News from the Wider World

Another useful thing from this week (and relative to Edouard Rollet's master's thesis): I found a nice site on uses and gratifications theory. I have been thinking a lot about uses of news and information by citizens in a democratic society. I have a full explanation (in an unpublished book chapter of mine) of social use, personal use and diversion/entertainment -- basically, I reject the taxonomies of use that include eight or ten categories. My rejection is based largely on the "magical number seven" (see below).

This week, though, I thought of something new to add to that. It's sort of a centers-and-margins thing, but I think I would rather characterize it as inside/outside and place it inside the "social use" category. The idea came to me during the New Directions for News workshop at Stanford on Monday, May 21. Several people on the audience panel commented on their desire to find news and information about the world outside the world they live in -- the wider world, the global village.

This fits, of course, with the old idea that news (or journalism) helps us understand the world, and this understanding is very necessary to citizens who self-govern. We cannot function as a democratic society if we are ignorant of other cultures, other nations -- or even other people not exactly like us in our own towns and cities.

So, within my own "uses and grats" category of "social use" information, I would like to distinguish between information that is useful directly -- because it is inside our own world or sphere (our town, state or country, I suppose) -- and information that is useful mainly in its contribution to our understanding of the larger world. (Call the first "inside" and the second "outside.")