Are you writing or being written?

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, and believe it is going to be important to the work we are doing with NewsWrights United.

(Full disclosure: I’ve been following Rushkoff’s work since the mid-90s, consider myself a huge fan, have participated on the discussion lists he moderates for over a decade and have had some correspondence with him. Grain-of-salt that as you will.)

Rushkoff’s central idea is that we have become increasingly disconnected from these machines with which we spend so much of our time. Computer training is actually application training; fewer and fewer of us understand how to program, have ceded the power to shape our world to others.



I’d argue (and maybe he argues – my copy hasn’t arrived yet) that this is especially true with journalism. Because everyone, absolutely every single information source, from content producer to aggregator, has an agenda. You can argue for the relative benevolence or FoxNewsiness of one agenda over another, but each writes from and to its own worldview.

If you aren’t taking an active role in your information gathering, if you aren’t thinking about the choices you make and looking for diverse perspectives in some kind of attempt to triangulate on a real truth, you are swallowing someone’s agenda whole. You’ve stopped listening to your own story, stopped writing your own narrative.

And this is where it becomes important to NewsWrights. Because, yes, we are just another voice hawking it’s agenda, it’s narratives. But the Living Newspaper is about more than the stories it covers. We present local, topical stories as live theatre because it is unexpected, because it is different from the ways we are used to seeing these stories covered and presented. And there is something in that move, in the audience being invited to think about not just the content but the form and the implications of the form.

When I taught composition, I explained it to my students as the move from reflexive to reflective. I was asking them to become more conscious of what they were doing with their writing, to ask themselves questions, to be purposeful. The Living Newspaper asks us to be conscious and reflective on how we get our stories and what that means to our concept of the world around us.

Are we writers or written? Programmers or programmed?