Award-winning broadcaster, academic and columnist Waleed Aly delivered the 2016 Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney on Friday, 14 October.

Thanks so much for having me, and for turning up for this most improbable evening. Improbable because my whole presence in this industry is a bit of an accident.

I always liked the thought of media work, but I can't say I pursued it particularly hard. I applied for a cadetship at The Age out of university and got asked to come in for the exam. But in the meantime I'd been offered a legal job and the exam was on Grand Final day, so I didn't turn up.

Truth is I kind of stumbled into doing media work. I started out as a lawyer and then moved into academia, and media only happened at all because I liked writing, had a deep love of newspapers and started getting the odd column published.

So in some ways it feels like I'm now in a parallel universe to the one in which I began. And I suppose in some ways I am.

But then I'm reminded of that old saying my wife often throws at me about academics: primary school teachers do it because they love the kids; secondary school teachers do it because they love the subject; university lecturers do it because they love themselves.

So I guess it was only a matter of time before I'd end up working in commercial television.

But however you get in this industry, being asked to give this lecture is utterly unexpected and about as humbling as it gets - as I've said before, too intimidating a request to accept, too huge an honour to decline.

Of course, that's true in no small part because of the kind of shadow Andrew Olle casts. I have no aspiration to step out of that shadow. In fact, I'd be pretty chuffed if anyone considers me to be in it. So, to that end I particularly want to acknowledge the presence of the Olle family in the room: Annette and her children Nina and of course Nick, who I'm fortunate enough to work with every day at The Project. In fact, we both began working there on exactly the same day - Australia Day last year. I know from speaking to Nick how much this event means to him, and he was generous enough to assure me the family was happy with this year's choice of speaker, which means a great deal to me. So to the family, please know I take this trust seriously and hope above all else I do justice to the occasion, and to Andrew's legacy.

I was never fortunate enough to have met Andrew. I can only go on the accounts of those who had. But the one thing that comes up ceaselessly is his integrity. Andrew Olle is a kind of shorthand for journalistic values. He's revered because he has become a symbol of the best of what we do; of those ideas and principles that give our work meaning. They're the principles on which our industry is established.

But these days you could be forgiven for wondering if anything is established on anything anymore. I suppose it's trite to observe we're gathering at a thoroughly revolutionary moment. The Middle East seems finally to be careering towards the logical extension of the disastrous social and political trauma it has experienced for the past 200 years at least, and it's now feasible the end result might the redrawing of borders. Britain has voted to leave the EU in one of the greatest acts of popular blasphemy against an established political orthodoxy I can remember seeing. The United States is now three and a half weeks away from an election in which Donald Trump is a major party nominee, and who for much of the journey has had a realistic chance of winning, although it's possible that has now finally run aground on the shores of his own crass misogyny.

The Cleveland Cavaliers won the NBA championship, Leicester City won the Premier League and, of course, both the Western Bulldogs and even bloody Cronulla won the premiership. For those familiar with rugby league folklore, that clearly means Harold Holt has returned home alive and well. Which for those familiar with contemporary political reporting surely means an imminent bout of leadership speculation centring on a fresh, credible challenger to Malcolm Turnbull.

Now, rest assured, I'm going to resist the temptation to embark upon some grand theoretical excursion that somehow connects the Middle East to the Cronulla Sharks in a single, continuous narrative. I raise all this only as a way of summing up the atmospherics of the age: this sense that there are no reliable rules anymore with the result that we're all extremely confused. Wisdom isn't conventional, and what's conventional seems no longer to be wise.

I'm not here tonight to solve this or even to lend an easy coherence to it. Mainly because I can't. But also because this occasion has a narrower focus on the state of journalism rather than a broader one on the state of the world. And despite our inexhaustible self-importance, I'm forced to admit journalism is not yet the same thing as the entire world. That said, there's no doubt it is of the world and so, for that reason, I want to start by doing what I think every reporter, columnist and broadcaster on the planet has done at some stage: talk about the relationship between the online world and journalism.

I'm aware that I'm far from the first to raise these issues even in this forum. On this stage four years ago, Mark Colvin delivered a lecture about how journalism might survive what he called the "digitisation tsunami." Two years before that, Alan Rusbridger, who was then editor of The Guardian, spoke about how technology was splintering the fourth estate and changing the very practice of journalism, and the opportunities it provides for interactivity, distribution, the aggregation of information and even investigation. Frankly I don't deserve to add to their thoughts on these things because they're both more talented, more experienced, wiser, more knowledgeable and more insightful than me.

So instead, I want to approach this from a different angle; one that isn't so much about collapsing business models and the funding of good journalism, or even about the creative possibilities of the internet. I want to talk about what our unavoidable amalgamation with virtual life means for the values and ethics of journalism. I'm interested not so much in the commercial questions it asks us, as the moral ones. That is, I'm not asking how we can go on funding good journalism by convincing consumers to pay for it. I'm asking how much, as an industry, we really want to produce it right now.

Technology is never value-neutral. It might allow us to do things we already do more easily. It may offer us new ways of delivering the same service. But it never does merely that.

To that end, let me be as clear as I can be. This is not about journalists. This is about journalism, that field of endeavour that exists beyond any one of us. It's about the forces beyond our control that now surround us, and what the consequences of them are. It's about what happens when we're swept along by these revolutionary currents. And so I need to acknowledge a couple of things up front.

First, that I am not remotely exempt from any of my reflections tonight. Whatever the shortcomings of contemporary journalism, I'm entirely complicit - at least as much as anyone else. You can save your charges of hypocrisy, because I plead guilty upfront, fully in the knowledge that everything I say about journalism rebounds onto me. I'm constantly wrestling with my work, trying to figure out if I'm doing it with integrity, or if I'm succumbing indefensibly to compromise all the time. And I know from talking to colleagues across all kinds of platforms and media companies that I'm far from alone in being this quivering wreck. So please understand nothing I say tonight is in a spirit of criticism, so much as therapy. I feel we're at a genuine flashpoint and we need a place to talk through that. Ideally that place wouldn't be broadcast live on radio and later on television. But here we are.

Second, I acknowledge that I speak tonight from the luxurious position of not having to worry about things like journalism's collapsing business model, not having to be obsessed with ratings, and not having to figure out how to monetise everything we do. I guess I have to worry about all this indirectly - I'll lose my job soon enough if I fail by those criteria, or if the business model collapses around me as it threatens to - but in the short term I can (and do) just turn up every day and do my job under the cover provided by those who have to solve this diabolical equation. Those people have my admiration, and even my sympathy, but certainly not my envy.

So with that said, let me begin with a statement of principle. Technology is never value-neutral. It might allow us to do things we already do more easily. It may offer us new ways of delivering the same service. But it never does merely that. You can choose just about anything to illustrate this point. The invention of the motor car didn't merely allow us to move faster from A to B. It completely changed the possibilities of what A and B were. It didn't merely save us time, it contracted physical space, and with it, contracted social space. It is only when the motor car became available that the vast modern city became possible: spread out over distances that once upon a time would have encompassed different villages or even rural areas. I won't waste your time grinding this out, but the point is that this technology changed our entire social organisation.

The printing press didn't merely make it easier to publish books. It radically changed the range and availability of the written word, disseminated ideas beyond imaginable limits and even created whole new communities. The modern nation-state, in which disparate cities and regions became unified within fixed borders under a single national mythology was only possible because a national press existed to make this unification feel real to us. It created a national conversation which helped create a national identity. It's no exaggeration to say the printing press ushered in an entirely new form of political organisation.

Is it possible to think fast?

So it is simply naive in my view to assume that as the platforms for journalism change, that the very idea of journalism itself will be somehow remain unaffected; that whether we're talking about a printed newspaper, a broadcast news bulletin or a website, that we're merely talking about different platforms for delivering the same content. We're not. Each of these platforms has its own inherent values system. Each imposes its own requirements on the content it carries. At the most basic level, this is obvious.

Radio, for instance, requires no pictures. Print requires no soundbites to be recorded. Online articles are not constrained in length by the size of the newspaper. And this has a repeated editorial impact. Stories lie abandoned by television programs all the time because there's simply no vision to carry them, for example. Broadcast media will decline to speak to certain people, even if they have world-leading expertise on a subject, simply because they don't speak in a way that comes across well in the medium: perhaps they stutter or talk in long-winded sentences or are uncomfortably shy. Print, of course, has no such problem. It doesn't care how good you look or sound when you say something. It doesn't care if you pause to think before you say something. As long as you say it.

This is something the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was particularly concerned about. In the 1990s he gave a couple of lectures on television that were, ironically enough, broadcast as TV shows. As someone who works in television, I'll admit I found his analysis particularly challenging. Not least because, while I really like his work generally, I'm pretty sure he would detest mine. It's fair to say he had a fairly jaundiced view of television. "I think television poses a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production - for art, for literature, for science, for philosophy, and for law. What's more ... I think that television poses no less of a threat to political life and to democracy itself." That's how he begins, which more or less gives you the flavour of his analysis.

The result was a months-long furore as scores of journalists took to their keyboards and airwaves to defend their honour. But beneath the more incendiary language we might expect from French sociologists, Bourdieu wasn't really attacking their honour. He was really talking about television's power over every other sphere of life: how it decides which historians or scientists are listened to, for example, rather than the relevant peer groups of experts. And while I clearly don't accept all his conclusions about television, Bourdieu's analysis is really useful for the way he breaks down the inherent values of a medium.

For Bourdieu, television's great limitation is time. "You can't say much on television," he says, before turning to consider what it is you actually can say. Pretty soon, he runs into Plato - as you do - who argues that the one essential difference between the philosopher and the lay person is that the philosopher has time. They aren't constantly rushed or under pressure. "You can't think when you're in a hurry," is Bourdieu's paraphrasing. But on television everyone is in a hurry all the time. They're in a hurry to produce the content in time for the broadcast, they're in a hurry to find people to speak about the relevant issue, and then whoever's speaking is in a hurry to say something before they run out of time. That leads Bourdieu to a big question: "is it possible to think fast?" Or more specifically: "why and how can [people on television] think under these conditions in which nobody can think?"

He calls these people les fast-thinkers. That's French, by the way. And the reason he says they can think so fast is that they aren't really thinking very much. Rather, they're thinking in "received ideas":

"Banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem ... Communication is instantaneous because, in a sense, it has not occurred; or it only seems to have taken place ... [it] work[s] because everyone can ingest [these ideas] immediately ... At the opposite end of the spectrum, thought, by definition, is subversive. It begins by taking apart 'received ideas' and then presents the evidence in a demonstration, a logical proof ... Making an argument like this takes time, since you have to set out a series of propositions connected by 'therefore', 'consequently', 'that said', 'given the fact that ...' Such a deployment of thinking thought, of thought in the process of being thought, is intrinsically dependent on time."

Of course, this time is never available on television because it is a mass medium. And as such, it measures its success by its ability to reach the greatest number of people possible. Documentaries aside - and perhaps even then - time seems to be the enemy of ratings.

As a result, though, Bourdieu argues that something really strange happens. Television's reliance on "received ideas" as a way of maximising the audience, means that in the competition for ratings, everything ends up being more or less the same as everything else. If we're honest, we'll admit we've seen this in our various newsrooms. The minute one network (or radio station) is running with a particular story, every other network scrambles to ensure they have it too. This phenomenon of journalists watching each other to ensure they are never left behind their competitors, combined with the narrow range of "received ideas" television allows, has an overall homogenising effect where everything begins to resemble everything else while insisting it's unique. It's why, for instance, we tend to see the same circle of people reappearing regularly to have similar conversations with each other. And it's why anyone who's tried to pitch a TV show to a network knows that eventually they'll be asked something that amounts to: "can you come up with something entirely new that's already been successfully done before?"

You don't have to agree with Bourdieu's assessment, of course. For what it's worth, I think there's less homogeneity than he describes and I think there's perhaps a touch more room for thinking than he admits. But whenever I've run Bourdieu's analysis by media colleagues of mine, they've admitted with varying degrees of reservation, there's something to them. We're all familiar, for instance, with the way experts will be overlooked for certain stories in favour of personalities or commentators that are, as we say in the industry, "better talent." We've all seen the way television and radio shows will gather punchy, diametrically opposed voices to discuss an issue because the ensuing fireworks will be entertaining, even though the two guests might be talking past each other. We've all seen examples where some kind of performed, heated disagreement stands in for an actual debate where people engage each other's ideas rather than simply roll out their pre-determined talking points. What we're witnessing there is a spectacle of duelling "received ideas." And it's hard to dream up an alternative because, to put it simply, a real debate just takes too much time. So it's easier to pretend conflict is the same thing.

These limitations are no one's fault, particularly. It's as though the medium itself seems to impose them. We could try to resist them, but there's every chance we're risking death in doing so, which is a hard price to ask anyone to pay. The point, to reiterate, is that different mediums will impose different values.

In the competition for ratings, everything ends up being more or less the same as everything else.

So the question becomes, as we merge with the online world, what values are we silently taking on. And here, I doff my hat to my more optimistic colleagues who see here the chance of liberation. Who see the prospects of a radically collaborative journalism in which reporters can crowd-source the expertise of their social media followers to pore over and interpret documents for them; who see the bursting forth of ever more varied voices who can disrupt the "received ideas" of old media; who see the rapid-fire ability to source information, conduct research and disseminate their work in a manner that outstrips anything we've seen before.

And to be clear, I don't deny all this. But at the level of values, I'm not so optimistic. If I had to come up with a set of online values as they express themselves in media, I'd probably say speed and shareability were the top two. Sure, there are others you might name: transparency, for instance. Or maybe even - contrary to the stereotype - sustained attention. Alan Rusbridger argued in this lecture that whatever story you're interested in, if you punch it into Twitter you'll find people are still engaging with it, updating it and inquiring about it long after the mainstream media has moved on. And all that's true.

But I'm more interested in what the dominant expression of this online environment is, and how we in the traditional media interact with it. And I don't think that if you monitor the kind of coverage we now offer, you'll find that we're suddenly producing content with a much greater attention span, especially in daily news. I don't see us rolling out lots more stories that are being kept alive beyond their ordinary shelf life in ever more detail because these are the values the online world is drawing out of us. What I see is a news cycle that's only getting quicker, and whose attention span is only getting shorter. That's been a growing trend in broadcast media anyway, but the growing integration with online platforms clearly isn't helping changing this.

So, speed and shareability. To be honest, I feel like it's so self-evident I can't be bothered making the case. You can see it in the way people will actually apologise on social media if they share something that has been around for more than a day, lest they look like they're off the pace. That's actually quite a profound practice: to be slow online, even slightly, is embarrassing. It requires some token of self-awareness, like an apology, because without it, it's like we're risking our social status. That's why it's more than a consequence of online interaction: it's a value; a way of measuring our worth.

Stories become old quicker than ever, meaning commentary on those stories becomes uninteresting at the same speed.

So, trending topics so quickly vanish into the ones that follow. As the British political scientist Ian Bremmer observed after one celebrity death, Twitter "reduces the famous person mourning cycle from days to hours." The same is now obviously true of the front pages of a digital newspaper. Try it: take a screenshot of your favourite newspaper's website at the start of the day, and then just before you go to bed, look at it again. It will look positively retro, like an artefact or something. Articles get dropped quickly now if they don't gain traction within a couple of hours. Stories become old quicker than ever, meaning commentary on those stories becomes uninteresting at the same speed.

Here we see the logic of television amplified: there's simply no time to think, only to produce. If my conversations with colleagues are remotely instructive, just about every journalist of our age knows this feeling intimately. Even Bourdieu's fast-thinkers aren't fast enough anymore. We're now after instant thinkers. Our "received ideas" now need to be almost premeditated. Even in print - what has traditionally been our most serious, reflective medium - there's precious little room available for the idea that has taken days to percolate. Not unless a topic has generated enough heat to become a snowballing scandal over days. And I think this is a problem because when I think about the people I know whose opinions are consistently the most challenging and insightful, they often can't think of anything to say until the media cycle has lost interest.

Now, speed has always been a value within journalism. Ever since reporters have existed, they've wanted to "scoop" each other, be first on the scene, first with the story. And that value has always existed in tension with other journalistic values such as accuracy, context and the explanation of stories. I suppose the question for us now is whether we think our move to warp speed upsets balances like that. Clearly I think it does - especially when it's combined with the ever diminishing resources in our newsrooms.

But I think the results are potentially radioactive when you combine this with the premium on shareability. To see how this works, consider the context. The online explosion has meant we have access to more information than ever before. What we don't have is the time to sort through it, weigh it against other information and consider what the consequences of it are.

The result of all this increased speed is therefore increased noise. Our world, and especially our media culture - is just so loud. News, and reactions to news are now so omnipresent that they're ambient: on screens constantly in public places as well as the most mobile private ones. It's like we're living our lives to an industrial soundtrack: the constant grinding of gears in the background. And yet it is the lifeblood of media organisations to attract attention; to be noticed somehow above the din. In online terms, that means to be shared. To have your audience harvest your clicks for you. To achieve virality. That leaves us with some pretty new measures of journalistic success. Television programs are successful if their hashtag generates a voluminous Twitter conversation; online articles are valued if they generate an enormous comments thread and lots of hits. That's not a point about the evils or otherwise of social media. It's a point about how what role we want it to play in deciding what is and isn't successful journalism.

We can't be surprised when we find that the most successful content will be strident, provocative and polarising; that it will infuriate more than it inspires; that above all it will evoke a reaction.

We're at a point now where we don't really have to guess what it takes to achieve this form of success. There are lots of studies analysing what sort of content is most shared on social media platforms, and trying to crack the code for virality, and certain things keep coming up. Once you remove all the stuff about pictures of cute animals and babies, you're left with some pretty reliable traits. Quizzes and lists do well. So do images, videos and charts. Health tips and love advice are reliably strong, as is anything about a topic that is already trending. And beyond that, emotion and controversy are very effective.

We can't really be surprised, then, when we find that the most successful content will be strident, provocative and polarising; that it will infuriate more than it inspires; that above all it will evoke a reaction. And we can't be surprised if it becomes less important - less valued - to provoke thought and reflection, than it is simply to provoke. Here we might be encouraging more than a new breed of fast-thinkers. We might be producing a new creature: the fast-feeler, who explains and analyses little but emotes quickly and largely; purveyors of not merely received ideas, but received emotions.

I'm not saying all viral content is like this, by the way. Some fantastic journalism manages to be successful within these online metrics. The Guardian's recent publication of the Nauru files comes to mind, for instance. Mother Jones recently published a 35,000-word feature on the private prison system that took years to create and attracted a million readers. I'm sure you'll all have examples from within your own organisations, publications or even programs you could offer.

And I'm not saying there's no place in journalism for content that is emotional, accessible and even provocative. But I am saying we have a problem if that becomes journalism's centre of gravity. We have a problem if, for instance, press gallery journalists are being asked to provide content that will do well online, rather than that which will offer citizens a nuanced understanding of what happens in Canberra. Speaking for myself, if I'm in that environment and I have the choice between reporting a story on, say, how superannuation tax concessions work and another story about, say, a gaffe from Tony Abbott, I'll choose the gaffe story every time. It's easy to write, easy to read and will earn me more kudos. Why wouldn't I? And if I have a choice between spending weeks or months getting to know a low socio-economic community to get a direct sense of what their concerns are and staying in my office and bashing out a live blog of the parry and thrust of the day in politics, I'll choose the blog every time. Again, why wouldn't I?

It's this kind of shifting centre of gravity is I fear we're now seeing. Sure, the last election campaign wasn't exactly a classic, but I can't remember one whose coverage has been so gaffe dominated. In our contemporary metrics, that stuff works. And it's for similar reasons we're witnessing the ever collapsing wall between opinion and news in our work. I remember the first time I saw my op-ed column published at the top of the webpage amongst the top news stories. It was 2013, and I was deeply shocked. Now I'm shocked if it's not. Once I understood that news was king and commentary was subordinate. But the facts of shareability often say otherwise and now I'm not so sure anymore. This week, as Donald Trump imploded, I saw news pages leading with 3 or 4 opinion pieces. It's becoming increasingly common for us learn the latest news from some opinion or analysis piece, for instance.

If everything our audiences consume begins to look like opinion, we're going to have a hard time preserving our craft.

Clearly I have no problem with editorial content. In fact, I think it's crucially important. But that's not the same thing as saying we should welcome this dynamic by which we privilege opinion and pump it out into digital forums in which we encourage people to react with their opinions so that others might then add theirs. We need to be careful here, because if everything our audiences consume begins to look like opinion, we're going to have a hard time preserving our craft. Anyone who has done an accountability interview will know how annoying it is to be attacked by people in the audience who interpret asking testing questions of a politician as an expression of your own views. We get frustrated because we know that asking a question isn't the same thing as stating an opinion and that it's entirely possible to sustain a critical line of question against a policy you personally agree with. We do this all the time. But then I think, if the audience is constantly being bombarded with our "hot takes" - if we're slowly replacing the news cycle with an opinion cycle - can we really complain when they think that everything we say is commentary?

And in a similar way it's remarkable how much content we get now out of reporting on each other. There's now an apparently compulsory tradition for instance, of reporting on what happened on something like, Q&A: delighting in the take-downs and the zingers, revelling sarcastically in the howlers. Really it has become a whole new genre of news. Hence the constant reporting of other people's interviews, in which no one simply asks their guest some firm questions: instead they "grill" them or "slam" them in a "fiery exchange." This stuff is eminently clickable and easily shareable. Certainly more so than a breakdown of health funding or even a report of Q&A written straight.

The point is that even the successes of great journalism won't save us if we submit ourselves wholly to the commercial logic of clickbait, even if only by accident. That Mother Jones piece I mentioned, cost $350,000 to produce. By their own accounting, it brought in about $5,000 of advertising revenue. The problem is there are much cheaper ways to a million views.

Bourdieu's most fundamental concern with television was that in its insatiable search for ratings it ultimately played down any serious ethical code beyond that of the market. That whatever television did, it could point to the viewers as justification; that as long as it was giving the viewers what they wanted, it didn't really matter what that was. We would never accept this, he says, of the law. We'd be uncomfortable with the idea of judges simply playing to the biggest gallery, rather than to the fundamental values and principles that have defined the legal profession for centuries. Again, having been involved in plenty of conversations in which "good television" (or "good radio") has been sacrificed for ethical reasons, I think he's being too absolute, here.

Journalism isn't really a profession in the traditional sense. It's not like medicine or the law ... That means that when we face enormous commercial pressures, we're vulnerable.

But he is hitting on something that's important for us to recognise. That although we think of ourselves as professionals, journalism isn't really a profession in the traditional sense. It's not like medicine or the law. We have an ethical code of sorts, but we're not bound to it by some solemn oath. There are no induction ceremonies in which people wear ridiculous gowns or hats. There's no official body that can strike us off the roll for malpractice. And no one is suggesting there should be. The truth is that in traditional terms, we're a trade. We're pretty much self-regulated. If we stuff up, we publish a notice or an apology, maybe pay a fine if it's serious, and we move on. We lose our jobs not because we lose our licence to practice but because our jobs either disappear, or our reputations are damaged enough to mean our market value has crashed. If we're unethical but valuable, there's nothing to stop us, really.

That means that when we face enormous commercial pressures, we're vulnerable. It's easy for us to adopt whatever values commercial realities demand. And as I've already said, I'm in no position to criticise the people who have to circle this particular square. But I think amid all the enthusiasm and optimism for what digitised journalism can be, and how we might fund it, we'll need to figure out exactly what it is we're trying to protect. Because as Katharine Murphy has recently observed, we're not terribly trusted by our audiences at the moment.

Some of the reasons for this are beyond our control. Everything from politics, to our audiences, to the very notion of authority itself, is now splintering. But surely just as the public is disillusioned with politics in part because of the way politicians have devalued their entire field by attacking each other so relentlessly, so too is our predicament partly in our hands. What if, in the endless competition amongst ourselves we're driving each other to do anything for a commercial advantage? What if our cut-throat rivalries are driving us ever further into the admittedly profitable world of clickbait? Is it possible we'd be pursuing short-term victories at a more comprehensive, long-term cost to our authority, much like we're seeing in politics?

Four years ago, Mark Colvin observed that "before we journalists cut each others' throats we should remember that we face other threats." He was right. And maybe the greatest threat is the prospect that we might forget why we do what we do; not our careers, but our vocation. We're being asked so many questions right now. And even as they are inclined to distrust us, our audiences are watching us for our response. How we handle this is on full display, because, whatever Gil Scott Heron says, this revolution will definitely be televised.

Waleed Aly is co-host of The Project, a columnist for Fairfax Media and co-host of The Minefield on RN.