A while back you had these conglomerates buying up newspapers; that certainly didn't help, but I don't think-you know, even the New York Times can't figure out how to make money.
Kall: Well, I'll tell you; I recently watched the documentary, Sick Around the World. It characterizes how universal healthcare is provided in England, Germany, Taiwan, Japan and Sweden. In just about all of them, profits are not allowed and they look at healthcare as something that's essential for all citizens.
Well, I believe that journalism is essential for democracy; maybe not newspapers, but certainly journalism and just as in the past there has been funding for artists, millions and millions for artists; maybe what needs to happen is they need to come up with a way to fund the journalists who can do their work, feed it out to the millions of blogs and media sites and aggregation sites are developing and maybe that's another area where the model's got to change big time
Schwartz: Maybe. The thing that makes it more challenging than with healthcare is that a significant part of the media's role in maintaining a democratic society is to be critical of the government, and so having the government be the supporter of media raises complications...
Kall: Absolutely.
Schwartz: ...that the government being the provider of medical care does not. So, if you're going to fund it that way, publically, you need also to make sure that there are all kinds of barriers between the funding source and the work that the journalists do so that the journalists can remain independent.
Kall: Absolutely. Of course, we do have those lobbyists from the healthcare industry that have caused similar problems in health care.
Schwartz: No question about it. It's a built in conflict of interest waiting to happen...
Kall: Absolutely.
Schwartz: ...when it comes to journalism, so that's why everyone is hoping for something else, for some other way to keep these newspapers alive, or some form of journalism.
Kall: Speaking of the web and all the blogs and what have you, and your book, Paradox of Choice, how does that reconcile? The web has exploded, where there are, I think, a hundred million blogs, something like that, just huge numbers.
Schwartz: Well, I think the problem is that the more of these blogs there are, the more people will end up gravitating to the web-based sources that also have a presence off the web. When there are millions of sites that are offering news and opinion, you're more likely to go to usatoday.com than when there are only a dozen such sites, because you don't know how to choose among the millions of sites, so you choose what you recognize.
Kall: Now, this is where I see the bottom-up process playing a role, where web sites like digg and reddit help people choose because things are recommended by a lot of people. It does have that liability you just described, but that's one way around the paradox of choice, is to embrace the help of the crowd, really.
Schwartz: Well, look, it's possible that these things will shake themselves out in a bottom-up way and we'll all come to know who to trust and where to go for the information that we want, that may... This is so dynamic a process at the moment that I think only a fool would predict with any confidence what it's going to look like in another five years, so I'm open to the possibility that you're right and the magic of bottom-up collective wisdom will assert itself. But I don't think there's any guarantee, so I still need my New York Times.
Kall: Well, one thing the more I look at bottom up, the more I've come to believe that, even in bottom up, you need to have leadership, and you've got to have people who take on that role. Somebody can be a bottom-up leader and be very inclusive and facilitate participation, but you still have to have both, so it makes that difference.
One more thing I want to cover with you. I'm on a positive psychology listserv. One of the things that I've gotten into over the years is optimal functioning and I've written a lot and lectured a lot about the anatomy of positive experience, and I've been involved, and I even gave a presentation on at the Positive Psychology Summit Meeting that Marty Seldman puts on, and on that listserv, when I posted a link to TED for your talk, somebody said, "Ah, but he didn't talk about some of his other stuff that is more positive psychology oriented." I'm just curious what that might have been?
