Today's headlines, tomorrow's world

UNESCO Courier, Oct, 1998 by Sophie Boukhari

The media's simplistic vision of the next century alternates between gloom and euphoria

We have been spinning fantasies about the third millennium for a long time. But the closer we get to the year 2000, the more harmless it seems, the more artificial the break with the past.

The future is already here, for the media have been swamping us with pictures and stories about what may lie in store. The Italian communications group Mediaset commissioned the Explorer-Ipsos research and marketing institute to conduct a study of how they view the years to come. Entitled "The Media and the Millennium", it was carried out in seven countries regarded as the leading trend-setters - Germany, Spain, the United States, France, Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom - where the media are powerful enough to influence a global public. "We tried to understand how the next millennium was being depicted in the press, on television, on the Internet and in fashion, design, advertising and art," says Giulia Ceriani, who is in charge of semiotic studies at Explorer and presented the survey's main findings at Candido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) last May.

If the media are to be believed, life in the twenty-first century will be no bed of roses. They are predicting "chaos", says Ceriani, citing as evidence cartoons and television series showing the end of the real world and invasion by alien rulers, the increasing number of Internet chat forums on the end of history and art and fashion trends reflecting ideas of change and hybridization. That bleak picture is symptomatic of a total loss of bearings in "a world of contradictions and 'contamination'" characterized by the disappearance of boundaries between objects, identities and values that have long been clearly distinct, such as masculine and feminine, the self and the other, the natural and the artificial.

Fear of the future is fueled in large part by lightning-fast, uncontrolled developments in science and technology such as genetic manipulations that make it possible to "free" an individual's identity from his or her genome, the high-speed circulation of information which shakes cultural certainties, and artificial intelligence which seems to abolish the boundary between humans and machines. "The print and broadcast media echo rising anxiety about the impact of scientific advances, which have much less support and raise many more questions than they did fifteen or twenty years ago," says Suzanne de Cheveigne, a media expert at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

When they are not preaching doom and gloom, the media, especially television, offer an almost idyllic vision of the future as an era of tremendous advances for humankind, including gene therapy, the emergence of a global citizenry through Internet and the development of clean energy sources. The media's discourse "oscillates between a 'euphoric' and a 'dysphoric' view," says Brian Trench of the University of Dublin, adding that articles and television programmes on science are often "superficial". Pierre Chevalier, of the French-German public television network La Sept/Arte, acknowledges that journalists have a poor command of the "very specific language" required by science reporting, which is difficult to illustrate with pictures. Moreover, most television executives are more interested in high audience shares than programme quality. And to capture the attention of a large number of viewers, shock is often more effective than rational inquiry. "By and large, the bigger and less educated the audience, the gloomier the message," says de Cheveigne.

Media coverage of science also varies depending on the cultural context. Americans have a mostly upbeat, "pragmatic" vision of technological advances and cloning, whereas ethical concerns come to the fore in Europe's Latin countries. American media "present only 'facts' and less speculation about what the implications of the facts might be," says Bruce V. Lewenstein of Cornell University. Trench stresses another facet of the problem. He says the media's rosy outlook on new information technology, for example, reflects a desire to treat computer companies, which are major advertisers, with kid gloves. "The media increasingly belong to corporate interests," says New York broadcast specialist Charles B. Potter, adding that the image they provide of the future has no inherent value but is merely one more "product" on the market.

Still, polls conducted by Explorer-Ipsos reveal that the public has had its fill of simplistic discourse. They would like to see more subtle, hopeful messages about the possibility of taking back control of their destiny. "People are aware they are living through a period of transition and want order," says Ceriani. "They want more rational, less sensationalist communication. They are fed up with the bizarre and the alien. Hence the return in design to simpler, reassuring shapes associated with technology that's under control." The media would do well to fall into step with the trend towards reassurance and a shift in focus back to everyday life. By continuing to stress the inability to find a way out of the crisis, they probably help to increase the public's anxiety and the appeal of New Age movements, forms of immanent spirituality considered capable of exorcising the demons of uncertainty.