Abstract
In The Newsphere: Understanding the News and Information Environment, Christine Tracy addresses a familiar issue: how should news consumers sift through a media environment with often overwhelming amounts of information but a paucity of depth and substance? However, she approaches this question from a fresh perspective, drawing on the integral philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin alongside media ecology to produce a guide to news consumption that is both high-minded and accessible.
For many media consumers – and likely many media scholars as well – Teilhard is an unfamiliar foundation for a book on the subject, so Tracy begins by explaining his philosophical principles and their application to the current media world. Teilhard, an early 20th-century Jesuit philosopher, built his understanding of the world around the interconnectedness of all things, forming what he called the noosphere, the continually evolving collection of humanity’s thoughts and knowledge. (The newsphere of the book’s title is Tracy’s play on the term.) For Teilhard, the individual’s responsibility is to see himself or herself as part of this connected body, becoming more aware of the noosphere and seeking out unity and dialogue, rather than division and debate.
As Tracy applies it to the media environment, Teilhard’s approach calls for a journalism that seeks to unite individuals and create opportunities for creating shared dialogue, culture, and history. This normative form, which Tracy calls integral journalism, also draws from Tracy’s other primary theoretical influence, media ecology. Through an ecological approach to news, Tracy moves her focus away from production and toward consumption, considering news not as a transactional good but as part of an open, evolving process over which the public has considerable influence.
After laying out this theoretical framework, Tracy surveys the problems with the contemporary news industry. The news media have lost the ‘ability to inform, elevate, and unite’ (p. 55), Tracy argues, briefly outlining the ways in which they have devolved into a sensationalistic and manipulative force that works against informed democracy. To make this point, she relies on the work of media sociologists such as Michael Schudson and political economists such as Robert McChesney, as well as a handful of examples, particularly the coverage of the 2009 rescue of an American hostage from Somali pirates.
Though Tracy’s critique of contemporary journalism centers on news production, she locates much of the agency to resolve these problems among media consumers, rather than traditional producers. She details how consumers misperceive stories and facts, often as a form of willful self-deception. The alternative vision she articulates starts with media consumers who exercise ‘a heightened sense of awareness and perception – a genuine openness to the truth and to the reality of one’s environment’ (p. 76). Like many contemporary scholars, Tracy posits that the public is continuing to gain power to influence the news agenda and journalistic practices. But Tracy locates that power not primarily in the public’s ability to create news, but in its choices in consuming news, which she views as inextricably linked with the process of creation. She argues that because the form and substance of news stories have become so fluid, the responsibility for filtering them and assigning their meaning has shifted from the professionals producing them to the public consuming and redistributing them.
Tracy concludes with numerous practical pointers for conscientious journalism consumption. Many of those are drawn, largely verbatim, from media ecology and literacy scholars such as Neil Postman, W. James Potter, and Howard Rheingold, though she adds some suggestions of her own, including four characteristics that define fully evolved journalism – participation, relevance, transparency, and a networked nature – and a few examples of the personal media consumption strategies of savvy users.
Tracy’s perspective incorporates optimism regarding the journalistic potential of a decentralized, open online ecosystem, as well as a sober approach to what is being lost with the decline of traditional news media. She spends time reflecting on the endangered state of local and regional accountability reporting, and she adopts Postman’s skepticism of digital technologies as a remedy to society’s lack of awareness about itself. Still, pointing to the integral functions of news blogging and to journalism’s repeated ability to adapt to new technological environments, she asserts that ‘journalism is truly poised to not only survive but thrive in the age of the newsphere’ (p. 63).
Altogether, these constitute a remarkably broad range of theoretical strains pulled together in Tracy’s brief book – Teilhardian philosophy, media ecology, political economy, digital literacy, media sociology, and others. This is the most distinctive feature and the greatest strength of Tracy’s work. She brings some welcome theoretical richness to the concept of news consumption, applying theories of production to the world of the consumer and using a distinctive philosophical perspective to connect them.
That ambitious scope can become a weakness at times, as well. Tracy’s efforts to integrate such diverse strands of thought in such a short book occasionally leads to too-brief treatments of crucial concepts and a scattershot feel within some chapters. However, that shortcoming does not significantly detract from this book’s fundamental accomplishment – its ability to guide non-professionals and non-scholars through an approach to conscientious news consumption that takes the why at least as seriously as the how.