence but give some examples.  These include creativity, perception and manipulation, negotiation skills and persuasion skills.  Social intelligence relies on our human understanding of each other, our empathy and our ability to use what we call “common sense”.   In other words, being human in a human society.

From all of this we can tease out where the humans may be able to flourish or at least survive in journalism, even in the context of the long march of software.

We can flourish where we have the social intelligence which software currently does not have.  Where we can empathise: to interview people in different situations.  Where we can negotiate for the access to people and data to make our stories.  Where we understand the complexity of the world and are able to capture the vital parts of that complexity and present it to our audiences.

Where we can be

We should avoid being in the middle of any labour process: either be an editor or do a job which software cannot deal with because it means dealing with the complexity of people.

Avoid the routine: the more the job of journalists is a routine, one of creating content from the content given to them, the more vulnerable they are.

Be analytical: some forms of developing AI can do this but they are dependent on vast amounts of data and a large amount of computing power, even at today’s speed and prices.

We can anticipate the future of journalism produced by humans in two ways: by looking at the processes of journalism, on the one hand; and on the other hand, by looking at the types of journalism.

With regard to editorial processes, we can review the skills (the things we can do), the knowledge (the things we know), the attitudes (how we normally see things), and the habits (how we regularly do things), of the job of the human journalists, and see where our strengths and weaknesses are.

We have the skills of writing.  Computers can do this as long as the journalism they generate is of a regular pattern.  We will have to give up the ground of the pyramid story to the computer.  But we have other ways of writing, in long and short form which will take AI  a long time to capture.  We have, for example,  the drop lead story with its quirky or anecdotal opening and varied structure.  Only a deep knowledge of the human reader allows us to employ these and other forms of ‘non-standard’ journalism.

For the moment, we have a monopoly on the skill of interviewing, although AI systems can engage in conversations with humans and gather information, and they may soon be programmed to ‘look’ for a story just as the human journalist does when interviewing.

Then there is our knowledge.  Computers have more information than a human does.  But information is not knowledge.  Knowledge is information with meaning.  At the moment human journalists have the edge here.  We have our social intelligence to give information meaning.

AI systems can only acquire attitude when it is programmed into them. Humans have attitudes as a result of the experience of our social lives as formulated into our social intelligence.

In the area of habits the computer seems to beat the human every time.   It can repeat the same thing without tiring and in the same way every time.  But that does not allow for the mutation of habits which is part of our human development as humans and as individuals.  The capacity both to maintain habits and make a judgment on when such habits need to be adjusted – again, our humanity gives us the advantage.

Human senses

Humans have senses.  Computers can “see” through cameras.  They can “hear” through microphones.   They can “speak” through loudspeakers.  But they cannot enjoy the smell of the flowers, the taste of a crisp and chilled white wine, or the touch of the hand of your lover.   There is no enjoyment nor sorrow in a computer, only the simulation of them.   Here, maybe, is our final advantage.   AI is, is after all, artificial intelligence, not artificial feeling or emotion.   What may seem to be weakness on our part may turn out to be a strength.

Now we can look at some of the types of journalism to see where human action is still, to some extent, required.  I cannot yet predict how fast the computerisation of journalism will develop.  This depends much more on the economic issues – costs versus rewards – as it does on the availability of the technology.  There will be areas where computerisation could be used but the investment is not available.  And there will be times when the computerisation of journalism is set back because it produces such absurd stories that its advocates flinch from pressing forward.  These will come, I think, as computerised journalism enters the areas social intelligence is needed to make sense of the story and AI, lacking in social intelligence, proves unable to do the job. But the boundaries will not stay the same forever; already some pioneers are seeking to press beyond existing limitations.

Ten types of journalism

I use 10 types of journalism and judge them to be either highly susceptible to computerisation, through to moderately susceptible and down to hardly susceptible.  This is not based on a mathematical model as used by Frey and Osborne but on the arguments above about the qualities (and current limitations) of computerised journalism.

It is clear already that the creation of stories from structured data in a pyramid form is highly susceptible to computerisation.  Employers will seek to lower costs and increase speed  of publication, so they will increasingly target this form of journalism.

Equally the ability of AI to sift through large amounts of data rapidly using different approaches will mean that any investigative journalism requiring the discovery of patterns in large data sets is ripe for computerisation.

These would seem to be the first available targets.

The next big target in journalism may well be the reporting of structured events, i.e. events which are structured in much the same way as data is structured.   Any game played by a set of rules is susceptible to computerised journalism, as long it is reported in a pyramid style.  This includes the reporting of sporting events or of court procedures, hence court reporting is high on the list of the types of journalism identified by Frey and Osborne with a 0.5 probability of being subject to AI.

Photo journalism is already subject to technology.  Drones are used to gather images.  But photo journalists with a camera are able to “see” the best shot and to frame it using their social intelligence to tell them where the human action is.   Drones can use cameras to farm images but humans are needed to select the telling image.  Thus the area of photo journalism is a medium term target for computerisation.

Unpredictable events, even if reported in a pyramid style, are harder to computerise: low predictability makes for low risk of computerisation. Conversely, if AI can create patterns which make such events more predictable, then they become more susceptible to computerisation.

A lot of journalism today is reviewing of products and services.  Since this form of journalism is largely dependent on the prior experience which the reviewer deploys as the basis for comparison and evaluation experience, the possibility of computerisation is low.

There are four areas of journalism which have a very low susceptibility to computerisation: interviewing, investigative journalism based on interviewing, commenting and the journalism of self-expression.

The key skill of interviewing depends on the interaction of the journalist and their human subject.   AI systems can mimic the role of humans in conversations but they only mimic it; they do not include the intelligence to focus on what the story is which unfolds in an interview.  Yet.

As a result the forms of investigative journalism which depend on interviewing humans, also have a low susceptibility to computerisation.

Writing comment in editorial and in analytical pieces is well beyond the power of AI at the moment.

Finally, and here is an irony for many professional journalists, the journalism of self-expression, the journalism of emotion, the journalism which entails the journalist’s own experience, is very low on the radar for computerisation. It is technically possible for AI systems to generate this type of journalism, but it seems that readers, listeners and viewers need the human being behind the expression to give it validation.  At the moment.

Ten forms of journalism and their susceptibility to computerisation

There is an eleventh form of journalism which, I think, has a very low susceptibility to computerisation:  headline writing.  What software could come up with such beauties as “Shit hits fan” when Eric Cantona dropped kicked a fan taunting him?  What software could come up with another gem when the Italian designer Versace was killed: “Shoots you, sir!” was a punning eference to a running gag in The Fast Show.  The amount of social intelligence needed to make human  readers, listeners and viewers smile at a good headline is so vast that it may take a very long time before software can write such headlines.  Summary headlines, yes, but gems like these, no.

An answer

I asked above, and did not answer the question: is this to be a long retreat in the face of the computerisation of journalism?  Retreat is the wrong military analogy: instead we should see this as a protracted asymetrical guerrilla war in which we human journalists use the tactics of the flexible power of scattered forces against a massed army.   We will stand where we can but our labour organisations are so weak that we will be defeated, not by the technology itself, but by our employers and the way they deploy it against us.

Journalists have few allies

We journalists do not have many allies, if any at all, in this struggle.  I am not sure that our readers, listeners and viewers, on the whole, mind if they are consuming the journalism of humans or of software.   They do not seem to care that a growing volume of journalism is only content marketing to boost brands.  Some readers, listeners and viewers will and they will follow their favourite human journalists.  But most will not.

Some people will benefit from these developments.  Employers and the shareholders of content generation companies who can exploit these developments will find their profits higher and their productivity soaring as humans are replaced.   Areas of publishing currently under threat because they are loss-making may again become profitable.  AI development companies will also benefit.  So will consultants and those providing the processing power and storage capacity.

So we journalists need to move and keep moving.  Move from the areas most threatened at the moment to areas where our humanity counts more than the speed, low price and accuracy of software journalism.  Move to new areas as yet unexplored which we can innovate in our human practice as journalists.  I cannot yet predict exactly where those areas are, but we shall find them and we shall survive, certainly not in the numbers we are now but with the best values we can have as humans.   I do not want the conclusion to this manifesto to be a wishy-washy assertion of human values; instead it should be a project to project our human values into journalism.  These values include empathy with the subjects of our journalism and the objects of journalism: to communicate with other humans.

We have become used to machines which can lift weights we cannot, to machines which can move faster than we can, to machines which can calculate faster than we can, which can make an image more accurate than we can draw or paint it.  Our humanity is none the less for that. We can lift weights to improve our body shapes rather than to carry a sack of coal.   We can enjoy the experience of a walk despite the existence of fast cars.  We can stretch out our understanding of the world using the speed of calculation afforded by technology.  Remember how we shifted to other forms of expression or representation once photography took hold of the portrait.

I think I have given ample evidence of what we human journalists need to do to sustain our role in journalism, even though the encroachment of software journalism is not under our control.

This manifesto is based on senior lecturer Richard Sharpe’s closing comments at the UEL Future of Journalism seminar in May 2016.

References

Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007), ‘Lousy and lovely jobs: The rising polarization of work in Britain,’ The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 118–133

Frey, CB, and Osborne, MA, (2013) The Future of Employment: How susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?, available at: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf, viewed on 3/7/2016

We have always been narcissistic: the Internet only allows us to express this side of ourselves more easily. If the cave men had Instagram they would have been posting selfies too, and updating the world on their latest cave paintings.

The problem for journalism is how to connect with a generation which does narcissism to the max, without allowing itself to be reduced to the same level. After all, interest in other people – rather than ourselves – must be one of the defining characteristics of journalism, right?

The latest in the selfie trend is the chelfie. This is taking selfies in shop changing room mirrors, and uploading them to get instant approval before buying a new outfit. Head designer and creative director of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, has even put iPads in the flagship Chanel store so all visitors can take chelfies.

A recent survey published on WGSN, the leading trend forecaster, shows that the amount of chelfie posts on Twitter has doubled in the last three months. Women wait for an average of three likes before making a purchase, and men wait for at least four; but some admit they won’t make the purchase if it gets less than 10 likes.

People always want opinions on what they are buying and this is just the latest way of getting them – before the chelfie, they would ask the opinion of the shop assistants and whoever they were out shopping with. The chelfie is just doing this but on a much larger scale – asking the opinions of people from all around the world in seconds.

Pollpic is an app that has been inspired by the chelfie trend. It allows you to simply take a chelfie and put it to the vote of friends and the public.

But when people start dying while trying to take the perfect selfie it should be proof that the obsession has gone too far.

Phoebe Luckhurst’s article ‘From tragic selfie deaths to instagramming on the go- its official, vanity has gone viral’, talks about how Instagram has made everyone narcissistic, but in reality if they did not self-advertise on that particular platform, they would just find another way of doing it.

People take selfies as a way to showcase their lives. The likes give you more self-confidence and can make you feel like you are living your life in the right way.
People are trying to fill the social media norm of making their lives look extraordinary, they will spend ages looking for the perfect angle and perfect lighting. But because everyone knows how long they spend doing, this it is not as impressive. We are all just living in a false reality.

You can make yourself and your life look better, because you have control and you can take the photo as many times as you want, without having to bother other people. Then you can pick the perfect filter and crop the photo to hide your imperfections. You have control over how your life looks; you only post the photos on Instagram that you want other people to see.

But has it gone too far? You no longer have to talk to your friends and tell them what you are doing because they will see it online. This is fine up to a certain point, but Instagram shouldn’t stop us socialising in the real world.

The important thing for everyone to remember in this selfie-chelfie world, is that you are not defined by the amount of likes you get.

Something else for journalists to think about, is that the chelfie – however self-indulgent – is also a mirror to the times; chelfies reveal the needs, desires and above all the anxieties of millions of people. Taken together, therefore, they also provide documentation of who we are and what we are worried about. So it’s up to journalists to find a way of using the chelfie as a resource for describing and understanding the times we live in.

I mean, that is journalism’s job, isn’t it?

Social media offer us escapism, an opportunity to escape physical reality and instead live in the digital world; a world of endless bragging and showing-off. Yet social media did not create the desire in us to be seen and heard. That desire has always been present, and now, with the advent of social media, there is further fuel for it. As one critic suggests, our already-narcissistic generation has been given ‘a platform through which we can inflate our egos even more’ (McAuliffe; 2014). And this, in turn, has intensified our need for validation.

In some ways, we are liberated but in other ways we are disempowered: we feel important or valued only when our looks are complimented or given the online seal of approval. And if the need for validation has always existed, the need for constant validation from an infinite number of strangers is surely unprecedented.

The funny thing is that most people are not the same on social media as they are in the rest of their lives. Our social media personas are always more illustrious and famous than their ‘real life’ counterparts. With social media we are able to present the best sides of ourselves, through the content we tweet or the pictures we post. We use filters to edit out our imperfections (or to accentuate the parts of us we do like); and we can’t do that so readily in reality.

To be honest, I’m a social media addict myself. I just can’t live without Instagram and Snapchat. I can press that one button and magically my pics are uploaded for the world to see. Not only have I gotten myself obsessed with the selfie culture but I also like to exhibit my latest gadgets, my new iPhone or my new Dr Dre beats. Materialism has never so easily celebrated as it is now.

Its saddens me to think that people might be losing the capacity for direct interaction. It is possible that we are slowly becoming more isolated and lonely as a result of this virtual world which we just can’t get enough of.

Perhaps we should do more to remind ourselves that vanity is only OK up to a certain point – a point which many of us may already have exceeded.

Awareness – you always have to be aware of everything and anything. You have to sell your soul to be famous, but the celebrities you follow on Instagram are all so glamorous. Aren’t you tempted? Wouldn’t we all like to be ‘almost famous’ in 2015?

‘Famous’ is your ticket out of the juxtaposition we all live in. A pretend-reality composed of equal parts digital displays, saturated food and happiness pills. Nothing is really real anymore. And yet it’s all documented on social media – we’ve never been more real. Look, the selfies are the evidence! But even all that the evidence isn’t re-assuring or calming. Teenage angst is a habit supported by ‘likes’ and ‘hits’.

The millennials are ruthless. These are the people alien to CDs, yet the same people have caused a resurrection of the ‘oh so dead’ vinyl market. That is the power of this daze. To look back at the old, yet marvellously blind at times – about our own times. Our new-found ability to scroll has given us the luxury of learning from not only our parents, but a much wider range of historical failure.

You aren’t learning from your own mistakes, simply because you can’t afford to make them. With the power of the World Wide Web comes responsibility. Knowledge is key and you can no longer rely on your own ignorance. ‘I didn’t know,’ will not get you anywhere. Just Google it.

This generation could have been the riot generation, and maybe it is. ‘What do you stand for?’ is a common question, all but asking for a manifesto. In 2015, it is not enough just to look alluring. You have to have an awareness. Where social media are the new streets, hashtags define a new brand of rioting. #FreeTheNipple and #BlackLivesMatters, tweet it, blog it, snap it. If it is not on Instagram, did it even happen?

Social media are saints and sinners all at once. The cost of this second virtual reality (because now even ‘the meat’ has been virtualised) is the crushing weight of impossible expectations. The corporations cash in on your misery; popping Zoloft is your causality…and you easily become a casualty.  Chemical happiness has taken over, and if you are not drugged up enough and are actually having a good time, you’d better not show it. You are coolest when you are out of your mind, though you probably would have had just as good a time anywhere worth half the effort.

Though this generation is not based on cynicism, you need a considerable sense of self-irony to survive. The deterministic view that technology drives the changes in society….has a point. But it is not just about smart phones and dumb people. It is bigger, more fluid.

Ditching the raves and acid houses of the 90s for some real good moments, which obviously must be documented on at least two social media platforms, provides the pleasures of pretence and snobbery across more than one dimension. Technology drives the patterns of our increasingly disastrous social life. You’re lucky if you have direct, unmediated experience of some real life insecurity and sadness, or what some might call an edge. The fast-paced reality and virtuality of this generation is brutal. Being a hit for a day will only mean so much until your top-notch achievement is replaced by a viral video of a kitten eating ice cream.

Generation Now is as good and as bad as it can get. The living proof of a world so contradictory it’s on the verge of being schizophrenic. They do have more pills for that though. If we ever reach 30, let us pray some valuable wisdom comes with it, or at least a good hashtag.

In the past, the very idea of a photo with only yourself in it would have seemed boring, strange and somewhat pointless. I myself can remember a time when I did not selfie everything I did along with every place I visited or person I met for brunch. Being a fairly recent phenomenon, I don’t think anybody is all that sure as to the real use of the selfie. For many years my idea of a selfie was the accidental photo you took when trying to take a spontaneous snap and then realising you were using your front facing camera, forever taking myself by surprise. But a selfie is fast becoming something like an art form, a key skill that more and more of us are desperate to perfect. It would appear selfies are taking the nation by storm and don’t seem to be showing any sign of slowing down.

Now, I’m all for taking pictures. I love my collection of spontaneous photographs capturing holidays, events and gatherings. If anything I use my Instagram as a photographic diary, which I and my friends can flick through when feeling sad or nostalgic for…yesterday. Who wouldn’t want to be reminded of all the fun they’ve had? But a selfie? A photo just of yourself, posing? Given the somewhat catastrophic hair days, drunken antics and wild times I’ve had, I’m not all that sure I want to be reminded of what I looked like at various points through the year (and by wild times I mean watching the entire Sex And The City box set in one evening. Yes, wild).

My concern about taking that ‘cheeky selfie’ now and again, is when now and again becomes daily and daily becomes hourly. The confidence-boosting potential and at the same time confidence-shattering nature of social networks, lies in the facility for others to like the content you’re posting. In terms of your selfie, lots of likes are nice, but it’s really dangerous when you begin to use said number of likes to quantify and boost your self- confidence. Similarly, a lack of likes can easily be perceived as representing wavering appreciation and dwindling social acceptance. Suddenly I’m a loser – all decided by one image, taken in a few seconds. Surely not.

It’s also interesting to think about a selfie as a means of representing yourself, showing yourself to the world in the way(s) you want to be seen. You’re in control of the image, after all. But remember, this control only lasts until you press the upload button. For those that spend hours cropping, editing and choosing the perfect filter (blemish-colouring, teeth-whitening and warmth-encouraging), what part of that original selfie is left? Is this the way you see yourself or just the way you’d like people to see you? I’ll put money on the latter, which again shows the increasing pressure on us all to look our best all the time.

So here’s the truth. The number of likes on your latest selfie most definitely does not represent the level at which you are liked; and the trend of taking likes literally is really unfortunate.

Memories are important. It would be naïve of us all to ignore today’s technological advances and not make use of our photo capturing and sharing facilities. Now unlike ever before we are able to capture everything we see and share it with those we love, whether they be sitting next to us on our phone screens or on the other side of the world through their computer screens. If one of those memories is a selfie of you in front of The Statue of Liberty or outside a London bar with the drunken friends whose names escape you, so be it!

But selfies should not be used for self-evaluation. Never should it be down to anyone but yourself to determine how you feel about you. We all have our quirks and differences, our talents and our own personal little niggles; but we are all rather brilliant, individual and unique and have been that way since before the selfie was born!

It’s official – vanity has gone viral, and it’s a killer disease. In the Evening Standard Phoebe Luckhurst relays that more than 12 people have died in 2015 as a result of impromptu selfies and melodramatic pouts. That’s four more fatalities than sharks, she adds, because we’re playing the inconsequential comparisons game.

But let’s get serious. Is it our own narcissism that is killing the conversation (and ourselves, by the looks of things); or the technology that we hold so dear?

On average, we post over 80 million pictures of cute dogs grinning, muscle-stretched tees and pictures of ‘bae’ to Instagram every day, across 400 million active users. That’s 400 billion photos in total. What we have here isn’t a series of narcissistic episodes but an attachment to social media that is so profoundly embedded in ourselves it’s almost impossible to tweet our way out. But why would we want to escape? Why shouldn’t we want to do this, especially if something like this always been wired into human existence?

The Science

10,000 years ago we would still have been posting selfies. The University of California (UCLA) recently discovered that our brains are naturally wired for interaction and bonding. Researchers found that even when are brains are at our rest, we are preparing to be social – a characteristic that can only be enhanced by twenty-four seven access to the web.

‘The brain has a major system that seems predisposed to get us ready to be social in our spare moments,’ claims Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. ‘The social nature of our brains is biologically based.’

But alongside the idea of the selfie as simply the continuation of socialised self-expression, there is also the notion that social media addiction can be compared to drug abuse. In 2012, researchers from the University of Bergen found that Facebook dependency is linked to the activation of the reward centre in our brain: it can induce changes in brain reward pathways in much the same way as drug addiction.

‘The social nature of the site itself was considered problematic, especially for women, extroverts, and those unable to fall asleep until very late at night (people with a delayed sleep-wake rhythm),’ researchers added.

The study also found that participants were more likely to respond quicker to notifications from their mobile phones, than they were to react to street signals such as traffic lights and stop signs.

Luckily, signs of social media addiction are easy to spot when self-declared addict Emma Power shares her symptoms with the Guardian.

‘You can’t get beyond the main course in a restaurant before you get out your phone and instagram the duck confit,’ Power divulges. ‘In fact, you are itching to snap away by the time the first course arrives’.

‘The very first thing you do when you wake up is reach for your phone (always by the side of your bed, in fact usually under your pillow),’ she continues.

Compromised interactions with a loved one, anthropomorphised references to social media and self-indulgence of likes also make Power’s list of disempoweringly addictive behaviour.

If social media addiction is really a terrifying reality of the twenty first century, what is being done about it? Unsurprisingly, there are already several self-help books online, including: Break Free From Your Social Media Addiction by Realsimple and How to defeat a social networking addiction from Wikihow, both opting for the cards down approach: acknowledge, abstinence and recovery.

Elsewhere, petrified parents are told to ban their children from using smartphones in the bedroom, as a study found that children were waking in the middle of the night (in cold sweats, presumably) to update their social media. Others suggest restrictions of internet connectivity during the daytime: according to this outlook, tweets are worse than sweets when it comes to Junior’s health.

When Junior reaches Senior level, the treatment gets tougher. In 2009, the first ever internet-addiction rehab facility was opened in the US, featuring the 45-day program reSTART, helping IAD (internet addiction disorder) sufferers regain normality. The first patient to walk through reSTART’s doors was a 19-year-old who could not remove himself from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. The reSTART program consists of therapists, yoga instructors and recreational coaches and is designed to induce social and career development within the addict. The course, however, costs upwards of $14,500 dollars meaning rehab may not be optimal strategy-wise.

You and Me

So has the calamity of internet addiction spread into our own journalistic community? Absolutely. As productive and resourceful as we may be, the Internet plays an indispensible role in data procurement and publishing solutions. Without it our work is archaic.

Should we be worried about the dangers of social media addiction that lurks around every corner of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? ‘Internet Distraction: The Writer’s Main Dilemma’, published by The Huffington Post in 2015 likes to think so.

‘Let’s take the negative of social media first’, Kristen Houghton writes, ‘number one, social media networking takes a lot of one’s time.

‘You can become so focused on checking social media that you end up wasting precious writing time sitting at computer or scrolling through other people’s lives. You get caught up in the social media whirl and it draws you in.

‘The rule here is: being a good writer is 3% hard work and 97% not getting distracted by the internet’, she proclaims.

Houghton’s concerns ring true – and uncomfortably close to home. Perhaps us junior journos make up the demographic most at risk of catching Internet Addiction Disorder.

See y’all in rehab.

Sources

https://instagram.com/press/

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/from-tragic-selfie-deaths-to-instagramming-on-the-go-how-vanity-went-viral-a2957101.html

http://www.medicaldaily.com/facebook-addiction-activates-same-brain-areas-drugs-how-social-media-sites-hook-you-320252

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/uoc–eww052815.php

http://www.realsimple.com/work-life/technology/social-media-addiction

http://www.wikihow.com/Defeat-a-Social-Networking-Addiction

http://mashable.com/2009/08/23/restart-internet-addiction/#fUbFRPoAPkqS

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-houghton/internet-distraction-the-writers-main-dilemma_b_8248214.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/parents-kids-smartphones_5600226fe4b0fde8b0cef8f3

Many people hoped that the internet would mean the democratisation of information flows. Web 2.0 would finally break up the huge media organisations which so easily manipulate and direct public opinion. Observers predicted a new platform of social activism where the middle man of professional media could be cut out and members of the public would speak to each other directly rather than through clunky stereotypes and clumsy associations with political blocs.

To a large extent, the established news channels have been challenged, if not broken up, by a combination of the internet and satellite television. Channels like Al-Jazeera and Russia Today have offered an ‘alternative’ to western dominated news, with continuing success, particularly in the case of Al-Jazeera English. Online, new contenders such as Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post (The Whip, 2014) have targeted social media sites, especially Facebook, which has more global users than any other website.  But far from ushering in a new era of heightened political engagement, the irreversible rise of online life has been accompanied by large scale disengagement from politics, specifically among young people in the west who were social media’s early adopters. Rather than mobilising new and independent political blocs, online networked news seems to be even more individualistic and inward looking than the television news networks of old.

Accordingly, the most popular ‘news’ content shared on Facebook, e.g. items from Buzzfeed and Huffpost, is designed to be ‘liked’ and ‘shared’; ‘informative’ and ‘comprehensive’ are well down the list of criteria. Similarly, Generation Y-oriented media such as Vice News prioritise edginess before instructiveness. It is nowhere near true to say that good journalism belongs only in a bygone era. But information has become fast and loose, and rather than trying to provide for a population that needs to be informed, journalism today seems to be based on the assumption that most people can’t be bothered.

The Long View

In 1990, Washington insider Francis Fukuyama called the fall of the Berlin Wall ‘the end of history’. He observed that the grand narrative of them vs us had finally fallen apart. Communism, the great enemy the west had constructed its ideology around, had been defeated.

But such supremacy was double edged. Western powers, chiefly the USA, could no longer rationalise their role at home and abroad by reference to an ideological opponent of real historical significance. Furthermore, successive attempts to continue the coherence of the Cold War by other means – ‘war on terror’, war against ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – prompted widespread cynicism especially among the young. With no ‘vision thing’ on offer – not even the negative notion of anti-Communism – these young people were prompted to turn in on themselves even more; and this direction of travel has since been confirmed in an increasingly personalised approach to news coverage.

In the 1990s, against a backdrop of civil war in both Bosnia and Rwanda, the idea that reporters should take sides against evil and write about how good it made them feel, was badged as ‘the journalism of attachment’. In an extension of this, not only the reporter but also the people formerly known as readers, are now invited to include themselves as part of the story.

Exemplified in #jesuischarlie and #saveourgirls, the routine is as follows: in response to reports of an atrocity, upload a selfie showing your outrage, and share it with friends; share it with enough of your friends and this will be reported as the next episode in the story, soon to overtake the original atrocity.

Even if one of those submitting a selfie is no less a person than the First Lady of the United States of America, this hardly offers a solution to the problems of West Africa, nor does it constitute worthwhile reporting of the region; yet this is the level of international reporting which social media seem to have taken us to.

To account for this, it’s short sighted and somewhat lazy to suggest that the younger generation is simply narcissistic or just doesn’t care enough to engage. Hammond (2007: 63) quotes veteran investigative journalist Phillip Knightley to the effect that, ‘out there in Britain is a new, informed section of the population: young computer-literate people who are scornful of spin and the traditional media.’

Hammond goes on to identify various factors which have prompted young people to scorn spin merchants and the politicians they are selling. Chomsky (2002) among others, provides insight into the relationship between western elites and the media. The collapse of interest in the latter can be linked to the breakdown of trust in the former. Traditional news media outlets which failed to pursue a credible line of questioning with regard to Blair-Bush and Iraq, or the Obama administration’s ‘humanitarian’ foreign policy, can hardly be surprised if younger readers are reluctant to take them seriously.

Of course, these young people still want information, and there is still a demand for journalism. But with ‘serious’ journalism having done so much to discredit itself, we have been almost propelled towards ‘churnalism’ – journalism-lite that is churned out with the sole purpose of clocking up the highest number of views; and now this, in turn, is cited by the journalism industry as reason enough for lightening up still further.

Back in 2008 Nick Davies wrote Flat Earth News. At that time, social media were on the point of acquiring a major role in global communication and commerce, so the swarm of clickbait articles that exists now hadn’t quite reached today’s levels. However, Davies’ writing on the degradation of news stories and journalistic standards is even more relevant seven years on.

Davies traces the problem back to the constant deadlines of online news: ‘It is arguable that rather than being beholden to corporate owners, online news proprietors have become beholden to advertising revenue, but not to the will of those who pay for ads, simply the need to get money.’ Thus, in the rush to get the maximum number of eyeballs, there is no time left to get the story.

This development has been the root of clickbait churnalism. Editors commission ‘stories’ designed to allow people on social media either to affirm their preferences to their friends or to say something about their own lives. But it can’t be clickbait if users share it, according to Buzzfeed UK editor Luke Lewis. Call it sharebait, then. Traditionally clickbait meant something that has little substance beyond the eye catching title. The same can be said for the overwhelming majority of Buzzfeed and similar social media-oriented news sites. They have found a way to increase clicks and ad revenue by appealing to an ostentatiously vacuous combination of narrow self-interest and nostalgia. All those items referring to ‘Fresh Prince Of Bel Air’, for example, are simply an invitation to share a tiny sliver of your own self-obsession among your similarly selfie-ish friends.

Of course such articles are mainly shared on Facebook, which is for friends. This kind of non-specific navel gazing is something most young people take part in now, in one way or another. On Twitter traditional news is far more shared than sharebait churnalism, owing to the platform’s use as a collective voice and mass communication tool rather than a friendly circle. But sharebait’s success in hooking in lucrative advertising is having considerable impact on cash-strapped newsrooms. The right hand column of the Mail Online website is perhaps the most obvious example; but a glance at the Facebook feed of The Independent shows that this approach is now being applied across the spectrum. Top of the list: ‘the wedding certificate that shows the disturbing demand of one Jihadi bride.’ Next story down: ‘the one simple test to see if you have a healthy brain’ (Independent, 2015). Not exactly the new standard of journalism which Andreas Whittam Smith aspired to when he started the paper 30 years ago.

It’s not only that lightweight stories float to the top; the underlying effect is that stories requiring serious consideration are configured to provoke the short-lived sharing of outrage, amusement or bewilderment. Consumers are encouraged to come this way for a moment of titillation, then pass it on before moving on towards the next, shareable titbit.

This is the pattern for stories such as ISIS throwing gay men from rooftops in Syria (Austin and Wyke, 2014), which generate plenty of outrage but little discussion or attention once they’re put down again. Meanwhile problematic complexities such as the politics of the Middle East are prioritised only when they have first been reduced to simple episodes, preferably attached to a victimised group which is trending at the time.

Meanwhile those disaffected from traditional media may gravitate towards Russia Today and Vice News, where propaganda and sensationalism (respectively) are confused with a tradition of information gathering that strives to be impartial and thorough. In fashionable circles conspiracy theories like the White House funding ISIS are now as sought after as metal filing cabinets. And if you turn to Vice to learn about the world today, what you get is the world as told to a hapless hipster in a conflict zone. Via the hipster-ish reporter, the intended, hipster-ish audience is asked to enter into a vicarious experience of West Africa or Libya, in what amounts to a Shoreditch-style version of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

It ain’t all bad. Plenty of good journalism is produced on these new platforms. Vice’s Russian Roulette, presented by Simon Ostrovsky, stands out as some of the best coverage of the Ukrainian conflict so far. But the trend for self-satisfying stories such as ‘I fraught in a war’ (Morton, Vice, 2014), cannot be discounted. And traditional outlets are picking up on this, too. The BBC has its young documentary makers such as Stacey Dooley and Reggie Yates. Once again, half of the documentary is taken up by reports of the external world, while the other half is concerned with how this situation has affected their internal make-up.  In defence of this style, you might point out that these shows appear in the BBC’s youth oriented section. But the journalism we offer young people is what they carry forward, so surely it’s even more important to get this right.

Good journalism is far from dead, but the scramble for sustaining revenue by appealing to a disengaged audience is undermining the value of news. The core issue is: to appeal to people who don’t care, news is fast becoming a personal spectacle, not, as it once was, the largely impersonal attempt to capture external events. The key question is: can the next generation be persuaded to engage with anything that isn’t so strictly personalised?.

It’s difficult to implement a rational response to changes driven by the irrationality of market forces. But reaching for the lowest common denominator will only drag things lower, inevitably. For journalism to resist the trend towards personalism, it will need to learn self-criticism. For this reason I am advocating a new kind of quality control. Not the sort of regulation recommended by Lord Leveson; something more like peer review among a college of journalists and their public(s).

If a dialogue is created on journalism and its standards, younger people might actually step back from the deluge of hipster war reports and spectacularly share-able emotions, and start to discern the good from the bad.

Bibliography

Austen, H. and Wyke, T. (2014) ‘ISIS throws man off roof to his death for being gay – and strings up ‘rapists’ in the streets’ [online]. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2868419/Thrown-roof-gay-ISIS-release-chilling-new-images-brutal-execution-man-guilty-sodomy.html Accessed 1 May. 2015

Davies, N. (2008) Flat Earth News London: Chatto and Windus

Hammond, P. (2007) Media, War & Postmodernity London. Routledge

Independent (2015) One simple test to see if you have a healthy brain’ [online] Available at: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/the-one-simple-test-to-see-if-you-have-a-healthy-brain–xyWZLaPmZb Accessed 1 May. 2015

Morton, T. (2014) Vice. [online] Available at:  https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/i-fraught-in-a-war Accessed 1 May 2015

The Whip (2014) ‘The Biggest Facebook Publishers of March 2014 [online] Available at: http://blog.newswhip.com/index.php/2014/04/biggest-facebook-publishers-march-2014. Accessed 1 May 2015