to be here, not least because this book was

written on Google Docs.

Is anyone here-- who here is on-- are you guys building it

here?

It is the most wonderful tool.

And actually a book before this, called "Art as Therapy,"

I co-wrote with a colleague in Tasmania on Google Docs.

And we would work simultaneously.

And it would not have been possible without your work.

So really from my heart, thank you.

You guys are doing a great job.

What I want to talk about today is a book

which is all about information and how

we are categorizing it and using it.

So it's kind of a Google topic, very much.

But the kind of information that I'm talking about

is news, news information.

We're very confused I think as a society

as to the way we are using news.

I think it's one of the most inefficient uses of our time.

Of anything that we do in the day,

the way that we access information

through this thing, this massive entity called "the news,"

right, is full of redundancy.

It's full of quirks.

It's full of perversions.

It's not working as it should.

There's an enormous opportunity to make news go better.

And that's what my book is about.

Trying to imagine how, in a different range of areas,

we could make news go better.

Because I think it's terrible at the moment.

Not terrible, I'm being hyperbolic.

But not great.

Part the problem, of course, is we are not educated in it.

So when we go to school, people will

tell us a little bit about paintings

and how to look at them.

And people will tell us a little bit about drama and literature.

But no one tells you what on earth you're

supposed to do when you come across this kind of thing,

or this kind of thing.

We're not systematically inducted

into the weirdness of the news world.

One of the problems, of course, is information overload.

Way back in the 18th century, there

was some promises made about what

would happen if news became widely and freely available.

The great promise of the Enlightenment

is put information out there, people will read it, use it,

and society will improve.

OK, that's the dream.

It hasn't really worked out that way.

It's almost nowadays as though you've got two options.

If you want to try and keep a population passive,

supine, not really able to understand reality,

OK, the first option is the North Korean option.

You throttle the pipe of news.

No news, right.

Then people don't know what's going on and they're confused.

But the other way to make sure that people don't know what's

going on and are confused is you give them

so news they don't what on earth is going on.

I mean, you guys unusually clever.

But most people don't know what on earth

was happening last week.

We don't know because there is too much information.

And most of it is orphaned.

It's ripped out of context, et cetera.

And therefore, the promise of news

has been seriously undermined.

In many ways, news replaces this religion.

Just as in the olden days, you used

to go to religion and religion would tell you

what was right and wrong, what the important issue of the day

is.

Now, we switch on the news.

That will tell us what is important,

what's right and wrong.

But, of course, huge assumptions there.

And just as you can be an agnostic, a skeptic,

an atheist in relation to religion,

so all those tags can apply also for the news.

And I would probably characterize myself

on the more skeptical/agnostic/aethist end

of the business.

Nevertheless, I recognize the unbelievable importance

of this stuff.

If you're planning a coup, always drive your tanks not

to the homes of the computer programmers, the poets,

the historians, the novelists.

You take your tanks to the news HQ

because that is where social, political reality is

made in the consciousness of the population.

So it's an incredibly valuable and important area.

But it's going wrong in lots of ways.

Let me run you through some of the areas where

I think it's going wrong.

One of the things is the very important stuff

of life, all right, used to be at the top of the headlines.

It used to be at the top of the news.

The important stuff is at the top

and the kind of frothy stuff is at the bottom.

The news, what is news, should be important.

And that's why we tune in.

And that's why news can command our affection.

However, nowadays, if you put something

like this on the front page of your site

or your news bulletin, the greatest news story on Earth,

your ratings will plummet.

No one is interested in this at all.

However, if you put her on, wow, Taylor Swift, everybody's

interested in Taylor Swift, particularly in shorts.

This is one of the perennial favorites of all news

organizations, endless photos like this.

OK, what are we going to do about this?

Well, one response of many serious journalists

is to despair.

They're prone to despair.

And this fact really leads them to take to the hills,

and hunker down, and escape civilization.

I'm hopeful because I know about the history of the Renaissance.

And in the Renaissance, the Catholic Church

knew that it had an awful lot of complex messages

to get across to people, arduous messages, difficult messages.

Really about how to live like Jesus Christ, kind

of difficult, all about the Gospels, et cetera.

So when they set about doing their altar

pieces of giant advertisements for their faith,

they realized that they had to do some particular things

in order to get the message across.

So if you've got something important to say

and you simply put it in the hands of the bearded guy

there on the bottom right, with a big book and the big beard,

no one listens to guys with big beards like that.

You're just not going to sell the message.

That's why they took the Taylor Swifts of the day, who

are in the centerpiece, and gave them

very lovely clothes, and hair, and svelte appearance

in order to sell the message.

So in other words, they realized that they

were in the business of popularization,

not merely the gathering of important information,

but it's conveyance, all the techniques of artistry.

They realized they had to work very hard,

not just to gather what Jesus said,

but to make sure the what Jesus said

was going to be listened to.

And that might involve them getting

Giovanni Bellini to make an altarpiece.

It's kind weird because most news organizations now

see themselves as data driven businesses.

We bring you the data, the important facts.

And we leave it on the table and you will read it and consume it

and then you will be overwhelmed.

The Catholic Church, much wiser.

If you simply put the Gospels on the table,

with the guy with the beard, no one will listen.

You need to work a little harder.

So this altarpiece is a symbol, a metaphor if you like,

for that extra work we're going to need to do.

The other thing about the news, of course,

is there's too much of it, as I mentioned.

But there isn't really too much of it.

What there is is stories that keep saying they're brand new

and they're never happened before in history of the world.

But in fact, of course they've happened before.

It's just we're taught by the news organizations

not to recognize what we could call archetypes.

The news is full of archetypes.

In my book I say that there are 32 archetypes that

keep running round and round.

They're the same stories.

It just keeps running.

The Kiev story, it's an archetype.

It's been running since 1789.

Of course, the news will never tell me that.

No.

For the news, it's totally new.

Something completely unbelievable has happened.

But it doesn't want you to understand the threads that

are running constantly through human life.

This happens just with less significant stories as well.

Let me show you a story which looks like lots of stories,

but in fact only one story.

So there's this guy and there's this lady.

And there's these guys.

Now basically, that looks like three stories.

It's about only one story because what it's a story of is

there's Prince William, a high and mighty guy,

wrestling with a car seat, with a baby seat.

Wow and amazing.

This is Taylor Swift again and she's

at Whole Foods buying lettuce.

Amazing.

A high and mighty person buying things.

And this is a high and mighty son of God.

But he's born in humble circumstances.

He could have been in a place.

It's the same story.

It's emotional structure is identical.

But the news is not in the business

of sharpening our eyes to the similarities between stories,

reducing the number of phenomena.

I come from the background of philosophy.

It's all about trying to reduce phenomena down to some noumena.

The news works in the opposite direction.

Everything is always new.

We've never seen it before, et cetera.

That makes life dizzying.

It makes it harder to navigate.

The area that we know as foreign news,

OK, the great promise of foreign news

used to be you send out some reporters.

You give them some fiber optic cables.

You give them a satellite.

They will tell you about stuff going

on in other parts of the world.

And then people will care.

They will agitate for change and the world will improve.

Nonsense.

None of that happens.

Last week, 200 people were killed

in fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

None of you know that.

I only know that because I'm in the business.

It just washes over us.

And the reason is, again, this problem of data.

People think.

News organizations believe that you can go out there and get

the facts, like 200 people died.

And people go, oh, my goodness, how awful, how terrible.

We must do something about it.

We must write to the congressman.

You don't do anything about it because you don't care.

And the reason you don't care is why should you

care about the death of 200 people whose lives you never

knew existed?

You didn't know that they were alive.

So who cares if they're dead.

I mean it's like a mirage.

If I put you in a performance of "King Lear,"

you might be weeping at the end of a performance of "King

Lear" for a guy who what, didn't even live.

So there you are.

You're weeping about people who never lived,