Excerpt from Issue #3: Christopher Fraser on Good Night, and Good Luck (2006):
“Despite all the extremity of opinion that comes from our modern access to the internet, the wide-ranging amount of diversity and an ability to join in on national and international conversations can drive momentum, shape stories, and shine a light on topics that Murrow and his ilk would likely never consider.
Of course, for every grassroots social reformer, there’s a hundred One Direction fan bloggers. Rather than flat-out complain about every moron with a keyboard, though, there’s a growing sense that what’s really needed these days is the ability to develop more cultural filters. Everything, now, is at my fingertips; a dozen pictures of adorable cats are suddenly a lot more accessible than a daily newspaper. It’s all a question of selection, though. The thought of paring down a thousand Facebook friends to a small handful isn’t a task I should find especially daunting. Choosing to spend the day reading a novel rather than obsessively keeping up with Twitter feeds shouldn’t fill me with anxiety. Stopping the constant flow of data has become an active choice, rather than something we fall into naturally.
What we often fail to see, largely because it doesn’t come with nearly as loud a fanfare, is that important and engaging media is actually *easier* to find than ever these days. The problem, though, is that by democratising everyone’s creative power, there’s just as much (and arguably more) meaningless fluff, the type of media that feels like honeycomb—delicious, but disappointingly light. And since we haven’t yet learned how to effectively isolate the excellence from the nonsense, we struggle to develop culturally. In fact, there’s a resurgence of the notion that an idea like developing a discerning eye is somehow elitist, as if Buzzfeed listicles are as fulfilling and important as War and Peace.”
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