The Media are Schrodinger's Cat

The media today are like the visitor (a dybbuk?) in the opening scene of the Coen brothers' new movie, A Serious Man - no one knows if it's alive or dead. Or, it could be, like Schrodinger's Cat, (a mathematical problem referred to in the Coen movie) in a state of being simultaneously alive and dead.

The Schrodinger's Cat paradox is a problem of quantum mechanics and exceptionally difficult to get your mind around. When applied to the media landscape today, it brings to the fore a number of puzzling and complex questions: Are newspapers alive or dead? Are the main-stream media fair and balanced or hopelessly biased? Is the New York Times too liberal or not liberal enough? Is the NPR business model fair to competing commercial radio stations and does its programming skew liberal?

The Scrodinger's Cat paradox is a thought problem meant to demonstrate that the superposition (simultaneous inert and moving) properties of quantum particles collapse into a definitive state (inert or moving) only at the exact moment of quantum measurement.

Applied to media, this would mean that a particular media outlet (cable network, newspaper Web site, or blog) is simultaneously fair and balanced and hopelessly biased, and that a newspaper is simultaneously dead and alive until they are examined; then they become one or the other. Two specific examples come to mind: Fox News and The New York Times.

Such Fox News vaudeville (Neil Postman's label in Amusing Ourselves To Death) performers such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity are clearly hopelessly biased entertainers whose emotional appeals attract an uneducated or incurious audience. On the other hand, Fox News reporter Major Garrett and anchor Shepard Smith seem to be as advertised - fair and balanced.

The New York Times newspaper, if not dead, is clearly dying. This week it laid off another 100 people from its newsroom, and advertising revenue continues to tank. The Times Company announced it wasn't going to sell the Boston Globe, not because of kindness to its staff or a desire to do a public service but because it couldn't find a buyer willing to take the dying paper off its hands. We'll have to wait and see if its San Francisco edition can make it. On the other hand, the NYTimes.com Web site is flourishing. It's the best newspaper site and best, most innovative news Web site. It's very much alive.

There are many other examples of media in a simultaneous state of life and death, fairness and bias, and left and right that become one or the other when examined by critics, which, of course, simplifies their complexity and leaves out multiple nuances.

It took a brain as huge as Einstein's to conceive of quantum physics and someone as thoughtful as Schrodinger to help us to begin to understand the concept. Today understanding the media is almost as difficult as understanding quantum physics.

The problem is that everyone in America today isn't thinking about the media as Schrodinger's Cat, but about the Balloon Boy, or who won on "American Idol," or texting their friends. So who are the modern media Schrodingers who can help us understand the media?

Certainly not the self-absorbed gossip mavens such as Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff and most other popular, superficial, celebrity-obsessed media critics. On the other hand, pay attention to The New Yorker's Ken Auletta (subscribe on iTunes). Never miss a broadcast or podcast of Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone's "On the Media" (subscribe on iTunes). Subscribe to Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody's blog, and keep up on what Jeff Jarvis writes, on this Buzz Machine blog, even though he will probably infuriate you, as he often does me. Finally, read Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death because it's still scarily relevant today.

Follow Charles Warner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CHWarner

Comments

[mmfiore]

As an alternative to Quantum Theory there is a new theory that describes and explains the mysteries of physical reality. While not disrespecting the value of Quantum Mechanics as a tool to explain the role of quanta in our universe. This theory states that there is also a classical explanation for the paradoxes such as EPR and the Wave-Particle Duality. The Theory is called the Theory of Super Relativity and is located at : http://www.superrelativity.org This theory is a philosophical attempt to reconnect the physical universe to realism and deterministic concepts. It explains the mysterious.

[Indon]

I don't know if superposition is really the part of quantum mechanics the media best model.

I would instead think it uncertainty - as, being systems designed to be observed, they change whenever observed, potentially making observations inaccurate.

There is one way in which this analogy is incredibly appropriate, though - when the box is opened, the waveform always collapses to kill the cat.

[TheEmptinessOfTruthiness]

If you enjoyed Amusing Ourselves to Death (which to this day I still count as the first step in my own de-programming from the mass media cult - This Just In!!!) you might also enjoy Frank Zingrone's The Media Symplex, among other things an examination of how media is at once incredibly complex and stupefyingly simple.

[bebopman21]

I'd like to dispute one of your examples. .... I wouldn't call the New York Times website "very much alive" if it's not paying its own way. If you're going to separate it from the newspaper -- as your comment does -- and it's not making enough cash on its own to feed the hundreds of journalists that make it great and it doesn't pay their mortgages and send their kids to college, then it's dying, too. It's just a very popular corpse (or near-corpse). .... In Denver, the fine journalists of the late, great Rocky Mountain News have failed at least twice (that I know of) at making a profitable standalone news website. It's not that the journalism on those websites was not good, it was that the journalists' bill collectors insisted on getting paid with money. Until someone figures out that problem, there are very few newspaper websites I would consider "alive" under the same standard you used for newspapers.

[ndolomar]

If Heisenberg had inadvertently destroyed Scrodinger's Cat by not looking in the box -- thus "measuring" its existence, that concept easily could describe the conundrum faced by most major media outlets: the only time they have to prove their importance is when they're confronted with just how obsolete they are, which -- by default -- kinda makes them go up on the importance ladder. At least, that could be the case.