I read the news to day oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
The Beatles' A Day in the Life came to me a day or two ago, prompted by the huge black headline covering the front page of one of our Sunday papers.
It read "Veitch suicide bid". He was found, according to sources, in a car up north of Auckland, apparently distressed and dishevelled.
We should be grateful he hadn't blown his mind out, because then we might really have had to sit down and address the nature of this voracious media beast; not just whether it is legal, ethical or appropriate to use the word "suicide" in a headline when there is little evidence to support the assertion.
In any case, it led to musing with friends on the nature of gossip, of news and the relationship between the two in an age where communication is being colonised by the Internet.
In the grand bazaar of the World Wide Web, information is voluminous, free and commonly inaccurate.
It can be loose-lipped, and contemptuous of the legal and social niceties that constrain more conventional publication.
The truth may be out there somewhere, but in the new hypermarket of knowledge there are greater virtues.
Speed, spontaneity, and personal opinion, for example, are features of the rapidly expanding blogosphere and its vast army of accolytes.
From time to time I find myself among them, marvelling at the energy, pedantry and poisonous disposition of this often anonymous and disinhibited community.
If , in the '60s, A Day in the Life altered perceptions of how a song could be constructed and decorated, and helped to change the way people both created and consumed music, the web is doing much the same with language and - if George Orwell were to have his way - with thought.
Writing in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language he railed against the decline of the language.
"It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts . . .", adding that "the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language . . ."
God knows what he would have made of the Internet, for there is no doubt the digital age is diminishing traditional standards of literacy and that there is increasing cross-fertilisation between the formal edifices of communication and their online understudies. (What major organisation does not have a website?)
Freedom of information is a wonderful thing for democracy, but we have yet fully to grapple with the consequences of this brave new world upon the carefully evolved principles and laws that govern the interactions between society and individual, between private and public lives.
How do the new virtues of rapidity, anonymity, and lack of accountability impact on our institutions?
How, for instance, can citizens have confidence in the justice system in the face of prejudicial, viral information circulating on websites and, increasingly, in traditional media? (A recent Auckland case revealed the difficulties when Judge David Harvey suppressed the website publication of murder-accused identities only to have them pop up on an offshore site.)
The culture of celebrity - the insatiable appetite for "news", and gossip masquerading as news, the trite and the needlessly sensational, the unfiltered and the untested - has slipped the leash and gone viral itself.
It has become corrosive.
Who in the future might contemplate a career in politics, knowing today's news cycle is 24-hours a day, seven days a week; and that public life seems, de facto, to imply open season on every aspect of that person, their past and their family? A day in the life, indeed.
Under such intense scrutiny, what sort of individual do we encourage to assume public office? And how possible is it for them to be human?
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
