Undoing Disruption: the case for Digital Media Policy in democracies

BY TIM RIDOUT

In their recent paper, Tom Wheeler and Phil Verveer argue that the United States is at a turning point in the oversight of digital platforms. They summarize actions taken by European countries and challenge Americans to lead, proposing the creation of a federal digital platform agency and offering guiding principles for new policies. This coincides with sharply declining staff in newsrooms, concern about news deserts in counties around the country, and proposals to revive local journalism.

This period of disruption has festered for many years, and it is not as if there were no advanced warning. In his 1990 book called Technologies without Boundaries, MIT professor Ithiel de Sola Pool explained:

“The Western tradition of freedom of speech and press developed in an era when there was no electronic communication. New electronic media then posed special problems. Most Western countries adopted a trifurcated system: one regime for press, another for broadcasting, and a third for common carriers… If the lines separating publishing, broadcasting, cable television, and the telephone network are broken in the coming decades, then which of the three regulatory models will dominate public policy? There is bound to be a great debate and sharp divisions between conflicting interests.”

The sharp divisions he foresaw have become pointed in recent years. We have been understandably reluctant as Americans to address these issues because of free speech concerns, but as Wheeler and Verveer note, “The governments in London and Brussels are not waiting.”

Mark Zuckerberg has expressed that social media platforms are something between a traditional telecom and a newspaper. They are akin to common carriers in some ways, but the contentious disputes between the platforms and news organizations over ownership of – and payment for – published written, audio, and video content indicate that the three regimes have collided, as Pool described. The old regulatory models no longer fit.

REGARDLESS OF WHAT SHAPE NEW DIGITAL PLATFORM POLICIES ULTIMATELY TAKE, AMERICA MUST RISE TO THE CHALLENGE AND BE A LEADER AMONG THE WORLD’S DEMOCRACIES ON THIS ISSUE. RE-EXAMINING WHY IT MATTERS IS WORTHWHILE.

Regardless of what shape new digital platform policies ultimately take, America must rise to the challenge and be a leader among the world’s democracies on this issue. Re-examining why it matters is worthwhile.

How Are Changes in Content Production and Mediums Changing Us?

In her 2018 book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Dr. Maryanne Wolf notes that “Increasing numbers of developmental researchers observe that when parents read stories on e-books with their children, their interactions frequently center on the more mechanical and more gamelike aspects of e-books, rather than on the content and the words and ideas in the stories.” Though her focus is on children, adult brains change throughout our lives. New neural connections are formed in response to the demands of new stimuli, so no one is immune to the changes brought about by new mediums. I certainly notice a difference in how I process content on a distraction-addled screen as opposed to paper.

Regardless of whether one is enthusiastic about new digital media, concerned, or essentially indifferent, it is hard to argue against the case that how we produce and consume information has altered the way we think and behave. If mastering Tweetdeck, search-engine optimization techniques, audience-generation metrics, and even dubiously accurate “sentiment analysis” of videos are becoming standard job requirements, then there is less room for discerning and fair-minded people around the country to firmly state, “that’s not what happened. I was there.” In a newsroom or research institution, this check should happen daily, acting to curb our natural passions and tendencies to confirm what we already believe. Consistently doing so not only facilitates a more informed public, it can protect against harm caused by defamation and mob mentalities. It is hard to do this when platforms are optimized for continuous digital engagement rather than providing reliably accurate and context-rich summaries of daily events within a community. It is too much to ask of journalists feeling the pressure to drive clicks throughout the day not to let their personal opinions come through on their social media feeds. Perfect objectivity is a human impossibility, an idealized relic of certain 20th-century schools of thought that has been thoroughly disproven by controlled studies. But we can get a bit closer to the ideal through practice if it is prioritized over speed and volume.

Regardless of whether one is enthusiastic about new digital media, concerned, or essentially indifferent, it is hard to argue against the case that how we produce and consume information has altered the way we think and behave.

Without organizational policies and better market incentives in place to reward accuracy, relevance, and deliberation, it is hard to see how we reverse the shifts toward greater impulsiveness and less focus on the actual meaning of words. If these core aspects of the editorial process is steamrolled by the gamelike aspects of today’s digital media described by Dr. Wolf, then professions rooted in fidelity to facts will become something resembling PR or political sloganeering.

WHY IT MATTERS

If in our digital transformation we are losing the ability to consistently get the facts right and help citizens understand why people differ on issues of public importance, then we have in many ways defeated the purpose of the entire exercise. Rumors, gossip, lies, misconstrued words, and interpreting news through the prism of one’s preexisting beliefs are on display every day on social media But they do not help us collectively deliberate, understand how our leaders think, or make meaningful decisions about how to govern ourselves. Many news organizations still do this well and experiments with sustainable digital-only business models abound. However, with the decimation of local news outlets around the country, hyper-polarized national news tends to fill the void and the complexities of life can get erased, dividing communities.

To return to Dr. Wolf, she explains:

“The protection of diversity within human society is a principle that was embodied in our Constitution and long before in our genetic cerebro-diversity… Within this overarching context, we must work to protect and preserve the rich, expansive, unflattened uses of language. When nurtured, human language provides the most perfect vehicle for the creation of uncircumscribed, never-before-imagined thoughts, which in turn provide the basis for advances in our collective intelligence. The converse is also true, with insidious implications for every one of us.”

The particular dialects, common phrases, taboos, and points of reference in local communities will never be captured by media organizations based in major cities. The shared traumas and joys, history, landmarks, gathering places, and local celebrities that are the stuff of real life will typically be steamrolled by reductionist surveys or compressed into stereotypes drawn from national debates.

The intrinsic value of getting the facts right and allowing opposing viewpoints to speak on the public record is that members of a community come to understand each other better, or decide which cause to support. This enables us to peacefully coexist in the public sphere while maintaining our personal preferences and core group identities that enable our complete selves to flourish. It requires recognition and perhaps grudging acceptance that our natural differences will always necessitate the ability to exclude others in certain circumstances, even as we strive to ensure that everyone is represented and permitted to participate in a shared civic life. As mundane events, random thoughts, public accusations, and serious political arguments have blurred into one continuous stream through digital platforms, the necessary separations between different aspects of our lives have broken down and we are too often at each other’s throats, with many resorting to violence rather than peacefully resolving disputes and reaching compromise.

The intrinsic value of getting the facts right and allowing opposing viewpoints to speak on the public record is that members of a community come to understand each other better, or decide which cause to support.

If our trusted fact-finders and observant note-takers become cogs in the machine of an information assembly line driven by a marriage between the behavioral sciences, digital media micro-targeting services, and narrow surveys generated in major media and academic centers such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, or Washington, DC, then the words and visuals reproduced on screens in counties across the country slowly lose their connection to empirical reality. They become oversimplified metanarratives superimposed on events in disparate parts of the world.

In doing this, we run roughshod over the actual beliefs, intentions, and governing philosophies of our body politic as they exist in each unique state and district of our federal system. A surefire way to infuriate people and leave them disoriented is to insist that they believe something they do not actually believe and then criticize, or even accost them for those imagined beliefs.

These risks are more pronounced as they apply to differences across international borders. No matter how much language recognition and translation software improves, the need for human intermediaries with deep background knowledge of different societies and the profundity of certain terminologies as markers in our collective historical consciousness will never be obsolete.

We often do not realize how important something is until we start to lose it. Building regulatory approaches that support local news and democratic deliberation for the modern digital world is an urgent challenge for American leadership. Solidifying a domestic consensus with an eye toward the international ring is a good start.

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Tim Ridout is a Pacific Council member and a writer living in Cambridge, Mass. He was a program manager at the Brazil-U.S. Business Council at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 2011 to 2012, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States from 2013 to 2017, and a program officer at the Center for International Private Enterprise from 2017 to 2019, all in Washington, DC. He currently works at an Amazon Fresh warehouse in Boston, a proud essential worker in America's food supply chain. His words do not in any way represent the views of his current or former employers.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.