Abstract
Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive follows up his widely read and influential study of We The Media (2004). This volume presents itself as a ‘“user’s guide” to democratized media’ (p. xvii), and is based on the principle that being an active media consumer in the era of digital, networked communication also means being a creator of content – that the boundaries between production and consumption are blurring.
If we take that as given, and welcome the decentralization and diversification of media production implied by the trend (as Gillmor clearly does), how does the community of content-generating media users, and indeed users who don’t create content but wish merely to consume it, determine the quality of the vast quantity of information being produced every hour of every day in the online environment? How does one determine the reliability and trustworthiness of online news and commentary, produced as it now is by a plethora of sources, professional and amateur, institutional and individual, whose bona fides and credentials may not be immediately apparent, or may be suspect?
The answer to that question, for Gillmor, lies in the adoption by the online community in general (producers and consumers, amateurs and professionals) of what are, in essence, traditional journalistic principles of data management. ‘Information overflow’, he suggests, ‘requires us to take an active approach to media, in part to manage the flood pouring over us each day, but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we see’ (p. 3).
This means, in practice, that in the digital era both users and producers of information need to learn the skills associated with critical thinking – to be skeptical, and exercise a kind of due diligence when considering the value of what is on the net. We need, all of us, to be able to identify and discount what is public relations and media management as opposed to authentic, objective information; to understand and factor in to our assessment of value the importance of sourcing and verification when claims are made.
We need, in short, what used to be called media literacy, and what Gillmor calls mediactivity, to highlight the enhanced role of the user in the actual production of content. In this sense, mediactivity is an extension of the skills traditionally passed on to students of journalism, and for Gillmor now deemed to be of universal application. We are, in a sense, all journalists now.
At a time when the need for journalism education is being questioned in some quarters, if only because it is believed that journalism is in terminal decline as an institutionalized, professional practice (a view I do not share), Gillmor’s argument will reassure and invigorate journalism educators, in so far as he calls for their teaching to be offered not just to students of journalism, but to all students, and indeed all citizens. Information management skills should no longer be the preserve of a professional elite in the journalistic media, but belong to citizens as a whole, from whom healthy democracy demands the ability to distinguish authoritative from unauthoritative information.
This is an important argument. I disagree with Gillmor’s overly apocalyptic assertion that professional journalists ‘can’t possibly compete in the media sphere of the future’ (p.53), because the sense-making, sifting, narrativizing functions of journalism become more important, not less, in the digital environment Gillmor describes. But he is correct to identify the proliferation of providers and sources, and the huge expansion of access to information, as requiring a new kind of media-literate, or mediactive citizen, able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff in information terms.
My view is that this digitally empowered, information-savvy individual will coexist with the trained journalist for the foreseeable future, if only because amateurs will always lack the time and the license to spend their lives working with information. Information management, in the form of journalism, is a profession which requires more than enthusiastic amateurism to be credible and valuable. The great benefit of the internet, or one of them, is the enhanced opportunities it provides for access to and participation in the globalized public sphere by those who have not been trained as journalists, or acquired the legitimacy of professional hacks. But the benefits of this user-generated content explosion are maximized when combined with the institutional structures and editorial resources of professional newsmaking organizations, as in the partnership between Wikileaks and a number of news outlets which produced ‘Cablegate’ in 2010/11.
But Gillmor’s overall argument is very much on target, and this book makes an important contribution to our emerging understanding of what the digitized, networked public sphere will increasingly demand of its inhabitants and participants. It should be read by journalism students, and by everyone who produces for, or uses the internet.
The book, like Gillmor’s previous work, is as well written and accessible as one would expect from an author rooted in professional journalism, and will function as an excellent teaching text in a variety of contexts. In addition, he has put his copyright where his mouth is and published the book under a Creative Commons licence, which means that it can be downloaded free of charge from the address provided in the text. A foreword by Clay Shirky endorses the thesis of Mediactive, which reinforces the ‘wisdom of crowds’ logic of his own writings on journalism. For Shirky, Gillmor’s work is valuable in its potential to ‘[make] enough citizens mediactive to make journalism good because we demand that it be good’.