[Infowarrior] - If Everyone's Talking, Who Will Listen?

[Richard Forno]

If Everyone's Talking, Who Will Listen?

By Dusty Horwitt
Sunday, August 24, 2008; B03

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082202396_pf.html

Everybody jokes about "TMI" these days: "Too much information," we say  
laughingly, when someone tells a story full of embarrassing detail  
about some personal foible or intimate relationship. But in our  
information-overloaded society, the concept of TMI is no joke. The  
information avalanche coming from all sides -- the Internet, PDAs,  
hundreds of television channels -- is burying us in extraneous data  
that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad  
audience.

Lawyers are familiar with this phenomenon. In fact, they use it to  
their advantage: They know that if you want to hide damaging  
information about a case, there's nothing like a document dump to do  
the trick. You make the facts freely available -- along with so much  
irrelevant data that no one will ever find them.

But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their  
goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of  
millions of citizens. Despite conventional thinking that the Internet  
helps spread information, such reach is actually impossible online.

Consider: In August 2007, there were about 100 million blogs. Of those  
that reached 100,000 people or more in a month, only about 20 focused  
on news or politics, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a company  
that measures Internet traffic. The most popular was Breitbart.com,  
with only 1.1 million unique visitors, or 0.4 percent of the 228  
million U.S. adults 18 and older.

Moreover, visitors to blogs and Web sites probably don't see most of  
the information on them. According to Nielsen Online, the average  
visitor to newspaper Web sites stops by for just 1.5 minutes per day  
on average. By contrast, the average print newspaper reader spends 40  
minutes with each day's edition, according to the Project for  
Excellence in Journalism. "When you think about the amount of  
information published to the Web, it's a physical impossibility for  
the vast majority of that stuff to spread virally," Derek Gordon,  
marketing director for the blog-tracking firm Technorati, told me in  
2006.

For this article, I got newspaper Internet readership statistics from  
the Web site of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). But if  
there hadn't been prior newspaper coverage of the NAA, I might never  
have found its site. And if I had simply posted the information  
online, few people would have seen it. By contrast, The Washington  
Post's print edition reaches about 2 million readers on Sunday, more  
than 35 percent of whom are likely to read the editorial page,  
according to a Mediamark Research study.

Which highlights the larger problem: The overload siphons audiences  
and revenue from newspapers such as The Post and other outlets that  
can spread important information, forcing these media to shrink and to  
rely increasingly on advertising to stay afloat. These trends predate  
the Internet era, but they've gotten worse.

"It's much more difficult [to reach people] today -- and much more  
expensive," said Steve Eichenbaum, creative director of a Milwaukee- 
based marketing firm that helped engineer Russell Feingold's upset  
U.S. Senate victory in 1992. Among Eichenbaum's innovations was an ad  
that ran only once in every TV market in Wisconsin -- yet helped  
Feingold win the Democratic primary. Eichenbaum doubts that Feingold's  
underfunded, underdog victory "could ever happen again."

Although the Internet has helped some candidates raise more money,  
media fragmentation has driven up TV advertising costs as candidates  
compete for the shrinking number of time slots that can reach voters,  
says Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at  
the University of Wisconsin. Moreover, viewers seem more distracted,  
and it takes more ads before pollsters can see any effect in tracking  
polls, says David Hill, a Houston-based Republican pollster. "The cost  
of media is accelerating and the ineffectiveness of media is  
accelerating," he said. "I'm getting hit twice."

The opportunity to educate millions of citizens, so essential to  
significant movements of the past, has dwindled. In the early New Deal  
era, the Roman Catholic "radio priest" Father Charles Coughlin  
promoted ideas for economic reform to a weekly audience estimated at  
40 million, which helped pressure President Franklin D. Roosevelt to  
enact Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and other  
programs. Today's top talk-radio host, Rush Limbaugh, reaches only  
about 14 million people per week.

Without broad media coverage, the civil rights movement might never  
have succeeded. In 1965, front-page newspaper coverage of the bloody  
march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., helped push Congress to pass the  
Voting Rights Act, write journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff  
in their 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Race Beat." Even the  
Fairbanks Alaska News-Miner carried the story on the front page for 10  
straight days.

In 1965, weekday newspaper circulation was more than 60 million  
copies, or roughly one paper for every two adults. By this year, it  
was down to about 50 million, or one paper for every 4.5 adults, and  
newspapers are slashing reporting jobs and, inevitably, news coverage.

Other outlets aren't picking up the slack. In 1970-71, Nielsen  
reported that 35 percent of households watched the three network news  
shows. That figure was down to just 16 percent in 2007-08. In November  
1980, ABC, CBS and NBC news broadcasts reached 52.1 million Americans  
nightly, or about 32 percent of the adult population. In 2007, ABC,  
CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox combined reached fewer than 30 million  
Americans each day, or 12 percent of the adult population.

The challenge is to find ways to strengthen democracy in the era of  
TMI. It won't be easy, but the situation may not be irreversible,  
either.

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself,  
perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the  
technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less  
widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to  
keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing  
assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

This solution may sound radical and unlikely, but as an environmental  
analyst, I've spent long hours studying energy consumption. Two years  
ago, I wrote an article speculating that the real problem behind  
America's loss of manufacturing jobs was low energy costs that made  
shipping so cheap that employers had overwhelming incentive to send  
jobs overseas. My argument that higher energy prices could reverse 50  
years of outsourcing was met with skepticism. Yet that's exactly what  
has begun to happen this year as the high cost of oil has brought some  
manufacturing jobs back to such cities as Bowling Green, Ky., and  
Danville, Va.

It's not too far-fetched to imagine that something similar could  
happen in the information world. Like long-distance shipping, modern  
information technologies are highly energy-intensive. According to  
Arizona State University engineering professor Eric Williams, a  
desktop computer "is probably the most energy-intensive of home  
devices, aside from furnaces and boilers." The Internet is built on  
about a billion such computers, in addition to data centers that, says  
the Wall Street Journal, "can consume enough juice to power a small  
city of 30,000."

It's possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers,  
Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain,  
could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally  
giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do  
the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment  
our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology  
might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community- 
centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper- 
individualistic outlets we have now.

If the thought of more expensive information technologies makes you  
flinch, consider economist Alan Blinder's warning that the Internet  
could lead to the outsourcing of 40 million American service jobs over  
the next 10 to 20 years, including such jobs as financial analysts,  
lawyers and computer programmers. So newspapers aren't the only ones  
to be hit by cheap information technologies.

Change will no doubt be difficult, and it won't happen overnight. But  
it's time for some creative solutions for digging our democracy out of  
the information avalanche that threatens to smother it.

dustyhorwitt at yahoo.com

Dusty Horwitt is a lawyer who works for a nonprofit environmental  
group in Washington.