Why am I writing?
Because I want to interview people I find interesting
Information has to be immediate now. We’re missing a process that involves the undulations and the room for surprise that we need to form rational and individual judgement. Pre-established narratives are factory-made for us on social media, built carefully to slowly edge us into greater certainty that what we previously believed is The Truth. This means that inconvenient facts and nuance often gets tossed out if it is slightly too garish for the stories we’ve adopted.
Here are two ways I will write to hopefully change this in my own small way. I want to write about environmental and political stories that I think we need to be hearing. As the media environment is fundamentally changing (audiences pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat than journalists), the way important issues are communicated needs to change to try and fit into this changing appetite, whilst attempting to maintain the integrity and depth of lots of ‘conventional media’. I will do this by:
engaging with individuals who can teach us more about current issues and how we can properly engage because they themselves are on the frontlines and have lived and experienced these issues
engaging individuals whose stance may be fundamentally at odds with mine but will probably enlighten me as to why things are how they are.
I want to break free from silo thinking and embrace conflicting views with the goal of truth and transparency. Hopefully writing like this can begin to wipe away the nihilism we have seen creep in that has had a trajectory roughly like this: disillusioned with political system/ economics/ environmentalism → no evidence of change for the better → systems, political parties and institutions labelled by young people as all equally bad → disengagement from electoral politics
We are undergoing a paradoxical communication crisis (see Jonathan Haidt) and I’m not an expert in that BUT I know the simple principle in our densely populated world that if something is interesting to you, it should be interesting to other people. And hopefully you’re one of them.
Not claiming this is unbiased, it’s not, and not claiming it’s all right (although I hope it is), but maybe just maybe you may also be interested in these stories I’m telling and people I’m interviewing…
