Yesterday I woke up to the disconcerting absence of the Today programme on my radio. In truth, I wasn't that disconcerted, as I'd had a general sense that nothing very much had been happening recently; the slow news period around Christmas seemed to have dragged on a bit.
Makes sense, I thought. In general, a slower economy and fewer resources for journalism probably means less is going on. Then I started to question whether that really was the case. What if there were lots of things happening but not being reported as they should be? Or what if the news was actually reported elsewhere but it wasn't accessible to me?
The online digital world should in theory be a boon to newsgathering and the explosion of newsblogs and citizen journalism is testament to that. However, the corollary of the explosion in information is fragmentation. Given the increased choice of news sources, it is perhaps ironic that exposure to variety and range of news reporting seems to be decreasing but this is what recent research (Ipsos Mori?) shows. People appear increasingly to be getting their news from sources that reflect their political preferences and perspectives. As a bit of an aside, this would appear to me to signal bad news for the idea of a shared common civic and deliberative space.
As we now know, the increase in channels and platforms and the massive growth of content has simply meant increased competition for our time and attention, which remains limited and finite. This of course explains the hugely privileged position of aggregators and search engines which do the job of sifting through a gazillion possible sources of information to bring you a "manageable" choice range. The information that Google collects on you is fed into their algorithm which effectively determines what you'll see based on what it thinks you want to see. But as search becomes less "organic" and more dominated by paid for advertising and advertorials, tailored not just to your preferences and profile but to whether you form part of the target market for certain brands, the possibility is growing that you may in fact be increasingly shepharded into a specific virtual space shaped by corporates with big budgets to spend on adwords, suggested posts, trending topics and promoted tweets. A concrete example of this is the trend towards paywalls for newspaper sites, where enticing free content now sits alongside links to articles and advertorials from other, mainly commercial sites.
So there is now a very strong possibility that you may be seeing things that you did not chose to search for, and also that your profile, as constructed from your social networks and browsing preferences may not qualify you to be within a particular target group. Those that are web-savvy know that they have to maintain a certain active social media profile in order for the best news sources appear in their feeds. In a world where information and transactions are increasingly virtual, the consequences for the non web-savvy and the non-web active hardly bear thinking about.
It seems to me that these issues are what those contemplating the future of public service broadcasting should really be discussing, rather than that old chestnut of media plurality.
Makes sense, I thought. In general, a slower economy and fewer resources for journalism probably means less is going on. Then I started to question whether that really was the case. What if there were lots of things happening but not being reported as they should be? Or what if the news was actually reported elsewhere but it wasn't accessible to me?
The online digital world should in theory be a boon to newsgathering and the explosion of newsblogs and citizen journalism is testament to that. However, the corollary of the explosion in information is fragmentation. Given the increased choice of news sources, it is perhaps ironic that exposure to variety and range of news reporting seems to be decreasing but this is what recent research (Ipsos Mori?) shows. People appear increasingly to be getting their news from sources that reflect their political preferences and perspectives. As a bit of an aside, this would appear to me to signal bad news for the idea of a shared common civic and deliberative space.
As we now know, the increase in channels and platforms and the massive growth of content has simply meant increased competition for our time and attention, which remains limited and finite. This of course explains the hugely privileged position of aggregators and search engines which do the job of sifting through a gazillion possible sources of information to bring you a "manageable" choice range. The information that Google collects on you is fed into their algorithm which effectively determines what you'll see based on what it thinks you want to see. But as search becomes less "organic" and more dominated by paid for advertising and advertorials, tailored not just to your preferences and profile but to whether you form part of the target market for certain brands, the possibility is growing that you may in fact be increasingly shepharded into a specific virtual space shaped by corporates with big budgets to spend on adwords, suggested posts, trending topics and promoted tweets. A concrete example of this is the trend towards paywalls for newspaper sites, where enticing free content now sits alongside links to articles and advertorials from other, mainly commercial sites.
So there is now a very strong possibility that you may be seeing things that you did not chose to search for, and also that your profile, as constructed from your social networks and browsing preferences may not qualify you to be within a particular target group. Those that are web-savvy know that they have to maintain a certain active social media profile in order for the best news sources appear in their feeds. In a world where information and transactions are increasingly virtual, the consequences for the non web-savvy and the non-web active hardly bear thinking about.
It seems to me that these issues are what those contemplating the future of public service broadcasting should really be discussing, rather than that old chestnut of media plurality.
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