What Matters Now: Proposals For A New Front Page

Some of you will have spotted and engaged in an interesting project this month hosted by the Aperture Foundation that was an attempt to  frame the question ‘what matters now’ in the context of a new front page.

Below is an except of the introduction on the website. I think the premise is off target, and I’ll explain why afterwards.

What should we be looking at? The extraordinary number of photographs taken on September 11 made it the most photographed event in history and may have signaled the birth of citizen journalism. However in our impulse to record, we have not formulated new strategies to gain a better understanding of today’s pressing issues of a globalized world.

As traditional print journalism was threatened, and the number of images published online has exploded into the billions (sixty billion on Facebook alone), we have been left with few common sources of news and analysis. There is no longer a “front page” to act as a societal filter through which, we can learn about important events and trends. Even the role that the physical café once played in our communities—the place we went to discuss and digest what’s going on around us — has become fragmented across a myriad of virtual spaces.

Where should we turn for our information? How can we function as a society with so few common reference points? How can we intelligently sort through all the images and information available to us? In terms of photography and visual information, what should we be looking at?

I’m slightly perplexed by the anxiety on show here about a move away from what for decades has essentially been a homogenized front page. A front page that has editorially been the reserve of the elite and of self-serving national and corporate interests.

The idea though that there is no longer a ‘front page’, at least for me personally, is simply not true. It has diversified, but that doesn’t mean it no longer exists. My new front page is Twitter, Facebook and for a more traditional view, Google News.

At any moment of the day, through following people that I trust and whose thinking interests me (people like Fred Ritchin who curated What Matters Now), I can reach out into a myriad of sources, of stories, of conflicting points of view, that are capable of educating, informing and entertaining me. Of changing the way that I think and feel about things.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Isn’t it something to be celebrated that I am no longer purely dependent on the editorial values of the BBC, The NYT and Fox News to help me form my view of the world?

What matters now is you. And you have new and better ways to engage with the world.