Sunday 30 June 2013

Journalistic Objectivity and Star Trek

A brief, and possibly not well-rounded, thought. I was mowing a lawn the other day, which leaves rather a lot of time for my mind to wander, and I started thinking "What would it truly take for journalism to be 100% objective?" It's impossible for us. No matter how well you research the facts, no matter how clear your photographs are, you will only ever be reporting a story from one point of view: subjectively. But what if there was a journalist who could cover and present a story or event from hundreds of different angles simultaneously? What if the story could be understood from every angle, published as a purely objective experience, and processed the same way in the mind of the reader. And then I thought, you know, there is someone who can do this...

The Borg.

Imagine a division, a guild if you will, of Borg journalists. This collective intelligence tackles one news story at a time, surrounding the event, flooding it with drones and recording the story from all possible points of view. That story is compiled as a collective understanding of what happened, and downloaded to the rest of the Collective to educate. Each drone would receive a fully objective understanding of the happenings. Fat lot of good it would do humans, though. Our minds have enough trouble understanding what we happen to be seeing most of the time; if our brains received a "file" filled with many, many points of view, we'd probably just explode. So, the moral of all this is that printing the truth is possible. All that is required of us is that we surrender our individuality and assimilate. The pen is mightier than the sword. Resistance is futile.

2 comments:

  1. My hand is giving you one of those wavey back of forth in the air "Eeehhhhhhh" signals right now.

    There was still a goal behind the borg. And the idea of individualism was constantly destroyed. It had a mission/cause/goal/drive whatever you want to call it; it manipulated their way of thought erasing the possibility of objectivity.

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    1. I'm not saying the Borg themselves would be the best people to tackle this project. I just meant to speculate that true objectivity, or the closest thing to it, could only maybe be achieved by a Collective consciousness.

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