Edward Greenspon and Media Murmurations

 

Then there’s the odd galvanizing role played by social media, particularly Twitter. The gallery vacillates between pack mentality and institutional incoherence. The Harper government was skilled at dividing and conquering. Increasingly, though, a group of Ottawa reporters gather every evening on Twitter, bucking one another up by sharing their journalistic humour, biases and insight. That they may well reinforce pack prejudices is beside the immediate point. Their virtual salon is reminiscent of the old days, when gallery members worked at close quarters in the famed Hot Room on the Hill and then hit the press club bar.

 

It's not hard to see why I enjoyed this piece - I see a trend of social murmuration on platforms like Twitter, too.  I like the fact that Greenspon refers to the Harper government's general inclination towards divide and conquer, too.  They're particularly good at that, but we have a political system entirely geared towards creating coalitions of voters around a given issue rather than drilling down to and then build on the foundation of common aspirations. 

 

We find all kinds of ways to justify this essentially tribal politics, but if you look more broadly, you see the same thing happen within and between religious institutions, community groups, even the scientific community.  It's no surprise why - we are predominantly a cognitively function-fixed species.  The competitive busy-ness of the modern economy fuels this as we convince ourselves it's not our job to push ourselves to learn something new, it's someone else's job to simply things for us.  Or we try to tell ourselves we fundamentally don't care about substance.  We can choose to see but through a glass darkly, or we can walk through the door that is always open to us.

 

Individually, we can be ignored or destroyed but collectively, people have power. 

 

It's a tree/forest thing.