With the new issue of the weekly Lider, we bring you a special supplement – The Future of Media – dedicated to the upcoming Weekend Media Festival.
About the fulfillment of the old (allegedly) Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’, which Robert Kennedy spoke about during the Cold War era, any contemporary politician from the New or the troubled Old World could also speak. In fact, some will argue that this era is ‘the most interesting’ in history if we do not only mean technological achievements that are (logically) at their peak, life with one foot in the real world and the other in the virtual, the ease of achieving Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, but also the horrors that undermine the foundations of modern civilization, from unrest in the Middle East, Islamist threats, refugee crises to the collapse of ideals about a perfect European society or democracy.
Trends Instead of Headlines
Most Earthlings feel that the world as we know it is coming to an end, which, of course, causes unrest and insecurity, to some extent even paranoia. However, as Harvard professor and author of the book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’ Stephen Pinker claims, this impression does not correspond to the facts; it is created by superficial and sensationalist media, of which there are now the majority. The author does not blame only traditional media but also millions of amateur war reporters and ‘opinion makers’ hidden behind Facebook and Twitter profiles for biased reporting on the state of affairs. His message would roughly be: ‘Instead of headlines, follow trends; instead of counting victims in your neighborhood, count them in other parts of the world, and you will realize that the world is indeed ‘in a banana’, but less so than it was in some other historical era.’
