Platform dependency and the global techlash
This is the Preface I prepared for the Chinese edition of New Media: An Introduction. It was recently published by the People’s Daily Press with the support of the Communication University of China.
When the first edition of New Media was published in English in 2002, the intention was to write a book that would be accessible to the general reader, and particularly to students, while also dealing with the major questions around the internet and digital media. With the book now widely available to the world’s largest internet community, this goal has finally been realised.
The ideas behind the book were first developed two decades ago, when I developed a course on New Media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The intention of the book has never been simply to recount what the new media technologies are, not least because such information quickly goes out of date. It has been to explore their wider social, economic, political and cultural impacts of new media, including how they impact on other media. The leading digital media researcher Sonia Livingstone has made the point that it is vital to ask ‘what’s new for society about the new media?’, rather than simply ‘what are the new media?’. That spirit has animated this book over its four editions.
When I think about what has changed over a 20-year period from 2000 to today, one of the biggest changes is that ‘new media’ is no longer new. The major digital platforms companies started in the 1990s or early 2000s, and most of the transformations associated with digitization, mobile devices and user interactivity are now well and truly embedded into the media that two-thirds of the world’s population are now using.
In 2020, the estimated number of internet users was 4.54 billion, or 67 per cent of the world’s population, with the fastest rates of growth being in the developing world. Among this digitally networked population, 3.8 billion (49 per cent) were social media users: the most widely used social media platforms in 2020 were Facebook (2.5 billion users), YouTube (2 billion users), WhatsApp (1.6 billion users), Fb Messenger (both with 1.3 billion users), and WeChat (1.15 million users).
This has in turn changed how we think of the media. Most of the world’s major publishers and broadcasters are still operating, and some have flourished in recent times, as they have been able to capture new audiences and readers through digital innovation. But increasingly, we access the media in ways that are quite different to what they were even in the 2010s. More and more people get news from social media, watch films and television from digital platforms, and play games on mobile devices. There are also new opportunities for the public to be the creators, and not simply the consumers, of digital media content. This has challenged longstanding media business models, and presented new challenges for professional media workers in maintaining their social role and ethical responsibilities.
A big change has been the rise of the giant digital technology companies to being among the largest and most powerful corporations in the world. The 2019 Global Interbrand Survey of the world’s most powerful brands found that six of the world’s top ten global brands are in the communications media and information technology space: Apple (#1), Google (#2), Amazon (#3), Microsoft (#4), Samsung (#6) and Facebook (#9).
In China, technology giants such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (the BAT) are a growing presence in industries such as finance and retail and well as media and information technology, and are increasingly integrated into ‘Industry 4.0’ initiatives that integrate big data, artificial intelligence and robotics. Such companies, as well as hardware manufacturers such as Huawei and Lenovo, are also a growing presence as global brands.
With greater power comes greater social responsibility, and many digital platform companies have been struggling with this. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was revealed in 2018 that personal data from 87 million Facebook users was leaked to the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, who then used it for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. and the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the U.K., created a global controversy.
The role played by so-called ‘fake news’ in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and in the elections of other countries, is the subject of ongoing public hearings and debate. Complaints about online harassment on social media, particularly of women and minorities, have led many to delete their social media accounts, and poisoned the atmosphere of some digital platforms.
Digital technology companies are increasingly being compelled to address what The Economist termed the ‘global techlash’. Even Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has conceded that some form of regulation of companies such as his was inevitable. The forms that such regulation may take are varying across countries and regions. The European Union has promoted the General Data Protection Requirement (GDPR), and it has been adopted by most companies due to the size and significance of the European market.
There are growing demands for data sovereignty, or the expectation that data gathered on citizens within a country should be subject to the laws and governance structures of the nation in which it is collected. Indigenous peoples around the world have been demanding data sovereignty as a vital part of their rights to self-determination, and the ‘decolonisation of data’.
Problems such as fake news, misuse of personal data, and online harassment that is poorly managed by digital platform companies speak to a wider crisis of trust in social institutions. Western digital platforms have largely maintained a ‘hands off’ stance towards government regulation, arguing that external controls on their activities are tantamount to censorship.
The situation is, however, changing worldwide, as global problems such as climate change require global dialogue in a spirit of co-operation and mutuality, and as people and governments demand greater accountability and transparency in the uses of data and online information. With greater power over the distribution of information, communication and entertainment comes new ethical challenges and expectations that the power of digital platforms will be used for social good, and governments are acting on such expectations to a degree that is very different now to what was the case even a decade ago.
The internet is a remarkable global infrastructure that has enabled an unprecedented degree of global interconnectedness and empowered people as communicators, learners, educators and creators. But as the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw in the 1960s when he wrote about a ‘Global Village’, greater awareness does not always lead to greater understanding. The risks of using powerful global platforms to spread falsehoods, or to align or defame those who someone disagrees with, is now greater than ever, and there is evidence that the platforms have indeed been misused in such ways.
The challenge of our times is to promote the ethical uses of data, the social responsibilities of technology companies, and the harnessing of the power of digital technologies to address the great social, economic and environmental challenges of our times.
