Has the digital revolution democratised content production?
December 7th, 2017
1880 Salon Night #2
“My job is not to make up anybody’s mind but to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking.” — Fred W. Friendly, former CBS News president
The night started with some questions, as we set out to ask even more. We desired to engage in the art of disagreement, hoping that through disagreeing, we would find the catalyst for conversations that change the world.
We began by determining that the issue isn’t in content production but in creating access to quality content, and in having the ability to filter content.
Dr Astrid Tuminez, Microsoft’s regional director for corporate, external, and legal affairs in Southeast Asia, pointed us to the costliness of accessing digital content in different parts of Southeast Asia. In Myanmar, 1 GB of data is equivalent to 8 hours of wages, in the Philippines, 5 hours of wages, and in Singapore, just over 1 hour of wages. In this digital age where we are inundated with information, discernment seems to be all the more essential.
Some argued that a lot of junk has surfaced post-2016, and curating the news can actually be a good thing; it would be a waste of intelligence, time, and resources otherwise. Others contended with this point insisting that freedom is messy but critical thinking is a habit one has to build to navigate the clutter.
Is content meant to conform to someone’s belief or to challenge it? Do we need to dumb down our writing style? Do we need to cater to the lowest common denominator? How relevant is long form journalism today when brief journalism is sexy, controversial, and captures attention? Former Straits Times editor-in-chief Peter Lim made his case by pointing out that simplifying is actually difficult.
In Singapore, a pertinent issue is how regulated the press is. We questioned if censorship here is overbearing, and if digital content makes censorship harder. It goes without a doubt that discourse is relatively free on social media — the Lee family feud was one that played out on Facebook, ostensibly intentional.
Curating information by the government might be prevalent in Singapore but censorship lies in the hands of the marketplace in the US, or the Philippines, for instance. Yet, we were rudely awakened to the paradox in the Philippines. As one of the countries with the freest press in the world, how many journalists actually live on after their story gets published?
What more can be done? Is activism key? Digitalisation engenders passive activism when we think we’ve expressed indignation with an angry emoji. Co-founder and editor-in-chief of RICE, Mark Tan, hopes for their platform to help readers understand their thoughts and perspectives a little better. After all, we might be just too safe and comfortable in Singapore.
We need some jostling. We need to be okay with turbulence. It is in discontentment, disagreement, and discourse that things get changed. And that is why we want to provoke and inspire conversation at 1880.
