One common phrase echoed in the modern business world is that "nothing fails like success."  In a fast changing world, companies that lock on to strategies that work today are likely to be out of action tomorrow.   They  focus on events that succeed in business terms and as a consequence they become oblivious to other opportunities that are outside that focus. Those "other things" become blindspots.  There are some fascinating things afoot on planet earth that go largely unreported as a result.

Journalism is a profession but it's also very much a business.  As such it also suffers from developing a fixed focus as all businesses to increase efficiency and fix responsibility.   It has built a lens called news, weather, and sports.   Newspapers and television news, like other businesses, have locked on to a series of categories that represent reportable ideas and over the years have created categories and assigned reporters and editors to cover those categories.   But, just like breakfast, lunch and dinner, that were fine solutions when nearly everyone performed some kind of physical behavior, in the modern office-working society if everyone ate that much food everyday they would be obese.  It's time to zoom that lens out.
 
To make matters slightly worse, when businesses decide who and what the categories of consequence are they then set up a budget to match.  If there's a budget for "x" and no budget for "y" then after a fashion "y" just doesn't get handled.  You have a vice-president for "x" and none for "y" and ......you get the idea.    The categories become hardened by money and staff positions.
 

   The social architect encourages journalistic professionals to expand their categories of reportage.  

Many believe that as we approach the millennium there will be an increased interest in the state of the planet and the civilization as a whole.  It just a natural thing to expand one's horizons during times of reflection and anticipated growth.   As such, I will put forward my recommendations on categories for expanded reportage.

The planetary commons.   Because we humans function on land it is easy to get caught in a trap of reporting only on land based events.   Most of the environment on this planet however is water and air.  The oceans around us and the biosphere above us are our planetary commons.  Unfortunately since no one organization owns them there is little in the way of budget for their maintenance and repair.  To say that we don't depend on them is obviously ludicrous.   Most of the living beings on our planet are found in the sea.  And because we haven't noticed in detail what is not directly present in our physical reality, we have seriously abused this part of our world.  Our biosphere, that precious seven mile high bubble that surrounds our living systems with  invisible properties of great importance, may become the most interesting topic of the 21st century.

We value a fiberoptic cable because it magically carries a set of signals at light speed wherever we direct it.  Our biosphere is similarly a communications medium that transmits signals, smells, birds, thoughts and moisture with an uncompromising array.   When it's properties are fully discovered the biosphere may become our resource of choice.

Connectivity.   I believe the most significant event in modern history is the rate at which each individual on this planet is being connected to each of the others and to the world and it's information base at large.  Finding out that the world is connected will eventually be considered a more important discovery that finding out that the world was round.  The value of this discovery is that more people can personally take advantage of this new information superstructure than any other since civilization began.   Planetary democracy is afoot.

So many people are barely conscious of the significance of the many communications tools that have been added to our world in the last few years.  We can send a 33 volume set of encyclopedia as data across the American continent in less than a second.  That transmission time includes switches, routers and amplifiers along the way.  The consequences of this connectivity are enormous.  Our stability, governance, educational growth rate and well being as a planet and a species are directly tied to this set of expanding resources.  If the right idea hits the airwaves the entire planet could change it's mind about something in a matter of hours.   That's news......or as Gragory Bateson was want to say.." the difference that makes a difference".

Consciousness.  This is a word that includes states of awareness, expanded ways of knowing, mindfullness and basic self-realization.  There are interesting times in history that have encouraged people to be self-directed and to accept responsibility for themselves and life around them.  There were other times when self-directed people may not have existed at all.  Needless to say civilization as an idea can be elevated when everyone has a greater capacity to contribute to it.   This need not be esoteric.   Conquering ones anxiety, noticing ones thinking patterns, accepting a wider range of beliefs are all very practical ways of becoming a contributing member of society instead of another member of the mindless grazing flock.  The prison warehouses would be a lot less crowded with more of it.

At a slightly grander scale, being conversant in the mythologies that spawned our age, paradigms that contain our thinking and language that controls our vision could become a tool kit to more consciously build our collective, as well as, our individual being.  This is a robust topic and the secret to a more democratic civilization.

The spectrum.  I hesitated to rename what might be called aesthetics.  But, the elegant new combinations I want suggest are much more a function of their mix than any individual selection. There is  new life at many of the crossroads on Planet Earth.   Our transnational corridors have exploded with a fusion of new luxuries, foods and color.   We have increased the number of colors that are practically available to people...three times over...in the last twenty years and it has barely been a topic of discussion.   Foods have been synthesized from all over the planet in a crescendo of feverish activity all in such a short time.  Decor has likewise become more sumptuous and full of new signs of civilization like saunas and spas.
 

 The amalgam of these advances are worth making a more conscious part of a civilization that is bound to have more time on its hands.  Once the fare of kings and nobles these amenities are available to a fourth of our planetary population.  

How is it that we can eliminate jobs with every efficiency program we install at work...while simultaneously screaming for more jobs?  Do we really need to create more jobs or more life?

Likewise our states of behavior are elevated by pleasant surroundings and there is more interesting technology involved here than meets the eye.   The quality of life overall may benefit from a renewed interest in these matters but they must reach general awareness for that to occur at a larger scale.

The timeprint.   People on the planet have radically different  ways of spending their time.  Only western civilization spends five days a week at work and tries to pack the rest of life into the remaining two.  This is a somewhat blind adherence to survival agriculture and the assembly line.   Actually recent surveys show more than a third of American workers now operate as entrepreneurs.   But the discussion about how we spend our lives is still waiting.

Some Balinese spend a third of their time growing something outdoors, a third of their life making something of value, and a third of their life pursuing community-based social and spiritual activities, often in nature.  Sound a little more intelligent?  The timeprint is a mapping of how life is lived.  It can be used to recommend healthier and more productive ways of being, doing and learning and especially to focus on the mix..

Some cultures spend most of their life behind a computer terminal while others bend over harvesting plants.  If we could become fluent with  timeprints then each of those respective cultures could have a bit of both kinds of work, making each desirable  and leading toward a much healthier combination.  Reporting on the pieces must give ground to reporting on the wholes.  So, lets report on how we spend our time.

Footprints.   Another way we have seen the train but missed the track is in looking at our patterns of development on the land.  We look at buildings and houses as events, but rarely discuss the patterns they are creating.  Did we really need to build a hundred thousand subdivisions with garages for frontdoors, no porches and no common places for the community to meet or the kids to play ? Why didn't we see what was happening ? It's partly because we weren't looking at the right framework.  Why didn't we create town centers we could walk to ?  What happened to the commons with places to sit in nature ?  Why isn't there any room for gardens next to our houses ? Who needs ten thousand square feet of house to live in?   Think of all the trees it took to make a house that obscenely large?

Zoom out, pressfolk...see the big picture...then go back for the juicy details.  Combine the most interesting footprint features on the planet and you will have informed your readership of their options and at a scale that we can afford.  Get a digital camera and get airborne the view is very informative.

Solutions.  Yes, it's cheaper and takes less intelligence to follow the firetrucks to the fire.  The pictures are juicy and the it doesn't take seasoned reporters to get the story.  The problem is that we are filling our daily consciousness with tiny episodic disasters.  Like it or not the news is the most present source that serves our collective awareness about our future.   Unfortunately,  we have "canned" our elders as a viable source of perspective.   They too are a subject where more interest could be aimed.
 

If we see our options as a series of small time disasters that then becomes the future we will anticipate and select.

If, on the other hand, we also see stories of success created by  regular people who produce that success, then we can expect to have a more empowering set of examples of how to make a useful difference.  We need to highlight institutions that produce a real service, individuals that create real solutions and elders who have a real perspective.   Soon more than half the planets population will be under twenty-five. Its not that occasional alerts about what's not working isn't also useful but "listen to the music".  Are we playing our own funeral song ?

Bodywork.  A veritable revolution in human contact has occurred under our noses and it goes unreported.  More than half of our culture to some degree and many to a large degree are having their bodies touched regularly.  Yes, it used to be that the wealthy could experience massage.  Now as a healing modality and as an expression of how a culture is redefining intimacy...people are being touched by others.  Bodywork is the generic category.   The styles of touching have gone from Swedish massage to the widest possible range of treatments.  This is part of the preventative medicine approach that has completely changed the way people are dealing with their health today.  The surveys show that more than 60% of Americans consulted an alternative practitioner last year.  So, where's the coverage ?

Self-help.  Why is it that we have to pay $20 for an entire book on the simplest self-help subject ?  There is so much information available in the world...and the primary subjects on relationships, love, parenting, hygiene, travel tips are still so obscure.   I can find out why an obscure company lost market share but how to make love must be had... somewhere else.  Yes, I appreciate that there have been some attempts to include "life" into the older news formats...but it seems to be had only as a function of finding out how a movie star did it !

Spirit   O.K. now we're entering territory reserved for those with real courage.  When we speak of spiritual matters in the modern world it's important to separate religion from spiritual practice.  People planet-wide are exploring a wide variety of spiritual practices that may have been originally associated with specific religious orders.  But, prayer and visualizations and affirmations are all very much the same kind of practice.  They work whether in or out of a specific religious order.  Meditation and other stress reduction tools are both specific to some religious practices and also a part of just coping with life.  We need the information about how to "do life" in a fundamentally more effective and pervasive way.

It could be said with the pace of life being what it is these days that we have never more desperately needed these common sense practices.  I believe that most people now employ many "universalistic" practices.  Those who attend a some more experimental churches find these new combinations taken from other religions.. Lets get these widely based phenomena on the map.  We need the tools for conscious living.
 

SUMMARY

There are other slightly smaller categories we could cover but these are the most obvious of the blindspots that I recognize. There could be a "desk" at a large paper or news network for each of these.  Then there is the matter of how the material is treated.  In this case it would be nice if major relationships could be included using systems graphics like those that have been created to treat the weather.

 Presently, the news is almost completely episodic and microscopic.  We are stuck in a incident reporting style. In the final analysis we get mostly bad news we can't do anything about and it comes in unrelated bits.  The crowning blow is damning since we have no other pervasive tool to use as a navigation device for our civilization.

If we are not getting the whole story, and further, not getting it in ways we can structure a quality response, then the resulting civilization is going to reflect the kind of aimless, stumbling trends we find in today's public fare.   The media is one of the only institutions extant today that has not publicly announced it was reinventing itself.  As Einstein and others have intimated...we can only reinvent our public life when we have reinvented our public view of it!

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Quest: Write this as a letter to a newspaper editor and suggest stories that fit for your community.