Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Students in Professor Raymond McCaffrey’s Spring 2020 Ethics in Journalism class at the University of Arkansas met for the last time together in Kimpel Hall on March 12. As they followed instructions about plans to cease face-to-face meetings and go to online instruction, the students received an email from university officials officially announcing the move to remote learning.
In the weeks since then, the more than 30 students have spread out from one coast of the country to the other, from Maryland to California, some of them staying around Fayetteville while others have moved to be with friends, family and loved ones throughout Arkansas and in places such as Memphis, Dallas, Kansas City, and Norman.
They have felt the course of their lives changes with each passing day. Despite keeping track of the news coverage of the pandemic, they are consumed by the same questions as many Americans. Can they get the virus and not notice any symptoms? If they get the virus and recover, can they get it again? They worry about their parents, particularly those who might be susceptible to the harshest effects of the coronavirus because they have pre-existing health conditions.
And then there are the economic hardships facing their families – one student has already had a parent laid off from work. They worry about what that economic fallout might mean for them, especially the seniors who are planning to graduate soon and are looking for work in much more fragile job market.
Despite a steady news diet that some agree has become excessive, certainty is not in great supply. Envisioning the future is a challenge. They would like there to be a sense that things are more under control. They would like things to get back to normal, though there is also a sense that that is not going to happen anytime soon, if at all. They wonder what the long-term changes will be in a culture that has changed so amazingly fast.
There is also a sense of appreciation for those who are on the front lines of the fight against the pandemic: not just the doctors and nurses and health-care workers, but the people who help produce the food they eat and put it on the grocery-store shelves where they shop. Might there be a move by more people to work for the greater good of society?
And, finally, they have considered journalism ethics in real time, not just a subject outlined in their textbooks, and its importance in a democratic society in crisis.
Virtual Lecture from Professor McCaffrey: April 9, 2020
At the start of the semester, months before the declaration of a global pandemic, graduate students in our Ethics in Journalism class were assigned a reading from a book called “Man’s Search for Meaning” (Beacon Press) by Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist who presented a unique case study: what it was like for one man to endure captivity in a German concentration camp during World War II. The camp survivor was Frankl himself, who writes about the notion of objectivity in research and details his experience in an almost clinical fashion. The book has been considered one of the most important books of the 20th century.
Frankl wrote that one of the greatest challenges facing him and his fellow captives was a prevailing sense of “uncertainty” because they found it “impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end” (p. 70). The plight of camp inmates, according to Frankl, was not dissimilar in a certain sense from the “unemployed worker” whose “existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal.”
Frankl concluded that a person could ultimately “make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners … everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (p. 66).
One of Frankl’s goals was to generalize his findings so that they could be of use to people in all sorts of life circumstances. So we would hope that he would not object to using his lessons to discuss what people are coping with during pandemic. Implicit in this reasoning is the understanding that some – in particular, those who have gotten sick from the virus – are suffering more than others. Yet, the social changes that have been a result of the global response have affected most people. The challenges facing college students during the pandemic has generated a number of news stories. Here are some links to a few by the New York Times.
“I’m in High School Again”: Virus Sends College Students Home to Parents, and Their Rules by Dan Levin
College Made Them Equal. The Virus Exposed How Equal Their Lives Are. By Nicholas Casey
Surviving Coronavirus as a Broke College Student by Sydney Goins
The Times is so interested in fact that it is interested in hearing from you.
Despite the challenges, there are uplifting stories about young people reaching out to help.
Where does information fit in with all this? At its best, accurate information can help people develop an educated sense of certainty (or at least less uncertainty than before) – and with it a sense of purpose. In his book “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” author James Gleick quotes Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist, who said: “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions.” Gleick himself speaks to the importance of “the meme,” which he sees as more than just an interesting symbol or picture attached to a post on social media: “In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator—an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory.”
When we think of information that we have been consuming, we should think about memes as well.
Meet Your Meme Lords by Steven Kurutz – The New York Times
It’s a TikTok! No, It’s a Song! Drake and the Viral Feedback Loop by Jon Caramanica – The New York Times
If I were in class, this is the point where I would say that all of this is a long-winded way of saying that the fashion in which we collect and process information is vitally important during times of uncertainty. I will leave you will some stories that look at the role of social media and other online vehicles in spreading and collecting information.
Fact-checkers cautiously optimistic about WhatsApp’s new kind of social distancing by Harrison Mantas – Poynter
What Google and Facebook need to do to fight disinformation by Matthew Ingram – The Columbia Journalism Review
The Lessons We Are Learning From Zoom by Brian X. Chen – The New York Times