An Institutional Perspective on Digital Media and Culture: News, Trust, Platforms, Policy
Part 2: What is an Institution?
Terry Flew, The University of Sydney
Thinking about the relationship between technologies and institutions requires broadening the definition of both. definition of both institutions and technologies. With institutions, I follow the economist Geoffrey Hodgson (Hodgson, 2003) in seeing institutions as having five characteristics:
1. Institutions have a history that enables them to be durable over time;
2. Institutions include formal organisations, and formal and informal rules and conventions;
3. Institutions shape the behaviour of individuals and how they interact with one another;
4. Institutions do not necessarily exist ‘outside’ of individuals, as they shape the thoughts, expectations and actions of individuals;
5. At the same time, institutions have a concrete form that is over and above simply being the consequence of the rational decisions of individuals.
There are also both formal and informal institutions, as well as institutional arrangements (governance structures) and institutional environments (macro-scopic structures). Taking the institutional environment to be ‘the rules of the game in a society, or … the humanly described constraints that shape human interaction’ (North, 1990, p. 3), the institutional environment includes both formal institutions such as rules, laws, constitutions, allocations of property rights etc., but also informal institutions, such as behavioural norms, conventions, codes of conduct etc. The latter connect to the ‘mental maps’ people in societies use to make sense of events around them, which are a mix of ideas and ideologies (Denzau & North, 1994).
Just as it is insufficient to define institutions in terms of organisations, it is inadequate to conceive of technologies solely in terms of the devices or artefacts that we use. Noting the etymology of technology as deriving from techne and logos, I follow Sonia Livingstone and Leah Lievrouw (Livingstone & Lievrouw, 2006) in understanding communication technologies as arising at the intersection of three elements: (1) the artefacts or devices that enable and extend our ability to communicate; (2) the communication activities and practices we engage in to develop and use these devices; and (3) the social arrangements and organisations that form around these devices and practices. They make the point that these three elements should not be thought of as being linear or layered — the technologies influence communications practices, which in turn shape social arrangements and institutions — but rather as constituting an ensemble characterised by ‘dynamic links and interdependencies among artefacts, practices, and social arrangements that … guide our analytic focus’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2005: 3). In other words, institutions and technologies are interdependent and interconnected.
Extending this institutional framework to current projects, we can identify:
1. News: We know that the digital transformation of news, and its impact upon traditional news publishers, has been dramatic. The question is whether this matters to society. Put differently, are news publishers in a position similar to that of travel agents when the Internet became popular, in that a set of skills that were once scarce are now ubiquitous, and we are in an era of Schumpeterian “creative destruction”? An institutional framework is helpful here in that it draws attention to the first-order and second-order dimensions of news institutions. At one level, they are the brands with which we are familiar (The Times, NYT, Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald etc.). But at another level, news constitutes the informational common-pool resource on which a vast range of social decisions are made, and with many consequences. So news that is accurate, informative, and engaging to the public needs to survive, whatever the fate of individual news brands, and there is thus a “market failure” case for the support of news.
2. Digital Platforms: Digital platforms are both more unique and less unique than we commonly assume. As outlined in many recent works (Moore & Tambini, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018) there is a distinctiveness to the platform business model that makes the digital tech giants uniquely powerful in the current environment. Yet there is also a degree of mysticism around questions of how to regulate them that needs unpacking. Claims that you would “break the Internet” or fundamentally abuse human rights by setting rules around search, or age verifications around social media, seem to assume that these companies occupy a digital space that is almost sacred in its nature, and unlike anything we have seen before. Yet we would not question the idea that governments can and should regulate finance, even though finance shares a lot of characteristics of digital platforms: activity is user-generated, data moves quickly around the globe, rules can be evaded by sharp operators, etc. So we do require an approach to questions of digital platform regulation that is more pragmatic and less metaphysical than much of the discourse that is in the public domain.
3. Trust: In some ways questions of whether there is a “crisis of trust” in contemporary societies struggle to ground what it is that they are taking about. The result, as philosopher Onora O’Neill has observed, is that the conversation around social trust can become circular and even conspiratorial (O’Neill, 2010).[i] The macro-meso-micro framework provides us with ways in which to ground debates about trust by linking them to particular institutions and institutional arrangements, rather than asking people about trust in society as a whole, which is by nature impossible. Moreover, the relationship of trust to mediation in different forms is an important one, allowing for both media-centric studies (e.g. trust in news) to non-media-centric ones (e.g. can social media comms people manage trust in corporations?).
4. Policy: Digital technologies could be eroding or destroying these institutions, whether it be the end of the mainstream media, the rise of the network society, or the decline of the nation-state. But the impossibility thus far of devising a mode of governance that transcends nation-states, and the associated decline of (neo) liberalism as an organizing doctrine for public policy, presents us with the question of how institutions continue to seek to regulate or govern digital media, and what are the cultural forces aligned with, or against, such governance strategies. In such an environment, we would expect developments in digital policy to be iterative, comparative and experimental, as there is no single set of tools and techniques that align to a globally agreed meta-objective.
[i] What we can see from the recent history of conspiracy theories is the extent to which trust is never simply a matter of rational deliberation on truth or falsehood, but has an emotional or affective dimension. The best conspiracies have an element of storytelling attached to them. If we take perhaps the best conspiracy theory movie of recent years, Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), its achievement is to take the viewer on a journey where the anomalies surrounding the “lone gunman” theory of Kennedy’s assassination can be articulated to a wider theory of the power elite of the U.S in the early 1960s that is, in the absence of Stone’s mode of storytelling, less persuasive than the claim that more than one shooter was involved.
References
Denzau, A., & North, D. (1994). Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions. Kyklos, 47(1), 3–31.
Flew, T. (2017). The “Theory” in Media Theory: The “Media-Centrism” Debate. Media Theory, 1(1), 43–56.
Hodgson, G. (2003). The Hidden Persuaders: Institutions and Individuals in Economic Theory. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 27(2), 157–175.
Livingstone, S., & Lievrouw, L. A. (2006). The Handbook of New Media: Student Edition. SAGE.
Moore, M., & Tambini, D. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Dominance: The Power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Oxford University Press.
North, D. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press.
O’Neill, O. (2010). A Question of Trust. Cambridge University Press.
van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Wall, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press.
