Big technological changes always have intended and unintended consequences, Gingras said. History is filled with examples from professions that had to adapt, he said, adding that's what the media and political culture need to do.
"It's not sufficient to simply talk about this through the lens of technology," Gingras said. "What is incumbent on the rest of society and its institutions to think about and address it as well. When you look at [an] environment where people are consuming information in different ways, forming opinions in different ways, this seems to me to suggest that we should rethink the mechanisms of journalism."
"How we interact with our audiences," he continued. "How we formulate content. The content models we use. Even business models we use to get there" How do these other institutions have to change? How do our basic cultural approaches to transparency and trust need to change to help folks understand why they are seeing what they are seeing..."
Gingras does not make this comment in a vacuum. He co-founded an initiative called the Trust Project, based at Santa Clara University Journalism School, which is urging news organizations to better label their online content and revise their websites so the search algorithms can elevate more authoritative content. That will help media stand out in the attention economy. Of course, it also helps Google do better searches -- because Google search, unlike Facebook, directs users away from its website, and better results will fortify its search monopoly.
As the Knight Commission's public sessions came to a close, the very issue Silicon Valley opposes the most -- only second to revealing its secretive computational formula -- was raised. What would be the result of government regulation, including the possibility of anti-trust actions breaking up the attention economy monopolies?
That question prompted one of the fiercest exchanges, and while unresolved, it suggests that Facebook and Google are going to have to become more transparent or face even greater backlash.
Gina Bianchini: "I have a very low confidence that the solutions are going to come from regulation. The solutions are going to come from the fact that we are building a grassroots mass motivation to move around centralization, which is going to be a whole different conversation."
Richard Gingras: "I find this thread a little bit puzzling. If I had heard the discussion about possible solutions to the problem, absent any knowledge of problem, I would have thought that we were talking about the fact that we actually have a problem with monolithic information in a society which is over-guided and controlled in one direction. Right? But of course that's actually not the problem we're facing. In fact, the problem we're facing is one that is completely the opposite. We have tremendous diversity and points of views, silos of thought, reinforced silos of thought, from one end of the spectrum to the other and around and back again. So when I look at that problem, I wonder what problem are we really trying to solve, and how? I'm failing to see the dots connected on this."
Gina Bianchini: "From a monolithic perspective, who's controlling that algorithm?"
Richard Gingras: "But the algorithm..."
Gina Bianchini: "It's two companies [Facebook and Google]."
Richard Gingras: "This putative control isn't controlling people's points of view. If anything, it's commending various points of view beyond their own level of comfort."
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and commission consultant: "It's impossible to know that from the outside world. It's literally impossible."
Richard Gingras: "Outside world. It's not hard looking at our world today to say we have a society that's less unified than ever before."
Ethan Zuckerman: "And you can ask a question... about whether this information environment, around Facebook and Google, took a very extreme part of that and made it much, much more powerful. But we have a very, very hard time auditing that... All I am trying to say is that one thing short of regulation, and actually breaking up these entities, would be paths to a great deal more transparency, so we can ask these hard questions about how these platforms are shaping the information and knowledge that we are getting."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
