The Downside of the Democratization of Media
Nowadays, the tools you need to produce and spread your message are at the tips of your fingers.
You can download professional grade editing software for free, you have a 4K camera in your phone, and there’s an audience of billions on social media, who you can reach with the click of a button, as long as your ideas are compelling enough.
This democratization means that everyone with access to a computer now has access to the tools necessary to create in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a decade or two ago.
On the upside, this has allowed positive and powerful voices — which otherwise would never have been heard — to find audiences, and allowed those voices to gain the kind of credibility that comes with professional production values.
On the other hand…
People have Quality Signifiers
In the 90s, if you saw a video with a green screen, a nice looking lower third, and a fancy star wipe between shots, you could be pretty sure that the production you were watching had some money, resources and industry approval. In other words, it was an ‘official’ piece of content.
This means that people who developed heuristics related to media during this time also developed related quality signifiers that they use to tell whether a piece of media is trustworthy or not. The problem comes when those quality signifiers become democratized enough that any idiot with a pirated copy of AfterEffects and 3 hours on his hands can replicate them.
The New World
Now that professional quality AV production equipment is available to the masses, we can no longer rely on simple and outdated heuristics to determine the trustworthiness of our media — or at least not the same heuristics.
Now that any idiot can make a convincingly professional video, any idiots from all over the world are convincing people — particularly older people with outdated quality heuristics — that their content is trustworthy, when it’s not.
Conspiracy theorists and white supremacists can now produce propaganda that looks just as good and just as slick as CNN, and some people are falling into the trap of believing that it makes these sources as trustworthy as CNN.
How Do We Fix It
In the words of Lindsay Ellis:
I hope this doesn’t come across that I’m trying to make a grand, sweeping statement about how “thing bad…” but rather “thing exists.”
I’m not advocating against the continued democratization of mass media, I’m just pointing out a negative side effect of this process, and theorizing about how it might develop over time.
I think that, in accordance with the continued evolution of mass media, our quality signifiers will also need to evolve. This could happen automatically as the populace gets used to the new paradigms (especially younger generations who have grown up without the expectation that HD video = trustworthy content), but we also may have to work at educating those with outdated heuristics.
More depressingly, perhaps technological advancement will now move so quickly that there won’t ever be a solid set of trustworthiness heuristics again — perhaps even we millennials will, some day, annoy our grandchildren on Facebook by sharing deepfaked political videos. Perhaps the only way to judge the trustworthiness of a source from here on out will be to vet each one individually before we put stock into new information. Perhaps the current stable of media giants (think Disney, the New York Times, CNN) will be further cemented as the only true sources, crowding new and innovative outlets out because people no longer trust them.
Whatever happens, it is becoming increasingly clear that media literacy is quickly approaching financial literacy as the most necessary and prioritized aspect of western education.
