Essay: The Roots of Coincidence

The year was 1952, and a young woman had approached famed psychologist Carl Jung with a particularly unusual case: her dreams, as of late, had been haunted by the recurring image of a scarab beetle. As the woman explained her quandary to Jung, however, she noticed that the psychoanalyst was preoccupied with a rapping sound at his room’s window. Eventually, Jung opened the window and allowed the source of the noise to buzz into the room—evidently, something about his patient’s story had attracted to the room a Cetonia aurata, a beetle of the family Scarabaeidae.

Most would write off the bizarre coincidence of a scarab beetle showing up to a conference about scarab beetles as nothing more than that—a coincidence, mere happenstance, no matter how eerie. But for Jung, the beetle’s presence offered a perfect conclusion to the woman’s psychological troubles, regardless of its relation to the woman’s actual dreams. This concept of “synchronicity,” as Jung termed it—the idea that experiences can be symbolically meaningful regardless of whether or not they are causally related—provided the backbone for Jung’s theory of psychoanalysis, influenced a number of Jung’s followers, and even lent its name to one of the finest albums by the English new wave band The Police. However, the inability to test the theory has led most rational thinkers to disregard it as pseudoscientific woo-woo.

If there is one field where synchronicity has never failed to prove itself true, however, that field is media. Journalism, after all, is the science of storytelling, and nothing penetrates, unites and links mankind quite like its stories. The chief failure of conventional news programs is their inability to recognize this—in scrambling to study, recognize and cover the stories that yield the highest ratings, they fail to realize that, in a society shaped by thousands of years of common experiences, anyone could potentially relate to any story. And in a wired, tuned-in world where anyone can play scarab beetle at the window and chime in with a digital comment, it’s easy to gauge what the people want to hear.

Facebook, Twitter and other online media have had so much success for primarily one reason—interactivity. People love to hear their own voices and shout their own opinions, and that’s why I dream of a news program that puts viewers in control. Although I would not eschew anchors for my news program, they would act as commenters rather than drive the action, reading and debating posts from a live Twitter feed or chat room stream. Stories—selected, whenever possible, from online polls and email-in suggestions—would run the gamut from local news to global affairs, but would most likely focus on opinion issues. Any news program attempting to claim its place as a forum for the people would no doubt attract a good number of opinionated people from all sides of the ideological spectrum, and with a good mix of equally opinionated anchors to guide and interpret—but never hijack—the conversation, it could prove to be quite the experiment in interactive media. By focusing on an online conversation—in effect, handing the microphone to the masses rather than talking down to them—my news program could prove to be just the kind of new blood television news needs, appealing not only to our common will to let our voices be heard, but also to that magic little thing called synchronicity.

I have been working on school newspapers since elementary school, and I was a staff writer, columnist and copy editor on Mason High School’s student newspaper The Chronicle my senior year. I am certified in Microsoft Office software and am skilled at using most Adobe products, especially Photoshop and Illustrator. Although I’ve never used Final Cut before, I know my way around Sony Vegas and am tech savvy enough to adapt to any program after just a little experimentation. However, my greatest strength has always been my writing ability, and I’m sure I could contribute a lot to JFreshman Newsroom with this skill. I also anticipate delving into broadcast journalism with the newsroom.