Book Review: The Newsphere: Understanding the News and Information Environment

Abstract

Christine Tracy The Newsphere: Understanding the News and Information Environment. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 132 pp.Christine Tracy's The Newsphere: Understanding the News and Information Environment offers an ecological examination of news. When viewed as an ecology, news is not a product to be consumed but a conscious act to engage with and produce shared information that has value in a community (p. 21). She calls today's relentless news environment the newsphere.Tracy, an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University, argues the acceleration of news in digital forms has leftmost citizens adrift, surrounded by an overwhelming number of as well as ever-changing methods, networks, and channels by which these are delivered. Thus, one key goal of Tracy's work is to provide instruction in learning to sort through the newsphere's noises and the clutter, and particularly recognizing unprocessed and unconscious messages (p. 2).But the primary goal of this book is to urge each of us to acknowledge not only a cultural but also a moral responsibility to take control of our own news expectations, perceptions, and consumption. By accepting the deeper and more understanding of the effect news has . . . you can design a more viable and enlightened relationship with and in the (p. 2).The reasoning behind placing ourselves consciously in the newsphere is driven by a conceptual model Tracy finds in the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881- 1995). Teilhard, a Jesuit priest, anthropologist, and scientist, was the thought leader of what he called the noosphere, a global layer of intelligence that encircles the Earth. As defined by Wikipedia (para. 3), Teilhard's noosphereemerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. . . . As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. . . . Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point, which he saw as the goal of history. The goal of history, then, is an apex of thought/consciousness.Thus, Teilhard believed, we have affirmative obligations ourselves to le Tout- the All-to improve the condition of humanity through our own evolving contributions to the noosphere. And part of that is Tracy's concern with our participation in the newsphere.Journalists are urged to evolve their work so that it becomes more participatory, relevant, and transparent. Such forces would keep the newsphere open and selfvetting, she says, and stories would gain value through these intelligent networks. Such reporting would lead us closer to truths, even inconvenient ones.For example, dramatic story imperatives drove the 2009 reporting on NBC's Dateline of the capture of U.S. Navy Captain Richard Phillips by Somali pirates. A one-hour presentation of leading questions by Matt Lauer to Captain Phillips appeared along with animated reconstructions of what had happened. Without subtracting from Phillips's horrid ordeal or subsequent rescue by the Navy Seals, Tracy asks us to appraise this docudrama and finds it lacking in several integral ways as journalism.For example, it does not consider that some nine million Somali people are near starvation, nor how that has been made worse by the overfishing of other nations. These factors may have driven the first ambushes at sea. The ecological damage done by other nations that have used the African coast as a dumping ground for nuclear waste makes all of this even more complicated. …