Chapter 13 covers a broad waterfront, encompassing digital transformation, the unevenness in access to new technologies, the complex power dynamics that underpin the new media and communication space, the shifting role of journalism in enabling (or not) public knowledge, and the challenges and opportunities for social progress in media access, with particular attention focused on the role of citizen journalism and alternative media.
Given such breadth, a central concern – certainly to a media support practitioner such as myself – is how such a chapter can foster a debate that enables us to identify strategies that are likely to lead to social progress. How do we pin down where the greatest traction and energy might lie for positive action?
1. WHAT MOMENT ARE WE AT?
It is important first to recognize that we are now at a fresh juncture. This sense of a historical moment is missing from the chapter. To simplify greatly, there was a period before 1989 when for most of humanity information was concentrated in the hands of governments through monopoly control over broadcasting (and often over print media too) – alongside Western international domination of the cultural and journalistic spheres. The fall of the Berlin Wall sparked a political and economic liberalization of broadcasting and telecommunication sectors across the world and coincided, also in 1989, with the invention of the worldwide web. Liberalization and the web together ushered in the most rapid expansion of the global public sphere in history and functioned as extraordinary engines of democratic social progress. Then, around 15 years later, social media platforms like Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, generated a new phase which I return to below.
Making sense of such dizzyingly rapid, broad and complex sets of changes needs a clear frame. One such frame involves asking who has power to shape media and communication environments? How has that power been deployed and with what effect? And how is it shifting?
The chapter talks a lot about power – corporate power, both of media conglomerates and technology platforms and the accumulating regulatory influence of the latter, state power (especially the power of the US in shaping internet governance), growing authoritarian power, China becoming a cyber power, the accumulating infrastructural power of the telecoms industry, colonial power and legacy power (including of the BBC), among others.
The first thing to reflect on is that the chapter is not optimistic that current dynamics are working towards social progress. Nor do I detect much confidence that the recommended action points (of which more below) will be easy to achieve or will readily generate positive impact. That lack of optimism is interesting given the global narrative advanced by the US technology giants of ‘impatient optimism’. A new information age was, we were told until recently, being ushered in of global social progress characterized by shifts in communicative power from governments to citizens, institutions to networks, and old to young. The new technology platforms were creatively disrupting the established order – economic, social and political – which was meant to lead to a democratic era of information-empowered citizens and consumers, transparent and effective government, as well as more connected, knowledgeable and tolerant societies (see e.g. Schmidt and Cohen Reference Schmidt and Cohen2013).
2. THE FAILURE OF OPTIMISM
There is little commentary or analysis in the chapter on the new giant technology platforms and the companies that have built them. This is strange in the current context, since assessing their role in social progress seems the most pressing challenge of our times (although, in their defence, it should be noted the authors wrote and submitted the chapter well before recent events, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, prompted greater scrutiny in this area). From my perspective – and much of this is implicit in the chapter – governments are reasserting communicative power and authoritarian governments appear to be the most adept and successful in doing so. Corporations and political actors are becoming ever more adept at exploiting their communicative power for manipulation. Mutual understanding and communication between different groups is becoming more difficult as societies become more fragmented and siloed in new online communication – or miscommunication – spaces.
All hopes that globally networked advocacy would exert new forms of power in the service of social progress look similarly threadbare. Those who want to resist progressive advocacy movements seem easily able to do so. Even campaigns raising massive viral interest and generating huge online movements, be it the campaign to free the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls (#bringbackourgirls) or the Kony 2012 film from the Invisible Children group, may fail to have any impact in the real world. The optimistic narratives of recent years have blinded us to and to some extent chilled the debate around the very worrying trends in the information and communication space in recent years.
Where the early promise of the new information and communication environments is proving transformative is in the assertion of identity, especially in the politics of gender and sexuality, which the chapter also highlights. We can complain if we wish about how the same tools are enabling regressive identities such as the so called ‘Islamic State’, white extremism and other racist movements. But these technologies are also enabling transformative positive social progress, whether it be the feminist resurgence catalysed by the ‘Metoo’ and ‘Timesup’ movements or antiracist movements such as ‘Blacklivesmatter’. The early promise of the internet to create spaces independent of patriarchal control in particular is being fulfilled.
However, the authors do not focus enough on the adverse corollary of this: the increasing challenge human societies face in establishing shared identity and dialogue across the divides that these technologies are widening.
The authors acknowledge that politics, economics, and technology are combining to shape a media that fragments and fractures societies, creates in-group identities and echo chamber effects, and the executive summary notes that hate media is on the rise. However, it does so parenthetically. In an analysis of the prospects for social progress the parenthesis might more appropriately be inverted. A strong case could be made that media that seeks to divide, to persuade or to control constitutes an increasingly dominant part of the current media and communication space. Media that informs, provides platforms for public debate, and strives for accountability is, on the other hand, diminishing and unprofitable.
3. THE CHALLENGE FOR ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
The chapter helpfully points to some priorities for policy attention and investment. In particular, there is a strong focus on ‘citizen’ and ‘alternative’ media. Such media should indeed be supported but caution should be advised against putting too much faith in this strategy. Citizen media is increasingly vulnerable to intimidation (citizen journalists cannot afford systems of protection or the kinds of legal backup that are available to larger media institutions) and co-option. The business models available to progressive citizen journalism and alternative media seem less available than ever and subsidy models may be especially difficult to devise. There are also new and rising costs inherent in creating trusted platforms for news as bots and automated attacks make defence against misinformation efforts difficult.
Moreover, alternative media is a term that lacks definition. It is difficult to argue that the more extreme right-wing media sites, increasingly characteristic of the US and other media environments (who often argue that they represent those who are politically and economically marginalized), are not ‘alternative media’ – but it is also questionable whether they are engines of what the Report would define as social progress. Few progressive media outlets have proved successful at engaging those who are most economically and politically marginalized. Community radio aside, a lot of alternative or progressive media addresses middle class audiences while non-progressive media with extremist narratives are proving far more effective at engaging those who feel most left out. Unless attention is focused on engaging these people on issues of social progress in ways which resonate with them and speak to their concerns, such progress seems unlikely.
Genuinely independent media institutions capable of investing in high quality journalism and of resisting attempts at co-option and misinformation, that can work at scale and engage all in society are going to be at least as important in the future but they are not substantively analysed in the chapter.
4. PROPOSED ACTIONS
Finally, the chapter presents a series of action points; I shall cover a few.
A central conclusion is that media and communication should be treated (at least in part) as a common good in the same way as other infrastructure such as roads and railways. I largely agree with this, not least because independent media increasingly lacks a business model. In particular, market models appear unable to support public interest journalism capable of engaging everyone in society, to provide platforms for public debate capable of connecting and enabling dialogue across increasingly divided and fractured societies, to enable the kind of independent journalism necessary to assure accountable government, and to underpin informed societies capable of sustaining healthy democracy in the future. The current information and communication environment is failing at, and often undermining, all those things. There is no obvious market solution to any of these problems. We need to put much greater imagination into devising systems that recognize this, which includes devising more innovative mechanisms of public subsidy for independent media.
I disagree with the authors’ search for inspiration in the debates of the 1980s surrounding the call for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). This is not only because NWICO was of a time so different from the present age of digital disruption. Central to any such argument are the following questions. Whom should we trust with the power to regulate and legislate for a better system than the one we have now? And who would define what is and is not socially progressive? Could any actor with the power to do so be expected to be socially progressive? The NWICO collapsed in poisonous disagreement with the USA and UK leaving UNESCO on the back of it in part because they felt it would put too much power in the hands of governments.
Besides, a new world order in communications is neither feasible nor desirable. We need ways of making sense of the chaos of the current information and communication space so that democratic politics can work. Media freedom demands that much of the currently existing media offering remains and continues to evolve if that is what people want. The policy attention in the context of social progress needs to focus on efforts to fill the gaps where technology and markets are failing: for public interest journalism, for more effective and inclusive platforms for public debate, and for media literacy.
The authors argue finally that fresh energy should be applied ‘to re-establish[ing] independent, sound journalism as an essential element of democracy, and for this purpose to explore alternative funding models besides the commercial (innovative forms of public-private partnership, license fees, etc.)’.
This recommendation provides a really important departure point for future debates and strategies on social progress, not least for a future academic and research agenda. It would be invaluable if a genuinely interdisciplinary research effort was put in place to try to address these issues by bringing together skills from media and cultural studies, economics, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, political science and international development.
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Chapter 13 covers a broad waterfront, encompassing digital transformation, the unevenness in access to new technologies, the complex power dynamics that underpin the new media and communication space, the shifting role of journalism in enabling (or not) public knowledge, and the challenges and opportunities for social progress in media access, with particular attention focused on the role of citizen journalism and alternative media.
Given such breadth, a central concern – certainly to a media support practitioner such as myself – is how such a chapter can foster a debate that enables us to identify strategies that are likely to lead to social progress. How do we pin down where the greatest traction and energy might lie for positive action?
1. WHAT MOMENT ARE WE AT?
It is important first to recognize that we are now at a fresh juncture. This sense of a historical moment is missing from the chapter. To simplify greatly, there was a period before 1989 when for most of humanity information was concentrated in the hands of governments through monopoly control over broadcasting (and often over print media too) – alongside Western international domination of the cultural and journalistic spheres. The fall of the Berlin Wall sparked a political and economic liberalization of broadcasting and telecommunication sectors across the world and coincided, also in 1989, with the invention of the worldwide web. Liberalization and the web together ushered in the most rapid expansion of the global public sphere in history and functioned as extraordinary engines of democratic social progress. Then, around 15 years later, social media platforms like Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, generated a new phase which I return to below.
Making sense of such dizzyingly rapid, broad and complex sets of changes needs a clear frame. One such frame involves asking who has power to shape media and communication environments? How has that power been deployed and with what effect? And how is it shifting?
The chapter talks a lot about power – corporate power, both of media conglomerates and technology platforms and the accumulating regulatory influence of the latter, state power (especially the power of the US in shaping internet governance), growing authoritarian power, China becoming a cyber power, the accumulating infrastructural power of the telecoms industry, colonial power and legacy power (including of the BBC), among others.
The first thing to reflect on is that the chapter is not optimistic that current dynamics are working towards social progress. Nor do I detect much confidence that the recommended action points (of which more below) will be easy to achieve or will readily generate positive impact. That lack of optimism is interesting given the global narrative advanced by the US technology giants of ‘impatient optimism’. A new information age was, we were told until recently, being ushered in of global social progress characterized by shifts in communicative power from governments to citizens, institutions to networks, and old to young. The new technology platforms were creatively disrupting the established order – economic, social and political – which was meant to lead to a democratic era of information-empowered citizens and consumers, transparent and effective government, as well as more connected, knowledgeable and tolerant societies (see e.g. Schmidt and Cohen Reference Schmidt and Cohen2013).
2. THE FAILURE OF OPTIMISM
There is little commentary or analysis in the chapter on the new giant technology platforms and the companies that have built them. This is strange in the current context, since assessing their role in social progress seems the most pressing challenge of our times (although, in their defence, it should be noted the authors wrote and submitted the chapter well before recent events, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, prompted greater scrutiny in this area). From my perspective – and much of this is implicit in the chapter – governments are reasserting communicative power and authoritarian governments appear to be the most adept and successful in doing so. Corporations and political actors are becoming ever more adept at exploiting their communicative power for manipulation. Mutual understanding and communication between different groups is becoming more difficult as societies become more fragmented and siloed in new online communication – or miscommunication – spaces.
All hopes that globally networked advocacy would exert new forms of power in the service of social progress look similarly threadbare. Those who want to resist progressive advocacy movements seem easily able to do so. Even campaigns raising massive viral interest and generating huge online movements, be it the campaign to free the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls (#bringbackourgirls) or the Kony 2012 film from the Invisible Children group, may fail to have any impact in the real world. The optimistic narratives of recent years have blinded us to and to some extent chilled the debate around the very worrying trends in the information and communication space in recent years.
Where the early promise of the new information and communication environments is proving transformative is in the assertion of identity, especially in the politics of gender and sexuality, which the chapter also highlights. We can complain if we wish about how the same tools are enabling regressive identities such as the so called ‘Islamic State’, white extremism and other racist movements. But these technologies are also enabling transformative positive social progress, whether it be the feminist resurgence catalysed by the ‘Metoo’ and ‘Timesup’ movements or antiracist movements such as ‘Blacklivesmatter’. The early promise of the internet to create spaces independent of patriarchal control in particular is being fulfilled.
However, the authors do not focus enough on the adverse corollary of this: the increasing challenge human societies face in establishing shared identity and dialogue across the divides that these technologies are widening.
The authors acknowledge that politics, economics, and technology are combining to shape a media that fragments and fractures societies, creates in-group identities and echo chamber effects, and the executive summary notes that hate media is on the rise. However, it does so parenthetically. In an analysis of the prospects for social progress the parenthesis might more appropriately be inverted. A strong case could be made that media that seeks to divide, to persuade or to control constitutes an increasingly dominant part of the current media and communication space. Media that informs, provides platforms for public debate, and strives for accountability is, on the other hand, diminishing and unprofitable.
3. THE CHALLENGE FOR ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
The chapter helpfully points to some priorities for policy attention and investment. In particular, there is a strong focus on ‘citizen’ and ‘alternative’ media. Such media should indeed be supported but caution should be advised against putting too much faith in this strategy. Citizen media is increasingly vulnerable to intimidation (citizen journalists cannot afford systems of protection or the kinds of legal backup that are available to larger media institutions) and co-option. The business models available to progressive citizen journalism and alternative media seem less available than ever and subsidy models may be especially difficult to devise. There are also new and rising costs inherent in creating trusted platforms for news as bots and automated attacks make defence against misinformation efforts difficult.
Moreover, alternative media is a term that lacks definition. It is difficult to argue that the more extreme right-wing media sites, increasingly characteristic of the US and other media environments (who often argue that they represent those who are politically and economically marginalized), are not ‘alternative media’ – but it is also questionable whether they are engines of what the Report would define as social progress. Few progressive media outlets have proved successful at engaging those who are most economically and politically marginalized. Community radio aside, a lot of alternative or progressive media addresses middle class audiences while non-progressive media with extremist narratives are proving far more effective at engaging those who feel most left out. Unless attention is focused on engaging these people on issues of social progress in ways which resonate with them and speak to their concerns, such progress seems unlikely.
Genuinely independent media institutions capable of investing in high quality journalism and of resisting attempts at co-option and misinformation, that can work at scale and engage all in society are going to be at least as important in the future but they are not substantively analysed in the chapter.
4. PROPOSED ACTIONS
Finally, the chapter presents a series of action points; I shall cover a few.
A central conclusion is that media and communication should be treated (at least in part) as a common good in the same way as other infrastructure such as roads and railways. I largely agree with this, not least because independent media increasingly lacks a business model. In particular, market models appear unable to support public interest journalism capable of engaging everyone in society, to provide platforms for public debate capable of connecting and enabling dialogue across increasingly divided and fractured societies, to enable the kind of independent journalism necessary to assure accountable government, and to underpin informed societies capable of sustaining healthy democracy in the future. The current information and communication environment is failing at, and often undermining, all those things. There is no obvious market solution to any of these problems. We need to put much greater imagination into devising systems that recognize this, which includes devising more innovative mechanisms of public subsidy for independent media.
I disagree with the authors’ search for inspiration in the debates of the 1980s surrounding the call for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). This is not only because NWICO was of a time so different from the present age of digital disruption. Central to any such argument are the following questions. Whom should we trust with the power to regulate and legislate for a better system than the one we have now? And who would define what is and is not socially progressive? Could any actor with the power to do so be expected to be socially progressive? The NWICO collapsed in poisonous disagreement with the USA and UK leaving UNESCO on the back of it in part because they felt it would put too much power in the hands of governments.
Besides, a new world order in communications is neither feasible nor desirable. We need ways of making sense of the chaos of the current information and communication space so that democratic politics can work. Media freedom demands that much of the currently existing media offering remains and continues to evolve if that is what people want. The policy attention in the context of social progress needs to focus on efforts to fill the gaps where technology and markets are failing: for public interest journalism, for more effective and inclusive platforms for public debate, and for media literacy.
The authors argue finally that fresh energy should be applied ‘to re-establish[ing] independent, sound journalism as an essential element of democracy, and for this purpose to explore alternative funding models besides the commercial (innovative forms of public-private partnership, license fees, etc.)’.
This recommendation provides a really important departure point for future debates and strategies on social progress, not least for a future academic and research agenda. It would be invaluable if a genuinely interdisciplinary research effort was put in place to try to address these issues by bringing together skills from media and cultural studies, economics, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, political science and international development.