sam b-r
across the sea
The very first newspaper was printed in 1605 by Johann Carolus of Strassburg. The idea of collecting information about recent events…events that could be meaningful to the local community…and disseminating that information to the general public was revolutionary. Information was no longer the property of the privileged few; it was available to anybody who could read or listen to it being read.
In 1605, the recent events that could be meaningful to the local community were those that happened in or near the local community. Four hundred years later, that’s no longer true. Today, the recent events that could affect the life of an old man reading the newspaper over his afternoon tea in Shanghai might take place in Caracas or London, in Washington, D.C. or Moscow, in Beijing or Baghdad.
An old man at his table in Shanghai, a student at her computer in Syracuse, a merchant in his shop in Suez, a businessman in his office in Salerno, a servant in her employer’s kitchen in São Paulo. They all read about the weather outside their window, about a terrorist attack at the airport in Glasgow, about the local election in their district, about the effects of global warming, about the price of gasoline, about the war. Any war. Every war. For a moment, for one brief moment, the news links all those people together.
In the end, all news is local.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
