Locate the conversation
Kaieteur News – It should be noted in advance, that there is no substitute for the mainstream press. The structure, training, discipline and administrative capacity that make up the average news entity is essential to ensure that the Fourth Estate plays its role in ensuring that the three branches of government play their own rule maintain a fair and functional society.
That said, a mainstream press comes with the biases, choices and prejudices of its management interests, whether those prejudices are open or implicit; when the interests of managing a press outlet find themselves aligned with political or economic or tribal interests.
When the Internet first began to evolve message boards, followed by chat groups, there came a sense that the Internet was democratizing human communication, not only shifting the power of mass communication from an increasingly unique elite, but also defining what was prioritized in this is an extensive talk in this brave new World Wide Web. With the creation of podcasts, a new dimension, audio, was mostly added to the text forums, and then came YouTube. The name has become so ubiquitous that most people give little thought to the brand name, a combination of “You,” the individual consumer, and “tube,” the American idiom for television.
And then social media, most notably, Twitter and Facebook appeared. What has led to this is a proverbial bilateral sword. A decade ago, social media – Facebook and Twitter, in particular – played a vital role in what became known as The Arab Spring, a series of massive political upheavals that rocked dictatorial regimes mainly in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Disagreements not only used social media to highlight the excesses of governments trying to suppress them, sharing photos, text and video from the midst of the uprisings where mainstream established media outlets reaching or using social media could or would not be used to coordinate the rebellions.
Of course, shortly thereafter he tried to overturn social media for a US reversal, using – every organization – the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in trying to create a Cuban version of Twitter. According to a UK Guardian 2-14 story on the plan:
“In a play on Twitter, he called it ZunZuneo – slang for a Cuban hummingbird tweet. Documents show that the US government intended to build a subscriber base through “non-contentious content”: news updates on football, music and hurricane updates. Later on reaching the critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, activists would deliver political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” – mass gatherings called a moment’s notice that could trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAID document said, ‘renegotiating the balance of power between the state and society’. “
Fast forward to 2021, and it’s no doubt a cruel irony for intellectuals of that program that the external reversal of American social media – by Russia if that wasn’t clear – decided the outcome of the 2016 election giving Donald the victory Trump, and that social media was instrumental in the Trump-induced mass attack on the American legislature and on American democracy itself.
A key role of mass media has always been for society to engage in a credible conversation with itself. Even as traditional news agencies – such as this one, for example – face a host of other critical challenges, serious consideration must be given to the way they handle social media and the competition it represents for space at the chat table. In Guyana, we’ve had serious issues thrown up, discussed, analyzed and resolved, conversations involving thousands of people who never make any mainstream media outlet. Society is ever evolving – there was a time when that credible mass talk was only based in mainstream media; it is probably time to acknowledge that much of that conversation relocated elsewhere.