PM's Twitter glass is half-empty

Our PM Julia Gillard and veteran journalist Laurie Oakes have both recently lamented that something has gone seriously wrong in our national discussion — that new technologies and the "news cyclone" as Oakes puts it, means that if our collective attention spans get any shorter, they'll stop existing altogether. Maybe it's the election we've just had or it's media coverage, but it seems as though everyone's looking at the glass and saying it's half empty. This doom and gloom needs a few rainbows and unicorns.

Recently Gillard, very rightly, pointed out that not everything can be reduced to a tweet. Worryingly for twitterholics, some things actually require people to go a little more in-depth than 140 characters will allow.

Imagine Romeo and Juliet: Wherefore out thou Romeo? I'm just here. Oh, are you? No, sorry I'm dead. All right, I'll kill myself. Oh wait, I'm not dead . . . damn.

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Or Pride and Prejudice: I don't like you very much; you're arrogant, pretentious, cold, aloof. Oh wait, you're none of those things. I love you.

Or Kafka's The Trial: I've been arrested. For what? Don't know.

I could go on but the point remains, you know that it just doesn't work on the same level does it?

Oakes says the attention span of the media and media consumers is getting shorter, reiterating Gillard's concerns that this brings discussion about policy down into the doldrums. Many more are lamenting the death of journalism from new technologies more generally, although there still are kernels of hope about the co-existence of online and traditional media. One neuroscientist has even hypothesised that the increasing presence of screen technologies in our lives not only shortens our attention span but may indeed leave us unbalanced; promoting sensory connections in the brain without developing deeper, cognitive pathways. That old wives tale about TV roting your brain maybe have a speck of truth to it after all.

They are all very valid and sound observations about the news cycle, new media and even our brains but it is odd that one moment we are very willing to blame technologies for encouraging lowering standards and short attention spans and then in the next we herald them with virtual street parades, bunting and confetti provided, for solving all the world's ills. Surely there's a middle ground?

For example often we think giving kids computers is all we need to get them to be smarter, launching them onto the IT superhighway, right? But, of course, left to their own devices, children and computers will not make smarter kids. However, when you get the kids, the computers and a good teacher who knows how to use the technology together, it can be a invaluable tool. Worth watching here for experiments doing just that in Third and First World classrooms.

Likewise one could think of the way we now digest our news. Just reading a tweet from a politician or reading a headline doesn't make you informed. But these days there is a wealth of information out there on the interwebs and 24-hour news channels; more primary sources and whole press conferences shown live and uncut. (Do we remember Gillard's first big presser with the umpteen "moving forwards"? Cleverly designed if it was simply going to be sliced, diced and edited for your consumption but instead the whole presser went live on air causing a bit of a disastrous, slogan-robot look.)

But the point is there are ways that these technologies can encourage more cognitive, long-term, inquisitive thinking. You've now got full interviews on the website, the trend of infographics, whole policy documents online, journos writing longer features for online not restricted by space on printing presses, bloggers, Wikileaks and crowd sourcing giving us ever more information.

These, more in-depth pieces of information, if anything, have become more available with new mediums, allowing for greater exploration of a subject and greater cognitive thinking. Professor Google can take us pretty far, but how do we encourage further engagement? Let's just hope that if people are willing to constantly check celebrity tweets or a blog containing only awkward family pet photos, then we can get this internet-hoozamajig and all the wealth of information it offers to drive deeper, long-term discussions.

I suppose it's up to you, Gillard and Oakes. You're the teachers in this classroom, we've got the computers, if you both do your respective jobs in the media and politics side of things, I'm sure we'll get smarter.

Bella Counihan works in the Press Gallery at Parliament House and writes for the National Times website.

http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/politics/pms-twitter-glass-is-halfempty-20101020-16tmw.html