Key questions

• 1. Are citizens today more informed or more misinformed than those in pre-networked times?

• 2. Does free online content offer an alternative to corporate monopoly sameness, or has the rise of free alternatives undermined creativity and fuelled the commercial focus on safe sameness?

• 3. Has the internet opened up scope to explore difference or encouraged increasingly detached silos?

• 4. Are censorship and editorial control the answer to fake news or the cause of it? Are traditional print and broadcast media more or less biased than online content is diverse?

• 5. Do digital networks cause increased social polarization or is it simply error to ‘blame the media’ for social divisions?

Links to affordances

Digital media increase the scope for citizens to access alternative news content, some of which is misinformation. It is not always clear to those accessing such content, or who are accessed by those seeking to deliver such content to them, who is packaging that information. Concealment remains, although this is true of mainstream media as well. Moreover, a part of online discussion, whistleblowing and alternative media production also serves to expose such actions. However, how far, once identified as misinformation, such content can be blocked is contested. Some content gets through (evading control), but blocking by search engines is prevalent – raising its own concerns over manipulation. Mainstream media rely in large part on such sources too. Claims that audiences are incited easily by such content are exaggerated. While existing tensions can be stoked, such incitement cannot take place in a vacuum, and state/corporate media are no less responsible for seeking to incite/manipulate audiences – with equally mixed results.

Synopsis

The internet has created the potential for ‘everyone’ to publish their own news and other content, and for ‘everyone’ to access it. Whether such ‘citizen journalists’ are treated as ‘journalists’ in law varies by jurisdiction. On the one hand, citizen journalism has undone censorship, while, on the other hand, it has led to fears of a loss of standards. The same arguments, between those that value editorial control and those that decry it, take place in relation to academic publishing and to trade writing (fiction and trade non-fiction). To what extent is cyber culture creating deeper social silos than existed before? Does new media increase or decrease the volume and susceptibility of viewers to so-called fake news?