Linear news in the age of reels

As a one-time hack and now teacher, battling the hyper-technology-bombarded 21st-century classroom, I find the newspaper as a form of communication and instruction more significant than ever. It’s truly so due to the digitalised information overflows and cell-phone ordering of lives that afflict people of almost all ages.

As a person who never overly genuflected to traditionalism, the surge of Artificial Intelligence, vanishing attention spans, and glut of ‘information’ have pushed me into a kind of guarded orthodoxy. In media literacy, we say older forms of information that were more ‘linear’ have gradually given way to the ‘disruption’ of news and information flows, such that its consumption for the last decade and more has been perennial and ‘circular’. Its impacts in the higher education classroom are enormous and intractable. It has brought a jolt to critical thinking if you consider how much learning loss occurred during the COVID era and even before.

If the smartphone, social and online media are sole knowledge providers, short news aggregators, and AI are the one-way stations for intellectual development, you get sets of minds generally deeply constricted in critical thinking capacity and ability to grapple with complexities. Please don’t mistake me, I am no anti-tech Luddite. The general upending of traditional media also means the qualities constituting the mental make-up of an enlightened citizen – the mantra of education in the widest sense of the term – flies out of the window. There has been much commentary on the impacts of all these on students worldwide, and it encapsulates the glaring contradiction of this age: the more ‘information’ there is, the less people know. The apparent democratisation of media has not necessarily led to more quality media or better-informed citizenry.

As a teacher at the undergraduate level, primarily teaching students transitioning from school to college, in an age of such commotion, it becomes even more important that ‘linearity’ return as a meaningful form of learning. The digital medium rarely obeys this pattern and has idioms, languages, and signatures of its own. For instance, it has invented the short capsule of news consumption, where a headline and a few more words convey information: a kind of return of the telegram from the early eras of modern communication. In the earlier eras, this was supplemented with longer forms of mass communication like the newspaper, magazine, radio, and later, television news bulletins and documentaries that aided in expanding critical thought on issues of public note. Now, the mobile phone has shrunk the world, yes, but also lateral thinking competencies that require pausing, distancing, and slowing.

An exercise that media educators like me nowadays undertake is bringing the newspaper into the classroom, since several students might not have turned its pages purposefully for a long time. Each student gets a newspaper of note, and then they close-read it for understanding news and feature article structure; the differences between news and analysis, fact and opinion; the point and the politics of headlines, subheads, and news photography caption writing; and, of course, design thinking in newspapers. Later, they watch a news bulletin, like in the old days, to understand and appreciate getting news in a structured way. For many, these exercises work almost like obtaining knowledge from a good textbook. Things may appear boring, but in the hands of an impassioned instructor, they get to see the benefits of linearity; regularity that is in contrast with their wont for non-linearity, immediacy, and brevity. Digital natives find it hard that certain words have to be capitalised, italicised, in single or double quotation marks, and that every small or big element in a newspaper has meanings encoded in them that make for engrossing unpacking in the classroom. These exercises deepen cognitive skills, and learners get to appreciate some of the greater fundamentals of required knowledge acquisition.

For educators in the current scenario, defining what the media constitutes is itself an enormous challenge. Digital natives assume ‘media’ primarily consists of social media, content creation, influencer reels, and then journalism. So educators have to work backwards to explain the nuances and differences of various forms of media. Herein, the newspaper (of record) in the undergraduate classroom is a helpful way forward.

The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru.