Modern media makes the world smaller – and that’s no bad thing

It’s not that often you get the low business of journalism put into its proper social and spiritual context but that’s what happened courtesy of the Oxford Dominicans on Saturday. Its conference on ‘Truth-telling and the Media’ – yep, that well known oxymoron – included a contribution by the Goethe expert, Nicholas Boyle. Not a sausage about any current issues relating to the press, thank God. Just a context to put it all in.

And that context is that journalists turn the big society into the small society in the way we write; we make the individual reader feel they can relate to the big stuff. I suppose it’s a bit like those really boring case studies you get whenever there’s a Budget, which bring the abstract things down to the level of the family of four, the single parent or the pensioner.

Professor Boyle’s starting point is that humanly speaking, we normally can relate only to a small group, a tribe of no more than 150 people, known as Dunbar’s number.