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.
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Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
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Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
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Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
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Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
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Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
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Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
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Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
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Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
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Frédéric Filloux External forces
Nushin Rashidian Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives
Michael Kuntz The only pivot that might work
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
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Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
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Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
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David Skok Finding an information-life balance
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Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
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Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
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Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
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Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
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Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
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Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Debra Adams Simmons And a woman shall lead them
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
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Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
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Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
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Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
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Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
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Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
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