{"id":61,"date":"2008-07-31T12:27:50","date_gmt":"2008-07-31T17:27:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/publius\/2008\/07\/31\/evgeny-morozov-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-about-new-media-literacy-and-love-the-internet\/"},"modified":"2008-11-18T16:49:49","modified_gmt":"2008-11-18T21:49:49","slug":"new-media-literacy-and-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/2008\/07\/31\/new-media-literacy-and-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Learned to Stop Worrying about New Media Literacy and Love the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Essay by Evgeny Morozov<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n

A response to Dan Gillmor’s Principles of a New Media Literacy<\/a><\/p>\n

Continue the conversation with Daisy Pignetti. <\/p>\n

While it offers a useful general perspective on the future of media literacy, Dan Gillmor\u2019s essay <\/a>doesn’t fully answer some of the most fundamental questions about the relationship between education, media, and democracy. Let me sketch just a few of them: <\/p>\n

1.\tCan we do anything to provide for better media literacy and more transparency in the digital age?
\n2.\tShould we actually do anything about it?
\n3.\tHow exactly do we go about it, if, indeed, we could and should? <\/p>\n

Gillmor\u2019s answer to the first two questions is an implicit but unqualified \u201cyes.\u201d He broaches the third one \u2013arguably the most important of the three \u2013 only in very general terms: \u201cWe are doing a poor job of ensuring that consumers and producers of media in a Digital Age are equipped for the tasks,\u201d he says and I agree; but how exactly could we do this job better? <\/p>\n

The word \u201cwe,\u201d in fact, recurs almost in every paragraph of this essay (not surprisingly, Gillmor\u2019s best-selling book is called We the Media<\/em><\/a>) . But who is this \u201cwe\u201d? Is it academia? Is it funders? Is it policy makers? Gillmor never says it explicitly, but I assume that it’s some combination of the three. If that’s the case, I am quite skeptical that \u201cwe\u201d are in fact capable of doing anything about these problems or, on some issues, that we should even try. <\/p>\n

Take the issue of misinformation. The problems Gillmor alludes to aren’t new; we’ve known for ages that power impinges on media, that journalists are fallible creatures and that what we read in the media is often not true. On a cognitive level, we have already learned how to differentiate between the reliable and the unreliable; few of us confuse the New York Post<\/em> <\/a> and the New York Times<\/em><\/a> . <\/p>\n

The yellow press in Britain, for example, repeatedly manufactures dubious truths \u2013 and yet the country still enjoys one of the healthiest democracies in the world. Are the Brits really less informed than, say, the Germans because of their yellow press? How does it happen then that the best journalism in the world \u2013 as practiced by the Financial Times<\/em><\/a> , the Guardian<\/em><\/a> or the Economist<\/em> <\/a>\u2014also comes from Britain? Perhaps, the relationship between media, democracy, and the public is a bit more complex than Gillmor wants us to believe. <\/p>\n

Gillmor is certainly right that the blogosphere is no longer the pristine land that it used to be. Corporations, PR agencies, and extremists are taking to it in droves for precisely the same reasons that activists, journalists, and pundits did a few years earlier: blogs are often anonymous, they help with quick mobilization and offer a much cheaper way of campaigning. But didn\u2019t the same thing happen with traditional media\u2014television, for example \u2013 a few decades ago? Are we really facing genuinely new problems? <\/p>\n

Also, wouldn’t they soon become non-issues as, thanks to the Internet, consumers now have terrabytes of reference data at their fingertips and they can verify any fact momentarily? Wouldn’t new systems for determining one’s online reputation \u2013 be that Google’s PageRank<\/a> , the number of Diggs <\/a>or some other metric\u2014 help address the credibility gap? We are only beginning to scratch the surface here, as even Google itself is barely a decade old. <\/p>\n

Gillmor\u2019s diagnosis of the issue is largely correct \u2013 \u201cwe are doing a poor job\u201d (and we always were), but his prescription \u2013 \u201clet’s just do more of it\u201d\u2014seems inappropriate. I don’t believe that the Internet would suddenly change our academic, philanthropic, or policy-making institutions, which, armed with their long-term, large-scale and systematic hammers, see everything as a nail. Quite the opposite: the Internet is only making it harder for them to deal with issues that they couldn’t handle even in the pre-Internet age. Adding a qualifier like \u201cdigital\u201d or \u201ccyber\u201d to the names of their programs is never enough. <\/p>\n

Such an over-reliance on conventional solutions looks awkward in today’s vibrant era of instantaneous self-publishing and micro-change. Media literacy in the digital age <\/a> is an ever-elusive and always-moving target; we desperately need flexible, ad-hoc and decentralized ways of zooming in on it on a daily\u2014not yearly\u2014basis. It seems that Gillmor’s proposed solution\u2014developing and updating new media literacy curricula\u2014would be ineffective for one simple reason: this would usually take months if not years and make the solution outdated before it even hits the printing press. <\/p>\n

Instead, what we \u2013 those who belong to some of these institutions \u2013 should do is switch from thinking in this anonymous \u201cWe\u201d-mode to thinking in a very concrete \u201cI\u201d-mode, where individuals, armed with a panoply of tools like Google or Wikipedia, would play the leading role in solving transparency and literacy problems. We shouldn’t underestimate the great changes that such a switch from \u201cWe\u201d-mode to \u201cI\u201d-mode could bring. It may just be that there is no other choice; the era of Web 2.0 has proved that today almost anyone can build effective, cheap and beautiful web projects\u2014anyone but most governments, NGOs and policy-making institutions. <\/p>\n

So where Gillmor sees \u201cus\u201d not doing a good job of equipping \u201cthem\u201d for \u201ca Digital Age\u201d, I see something different. I see \u201cus\u201d not doing a good job of equipping ourselves for this age, not learning fast enough from \u201cthem\u201d\u2014from the great bottom-up examples like Wikipedia with their own community-based governance and organically changing reputation systems.<\/p>\n

Why do we assume that 15-year olds — who spend most of their time reading anonymous blogs and browsing fake Facebook profiles \u2013 would be as na\u00efve as their parents when dealing with other media? These \u201cdigital natives\u201d know much better than we do how easy it is to produce (not just consume) and manipulate information; this automatically makes many of them immune to the trickiest PR stints. Isn’t there a lot that \u201cthey\u201d can teach \u201cus\u201d instead? <\/p>\n

Gillmor\u2019s alarmist tone may just reflect the panic and unease that \u201cwe\u201d– academics, funders, journalists– feel about losing our capacity to influence things. I am not sure this is a bad thing, since our influence\u2014particularly on such soft and intangible issues as media literacy\u2014often carried our own biases and outdated thinking, and was not always effective. That today\u2019s citizens find their own ways to educate themselves and build their own platforms for increasing transparency should be a cause for celebration, not regret. <\/p>\n

Evgeny Morozov is the founder and publisher of Polymeme.com<\/a>. He has written for The Economist, The International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, Business Week, openDemocracy <\/a>, RealClearPolitics<\/a>, and other media. Evgeny is on the sub-board of the Information Program at the Open Society Institute<\/a>. Previously he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online<\/a>, a Prague-based media development NGO.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Essay by Evgeny Morozov A response to Dan Gillmor’s Principles of a New Media Literacy Continue the conversation with Daisy Pignetti. While it offers a useful general perspective on the future of media literacy, Dan Gillmor\u2019s essay doesn’t fully answer some of the most fundamental questions about the relationship between education, media, and democracy. Let […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1815,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3603,2646,701,2770,3604],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-access-to-information","category-daisy-pignetti","category-dan-gillmor","category-evgeny-morozov","category-the-fourth-estate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1815"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}