Echo chamber: Facebook’s data centre in Lulea
NEWS ANALYSIS
When the Sunday Times and City Press published shocking revelations on Sunday of email exchanges involving the Gupta family and their associates, a number of people on Twitter at first responded with incredulity – and this is not counting the chorus of so-called paid Twitter.
Many legitimate questions were asked about the sourcing and credibility of the reports. Readers asked how these emails were verified and how the papers came to be in possession of them.
The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, released in February, found that trust in the media in South Africa dropped to 39% in 2017, from 45% in 2016. This compares to 43% globally.
The barometer distinguished between media and “traditional media” and found that trust in traditional media declined from 60% in 2016 to 56% this year. There was also an increase in trust in search engines from 66% in 2016 to 69% in 2017.
Today’s media landscape looks nothing like what news consumers took for granted in 1967, or 1987, or even 2007. We live in a world where media is woven into our social fabric. The internet gives us the power to take control and broadcast our messages globally.
But it is exactly the ubiquity of search that should help readers to arm themselves with the information they need to better confront the vagaries of the news media. Google would not immediately help to dispel any doubts about the Gupta emails stories but it would add context.
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have played a significant role in how the Gupta email trail was received.
The concept of a filter bubble was popularised by internet activist Eli Pariser to describe how tools to “personalise” your search by companies such as Facebook, Google and, soon, Twitter have isolated us from opposing viewpoints, leading to political polarisation.
In our defined social media spaces – such as a group of like-minded Facebook friends – information, beliefs and ideas are amplified and reinforced in “echo chambers”, giving false impressions of what a majority of people think or believe.
For too long the emphasis has been on traditional literacy, that is reading, writing and comprehension, coupled with information literacy – the ability to search and retrieve information. Media literacy – the ability to find and interrogate information – has been largely overlooked.
Add to this that people have biases and prejudices and are often ignorant of their own ignorance. To recognise the need to verify or further investigate “news”, you have to acknowledge that you don’t necessarily know the answer.
Because South Africans are generally clued up about politics, they believe they are equipped to gauge a story but we are more inclined to fact check or examine the source of the news when we don’t agree with it. This reminds us that we need to move beyond our emotive responses and engage critically.
The influx of online news sources, some reliable and some not, contribute to the sense that all media is untrustworthy.
At the epicentre of this is social media. Facebook plays a bigger role in information dissemination and use than any single entity has ever played in the history of modern information consumption. More than 1.5-billion people use the network, and many get their news there.
Facebook repeatedly rejects that it is a media entity, or that it ought to behave like one. The social network also refutes that it has any responsibility to inform people about the world around them in any kind of journalistic way. From that vantage point, engagement, not accuracy, is king.
So what is the media? The word raises more questions than it answers.
Washington Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi says: “There are hundreds of broadcast and cable TV networks, a thousand or so local TV stations, a few thousand magazines and newspapers, several thousand radio stations and roughly a gazillion websites, blogs, newsletters and podcasts. There’s also Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and who knows what new digital thing. All of these, collectively, now constitute the media.”
He says the media is such an imprecise and generic term that it has lost any meaning. It’s essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you dis-agreed with or didn’t like.
Now, more than ever, we need to understand the differences between what is comment and what is hard news. Also, we ought to escape our echo chambers by confronting legitimate opposing viewpoints and learn to question the information that pops up on our newsfeeds.
If we don’t learn to decode, analyse and critique the flood of media around us, we open ourselves to malicious and dangerous misinformation.
Without media literacy, we return to the bad old days when a minority dictated what everyone heard, saw and experienced.