What Should We Be Worried About?

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN NEWS AND UNDERSTANDING

GAVIN SCHMIDT

Climatologist, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

We are surrounded by complexity. Issues demanding our attention—health-care reform, climate change, the Arab Spring—have a historical context, multiple viewpoints, clashes of diverse values, and a bewildering set of players with their own agendas. The news provides a source for what’s happening right now: voting results, who made what speech, how many people died, etc. While imperfect, the news industry mostly delivers on its duty to provide information on what’s “new,” and with the advent of social media platforms and aggregators like Google News, it has never been easier to stay up-to-date.

But much of what we need to understand a situation is not “new.” We need a deeper knowledge of the context to inform our understanding of why the new events have occurred. The situation in Afghanistan makes no sense without an appreciation of the culture and history of the region. The latest warning of a future climate effect makes no sense unless you understand how we know anything about how the climate operates and how it has already changed. Understanding the forces driving the Arab Spring requires a background in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the responses to the Colonial adventurism that followed. Unfortunately, this context is not in the least bit newsworthy.

The gap between new and old is widening, and that should be profoundly worrying. It’s as if we had a populace that was well informed about the score of a game but knew nothing about the rules and, worse, had no inclination to find credible sources to explain them. Public discussions often devolve to mere tribalism; it is far easier to base decisions on who supports what than to delve into an issue yourself. Any efforts to make it easier to access depth and context must therefore be applauded and extended. New online tools can be developed to scaffold information by providing entry points appropriate for any level of knowledge. Context buttons alongside online searches could direct the interested to the background information. But unless we start collectively worrying about this, nothing will change, and our society’s ability to deal with complexity in a rational way will continue to decline.