Chapter 1: Introduction
Navigating the Digital Transformation in Journalism
“Journalists know news and opinion are separate, but readers often can’t tell the difference” – Kevin Lerner.
Chomsky asserts that “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state” -Media Control.
Welcome to our smartphone-tethered, screen-dominated, digitally convergent, template and algorithm-driven society and AI-aided world where the multifaceted over 8.2 billion world population contributes to a rich tapestry of cultural and philosophical thoughts. In this troll-harassed, social media-dominated, media-saturated and content-flooded post-truth era thousands of children and unsavvy net users are being victimised by scammers and fraudsters.
Admittedly, digital migrant journalists must feel unnerving faced with the suite of gadgetry in the world of digital convergence whereas digital native journalists have naturally embraced it and use them with ease, as if it’s second nature to them. The digital era has ushered in an unprecedented transformation across all aspects of human existence, redefining how we communicate, consume information, and connect with the world. For journalists – be they seasoned professionals, emerging trainees, or everyday citizens capturing and sharing events – this transformation represents an extraordinary opportunity as well as an immense challenge for citizens.
Unbeknown to many a new wave of undercurrents of digital technology, most notably artificial intelligence and algorithms has permeated our life to fundamentally alter the way we live, study, work, interact with others, how we care about our health and perceive world affairs. This phenomenon has made an inroad into our life, influencing the modality of everything we do – the way or mode in which we live and do things. The redefined media have also redefined this modus operandi of gathering, dissemination, production, distribution and consumption of news.
AI-powered tools are capable of rejigging headlines and news angles to attention grabbing headlines, writing articles, editing videos, rapidly analysing vast datasets, enhancing storytelling, generating photorealistic characters and deep fake videos with startling accuracy. AI has also dramatically transformed every aspect of capital-intensive filmmaking, having taken over the role of a film crew from writing scripts and production to film direction and editing. Paradoxically, while the waves of innovations are promising for mankind they also create a set of concomitant dilemmas of values, morality and ethics.
The increasingly pervading AI tools have led to gatecrashing of journalism allowing entry to net users who are constantly churning out user-generated content of different sorts:
(a) Audio-Video information: animal intelligence and behaviours, demos of products, brand tributes, tutorials on how to build, make or solve a problem engage real people encouraging them to share on social media.
(b) Comments, Views and Reviews: User-generated reviews on social platforms, primarily on YouTube channels, forums and discussion boards, and websites enabling feedback from net users.
(c) Podcast dialogues: Podcast involves dialogues between one or more participants, generating awareness and building trust among listeners.
(d) Dramatised events: A dramatised event is a real-life occurrence or story that is recreated, portrayed, or presented in a way that enhances its emotional, narrative, or visual impact. This often involves scripted dialogue, heightened tension, music, or visual effects to make the event more engaging, memorable, or relatable to an audience.
(e) Selfies: Selfies that customers take with products or branded materials (e.g., posters, storefronts, and branded backdrops) help enhance brand awareness on social media.
(f) Articles: Content creators who create and post their experiences, poems, thoughts, views and reviews on community forums and journals and
(g) Ideological discourses and personal messages on mobile apps including Instagram, WhatsApp etc.
The cyberspace is awash with personal, promotional, business and professional data while fostering engagement and creativity within an audience. Basically, there are three types of content which are conflowing in the mediasphere, the majority of which are unscrutinised and need to be filtered with critical thinking (CT). The computer-mediated-content (CMC) falls within three types. They conflate, converge and conflow globally across the Internet as:
(a) Profession-generated-content (PGC) – It relates to news and editorials – views, opinions, commentary, comments and analysis, technological, medical, scientific and research findings from say, journalists, technologists and scientists.
(b) User-generated content (UGC) – this refers to the content created by the audience as well as citizen journalists who live, play and participate in debating, raving, ranting, challenging, disputing on the blogosphere and SM and on public forum, online discussions.
(c) Artificial Intelligence-generated-content(AiGC). – programmatically created content which are of two types that can have a manipulative effect: (a) Generative – AI-generated mediatext – any type of content including text, image, video or audio and (b) Transformative which can edit by altering, improving original content, paraphrasing, summarising, translating or rephrasing text.
The questions raised by the above scenario are: how deliberative, scrutinising, evaluative and critical are citizens in their online posts? A sample of three responses to these questions posted on Quora platform are indicative of the internet’s impact on critical thinking as a contentious topic: (1) Eugen Grathwohl highlights that the internet exacerbates the spread of misinformation, particularly through social media platforms like Facebook. While facts require effort to verify, misinformation is easily absorbed and shared, even by intelligent individuals, when it aligns with personal fears. (2) James Keenley shifts the blame from the internet to human behaviour, emphasising that our failure to engage in critical reading and thinking, coupled with reliance on superficial sources, hinders critical evaluation. He underscores the internet’s potential as a vast knowledge repository that remains underutilised and (3) Stephen Whitehead argues that the internet does not significantly influence critical thinking, as most users seek information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs and fall prey to fake news. He advocates teaching critical thinking in schools, citing Finland as a global leader in this area, while pointing out the lag in other nations, such as the United States.(Quora)
Livingstone (2019) presses for a two way trust between the media and the audience. (Sonia Livingstone, 2019) What are the challenges and how can we deal with them? Livingstone asserts that media literacy skills must serve citizens as well as consumers.
Today’s journalism needs to move beyond the BBC’s triune responsibilities; inform, educate and entertain which was enunciated in the BBC Charter almost a century ago (1st January 1927). While adopting several key journalism imperatives of a digital journalist includes: (a) upholding the principle of freedom of expression and right to access information, and (b) fostering media that is free, participatory, pluralistic, inclusive, and independent as essentials for transcending the traditional Reithian purposes in order to: (a) advise citizens, (b) enable the development of informed citizenry, (c) empower citizens to make informed decisions, (d) participate in governance and (e) hold the government accountable for its actions.
It must be noted that even though AiGC is artificially created it’s people who drive it as reminded by former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan in 2003; ‘while technology shapes the future, it is people who shape technology, and decide what uses it can and should be put’. Kofi Anan’s concern for safety reminds us about the recently released ChatGPT – an algorithm-powered application, which Alex Kantrowitz described as, “is scary-good, crazy-fun, and so far not particularly evil. Within a week of its launch on YouTube 30th Nov. 2022 ChatGPT attracted millions of views. It is touted as the most impressive development in Ai to provide us with convenience and time saving. (ChatGPT, 02.12.2022) Algorithm is the set of instructions and rules used by computers on data to solve problems, or to execute a task (cited in Head, Fister & MacMillan, 2020)
Discourses on the forums, blogs, vblogs, podcasts and websites comments, into content creation enabling access to almost anyone equipped with an internet connection to produce and disseminate information. This phenomenon, while empowering, has resulted in an overwhelming influx of content – the good, bad, and ugly as outright harmful making it harder than ever for journalists to distinguish fact from fiction.
The flip side of AI is conspicuously contrasting. The growing democratisation of AI tools has concerned journalism, lowering the barriers to entry for content creation and sharing, and granting virtually anyone internet access to run their channels. While this shift is empowering billions of individuals from all walks of life, it has also led to an unstoppable and uncontrollable surge of content from over a huge number of active internet users, ranging from valuable to misleading or harmful, increasingly overwhelming journalists and non-journalists who are struggling to discern fact from fiction. By October 2024 the total of 5.52 billion people around the world were using the internet equivalent to 67.5 percent of the world’s total population. Eighty percent of all online content is consumer-generated. Ninety percent of consumers have posted an experience with a brand or product on social media. Eighty six percent of people consider customer reviews an essential resource for making purchasing decisions. (DataReportal)
The foundational principles form a conceptual framework which is built on several critical ideas:
(1) Recognising humans as media creators, interpreters, and disseminators of content embedded within the information ecosystem. This perspective highlights the risks of treating the human mind merely as a database.
(2) Acknowledging social media as deeply entwined with daily life and human interactions is evident of integration of social media with human experience.
(3) Drawing on the reflective and inquiry-based principles of Socrates and Chanakya’s Arthashastra to promote critical examination of beliefs and knowledge.
(4) Building justified knowledge in today’s world stresses the importance of understanding how we know what we know, especially in an era defined by fake news and ‘fabricated truths’.
(5) Propositional knowledge requires that the satisfaction of its belief condition be suitably related to the satisfaction of its truth condition. In other words, a knower must have adequate indication that a belief qualifying as knowledge is actually true. In Theaetetus, Plato argues that knowledge of “true belief accompanied by a rational account” is conditional upon the belief being justified and true.
In focusing on epistemic knowledge building the author identifies four key elements for acquiring knowledge: (1) Truth: Ensuring information accuracy, (2) Belief: Accepting information as true, (3) Justification: Supporting beliefs with valid evidence and (4) Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning which is key to helping individuals to adopt a dynamic approach to knowledge.
The following objectives provide the foundation for discerning truth in a complex information landscape. They form the author’s primary goals to: (1) Introduce metaphysical thinking to empower journalists and citizen journalists, (2) Equip content creators with advanced skills to analyse embedded and encoded messages in news and information, (3) Evaluate the role of journalism in fostering informed citizenship and promoting vibrant and healthy democracy. The absence of CML undermines the freedom of expression and complicates efforts to reassess journalism’s epistemic role as it leaves citizens ill-equipped to identify bogus information, perpetuates misinformation and weakens the public’s ability to engage in informed democratic discourses.
With an interventionist approach, this author adopts a CML framework to explore strategies for encouraging multiplatform societies to participate in freedom of expression as informed citizens and restore trust in traditional media or legacy media while evaluating social media as a potential source of credible information.