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And so we stand at the crossroads of truth and propaganda
Novo ano. Da primeira peça deste que aqui registamos: o jornalismo é mau para a democracia.
Journalism fails at showing the systems that drive our society. In 2019, journalism will continue to be bad for democracy.
Journalism isn’t good at empowering people to change society. Our audiences need to understand the systems that shape our society, what forces drive that system, and at what points you can use a force to change the system.
Protest coverage may include individual voices from the protests as illustrations to the story — but is “balances” that with the stories of property damage and inconvenience to others. We don’t delve into the deeper reasons why people are protesting.
We may say journalism holds the powerful to account. In reality, journalism reveals what is going on, and our audiences take action to make that a reality. If we don’t empower our audiences to take those actions, we’re damaging our democracy. Until we take the steps to change our industry, though, journalism will continue to be bad for democracy.
in "Journalism continues to be bad for democracy" jan 2019
2019 então: para a tendência que seguiremos no ano que começa basta unir os pontos que retalhamos nestas peças.
I
In 2019, the media power dynamic will shift dramatically — from the establishment led by traditional communicators (journalists) toward communities led by new conveners. As the internet becomes more saturated and noisy, consumers are searching for real, authentic human conversation that is more engaging than today’s passive media model. They’re sick of just listening, reading, and watching. They want to be speaking, collaborating, and taking action.
Traditional media, which long neglected the power of authenticity and avoided two-way communication with its readers, is what pushed the audience into these communities. Perhaps the most radical difference people see between the media and these micro-community creators is the conveners’ ability to bring passionate and earnest people into community with each other. As a result, hyper-niche communities -digital and physical groups of people who gather around similar beliefs or interests- are popping up everywhere. A surge of conveners who start conversations with no association with a news organization and who don’t consider themselves a journalist or reporter of any kind. They’re just themselves, and that’s what has created such a strong community around them.
in "The rise of the conveners" dez 2018
II
Increased individualization and eroding networks of solidarity have led to the formation of new tribes as "communities of ideas" characterized by elective sociality, fluidity, occasional gatherings, and dispersal. In many parts of the world, tribal journalism compensates for a seeming fragmentation of society by nurturing a sense of belonging and exercising tribal solidarity.
Early tribal journalism was a niche market. In recent years, tribal journalism successfully took root in political journalism once partisan news turned out to be a highly profitable business. Ongoing processes of increased social fragmentation and polarization have finally propelled tribal journalism even further into the professional mainstream. And it is thriving.
For a long time, we journalism researchers and educators have taught a kind of journalism that is intellectually sober and relentlessly beneficial to society. In professional and public normative discourse, news-making used to be the business of objective, neutral, and detached reporting. Tribal journalism is not aspiring to the now seemingly old-fashioned norms of objectivity, neutrality, and detachment. It caters to the expectations and preconceptions of the tribe it is serving: tribal journalism addresses its audiences less as members of a larger, however loosely defined "public" than as members of a group with specific, collectively shared practices, values, identities, and experiences. It is deliberately subjective, partisan, assertive, and socially committed.
in "The rise of tribal journalism" dez 2018
III
Journalism, media, and communication at large are going through a much-needed process of democratization. This phenomenon it’s a global transformation taking place across all countries, fuelled by access to the digital world and accelerated by social media. Our social spheres are evolving at a rate unseen in our entire history.
2019 will redefine our current understanding of this world and hopefully allow us to accommodate those who, outside of elections, have seldom had the means to influence our collective narrative. The most salient feature of this disruption has been the seismic shift in the balance of power in social discourse. Once a closely guarded citadel of our urban power centers — our beloved city-state metropolises, where information was essentially a one-way street, flowing down to the rest of the polity — social discourse has now become a two-way conversation with the continuous growth of the digitally active and savvy masses.
The entry of these divergent and often incompatible views has begun the process of leveling the playing field in mass communication, which naturally unnerves its traditional occupants and dominant players. They in turn — as a strategy to avoid ceding ground — have suddenly developed a voyeuristic obsession with labels and counter-labels to differentiate the "us" from "them." Globalists, nationalists, snowflakes, alt-right, alt-left, fake news — the list just keeps growing. The one label I find particularly interesting is "post-truth." Apparently, we live in a post-truth world where some people just inherently know the truth — they’re innately aware of right and wrong. Meanwhile, the rest of the lot, even with all the world’s information at their fingertips, just aren’t capable of finding it. They apparently lack the judgment to know right from wrong. They’re meant to follow those that know better.
The future lies with those who’ve recently, for the first time, acquired through social media and the internet, a voice in our collective discourse. Their truths are challenging ours. I believe the future will judge ‘post-truth’ phenomena as the logical next step in the technologically fuelled evolution of our collective social consciousness.
in "A culture clash on India’s growing Internet" dez 2018
IV
In 2019, let the idea that we’re seeing the death of truth die. What looks like the death of truth is actually the death of consensus, and a broader transition to a world of dissensus nudged along by a wide variety of media outlets online. We need a vision for a new journalism, and a clear path to supporting and sustaining it in a world where consensus can no longer be taken for granted.
The world as a whole is moving from a world of broadcast-based consensus to digital dissensus. Traditional institutions, which are accustomed to something close to ex cathedra trust and influence, are not adapting for our current information landscape. Rather than trust in sources of authority (institutions in power as such), people today are more likely to put their trust in networks of affiliation (those in your circle, however you define that). In this context, people are more likely to trust what they see around them, people and things that directly impact them, and people in their social networks.
Understand how authenticity works and why networks of affiliation resonate today: authenticity might matter more than traditional markers of trust. Authenticity is a difficult word to define, but like art, it’s a "know it when I see it" phenomenon. I think of it as the perception that one is not performing a self. Indeed, the ability to project authenticity matters in a social media context, and I think reality television stars, microinfluencers, affiliate marketers, and digital propagandists understand this better than most: In a digitally networked environment, trust requires multiple touch points, multiple media outlets, expressions of individual selves, and genuine interactions with a community — or, at least, the appearance of being genuine.
in "The death of consensus, not the death of truth" dez 2018