WHAT IS The
STATE OF THE 4TH ESTATE
Looking back four or five decades, the media eco system was quite different from what we encounter today. There are more of them. There are other kinds of platforms. No longer is Radio and TV the dominant hubs in the public sphere. Online media of a newer kind converge with the older media forms, firms, and flows to create a more seamless, more global and more ubiquitous media presence.
The term literacy is closely linked with literature, being literate and actively engaging in both capacities. We speak of someone being “literate” as someone being familiar with a particular theme, author, discourse or area of specialization. A literate person is also someone who can read, literally…
We measure literacy in the context of ability to read, but increasingly we are also concerned with literacy as an aspect of being able to navigate an ever-more complex media eco system, in a world where there is information abundance and information wealth. In the “digital age” we are confronted with information in moire media than in earlier periods. We are also confronted with information being presented in more formats.
Casettes, an example
Think about this: The cassette came with tapes of 30-60-90-120 minutes. You put the cassette into a device in order to record or listen. Each cassette was a physical entity that you either borrowed, copied, bought or otherwise acquired. Accordingly, sharing with others was hampered by that physicality. When playing, there was no fast way of moving forward and backward. The "fast forward/backward" function was incredibly slow. And yet there are examples of the cassette being a politically important medium, as in the Iranian revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeni to power in 1979. Click the photo for a story on that.
Convergence, an example
Two decades after the 1979 insurgence in Iran, the global media landscape had changed radically. With too many aspects to account for here, one stands out: Not only had information and entertainment flows moved online; they had generated and been transformed by new platforms. With the world wide web and email coming our way in the 1990´s social media like Facebook generated the web 2.0 transformation that now removed the cumbersome physical aspects of sharing information and relaying information in new patterns of flow. Global standardization now follwowed.
With media and information flows becoming global in new ways, it is easy to forget that the media in general have been global for a very long time. When we reflect on global news, we tend to see them as just thaty — local. However, they are produced in globally outreaching technologies. They are based on globally accepted format and genre standards. They often refer to global information flows. Examples would be local issues concerning refugees, migration, sustainable development and urbanization issues, as more. We are reminded that the beginning of modern journalism actually was information passed back and forth in the British colonial empire. The first news papers saw the day in either that or in the American revolution, both of which are by now quite old historical circumstances. And since those days, the publics have gradually acquired reading and writing skills enabling them to maneuver in this landscape. Modern education institutions have matured, as have the institutions of publishing and writing. Without writing there is nothing to publish. And without audiences there is essentially a quite reduced means of making your creative work known. Accordingly, it all hangs together.
Now, a few decades into the new millennium, we are talking about “fake news” as an aspect of new literacy requirements. While the term “fake news” has hit an all-time high, the phenomenon is not new. There is a reason why many departments of journalism have sprung out of previous institutions of propaganda, publishing, literature, and “the press”. Propaganda hit a new high with the uses of radio during the build-up to WW2. So whatever else we say, we will not say that fake news is a new concern.
What is the scale and the depth. While radio was medium speaking to the “masses”, contemporary social media today speak to the individual, but in a massive way. We each have become our own publishers and relay stations. That makes current misinformation more unpredictable and predictably more powerful in ways we have not come to fully understand. In short, the scale of information flows a few decades into the 21st millennium is greater than what was ever anticipated by the architects of the “internet revolution”. And if we add to this that the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) adds a new level of depth to this through its ability to both summarize and “bend” knowledge in ways human perception and cognition finds difficult to fo9llow in a critical way, we have global communication in more expansive and intensive modes than at any other time in human history. Understanding the se phenomena is what literacy in the digital age is all about.