Journalism, Society and Politics in the Digital Media Era

By Stephen Jukes

Advances in digital communication have affected the relationship between society, journalism and politics within different contexts in varied ways and intensities. This volume, combining interdisciplinary academic and professional perspectives, assesses the impact of the digital media environment on citizens, journalists and politicians in diverse sociopolitical landscapes. The first part evaluates the transformative power of media literacy in the digital age and the challenges that journalism pedagogy encounters in global and fragmented environments. The second part critically examines the methods in which social media is used by politicians and activists to communicate during political campaigns and social protests. The third part analyses the impact of digitalization on professional journalism and news consumption strategies. The fourth part offers a range of case studies that illustrate the significant challenges facing online media regarding the framing and representation of communities in crisis and shifting contexts. The book is intended to introduce readers to the crucial dynamic and diverse challenges that affect our societies and communitive practices as a result of the interplay between digital media and political and societal structures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789381702

Book preview

PART I

Civic media literacies and journalism pedagogy

Civic media literacies: Re-imagining engagement for civic intentionality

¹

Paul Mihailidis

As new media structures and systems further define and disrupt the core relationship between media, citizens and society, media literacy is in a fight for relevance. Advocates for media literacy often argue that if there is more media literacy, then the contemporary challenges societies face with regards to media systems and messages would be alleviated. As the fight for legitimacy continues, media entities, both mainstream and grassroots, continue to curate new information ecosystems, tools and platforms, intent on perpetuating distrust of basic institutions, trading truth for ideology, and normalizing spectacle above nuance and meaningful dialogue. As a result, media literacy’s long-standing approach of critical inquiry through reasoned deconstruction and the creation of media texts is less and less relevant to the current ecosystem for media’s influence in daily life.

Out of the new information and communication norms of digital culture emerge a series of questions for the media literacy movement: How can media literacy remain relevant in contemporary digital culture? How can media literacy respond to the ever-changing digital media landscape? What values do media literacy initiatives and interventions need to uphold to create impact?

These questions are difficult, with perhaps few concrete answers. They are important to explore however, considering the renewed calls for media literacy to be a solution to the recent rise in harmful populist and extremist rhetoric that is playing out simultaneously in the mainstream media and in the digital underbelly of the networked web.² National elections in France, Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, the United States and beyond became spaces for contestation of ideas and ideologies, increasingly debated through vitriol and aggressive rhetoric online, and supported by dangerous reductionist narratives by politicians and fringe groups in the mainstream media. Many of these debates were being staged not with others in dialogue, but through mobile devices that connected individuals in homophilous networks premised on the support of peers to advocate values and ideologies in ever more aggressive and extreme ways.

The result is the re-emergence of populism and fringe political groups that have found a sense of place, and vast support, through networked publics. Further, these groups have been legitimated by mainstream media, increasingly giving life to the spectacle of stories that gain momentum through alternative media publications, and that take advantage of algorithmic designs to garner like-minded communities in collective online spaces. Platforms like Breitbart News become widely read sources of information, eclipsing mainstream newspaper and television stations (Hynton 2017), while their stories are appropriated and shared out across myriad interconnected networks, supported by peers, with little room for dissent.

These online networks and alternative media platforms have seeded the legitimation and vindication of hate groups in the United States, the jailing of thousands of academics and political opposition groups in Turkey, increased the presence of nationalist parties in progressive countries like Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany, and further cemented the distrust of our major civic institutions. Further, the pace of communication in digital spaces is beyond the capacity of what many institutions can respond to. As a result, we’ve seen some of the largest social and civic issues of our time – from migration to climate change and global conflict – played out in the depths of the Internet as much as it is in public dialogue. In the United States, political memes ignited an alt right movement around national elections, a Reddit forum launched and perpetuated a fabricated news story that grew to global mainstream media coverage, and a presidential candidate’s early morning Tweets set national daily media agendas for months on end. The role of media organizations, particularly digital media and social networks, in the emergence of populism, polarization and partisanship, brings to bear the question of how media literacy interventions can and should respond.

This chapter interrogates the relevance of contemporary media literacy initiatives and interventions in responding to this new media and sociopolitical realities of our time. This chapter will argue for the need to re-imagine media literacies for renewed relevance. danah boyd (2017), in a recently published blog post, articulated what she sees as the main constraint for media literacy today:

Anxious about the widespread consumption and spread of propaganda and fake news during this year’s [US] election cycle, many progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy programs. Others are clamouring for solutions that focus on expert fact-checking and labelling. Both of these approaches are likely to fail – not because they are bad ideas, but because they fail to take into consideration the cultural context of information consumption that we’ve created over the last thirty years. The problem on our hands is a lot bigger than most folks appreciate.

This chapter will argue that traditional approaches to media literacy are alone not sufficient to respond to the realities of today’s information environments. Media literacy, boyd (2017) argues, ‘asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another’. In unpacking its relevance problem, this chapter will articulate some of the new norms of digital culture that are further challenging media literacy’s ability to effectively respond to present media challenges.

Lastly, this chapter will advocate for the development of civic media literacies that reframe how we think about the media interventions designed for what I call civic intentionality: a set of design considerations for all media literacy initiatives that are based on the value systems of agency, caring, persistence, critical consciousness and emancipation. The ideas presented below are not a repudiation of the decades of impactful and meaningful work in media literacy around the world. Rather, this chapter builds on those foundations to develop an approach to media literacy work that re-imagines engagement in a digital era, based on relation and intentionality. The concepts below will argue for civic media literacies initiatives that can reframe how we meaningfully engage in a culture of partisanship, polarization and distrust.

Structural constraints on contemporary approaches to media literacy

Media literacy definitions are wide-ranging and varied, but a general axiom has been adopted as ‘the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication’ (Aufderheide 1993). In simple terms, ‘media literacy builds upon the foundation of traditional literacy and offers new forms of reading and writing. Media literacy empowers people to be critical thinkers and makers, effective communicators and active citizens’ (NAMLE). These definitions provide avenues for initiatives and interventions in media pedagogy and practice to articulate a process. This process entails deconstruction, critique, reflection and engagement. Media literacy initiatives normally achieve such ends through inquiry that is grounded in core concepts. The Center for Media Literacy, for example, provides the following set of key questions and concepts to articulate its vision of media literacy.

Constructions like this can be found in many different media literacy and education initiatives. From UNESCO to the US-based National Association of Media Literacy Education, foundations, principles and frameworks have been meticulously developed to support media literacy work in the classroom and beyond. The digital media age has been met with new approaches to teaching and learning about media. In her policy paper titled Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action (2010), Renee Hobbs argues that policy-makers, educators and curriculum designers must transcend traditional approaches to media literacy in designing new initiatives in classrooms. She articulates her essential elements for digital and media literacy as follows:

TABLE 1: Media LitKit. Center for media literacy. Source: http://www.medialit.org/readingroom/five-key-questions-form-foundation-media-inquiry

TABLE 2: Digital and media literacy: A plan of action. Source: https://knightfoundation.org/reports/digital-and-media-literacy-plan-action

Hobbs’ work in digital and media literacy responds to the increasing presence of technology in daily life. Her constructs provide a strong conceptual foundation and grounding for how media literacy is articulated and can be applied. These constructs, while not far removed from traditional media literacy pedagogy, articulate application to technologies and social networks. Others in media literacy have put forth a different way to explore media literacies in the digital age. Jenkins et al. (2009) developed a set of new media literacy skills that embraces participatory culture, where they question, ‘do kids have the basic social skills and cultural competencies so that when they do get computers in their classroom, they can participate fully?’ The skills Jenkins and his team articulate – play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking and negotiation – present a different set of considerations for implementing media literacy interventions, based on empowerment dispositions, voice and a context of participation.

Such constructs are certainly helpful, and have allowed for the development of media literacy initiatives that help people – particularly young people – learn to critique and create media texts. They help educators and community stakeholders map lessons and facilitations onto concrete approaches, and they help media literacy research and practice find common voice, when possible. Within these approaches have emerged some strong initiatives around media literacies, specifically in the context of critical inquiry, news, data and digital culture, in increasingly imaginative ways. There exist, however, constraints within the application of these frameworks that, while not diminishing their impact, emerge from new norms of digital culture.

First, many of these approaches assume a critical distance from media, where the reader, viewer or consumer is able to meaningfully step away from media texts and critique or engage with them from an objective point of view. Research on confirmation bias, selective exposure and on source layers shows that this critical distance is an ideal outcome but less realistic (Del Vicario et al. 2016; Lee et al. 2014; Kang and Sundar 2016). Second, contemporary approaches to media literacy are transactional. They often lead with skills attainment. The notion of attaining skills leads one to believe that once skills in media critique or creation are learned, then one has attained a level of media literacy. Research has shown that such approaches can backfire, leading to increased cynicism and less meaningful engagement (Mihailidis 2009). Third, media literacy is often deficit-focused, concentrating on deconstructing the ways in which media manipulate, skew or insert bias into information. Lessons in deconstructing advertisements, for example, are low hanging fruit and make for compelling media literacy pedagogy, but can skew critical inquiry into fault finding. Fourth, media literacy is content-focused. The point of focus of many media literacy initiatives is around the critique or creation of content, and secondary are the platform or modality relationships to information and communication. This, while still highly relevant as a core aspect of media literacy, often excludes how content is impacted by algorithms, platforms and abundant information flows across a myriad of loosely affiliated networks (D’Ignazio and Bhargava 2015). And fifth, media literacy prioritizes individual responsibility. The notion that we individually have a responsibility to be media literate perpetuates what boyd (2017) calls a ‘return to tribalism’, where ‘we’re undoing our social fabric through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation. And whether we like it or not, our culture of doubt and critique, experience over expertise, and personal responsibility is pushing us further down this path’.

As long as contemporary approaches to media literacy remain limited by these constraints, initiatives will lack relevance in their response to the contemporary media landscape. In the wake of the 2016 US presidential elections, many educators, media practitioners and policy-makers believed that if media literacy were properly supported and implemented, then people would be better equipped to handle a loud, partisan and polarizing media landscape. There is some truth to this: media literacy’s transdisciplinarity has hindered its ability to emerge as different from media studies, journalism, critical pedagogy and similar disciplines. Nevertheless, positioning media literacy as a form of solutionism has exposed constraints of media literacy work³ and called into question how it should respond.⁴ Beyond the constraints of contemporary approaches to media literacy, new emerging norms of digital culture are further placing into question the relevance of media literacy.

New legacy networks and spectacle culture

While once thought of as spaces for vibrant dialogue, open debate and the potential of strong civic engagement, new media conglomerates – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple in particular – have picked up where the old legacy media corporations left off: by imposing greater and greater control on the daily flow of information and communication for a majority of people in the United States and around the world (Taplin 2017). Whereas companies like Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, Comcast and CBS continue to control a majority of mass media content, what Jonathan Taplin calls ‘new monopolies’ now control a significant majority of online media access and traffic.

The platforms controlled by these companies have, in the past decade, become increasingly central spaces of contestation and confrontation, where partisan and polarizing rhetoric are incentivized over nuanced dialogue and engagement. Whether sharing via Facebook or purchasing an eBook on Amazon, people are increasingly subjected to algorithmic advertising, personalized information and targeted content that are designed for the extraction of data and for their continued sharing. As Marwick and Lewis (2017) make clear in their recent report on Media and Manipulation, these new media ecosystems are fertile ground for Internet subcultures that exploit the tenets of social networks to propagate spectacle.

Critical scholar Guy Debord articulates spectacle as: ‘not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’ (1967: 8). The abundant information flow online, in platforms designed for short attention spans and consistent stimulation, has created an ecosystem of spectacle where people are further and further normalizing the sensational. Douglas Kellner articulated this phenomenon in mass culture as: ‘media constructs that are out of the ordinary and habitual daily routine which become special media spectacles […] They are highly public social events, often taking a ritualistic form to celebrate society’s highest values’ (2009: 1).

In digital culture, the core elements of spectacle have embedded themselves in the daily, and even hourly, engagement with information online. The normalization of spectacle emerges from platforms designed to ‘publicize every teen fad, moral panic and new hyped technology’ (boyd 2014: 70), and which are reinforced by urging for this content to be shared ad hominem by their users. As a result, boyd’s (2014) networked publics – ‘the imagined communit[ies] that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice’ – become active participants in the creation and perpetuation of spectacle. Because personal and public communications integrate in these spaces, the flow of sensational and polarizing content is not explicit, but implicit in daily communication rituals and practices of populations that are tethered to devices that keep them connected. Tethering, according to Sherry Turkle is the dependence on technology to ‘facilitate self-worth, community, and communication’ (2012). The result of tethering is the expansion of massively scaled connective platforms (van Dijck 2013) that have increasingly become spaces where spectacle is created, sustained and spread by people who ‘are making their presence felt by actively shaping media flows’ (Jenkins et al. 2013: 2). As audiences have more control in shaping their own media flows, and in the ecosystem of platforms designed to align them with peers, they are emboldened to continue to share and promote ideas and ideologies, regardless of their credibility, validity or accuracy.

Distrust and a crisis of legitimacy

Rising spectacle has been paralleled by crisis of legitimacy of institutions, and media institutions in particular. In the United States a recent Gallup Poll found that

Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media ‘to report the news fully, accurately and fairly’ has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% of U.S. citizens articulating a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.

(Swift 2016: n.pag.)

A recent study on trust globally found that, around the world, trust in all institutions – government, business, non-governmental and media – was on the decline (Edelman 2017). Media institutions have experienced the largest declines in trust compared to other organizations. The report, which surveyed trust levels in 28 countries, found that increased trust in peers via networks led to declining trust in media institutions: what peers shared mattered more than where the information they shared originated from. At the same time, the report found online echo chambers ‘elevate search engines over editors and reinforces personal beliefs while shutting out opposing points of views’ (Edelman 2017: 10). The report continues:

Fifty-five percent say individuals are more believable than institutions, and a company’s social media page is more believable than advertising. In tandem, spontaneous speakers are more believable than those who are rehearsed, and those who are blunt and outspoken are more believable than those who are diplomatic and polite. Finally, respondents say they value personal experiences as much as, if not slightly more than, data and statistics when it comes to believability.

(Edelman 2017: 10)

The echo chamber, while not a new phenomenon, has emerged as a dominant phenomenon of the social media age (Colleoni et al. 2014). A 2016 Brookings brief highlighted how much people relied on self-referential networks and peers for credible information. The Pew Research Center’s report, The Modern News Consumer, found similarly, that increasingly citizens are spending time sharing, consuming and engaging in self-curated social networks (Mitchell et al. 2016). Echo chambers online are not a result of citizens self-curating like-minded networks entirely. While self-curated groups do emerge in spaces like Reddit and 4Chan, large networks like Facebook and Google design algorithms to intentionally curate like-minded groups to engage online, as it increases chances for their interactivity, and for rich marketing data to emerge.

Declining trust in media institutions, while not new, has reached a point of concern. While once seen as a potential response to Putnam’s (2000) widely accepted treatise on declining social capital in the United States (Brabham 2013; Faraj et al. 2015), the massive growth and resulting commodification of social networks have created a landscape where citizens are not bowling alone, but bowling together in digital alleys reserved for singular ideologies, aligned value systems and shared worldviews. In these digital alleys, contrasting ideas, disputed ideologies and diversity of thoughts are not only welcome, they are actively dissuaded. It is no surprise, then, how in this climate, distrust has so evenly complemented the emergence of a culture of spectacle.

The civic agency gap

The third and final new norm pressuring media literacy is what Boyte (2014) has termed a gap ‘between concern and capacity to act’. In a forthcoming study conducted on how young people see social networks as spaces for meaningful engagement and action-taking, the results show an emerging gap between being aware of and articulating concern about issues, and the ability to envision pathways towards meaningful engagement or action-taking around those issues. The study showed that social networks are central spaces for information consumption, providing spaces for young people to share concern around issues of personal importance. Beyond the articulation of concern however, the design and structure of these networks actively restrict dialogue, engagement and pathways to action-taking.

Three main findings in the study support the idea that social networks work to actively dissuade meaningful engagement. First, networks align like-minded individuals with one another. This catalyses exposure to information that is of personal interest, creating a sense of self-confidence and security that emerges from being in shared spaces with like-minded communities. Second, young people were highly self-conscious about expression beyond sharing existing content with like-minded peers. They were uncomfortable with the prospect of being challenged in an ecosystem where comments can be vitriolic and vengeful, and where real dialogue is often secondary to rants and incendiary remarks. Their repeated exposure to such behaviour in platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter soured the idea that any real sharing of ideas or meaningful dialogue could occur online. Third, repeated exposure to the inappropriate behaviours of others in social networks created a sense of apathy, where study participants distrusted peers in networks, doubted the ability for technologies to create real social change and saw the increasing hostility of online information environments as a primary reason for them to distance themselves from these platforms beyond consumption and reposting of existing