grey thoughts

It's nearly eleven a.m., but it feels like some unspecified hour of the too-early morning, so grey and chill is it this fourth of September.

I've a whole bouquet of anniversaries over this last just-a-bit-more-than-a-month. Yesterday made it three months since my surgery. Again, it isn't possible that it's been that long.

(Forgive the somewhat precious tone. I've been reading Emily of New Moon. I have lots of excellent Improving Books people have leant me or I have bought or borrowed from the Library to read, but I am re-reading Emily.)

( Attempts to revise mood into more useful state )

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things other people have said more cleverly than me

Someone... and I don't think I can track back to where, so apologies, mentioned the tsunamis in context of writing about Hurricane Katrina, which I have mostly been following through LiveJournals and the occasional bit of TV news

(And note interesting comments about flags at half-mast, further down, which we discussed once in passing here, in context of the tsunamis.)

I thought again about the cliche that the media can't hold onto a story long enough to really deal with its scope, what with the need for New Angles and Personal Anecdotes and Relevance to the Viewer. Now, I don't watch a hell of a lot of TV news, so maybe everything I'm saying here is actually about my own lack of perception, rather than the current condition of mass media.

I'm assuming this is going to happen with Katrina, as it more or less has already happened with the tsunamis. Which is not to discount the people who are still fundraising, etc. But the collective North American attention has drifted.

It made me want to ask: is there a medium for collective discourse that deals better with the scope of events that have consequences over months and years, and evolve as processes? The only event I can think of offhand that was covered assiduously over its entirety is the OJ Simpson trial, which gives you some idea of the problems we'd be facing in trying to come up with a real discourse.

I don't say that it's webjournalling. I think there are lots of good things about it -- the ability to make publically available opinions and debates that wouldn't have been accessible except on the very intimate scale (local coffee shop, neighborhood rally, town meeting). It might have a leg up in terms of organizing some kinds of assistance. It's fabulous for opinion, and opinion can be very useful.

But webjournalling is just as capable of letting an issue fade out in favour of a new one as TV or radio (or web) journalism. It has the same problem as conversation, which is that people tend to pick up and repeat what they've heard (read) other people say, so it can get repetitive, and there's a lot of hearsay. (Though the attention to detail of some of the journals I've been reading is impressive.)

Is there a communicative medium that's not like that? Are we just trained to it by older media?

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