Maybe tomorrow

Jeff Jarvis is blogging from the Davos world leaders conference, finding (amongst other things) that 53% of Western Europeans think that the next generation will be less prosperous than this one. That's compared to 37% in the US, and just 14% in China. "The Chinese know that tomorrow belongs to them", says Jeff. No surprises there - China had the largest economy for eighteen of the last twenty centuries and it was the C19th, led by the British Empire, and the C20th, overtaken by the American, that were anomalous.

But back to the 53% of Western Europeans who think that the world will be less prosperous in the next generation. What is is that inclines us to so fear the future? I've mentioned before Michael Chabon's article The Omega Glory, in which his notes that,

"If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now."

There's nothing new in a pessimistic view of the future. Christianity is at heart an apocalypse cult and much of the fundamentalist revival in the US focuses on an allegedly imminent rapture. The late C20th lived in the shadow of the bomb. Different armaggedons seemingly haunt every generation. Only last week conversation with friends over dinner turned to survivalism and contingency plans for the collapse of civilisation (remote, fortified Greek islands featured prominently).

I've posited before that our culture's future-pessimism might explain the decline of the newspaper industry. An interest in current affairs is indissolubly bound up with the connection the reader feels with an imagined future to which those affairs might relate, and newsprint is suffering particularly from the evaporation of that connection. Chris Charron recently asked the LinkedIn community about the future for newspapers:

"When does the circulation drop below a point where the editorial, classifieds, and advertising models collapse and our vehicle news needs radical innovation?"

Vidar Hokstad gave, for my money, the most interesting answer - that newspapers face "not just a technological challenge, but a cultural challenge". Indeed. The cultural challenge for newspapers is to
present a vision of the present, and therefore a vision of the future, that resonates with their readers and inspires them to engage with the news every day. Western media owners have the hardest job in the world - 53% of their audience think that the future will be poorer than the present. Chinese media owners have the easiest - a massive 86% are optimistic about their future prosperity. Getting people who think that every day is a little bit better than yesterday to enthuse about the news that is taking them there should be shooting fish in a barrel.

Comments

[Ron Davison]

Great post!

It is a bit chicken and egg, no? If western audiences are more pessimistic, wouldn't western journalism be in part to blame? The race for ratings suggests the need for stories that dilate your pupils - stories of sex, violence, and apocalyptic warnings bring in more revenue.

[Ilana]

I wish I was clever enough at age 8 to know what 'desertification' meant. I'm not convinced I know the exact meaning at the age of 27.

I think to ensure some sort of future for newspapers (read: newspaper groups and newspaper brands), the following needs to happen:

- Make daily papers free (although, with more and more advertising revenue being put on the web rather than in papers, not sure how a free newspaper model would work in the 'future' - you probably know the answer to this though)
- Make paid for newspapers weekly (indepth round up of the weeks stories)
- Newspaper sites should offer an afternoon PDF print out that has been created from the personalisation of the types of news stories (imagine your example of MyESPN printed out)
- Have a 'web first, print second' model in place (and not just in name!). Ensure all jingly-jangly handheld BlackberryiPhonePDASidewinderCameraVibratorTelevision are as interactive as the computer websites.

But these are small fry, standard ideas. Ultimately newspaper groups should invest heavily in television, web television, radio, blah blah blah convergence etc and all the rest of it to turn themselves into a strong media group (goodbye Northcliffe Newspapers, hullo Northcliffe Media a case in point). They need to follow the advertising spend, and not be precious about lending their strong brands to other forms of media (as well as investing quiet stakes in others that don't betray their key values).

Ultimately it's about turning newspapers into news organisations, and being able to compete with other news organisations from different media. Obvious, right? Right.

Oh, and to address the point of your blog, I don't think newspaper groups are pessamistic, they're invigorated by new directions. Don't confuse newspaper journalists and slightly sozzled bloggers with the companies.

PS, still not finished your book, will send to you eventually unless you want it sooner.

[Grayson]

Although I've been known to foist Chabon's New York Review of Books review of Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy on a few (adult) folks who make the mistake of getting me going down that garden path, I doubt I'd want my 6-year old daughter growing up to marry Chabon's 8-year old son. She still thinks she's going to sing and dance to High School Musical forever, and that maybe one day she'll get to kiss Troy (the boy lead). She apears to have, with my help, a sunny childhood going, for the time being at least. What would that particular 8-year old have to fall back on to fuel a Future that could ever account for and include singing and dancing as needed? Surely the survivalist's kit would include such elements over a uber-yuppy's Greek Island.

If ever there was a time to impose a feminine ideal on western culture, then we women folk need to be practicing our all-American moves -- really, really hard.

[ZF]

I suggest that people generally become pessimistic and addicted to gloomy navel-gazing in proportion to how much their lives are circumscribed in practice by thousands of petty regulations, enthusiastically enforced.

Europe has more of these than either the US or China (and is getting worse all the time). The US is in the middle, and China is currently more like the Wild West in this regard.

QED.

Most of Europe has a history which is actually, when you remove the cant and posturing, one of ever increasing domination by tiny elites, punctuated by occasional revolutions. It's their way of 'throwing the bastards out'. Under these conditions a period of stability such as we've now had for 50 years becomes crushingly demoralizing for the little guy, as is so well reflected in this survey data.

The truth is that the modern EU has become every bit as trapped in its stultifying pieties as was the pre-reformation Catholic church. It's a repetition of the same cultural phenomenon.

As in the earlier case, the answer lies in a change of behavior. The reformation, in whatever form it takes, will have to come from within. The rest of us outside Europe can only watch (and the EU moves so slowly these days we don't even have to do much of that).