Everything changes but me

At Editorsweblog, John Burke comments on the rise of "citizen journalism" and the challenges it poses for professional journalists. He makes some valuable, if familiar points about the shift from information scarcity to information abundance, and how this shift informs the shifting role of the traditional centres of media authority, but I echo Steve Yelvington in finding his most interesting comment this one;

"Journalists – and this may not come as a surprise – are hypocrites. We lecture the rest of the world on the urgent importance of change in everything from American foreign policy to food labelling. Yet the same journalists loathe the effort and uncertainty of change as much as anyone else; their extensive experience of recommending change does not translate into any higher skills in actually facing up to it. Journalists react to digital technology’s disruption of their industry with the same queasy resentment as any other group of professionals required to rethink what they do."

Not because journalists as a group are unusually resistant to change, but because humans as a group are resistant to change - and in this period of unprecedentedly rapid change it is imperative we face up to this fact. Consider the earliest applications of humanity's vaunted capacity for reason - "yesterday we ate the red berries. Today we are still alive. Perhaps today we should eat the red berries again". For most of the time that "human" has meant anything at all, resistance to change was an explicable and thoroughly responsible survival mechanism in a dangerous but largely unchanging environment. Now that, as Lobkowitz put it, "we have deconstructed the universe and are refusing to rebuild it", it is rather too late in the day to start complaining because our natures are at odds with our accomplishments.