A photo of a hand holding a smartphone, source of both news and social media.
A hand holding a smartphone. Credit: Rodion Kutsaiev / Unsplash Credit: Rodion Kutsaiev / Unsplash

First, the news. There’s not a lot left. We’re misled in Toronto because we still have four functioning newspapers but everywhere, newsrooms are pared or closed, journalists fired or bought out, stories go untold. This is wretched for democratic health. Other things, like shattered careers or profits, matter less.

It happened because ads, the main source of news media income, migrated massively to internet giants like Google and Facebook. So the government has introduced a bill (C-18) modelled on an Australian law, requiring big platforms that conscript stories from news outlets to “compensate journalists when they use their work.” Heavy opposition to this bill has come from left (Canadian Dimension magazine) to centre (academic Michael Geist) to right (The Line).

They argue the platforms aren’t ripping off news outlets, they’re linking to them and giving them a profile and a boost so C-11 is illogical. Frankly, I don’t care. A democracy needs independent sources of info apart from the major economic players and governments. News media did an often wretched, but also often enough useful, job of filling that need, and to do it you need big resources, not piddly ones. No number of earnest, honest journalists with independent voices on Substack can properly dig into urgent subjects like Doug Ford and the Developers. They can comment on those but can’t generate them.

The point is the ads are mostly gone and the institutions are mostly (like Westley in The Princess Bride) dead. A government that cares can either fund news directly, like the CBC, or impose taxes and transfer the funds, or force the Googles to share with the news outlets, as the current bill does.

I get the resentments because the main news media have been such dicks or tools and still are. But what can you do? Will the world be better or less risky without them, or the reverse? Anyway, want to know what’s truly illogical? Making journalism dependent on ads in the first place. There was no inherent connection, it just happened, accidentally. So solve the problem, somehow.

And now, the young. The New York Times leftish columnist, Michelle Goldberg, wrote this week about high levels of mental anguish among youth, especially girls. She said it can be statistically best correlated not with real-world bummers like climate and war but with “the deleterious psychological effects of social media.”

This week, too, right-wing U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, tabled a bill banning kids under 16 from using social media. Ontario’s People for Education reports a worrying rise here in poor mental health among the young, though not linking it to social media.

In this light, I’d like to put in a word for social media. I think they may represent a new baseline for the human experience. That’s all. I know claims for new media technologies are routinely overblown: not just the printing press but semaphore, Morse code, movies. Still …

Humanity’s existential baseline in the past was mostly to be alone, though sometimes not. You could be out with your flock in the field, or walking to the 7-Eleven at night for groceries. Nobody knew exactly where you were. If you saw someone yapping on the street, they were probably deranged. Now they’re just on their phone.

You’re almost never fully out of touch. You take your phone to your bedside. You might check it if you wake up and respond or not, depending what’s on it. That’s a big change. You’re almost never out of touch with others. This isn’t inherently bad or good, it’s just a change, albeit a monumental one.

Now don’t forget how miserably alone adolescence can be. In that light, internet connectedness is a hope-filled potential resource — provided, to be sure, it isn’t a substitute for actual in-person interaction with those you care about. Maybe the role of the old(er) should be to remind the young, when it’s needed, of how important a balance can be, versus tossing them offline altogether.

This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.