It was Ray Bradbury that said predicting the future was easy. You just look around and predict more of the same. But he wasn’t having it.
“To hell with more,” he wrote, “I want better.”
In the area of digital media literacy education, the “more” prediction is easy. There will be more of it. States, provinces, and countries will begin to roll out larger programs. People will be hired. Initiatives will be funded. Consultants will be engaged and new programs designed. Edtech startups, lurching out of recent personalized education failures, will sense money to be extracted from the public purse and pitch last year’s wares with a brand new pivot. 2016’s coding microcredential platform will become 2018’s information literacy solution.
There will be 32 headlines that claim a newly funded company has “solved the information literacy problem,” all dutifully transcribed from the latest Y Combinator press releases. They will use the term “fake news.” The irony of this will be lost on both startup and tech press transcriber.
So that’s the more. But what about the better?
Lost initially in the mad rush to monetize the most recent crisis will be the fact that underneath the new coat of paint many of these solutions are decades old. That’s fine, of course, if it turns out these solutions help folks make sense of the web. Maybe the failure of them is due just to underuse. It could be.
Me, I’m skeptical. I’ve been involved in online literacy for a decade and I’m not convinced “more” does it. Recent studies seem to support this conclusion, finding that an awful lot of highly educated folks, skilled in all sorts of traditional media literacy, are hopelessly lost on the web. (Many of these people are faculty).
Given this, 2018 could be the year that we refactor media literacy, bringing the insights of people with teaching experience together with experts on the current information environment and people (such as fact-checkers) that most closely model target competencies. This project would start by asking what a citizen needs to be able to do online, and what skills, understandings, and dispositions they need to do it. It’d work backwards from there, tapping into the insights of the newly thriving interdisciplinary field of misinformation. It’d make something new, and suited to the purpose in front of us.
Far-fetched? Maybe. But media literacy has always been crisis-driven, and has undergone major revisions to address perceived threats before. The interdisciplinary collaboration that we see the misinformation field currently engaging in is inspiring, and provides a possible model. This could be the year.
Don’t bet on that of course. Always, always, bet on more. But put your heart and soul into achieving better.
One other prediction, on the rise of the right to be informed.
In our mental model of tyranny, Orwell’s 1984 has an outsized influence. The government chirps its preferred narrative repeatedly at the people, monitors their acceptance of it, maintains the only historical record, and bends history and perception to its centralized will. Orwell’s “boot stamping on a face — forever” is always government-issue footwear, the make and shoe size clearly visible.
In Orwell’s world, and indeed in the world of many past totalitarian regimes, the right to speak and the right to be informed — the ability to hear views outside of what the government provided — were inextricably intertwined. The government had monopoly power over narrative, which it both exercised (keeping the population uninformed) and protected (preventing expression of divergent views). Our society, always set up to fight the last war, has tended to see these rights as intertwined.
This model, however, is outdated. Modern totalitarian regimes do not exercise monopoly control over narrative. Rather, they use a variety of technological and organic means to make competing narratives inaccessible to or untrusted by the public. They leverage the use of “patriotic trolling,” as seen in the Philippines, and armies of paid commenters and fake profiles leveraging real participation. In the U.S., the hordes of bots and people who talk like bots invade competing hashtags and disrupt political communication. Weaponized transparency, defended by free speech advocates, is used to overwhelm the public’s capacity to separate fact from fiction, as we saw with the Podesta email “leaks.” Speech — whether automated or organized — is being used strategically to prevent access to information the public needs to govern itself.
In such a world, we will start to see people, out of necessity, peel apart the right to free speech from the right to be informed. The right to be informed will need to take into account, as Zeynep Tufekci has argued, the limits of attention and the way bad information can be used to crowd out good. It will take into account the deleterious effects of information overload, and wrestle with the impact of systemic harassment in wiping out minority voices. This evolved conception of free speech as a right to expression that sometimes conflicts with a parallel right to be informed will begin to form a legal, technical, and educational framework which is better able to defend against the tyranny face instead of the tyranny we remember.
Mike Caulfield heads the Digital Polarization Initiative at the American Democracy Project.
Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Kinsey Wilson Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up
Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
Alice Antheaume Are you fluent in AI?
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Renée Kaplan The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg (Hint: It’s about your brand)
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
David Skok Finding an information-life balance
Manoush Zomorodi Self-help as a publishing strategy
Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
Andrew Ramsammy The year ownership mattered
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
Nicholas Quah Stop talking trash about young people
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Adam Thomas Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Christopher Meighan Passive partnership is in the rearview
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Lucas Graves From algorithms to institutions
Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Michael Kuntz The only pivot that might work
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Monika Bauerlein The firehose of falsehood
Rubina Madan Fillion Unlocking the potential of AI
Dheerja Kaur Fun with subscription products
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
Nikki Usher The year of The Washington Post
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
Mario García Storytelling finally adapts to mobile
Nushin Rashidian Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives
Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Cory Haik Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact
Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
Tanzina Vega It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic
Niketa Patel Live journalism comes of age
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Hannah Cassius The year of the echo-chamber escapists
Felix Salmon Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Kim Fox Audience teams diversify their approach
Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
Francesco Marconi The year of machine-to-machine journalism
Will Sommer The year local media gets conservative
Rachel Schallom Better design helps differentiate opinion and news
Debra Adams Simmons And a woman shall lead them
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
C.W. Anderson The social media apocalypse
Corey Ford The empire strikes back
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Susie Banikarim R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)
Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Amy King Let’s amplify visual voice
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Kawandeep Virdee Zines had it right all along
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Corey Johnson The pro-fact resistance
Helen Havlak Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds
Cristina Wilson The year of the Instagram Story
Pablo Boczkowski The rise of skeptical reading
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Daniel Trielli The rich get richer, the poor scramble
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer Skepticism and narcissism
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
Gordon Crovitz Serving readers over advertisers
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Joanne Lipman Journalists inventing revenue streams
Julia Beizer A longer view on the pivot
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Borja Echevarría TV goes digital, digital goes TV
Joyce Barnathan It will be harder to bury the news
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Mariano Blejman News games rule
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
Yvonne Leow The rise of video messaging
Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Eric Nuzum Beyond the narrative arc
Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Nicholas Diakopoulos Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Publishing less to give readers more
Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
Jessica Parker Gilbert Design connects storytelling and strategy
P. Kim Bui The reckoning is only beginning
Tanya Cordrey Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention
Joanne McNeil Gatekeeping the gatekeepers
Craig Newmark Working together toward sustainable solutions
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Dannagal G. Young Stop covering politics as a game
Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
Jacqui Cheng Retailers move into content
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
An Xiao Mina Memes and visuals come to the fore
Raju Narisetti Mirror, mirror on the wall
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Frédéric Filloux External forces
Kyle Ellis Let’s build our way out of this
Zizi Papacharissi Women come back
Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Federica Cherubini The rise of bridge roles in news organizations
Lam Thuy Vo Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest
Sydette Harry Listen to your corner and watch for the hook
Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
Umbreen Bhatti The trust problem isn’t new