Technology's Power to Narrow Our View

By Samantha Power

Commencement season is upon us, when students across the nation make familiar pledges to go forth and change the world. The explosion of social networks on the Internet--Facebook users have affiliated with more than 80,000 causes--has emboldened them to believe their generation will make change. But does new technology make it more or less likely that young people today will commit themselves to do something for others?

Let me start by confessing that I am a thirtysomething anachronism. I still read the hard copies of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and I refuse to consider changing my habits. My students marvel at me the way I once marveled at my mother for being slow to get an e-mail account. They don't understand why right-thinking people would willfully make their hands dirty every day when they don't have to. To them I am like a person who takes a shower in the morning and then decides to do gardening before work. True, smudge isn't great, but it seems a small price to pay for what the newspaper offers: serendipitous discovery and wide-angle perspective.

I would not be doing what I do today if not for two encounters I never would have sought out on my own. After my freshman year in college, I interned in the sports department of the CBS affiliate in Atlanta and spent my days taking notes on the then hapless Braves' baseball games. One day news from Tiananmen Square suddenly interrupted the CBS feed. Chinese soldiers mauled students and then lunged toward the CBS cameraman filming the scene. I sat looking at my clipboard, wondering what on earth I was doing with my life. Three years later, I got a second push when the nightly news (all three networks!) and the New York Times showed images of emaciated Bosnian men imprisoned in concentration camps in Europe. I went off to the Balkans to cover the war as a freelance journalist.

Much has been made of the convening and mobilizing power of today's technology. A person inspired by a cause can blog about their outrage and plot a response on Facebook with other similarly animated people. While any single congressional district might not produce a groundswell to demand a halt to global warming or killing in Darfur, a virtual community unmoored from geography can deliver a critical mass. And once converted, advocates are far better informed than a generation ago. They can hear the personal tales of aid workers over Skype. When the Western press steers clear, they can access and share local media reports. Thanks to what Chris Anderson called the "long tail," far more documentaries are available than when movie theaters and video stores catered only to the most popular side of the market. Netflix carries close to 7,500 documentaries, allowing people already immersed in a cause to deepen their knowledge and commitment--and enabling proselytizers to attract new adherents.

For many of us, though, technology has actually lowered the odds of bumping into inconvenient knowledge. If I had been setting up a Google alert in 1989, mine would not have been for "China" or "human rights." In 1992, I certainly would not have asked for stories on "concentration camps." When I'm abroad these days and have to go without my newspaper, I often turn to the most e-mailed stories on news websites, which are generally opinion pieces (rather than news stories), from which I cherry-pick arguments or facts that comport with my pre-existing views. Reading this way, I rarely stray from the familiar and soothing.

Amid the hoopla over new media, it is worth considering the costs of the personalization of news. Sure, viral YouTube videos of global conflicts and tragedies will occasionally find an audience, and movements may grow up around iconic new-media images as they did around the old. But while the long tail ensures once obscure documentaries remain available, citizen advocacy may have a short tail, causing the number of viable causes to get winnowed to a handful of megacauses. Burma may achieve the requisite market share, while Burundi fails to penetrate at all.

Further, the screen on which people view the world will narrow. Spared the burden of considering multiple parts of the world at once, single-issue advocates may have a hard time seeing the relationship of one foreign policy challenge to another. Viewing issues `a la carte, they might be unable or unwilling to prioritize. To be fair, if young advocates fail to see the way Guantanamo has undermined U.S. efforts in Darfur, they are being no more tunnel-visioned than the Bush Administration. But they are the ones we are counting on to help turn things around.