The Overhead Wire Daily | Suffering from a Lack of News

I have noticed that there are a lot of post-mortems on the election, specifically looking inward at some of some of the acute problems cities currently see and why that likely led to a shift for some voters to the right. There are a lot of compelling arguments from commentators about governance and adaptation and I don’t have much to add there.

But there was an interesting item in The Nation that went a bit further on the idea of America overall, not just cities, as a civic desert, referencing Robert Putnam’s work Bowling Alone about the loss of local membership groups such as religious congregations, fraternal organizations, and political groups in the United States. These groups, once the center of communities, are now greatly diminished as the internet has become our (dis)connective tissue.

We are more connected than ever, but less connected to things like political parties that end up making huge decisions that impact our lives greatly. Many identify as a member but the only action taken is just send money every two to four years after checking a box on your voter registration that then gets mined by text and email farmers. The article’s author believes we’d be better off going back to more local organizing and organization instead of allowing party leaders to make decisions with big money fundraisers that outweighs a lot of the local committees that do exist.

The article is worth a read, but my mind instantly jumped to the information environment as well. We know from research that places that don’t have local papers or sources of information suffer greatly from the void as there’s less accountability for elected officials while the price of getting things done, infrastructure and otherwise, is much higher.

I myself feel like we suffer as I look through the news every day and see very good journalism on great topics, but also a huge amount of repetitive junk and useless pages that are just holding spaces for per click advertising. It will only get worse as machine learning and artificial intelligence combing and content producing grows.

So why does this politics and information stuff matter to professionals working on a whole host of urban issues? I worry that it will get advocates and professionals steam rolled on issues that are important but contested such as traffic safety, housing, or economic policy by those with big pockets or a big megaphone.

I kept telling myself I wouldn’t share any hot takes after the election but I don’t know if this is a hot take. Maybe just a larger observation connected to feelings I’ve been having even before the election. Maybe I just need to ride my bike to find dumplings more often.