By ELISA TAMARKIN [Common-place] – Judith Halberstam worries, in a story on “The Death of English” for Inside Higher Ed, that the New York Times has stopped dispatching a reporter to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association to write up its yearly mockery of the conference (with its “wacky” paper titles) and to savage the “sad efforts of earnest English profs to look hip, cool and vaguely relevant.” For Halberstam, we need to “update our field” or it won’t even be worth insulting, and she argues that literary scholars in particular have not “kept up” with emerging areas of focus (on empire, for example, or popular culture) that could replace traditional fields as they become “irrelevant as areas of study.” She wants her arguments to provoke and scandalize, not just to make English a vital discipline in a “rapidly changing world,” but to make sure that it stays newsworthy too: “Let’s hope that in another decade The New York Times … is forced to spend the entire year reporting in meaningful ways on the reinvigoration of the humanities.”

Is newsworthiness the same as importance? This was one of the questions posed in a lecture by Kirk Citron at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, CA; the lecture was recently posted on TED’s (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. Citron compares top AP stories of the past year (the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane landing and Michael Jackson’s death) with less prominent news of scientific discoveries (nanobots fighting cancer from within the bloodstream) or endemic global problems (resource scarcity in the developing world) that he thinks may be timeless enough to stay news. His point—which for the purposes of a TED lecture he communicates in a succinct, non-Emersonian three minutes—highlights the degree to which we attribute newsworthiness not to important information but to information whose relevance is just a function of our immediate interest in it. Thus relevance, as an expression of recency, crowds out almost every other factor that we could use to sort through information for what matters and what doesn’t.

The contemporary nostalgia for newspapers often trades on the idea that there was once a common set of issues that the public widely recognized as important or, as Emerson might say, relevant to you and also to me.

Continued at Common-place | More Chronicle & Notices.