By Sam Omatseye
The maiden public discourse lecture of Trinity University, Lagos, themed, ‘Information in an age of flux’, and delivered by Sam Omatseye on Thursday, September 26, 2024
Time and information intersect like twins. We even need information to know time and time to secure information. Hence, the historian is the most important tool to the social scientist. The historian is the custodian of time. If the social scientist needs the historian, memory is the armour of all humans. History is official memory. But our other memory is in our minds and hearts. And time is the only commodity you cannot get back. You can get back your honour, your love, your money, your wife or husband, your certificate, you can reverse your defeats. You can rsecycle wastes, paper, plastics, etc, even your faecal evacuations. Even at that, you need time to get all these things back. Time is restoration. Time is a great healer. Science and technology, with all their amenities, must yield to time.
Time creates the age. Time changes language, changes leaders, recalibrates culture, overthrows regimes, refines the barbaric into a debonair, makes a monster of a prince or transforms an angel into a Mephistopheles. Times passes like stealth, and it is like death. You cannot resurrect time. You can only imitate or mimic it.
Time gave us Caesar but also Brutus. Time gave us Napoleon the great but also Napoleon in jail. Time put Mandela in jail but also brought him out a hero and avatar. Time gave us great plagues and human tragedies but it had mercies on us enough to make the medicines of restorations. Time gave us AIDS but also gave the aid to fight it. Time gave us the cell phone. Time is kind, beneficent, a succor, a rescuer, a salvation. It is also cruel, drowns desperate people at sea seeking a new life abroad, gives monsters as leaders like Hitler or Mussolini, or Bokassa or Abacha. Time, in short, is a harlot. Yet we cannot kill it without consequences. As American writer, Henry David Thoreau said, “you can’t kill time without injuring eternity.”
When I chose the topic, Information In An Age of Flux, I was wondering at how information dissemination was when I was a child, and how it is now. What we have today could not have been imagined in the 1960’s or 1970’s, except as science fiction. If an earthquake happened in the next village, you would wake up in the morning the next day to find out, and the day after to more details about the victims of the depredations. Today, you would know even before the monster has stopped lapping up the village. As a child, you listened to live broadcast of football matches. Today, we watch them live on our phones. Then, it was impossible for a middle-class manager to own a phone in his house. Today his child owns a better one than his father or mother. It was the age of slow humanity. Yet, at that time, life had never been so fast. After all, television was a miracle, if black and white. The big blaring Grundig Radio was a marvel, with record player and large discs. It was a good time for exercise because to change a radio station, and there were one or two then, you had to tweak you muscles, stand up and walk up to the device. Ditto to television. Where was remote control? It was still gestating in the imagination, especially in science fiction.
But authoring science fiction is now daunting, and the imagination of science fiction writers known to be fantastical and wildly out of this world has now met a reality that is wildly out of their world and superior to their imaginations. So, the writers have to try to get out of this world to reimagine a more fantastical world than we are living now. Einstein said, Imagination encircles the world. Imagination and time are walking into higher orbits in tandem. We are mere passengers held in awe by this moving spectacle.
We are witnessing a giddy wave of time. Time is dizzy; it is a whirligig. Today, it is a world of interconnectedness. We call it globalization. Bible scholars say it is a fulfilment of a prophecy from the book of Prophet Daniel when God told him when he could not fathom some of the mysteries. “Go thy way, Daniel,” God said. “Leave it till the time of the end. For people shall go to and fro and knowledge shall increase.”
Each age claims that prophecy as referring to their own. When the Wright Brothers gave us the aircraft, they said that was the age of prophecy. And that was before the age of the supersonic jets, the email, the WhatsApp, the Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, the drone, et al. People are going to and fro, not through bouffant clouds in an aircraft. Humans these days are spirits. They can be in a village near Ogbomosho and be in Frankfurt in one minute and Oslo the next and Sydney, Australia and Denver, Colorado simultaneously. You can do a job interview via zoom with a CEO in America, looking at each other while wearing a tie and jacket whereas you are naked from the waist down. Both of you, in American and Nigeria. Yet, you were properly dressed for the interview.
We are seeing our age as the ultimate. The future is not imagined yet. It is never imagined, because it drops upon us like a plane crash. When I was covering technology in the United States as a reporter, we still had what was called 2G, or second-generation technology. I traveled across the country for conferences and pilot programmes. The rave at that time was the magic that 2.5 G and 3G or third generation would do to the world. In one story, I covered a scenario about a busy man who wanted to buy a house but his real estate agent had to transmit live videos of his intended home. It looked fantastical at that time. It is taken for granted now. I also did a story of next generation television in which you could watch live transmission of events, including ball games and concerts and political hustings on your device, on the road, in your car, in your village. It seemed a fantasy then. It is commonplace today. It reminds me of a tech expert’s testimony to the changing times as far back as 2004 at a Cellular Telecommunication and Internet Association (CTIA) conference in Atlanta. He said he overheard his children say that “daddy said they didn’t have cell phones when he was growing up. Do you think he was saying the truth. I think dad was lying.” Even those of us who saw all these find it difficult to understand how we survived without colour television, without live television, without email, without cell phones, without WhatsApp. But that is a picture of the overwhelming power of time. I recall as a student of Government College, Ughelli, we had seniors in our football team travel to Asaba, Warri and Benin to play soccer or sometimes for debating competitions. We would wait with bated breath till late in the night for their bus to arrive before we knew who won, who scored and how the goals were scored and who the heroes were. Today, we would know live.
Yet I recall at one time I wanted to interview Ken Saro-Wiwa over the rise of his Ogoni movement and the controversy over his popular television show, Bassey and Company. Each time I paid a visit to his Surulere office, not far from Ojuelegba, his secretary would say, he just left. In a number of times, I would hop on molue from Concord newspaper office in Ikeja to Victoria Island to interview a fellow only to be told, he travelled yesterday. Today, all you need is a cell phone, or text message or WhatsApp, and you may not need to see the person in flesh and blood. You don’t have to waste man hours in a sweaty bus after the order of Fela’s satiric sway of suffering and smiling in a bus of “99 standing.”
Yet what we have today has been coming for centuries. It has been a drip-drip of technology advance. Gone was the day when Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, was the chief reporter in the kingdom. Historians now call him an artful reporter because he documented his exploits and heroics in his wars. But journalism and media have mutated over the centuries, booming in one age and muted in another with each age absorbing its triumphs and disasters. In our villages, we had the town criers and these were more immediate than the griots, who stylized histories to suit their fantasies and feudal prejudices. The town criers had gongs and a special voice to ring through the neighborhoods.
But that age quickly passed because of technology, especially with Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type. It revolutionized communication. For so long, to communicate meant to meet the other party in person. The meaning of communication has changed since. You could then communicate by writing letters via the post office. But all that is primitive today with WhatsApp. For instance, to do this lecture, I never met Professor Olusegun Kolawole until today. I never entered the portal of this university until today. Yet, we had all the communication to make this event possible. While Gutenberg invented the movable type, Friederich Koenig made it commercially viable.
The technology turned Europe upside down. People who were conned by the Holy Roman Empire with the derailing mysticism of the Catholic establishment and its feudal partners began to see, as a popular saying of the time, that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an empire.
The Bible that was the exclusive preserve of priests were now available to all, who could now see what Apostle Paul said of the worshippers of Berea who read to find out if what the clerics told them was so. The literacy that followed gave birth to what was known as the Renaissance, and it was the flowering of a new civilization. The church broke down in pieces and in parts, with what was known as the Transformation. It birthed new nationalisms, guillotined feudalism and led to the age of Enlightenment. But it also enabled one of the blights of history: slavery, slave trade and colonialism.
As this was going on, it engendered rural-urban migrations as cities were being born with the rise of scientific and therefore industrial revolutions.
All of this fall into what Alvin Toffler in his famous book, The Third Wave, called the Second Wave of history. For him the first wave began with the neolithic age, the hunter-gatherer or what some may call the stone age. His categorization may be arbitrary and the content of each category peremptory, but it shows how the mercurial spirit of humanity has spun many a narrative so much so that it takes a lot of work to simplify. The first wave still encompasses the first civilisations, including the Egyptians with the impetuous pharaohs and their powers of faith and gods, the Persians with their laws that no one could change, the Greek Empire with their swagger of ideas and wars and their first flushes of the democratic ideas and impulse and such august creatures as Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, writers like Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes and Sophocles and leaders like Solon and Pericles; the Roman empire of course with its pomp and glories and the wars and the Caesars, the Pompeys and Caligula and the romp of erotica and despotism. The world was supposed by a set of historians to have wallowed in an age of darkness referring to the Middle Ages. Some historians said it has no cultural bequeathal in spite of the wars and colourful creatures and ideas of that era. For instance, the wave of scholasticism and the divine rights of kings. In spite of that, the renaissance benefited also from the burst of the scientific revolution, and the political awakening that led to the dismantling of feudalism.
It was in the context, that we had what was known as the Penny Press in the 19th century. Newspapers were cheap and affordable, and they were available. People could now see what was happening faraway. They could now understand the meaning of oppression and how to engage tyrannies. It was also the genesis of tabloid journalism.
If we had political journalism then, we also had gossip and the rise of popular culture. The newspaper was the king of media, and it was so for a long time, leading to new ways of reporting. Reporting was saved from its arbitrary chaos as the rebirth of the New York Times, after the chaotic time of yellow journalism, instilled discipline in the profession with what we call the inverted pyramid, with the introduction focusing on the latest facts first, then followed by what is called the nut graf.
The third wave, according to Toffler, came especially after the world wars of the 20th century. The hurly burly of the two World Wars of the 20th century led to what became known as the New Journalism that valorised writing in the novelistic style, with such writers as Tom Wolf, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, et al. But technology was making its own reckoning. We had the invention of the radio with the Italian genius, Gugliemo Marconi. Later, it was the television and film. When each of these came on stream, the newspaper was seen as the endangered species. But somehow, the newspaper adjusted, and cohabited with radio and television. Yet, the tension was building from decade to decade.
The Third Wave has been the wave that has transformed the world the most. And the major feature of this age is what we call the information age, which has extended into what we now clarify as the digital age. This is the age of disruption, where time and space collapsed into a unit, even that unit continues to miniaturise into bits. Time, as defined two decades ago, conflicts with today’s understanding. The same thing obtains with defining space. It is not just physical, it is sometimes temporal, or even temporary, and abstract even.
The newspaper was one of the drivers and victims of this wave. Like the phoenix, the newspaper had a resilience of rebirth, reengineering itself into an amoebic force. The newspaper became the ensign of democracy. As Richard Kluger said, “Each time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism.”
A generation of Nigerians or readers around the world cannot do without the tactile experience of holding a newspaper in their hands as they sip coffee, and hear crisp pages rustle and crumple over their coffee table or over their laps. But that age is passing, and the new sensation of all media converging on one page on a laptop and cell phone is the new revolution. That page could be a moment or a sound.
The progression happened by stealth. First, it was just the text. Then we had sound. Then we had still images in black and white. It was followed by moving images in colour. A technology known as interoperability ensured that platforms can interact, so sound and image conjoined to reflect true experience. It has magically blended, so you can hear, see and feel in one breath online in the way that a rustling newspaper cannot do for you.
The television became a potent threat. In fact, in 1991, when I visited a newspaper in Montreal, Canada, known as the Montreal Gazette, I heard that the editor was just fired because he could not adapt to the challenges of television that preempted newspaper headlines by reporting the news the night before. But editors adapted, and in spite of the flowering of television and morning whispers of radio orators, the newspaper still flourished. Imagination, said Einstein, is more important than knowledge. Editorial swagger still manifested in the newsrooms.
But with the coming of the internet, things began to change, and fast. Everything I reported in the early 2000’s had started to take on a furious reality. Exit fantasy. Exit television as superpower. Enter Facebook and X. Enter Youtube and instagram. Welcome citizen journalist. Everyone could be a reporter, editor and commentator. The online world had become a leveler and topsy turvy. Anyone was as good as a domain. All over the world, the paradigm of media profitability also changed.
But with it has come a major challenge. Apart from its ability to generate wealth for the truly creative, it also rewarded the creative rascal, and even buffoon. It made society unfortunate in many respects while expanding opportunities. It has also given us an age of dunces. In a recent episode of the reality show, BBNaija, the participants were asked a series of apparently easy questions. They did not know what seven times zero amounted to, who the first president of Nigeria was, could not identify Awolowo on a 100 naira note and did not know the full meaning of CAC. One of them said the judiciary was the lawmaking organ of government. This is N100 million and SUV prize for dummies. Yet, it is all the rage among the young, and the winners become role models for a generation. This is not to say this thing started today. When I was in Ife, a parade of queens who wanted to win a beauty contest did not know who was the head of state of the country.
The cultural critic Daniel J. Boorstin, identified what the obsession with modern media has generated. He identified them as image thinking and ideal thinking. But it seems image has trumped everything. The man who popularized it was the tennis star Andre Agassi, who featured in a television advert that said “image is everything.” It haunted the man when he played on the court. Whether he won or lost, fans yelled “image is everything.” He confessed it hurt him. image is the seduction of the age. The Japanese novelist, Hakuri Murakami wrote, “image is everything. You don’t have to spare any expense to create the right image…once you get a good reputation, the momentum will carry you.” What is a good reputation, the values of a society determine it. What do they care if it is good or bad so long as it is profitable. Said Elle Macpherson, an Australian beauty queen: “You have nothing to sell except for your image: the image is everything.”
Neal Gabler, a United States cultural critic, wrote a book, Life the Movie, and lamented how everything in the modern world was now tilted towards its entertainment values. Whether it was an economist or CEO or a movie actor or singer, or even a politician. The activist and politician, Julian Bond, said, “there is a thin line between politics and theatricals.” We know of a governor in southwest Nigeria whose first recognizable public trait is his dance moves, not a wise quote or a wise project.
Nothing exemplifies image thinking more than a certain fellow known as Bobrisky who titillated the young consciousness by his gender ambiguity. He made a career out of confusion, and the young loved it. Even after he left jail, he confessed before pulling the information from the web that not a few celebrities gifted him with about N100 million. The first man to be a woman and become a man, perhaps the first person to make profit from going to jail.
The word viral was a bad word yesterday. No one wished it on themselves because it entailed diseases like HIV-AIDS and Monkeypox. Today is sought after like gold. Everyone now wants to be viral. It reminds me of a scene in the comedy show The Jeffersons when Mr. Jefferson was showing some health symptoms and somebody said it might be ulcer. He winced at the prospect until somebody else explained that it was a disease of the rich. His face flashed and he quipped, “I get my ulcer all the time.”
Today, to be viral is a wish of the majority of online junkies. It is a disease they embrace. It makes them rich, famous and sought after. In short, it makes them virile.
But there are potent challenges. It is not yet accountable. Not in these parts. During the last election, I wrote a piece titled, Obituary, and I had a lot of death threats, and not one of them could be isolated or prosecuted. In fact, media types who did not share my view escalated the incitements and I had to live the life of a recluse for over four months. During that period, someone published a photo of a man bearing a goat at a political rally, and said that it was me. And many people believed the story, including a mainstream television station, even though my authentic picture had been in the public domain for decades and the anchors who knew me did not debunk it on air. Again, for irony, someone else used my real picture, without my permission, to advertise a product and presented me as an example of a person who used the drug to cure a disease. I tried to track the criminal but I was told by a lawyer that that may be what the offender wanted to achieve by making his skit go viral at my expense. Sometime ago, someone did not like my views on an issue and he wrote a comment on my Facebook page that he sat next to me at a university convocation in Niger State, and my mouth emitted such offensive odour that it repelled everyone around him. In fact, a fellow editor who saw it asked me if it was true. I had never and have never even been to that university in my life.
That is the peril of an egalitarian media. So bad was it once that somebody published online a fake letter that I had been fired, prompting a fan in the United States to call to sympathise with me. Just recently, a video went virile, after a DSS boss retired, of persons jubilating. Some contorted that video to mean that they were jubilating because their wicked boss had been fired. The truth, though, was that it was not the Abuja office but the Kwara office of those happy that one of their own had just been elevated.
Remember how many people believed that Buhari was a double. We may call it an egalitarian media, but it may also be an illusion of equality. What we have seen in this country, and even in some countries around the world is how new technology has inflamed a new virus: populism. It brings to mind a novel, Being There, about a person who grew up watching only television, knows nothing else but somehow rises to become a celebrity by accident and even touted to be president of the United States. Once somebody wants to mug him in public. He reaches for his remote control in order to change the channel, so as to avoid the assailant.
We have seen how a sentiment is canonized without facts or reason or a candidate who is barely interrogated can generate an online army of frenzy and become the star of the times. This is because we have entered what I might call a stimulated era. Anna Lembke wrote a book titled, Dopamine Nation: Finding a Balance in an Age of Indulgence. It refers to the dopamine in our brain, which stimulates us to have desire and to enthuse. Lembke demonstrates that social media with its skits and bytes has turned modern person into a specimen who is in a hurry to get high and quick, too. She argues that many things are boring in modern life, and we want something immediate, fresh with alcoholic intensity. She writes, “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy.”
About a century ago, Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” Warhol forgot to add that while they are seeking fifteen minutes of fame, consumers will be seeking 15 seconds of entertainment. It could be a tweet on a politician who just got caught with a mistress or pastor whose private chat with a politician went virile. In a recent essay, Ted Gioia, a music critic and historian, said the people seek distraction.
In a book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” Philip Reiff says, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”
It creates a superficial civilization. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Today, examining a life takes too much time from a busy life. For me, the greatest evil is WhatsApp. It creates chambers of us versus them. Nothing confirms Jean Paul Sartre’s assertion that “hell is other people” more than WhatsApp. It exemplifies the illusion of a democratic world. Rather, it encourages tribalism, not in terms ethnicity alone, or religion, but interests and even temperaments.
It is probably going to get worse with the new technology known as artificial intelligence, or AI. It is the ultimate mimic technology, as explained in Henry Kissinger’s book, The Age of AI. Anything or anyone can become dispensable. Someone else can present this lecture, if it were done remotely, and pretend to be me, the same face, the same voice. And receive the same applause, the same disapproval. How false that kind of world promises to be?
The future is cheery and dreadful. The media is a reflection of the new reality. New reality will be virtual reality. As newspapers are threatened, so is a new world, brave and fragile.
The only way to handle this is caution and a set of commonsense laws. Recently, former Lagos State governor and federal minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, sued a fellow for maligning his name. This is what I expect the new media ombudsman to do. Many who steal news of other media houses and those who distort them and publish outright lies ought to be pursued and prosecuted. A semblance of balance happens in the West. Facebook and X are being held to account. It may not be perfect. But a sense of retributive justice can restrain the beasts among us.
Technology is the way forward and back. As philosopher Karl Popper opined, we cannot predict the future because we cannot predict technology. But we can try to mediate by ensuring that the laws are more important that the criminal. That way, we can have both freedom and order, and the beat goes on for the media that is still looking for a new identity.