NOVANEWS
By Raafat Majzoub
The Farewell Chronicles
I’ll take a wild guess and say that my initial reaction is the sameas yours: Ask Google. So I typed in my query, and the search engine had no specific answer. I learned though that the death toll in Syria has surpassed 150,000. I felt nothing.
Headlines and their respective punch-line texts with quick, factual, and to-the-point statistics mean nothing anymore. I believe the media is already aware of the shortcoming of its textual narratives. Nothing else is a valid alibi for its use of ultra-violent imagery except the realization of the impotence of this text, but even these images mean nothing.
They’re fleeting, like everything else, and don’t provide any chance to process, feel or react to current events. It’s not just me, most people I know are quite sad, but it’s the kind of sadness that makes you say, “Uh” slowly with a slightly quaint facial expression as you continue your sandwich, continue your drink, continue your conversation – essentially continue your life like nothing much is going on. And it’s not just me and most of the people I know either. If the rest of humanity is actually affected by the information of what is going on in the world, then the world would have stopped, or at least been interrupted. We would have felt something – anything.
Last week, on the first of April, I wrote a fiction piece instead of my usual non-fiction opinion posts, investing in the parameters of bent truth allowed by April Fools’ Day. It was both exciting and confusing: exciting because I was eager to see how people would react to ‘news’ compartmentalized into a fictional framework, and confusing because this piece seemed out of place.
At the time, there was no tangible supporting argument of why it made sense. The occasion was merely a loophole to write something exciting about my homeland, which has been impossible for a while, and I took it. It was only after it got out there that the pieces starting building up. The reaction I was excited about materialized in different conversations formally and informally. Rania Masri took the conversation to her blog adding that, “Those of us who organize and struggle for justice are typically criticized for knowing only what we don’t want and not discussing what we actually do want; no to this, no to that, yes to what?”
Somehow, the confusing aspect of the piece was not as important as I thought it would be. It’s interesting because fiction was not an obstacle, but a tool for productive social commentary. It gets really interesting when we try to assess our news and media landscape to see where a hybrid piece of fact and fiction fits when what we consider credible news is already fiction.
To get a clear view of current events, some of us have become experts in critical theory, getting news from different sources, cross-checking, and fact-checking the excessive amount of opinion before we consume it as news. The rest of us align ourselves with comfortable fiction, and abide by it as a credible news source. On Lebanese television, people are not necessarily dying in Syria. If they do, it’s not necessarily severe. And if it is, it’s definitely not for the same reasons. All it takes is a click of a button, and the same piece of news is another.
One can argue that at least, this type of chamfered reality kind of fiction that is the base of most of our news outlets is a perspective to the truth as opposed to a complete load of falsities. This may be true, but what’s also valid is that we are at a point where we must rethink why we communicate what we communicate. If it’s a mere transfer of information, it’s obviously not working. If I go up the stairs and ask one of my neighbors, then downstairs to ask another about any current event, I am bound to have two distinctly different answers.
The situation in Syria is because of the barbaric rebels. The situation is Syria is because of the barbaric regime. The situation in Syria is that a lot of people are dying everyday, and not a single model of communication is being able to create a proactive audience out of its spectators to change all of this. I say this knowing that fiction does sound extreme as an alternative model for news, but what’s at stake here is not whether what we communicate is true or false. It is inherently false, so what can we do about it?
One obvious scenario is to create systems of information purification, where additions to the truth are scraped out to reveal bare incidents as content for news. Another is to create contextual content, which could be fiction, to induce the reality we aspire to exist within. I favor the second as an experiment, not as a polished proposal. What I know for a fact is that we’re sick of numbers, of blood in pictures, of analytical reports that hand us knowledge in frameworks that we can only understand intellectually – and forget actively.
In essence, all the information we have now is fiction, so why not use it outside the benefits of institutional agendas and inside the benefits of our common good. I know for a fact that I prefer living in a place filled with people that are more excited to make the news than just read it. Could fiction be a tool for that? Can we trust our audience to differentiate fact from fiction and understand the specific role of each? In these times where media is everywhere, how can we create media that influences, rather than media that recites? If that’s not the role of a news outlet, then maybe that role needs to change.
Headlines and their respective punch-line texts with quick, factual, and to-the-point statistics mean nothing anymore. I believe the media is already aware of the shortcoming of its textual narratives. Nothing else is a valid alibi for its use of ultra-violent imagery except the realization of the impotence of this text, but even these images mean nothing.
They’re fleeting, like everything else, and don’t provide any chance to process, feel or react to current events. It’s not just me, most people I know are quite sad, but it’s the kind of sadness that makes you say, “Uh” slowly with a slightly quaint facial expression as you continue your sandwich, continue your drink, continue your conversation – essentially continue your life like nothing much is going on. And it’s not just me and most of the people I know either. If the rest of humanity is actually affected by the information of what is going on in the world, then the world would have stopped, or at least been interrupted. We would have felt something – anything.
Last week, on the first of April, I wrote a fiction piece instead of my usual non-fiction opinion posts, investing in the parameters of bent truth allowed by April Fools’ Day. It was both exciting and confusing: exciting because I was eager to see how people would react to ‘news’ compartmentalized into a fictional framework, and confusing because this piece seemed out of place.
At the time, there was no tangible supporting argument of why it made sense. The occasion was merely a loophole to write something exciting about my homeland, which has been impossible for a while, and I took it. It was only after it got out there that the pieces starting building up. The reaction I was excited about materialized in different conversations formally and informally. Rania Masri took the conversation to her blog adding that, “Those of us who organize and struggle for justice are typically criticized for knowing only what we don’t want and not discussing what we actually do want; no to this, no to that, yes to what?”
Somehow, the confusing aspect of the piece was not as important as I thought it would be. It’s interesting because fiction was not an obstacle, but a tool for productive social commentary. It gets really interesting when we try to assess our news and media landscape to see where a hybrid piece of fact and fiction fits when what we consider credible news is already fiction.
To get a clear view of current events, some of us have become experts in critical theory, getting news from different sources, cross-checking, and fact-checking the excessive amount of opinion before we consume it as news. The rest of us align ourselves with comfortable fiction, and abide by it as a credible news source. On Lebanese television, people are not necessarily dying in Syria. If they do, it’s not necessarily severe. And if it is, it’s definitely not for the same reasons. All it takes is a click of a button, and the same piece of news is another.
One can argue that at least, this type of chamfered reality kind of fiction that is the base of most of our news outlets is a perspective to the truth as opposed to a complete load of falsities. This may be true, but what’s also valid is that we are at a point where we must rethink why we communicate what we communicate. If it’s a mere transfer of information, it’s obviously not working. If I go up the stairs and ask one of my neighbors, then downstairs to ask another about any current event, I am bound to have two distinctly different answers.
The situation in Syria is because of the barbaric rebels. The situation is Syria is because of the barbaric regime. The situation in Syria is that a lot of people are dying everyday, and not a single model of communication is being able to create a proactive audience out of its spectators to change all of this. I say this knowing that fiction does sound extreme as an alternative model for news, but what’s at stake here is not whether what we communicate is true or false. It is inherently false, so what can we do about it?
One obvious scenario is to create systems of information purification, where additions to the truth are scraped out to reveal bare incidents as content for news. Another is to create contextual content, which could be fiction, to induce the reality we aspire to exist within. I favor the second as an experiment, not as a polished proposal. What I know for a fact is that we’re sick of numbers, of blood in pictures, of analytical reports that hand us knowledge in frameworks that we can only understand intellectually – and forget actively.
In essence, all the information we have now is fiction, so why not use it outside the benefits of institutional agendas and inside the benefits of our common good. I know for a fact that I prefer living in a place filled with people that are more excited to make the news than just read it. Could fiction be a tool for that? Can we trust our audience to differentiate fact from fiction and understand the specific role of each? In these times where media is everywhere, how can we create media that influences, rather than media that recites? If that’s not the role of a news outlet, then maybe that role needs to change.
