Cartography 101
March 2026. I am seven weeks into teaching a media writing class. The 18 students in the course have listened to lectures about interviewing, crafting questions, and writing articles. It is time to segue from theory to practice. I tell them that their next assignment is to find a graduating senior student who is a stranger, interview the student in person for at least 30 minutes, and write an article about their post-graduation aspirations.
The students look at me as if I have asked them to eat a handful of glass.
“Let me hear your concerns,” I say.
“Professor Kelly, we won’t be able to find anyone who will agree to this. Talking to strangers is just too cringe,” one student says. I hear murmurs of agreement.
I ask the class to take it further. “What else is it besides cringe?” I ask.
“Scary,” someone offers. “You don’t know what might happen. People are weird. They do all kinds of scary things.”
And there it is.
I have come to expect the apprehension, the timidity, and the anxiety. But the mistrust and suspicion — these are pernicious emotional newcomers most of my students express at the idea of engaging with someone they do not know in what I perceive as a very low-stakes encounter. In my decidedly unscientific study with sample groups of bright and driven journalism and communications students over a period of 20 years, what I’ve witnessed in the past decade is a pronounced diminishment of trust and a pronounced increase in suspicion. What I hear with frequency is the belief that the most likely outcome of approaching strangers is potential harm rather than potential goodwill.
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The corrosive effects of suspicion have given pause to thinkers and sages for centuries. In the early 1600s, the English philosopher Francis Bacon published an essay positing that suspicion clouds the mind, obscuring clear vision and sound judgment. Not all suspicion, he advised; he outlined variations. Suspicion can serve as a protective mechanism, an internal warning system that positions us somewhere in the neighborhood of skepticism and doubt.
But it wasn’t the internal, self-generated suspicion that concerned Bacon. Instead, it was what he called artificially nourished suspicion — the suspicions that are suggested or implanted from outside actors. Some forms are as benign as friends’ gossip. Other forms are more insidious, amplified, constant, and presented in the churn of media content we wade through each day.
In a June 2026 global survey of news and information consumption across 48 countries, the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that social media and video platforms are now used more frequently as primary news sources than TV or the websites and apps of news outlets. In the algorithmically determined social media feeds whose aim is to keep us scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, trust doesn’t trend. Outrage does. Scandal does. As we all know, politically or morally charged content goes viral rapidly, furthering polarization, solidifying stereotypes, and presenting us with a showcase of questionable human behavior.
Twenty-five years ago, American journalists and media critics Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel co-wrote The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and The Public Should Expect, a slim yet potent outline of nine principles undergirding the sort of journalism that works in concert with citizens and institutions to keep democracy humming. One of the principles that gave me the most pause was about scale. In their book, Kovach and Rosenstiel write that journalism must keep the news comprehensive and proportional. “Journalism is our modern cartography. It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. As with any map, its value depends on a completeness and proportionality in which the significant is given greater visibility than the trivial.”
This proportionality that urges greater visibility for the significant sounds like a gorgeous albeit tricky ideal in an era where our social media feeds become our cartographers. How do we encourage one another to look up from the devices drawing our maps and expand our thinking to take in a larger world in which calamity, scandal and flamethrowing sit proportionally in a landscape that also includes people solving problems, helping neighbors, working quietly to contribute to a better world?
Francis Bacon might urge us toward knowledge, open dialogue, and a balanced attitude. His advice in his essay about suspicion was to use it as a prompt for investigation rather than a reason to withdraw from trust. Bacon says do more to pursue facts and evidence. Kovach and Rosenstiel say claim your agency. We have the power — and the civic mandate — to move from passive to active, to expect more, to respond to what we read and see, to swipe past what doesn’t serve our higher selves.
But it is Swedish physician, academic and popular TED speaker Hans Rosling who suggests that we become “possibilists”, a term he created. In his book Factfulness, published posthumously eight years ago, Rosling’s central idea is that the world is not as bad as our doomscrolling suggests. Rosling uses data to puncture some inaccurate ideas and calls out the media as the major driver of distorted global perceptions. He argues that most people’s understanding of the world is shaped not by objective facts, but by sensational, negative, and fear-driven reporting prioritizing problems over solutions, the outrageous outlier event over the wider picture. “I am not an optimist,” he writes in his book. “That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious possibilist. It means someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all of our progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible.”
When my media writing students return to class after their interviews, we debrief together. I ask for details about their encounters. Almost all of them talk about being surprised. “This was nothing like I expected,” one says. I hear murmurs of agreement. The strangers weren’t scary. Bad things did not befall them. Cringe came and went or it never came at all. Initial awkwardness gave way to connection. Interviews went on long past the 30-minute requirement. Where they imagined difficulty, they found willingness. They begin to sound like possibilists.
I tell them that their encounters were evidence. I tell them that their task is to compile more evidence. Approach strangers with genuine goodwill and curiosity. Ask questions to understand and connect. Suspend judgment and open your minds further to accommodate what you know now to be true. And begin to redraw your maps.
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Laura Kelly teaches writing and storytelling at the American University of Bulgaria. This story first appeared in FlagLive!
