Media and communicative reason

News and discussions in digital media

Abundance of information in the various media moulds our lifeworld all the time. This information is chaotic as rumours and deliberate lies, opinions and allegations are mixed with matter-of-fact reports and analyses. Writings that help us to arrange this flood of information seem to be rare. The media live on attention but peoples’ interest is not necessarily directed to the messages that give a profound view of matters but mainly to stories that tickle their immediate curiosity. The more peculiar a headline is the more interest, and sales, it will raise. Often this also means that the story tells little about anything that is important to our life. For example, gossip about the relationships of celebrities hardly affect the fate of nations, or economy, except by increasing sales of tabloid press (and ironically, most papers are now in the tabloid format). Another important thing is how quickly the media can publish a scoop. The facts are not often checked carefully enough. This is a specific curse of web pages. While the quality press wants to maintain its credibility, it feels under pressure to comment on rumours that some unprincipled medium publishes. It is not possible for the reader to check the truthfulness of news directly from the sources. Fake news is unscrupulously used for political purposes. 

The flood of information and misinformation gives rather an absurd and fragmentary view of the world. People do not have time to read a plethora of long reports and often content themselves with headlines. We are more motivated to read stories that strengthen our existing beliefs, which again are likely to be those that the media mostly offer. What seems to be the general opinion is taken as the criterion of truth. This situation is an obvious corroboration of the fact that the lifeworld is always an interpretation of the world. The disintegrating concept of truth will erode our lifeworld as well.

The commercial media live through the interests of audience; thus, some sort of populism is vital to their success. There can hardly be any field of science that tells us in almost real time what is going on in the world. I am not familiar with academic paradigms of journalism, but I guess students of the field learn about the criteria of what kind of information is reliable enough to be published. This challenge has been addressed in the press many times, but at the end of this analysis there is a million pounds' bonus.

Our worldview is being shaped by our choices of news that support the view of the media or appeal more to our emotions. One moving human fate sells better than statistics about thousands of equally sad ones, especially when a touching photo is attached to the human-interest story. Destroyed acres of rain forest do not break the news, whereas the decision of a celebrity to pay more attention to his or her carbon footprint does so. What we regard as essential depends on our values, and we should be critical with regard to the order of things as they are represented in the media. We need something more substantial for the framework of our understanding than the daily selection of news. Even the pieces of news that tell about new findings of sciences require critical reading and understanding the preconditions of scientific research.

Every now and then papers publish good essays that give ideas about how we can make sense of what goes on in the world, but these texts do not form a cumulative whole. Instead, the columns usually give advice about how people can cope with their everyday problems. So, newspapers and magazines become an ordinary part of our lifeworld, they inspire daily chat over a coffee and strengthen our sense of belonging to a community. The forming of the overall picture must inevitably be left to historians. 

The world viewed through social media is even more chaotic than what we see in edited papers and TV, including their web pages. Social media are open battlefields of ideas and stories. There you find every­thing that comes to peoples’ minds. On the one hand, it provides a feeling of community, shared experiences, and valuable building blocks to our lifeworld. On the other hand, channels of social media can bring on to you the feeling of strangeness, of being an outsider, or even hatred. It is difficult to interpret correctly the tones of textual messages, and people are quick to answer rudely to the comments they find offensive. So far, rational argumentation is not the standard mode of debate, to say the least. 

It is easy to support ideas put forward in a chat platform, but it is equally easy not to commit oneself to anything. Social media provide a quick channel to opinions, and when they become the public opinion they may influence political decision making, consumer behaviour and so on. When an opinion becomes public, we can hope that it is then open to critical evaluation which is based on facts. No one can guarantee that, however, and the impact can be for good or bad. 

The situation raises questions about the position of the media in our lifeworld. If the core of the lifeworld is what we take as the given truth, what part can the media have in it? Obviously, we learn to trust some sources more than others, and after sufficient corroboration, we accept some texts as true, with the same reservations as other things that we consider to be true. However, it is not unusual that people rely blindly on selected sources on ideological grounds. We have seen rather scary examples of people having lost faith in the truth in general. They may believe more in the authority of strong persons than corroborated research results, or if you happen to be the strong personality, the truth may be harmful to your purposes. Then you can invent “alternative facts”.

Encyclopaedias and evidence

Responsible users of the internet also try build solid edifices of knowledge that are more reliable than random collections of webpages. Encyclopaedias as accumulated storage of knowledge have also naturally taken a digital form. Wikipedia is the best known of those. Almost anybody can contribute to its contents, write new texts, or correct the existing ones. In the background, there are maintainers who control the integrity of Wikipedia. This editorial freedom results in miscellaneous content. The amount of irrelevant information is not a big problem, because the encyclopaedia is not meant to be read in the alphabetical order, or in any order. You find the interesting writings by means of search engines. According to Wikipedia’s own statistics half of the accesses come through search engines. Again, writings in Wikipedia are not often written by experts who have a university degree on the topic in question (nor does a university degree always guarantee the best expertise, either). There are competing encyclopaedias in which experts have written the articles, but they are far behind in popularity, perhaps owing to how search engines have indexed the sources. The idea of gathering and linking individual pieces of information together by means of computers goes back to the 1940’s when Vannevar Bush wrote his article “As we may know”. 

It would be absurd to think that we could rely only on the externalized knowledge, stored in books and digital storages. It is good that we need not burden our memory with a plethora of details of everything we consider worth knowing, but we do need in our mind a framework that gives an order and meaning to elements of knowledge, or at least the power of reason, a method to evaluate the given information. The basis of our worldview is our conviction of what is important to ourselves and to the world. This knowledge is the culture we have grown into through education. It gives us the ability to evaluate the flood of information critically, and, of course, with the help of documented facts. Any constraints to the freedom of thought and speech is a serious danger to humankind. 

Whereas controversial information of the media and social media threaten to shake the integrity of our lifeworld, the critical observer can also use valuable pieces of information to keep his or her worldview sound. But if one does not rely on one’s ability to absorb this information, it is alluring to look at things from a narrow ideological perspective that gives an interpretation of everything irrespective of the facts. Due to the complexity of the world nobody is totally safe against this danger.

Not everything that has been printed throughout history is replicated in the internet yet, but about almost every piece of text, picture, historical monument, or commercial product there is some sort of trace in the WWW. at least an item in a catalogue or other metadata. By means of search engines we can access this vast amount of information. Without those search engines, there wouldn’t be any chance to grasp that information. However, the order of hits does not necessarily agree with your expectations, or the order of significance in your lifeworld. The order of hits is often manipulated by algorithms or users that want to raise the visibility of certain views. One must look at the search results with a very critical eye. The convictions of your lifeworld give the first basis of interpretation, and if the new pieces of information contradict your existing view, you will check the claims from other sources. The situation is challenging, because those other sources are often other websites, too. 

One solution for providing reliability in press and online media would be the same procedure as science uses: if a newspaper, TV channel or an online channel publishes a piece of news, it must give all the media access to the original evidence. So, the claim is submitted to the same kind of peer review as research result of scientists.

The possibility of communicative reason

The main purpose of the essays in this blog has been to inspire confidence in the rational worldview through which the results of science, art, and our ethical reasoning deepen our interpretation of the world where we live. The present situation is rather controversial. Paradoxically, it seems that the only thing people agree upon is that there is no agreement on anything. Well, the goal cannot be that we are unanimous about everything, but we could hope to have a common ground to understand each other, i.e., the shared lifeworld. One of the latest signs of desperation is the phrase that we are living in the post-truth era. It does not matter what you say any longer. Well, what we say is not as important as what we do. If we do not react to signs of climate change, increasing inequality or international conflicts, we will encounter catastrophic consequences. Is it so that humankind can only learn through disasters? Influential thinkers have warned us about what is coming, Stephen Hawking among them. Yet, by expressing those warnings they try to say that we may still have a chance, even if it is the last one. 

People do know the menaces, but they do not see what they can do about them. The political behaviour of masses seems to be rather irrational, which again is a consequence of their confusion. People wait for a messiah who can save them, but the major political characters of today frighten us with their solutions to step backwards in time, to the era of nations fighting against one another. Those whose power rests in their wealth are prisoners of the system they themselves have created, even if they had seen that this road would end in a major catastrophe. Such great human figures as Gandhi or Mandela are rare. No one person can save us from global threats. 

When Bertrand Russell wrote about major risks to humankind during the cold war, the greatest cause for fear was a nuclear war between the USA and the Soviet Union. Russell saw as a realistic alternative that one party would lose the ideological and economic competition. If I remember right, he hoped that it would be the west, mainly because it was a less totalitarian system. This is what has happened, but there are new threats, beside the previous one – even if that may have diminished in importance. It is still there, and there are new, influential powers with nuclear weapons. The ideological dispute on the economic system is no longer between countries but globally between those who have and those who have not. Those who have not seem to be ideologically very poorly united and give no challenge to those who have money, wealth, and power. However, the major threat is now the risk of environmental catastrophe due to climate change, pollution, and extinction of natural resources. “The good news” is that this risk is common to all people, although perhaps more painful for example to the people living on islands that oceans will cover. The struggle between extreme nationalist ideas and competing religions has replaced the ideological dispute over economy. Terrorist attacks spread fear, which is their purpose, but they also tend to bring about irrational reactions. These confrontations make rational discourse very difficult, almost impossible. Hate talk seems to label social media.

One would hope that the leaders of nations could stay calm and maintain the ability to rational debate. This does not seem to be the case, and actions are taken to emphasise what is said, and what is said is not often what is meant. But if there are anywhere niches in which rational communication still is possible, those marginal spaces must be protected from declining to the same irrational mess as the rest of society. We must hope that someday people are again ready to listen to reason.

The preconditions of communicative rationality are truthfulness, sincerity regarding one’s purposes, and freedom of speech (applied from Habermas’s theory of communicative action). This also means respect for others, decent language, and acceptance of criticism. The guiding principle is: “let the best argument win”. This is possible only if the participants share common understanding of some set of facts, a common lifeworld. When discussion takes place in the net, it would benefit from an AI-tool that could support claims by representing accepted facts as evidence. There is already one application that checks if statistics of research papers are correct. As we can see in the online debates of newspapers, a big problem is the vast amount of comments that nobody has time to read. Comments repeat existing ones. This could be avoided if the support tool elicited a pop up window showing the topic that is being discussed and the writer could reconsider if his or her comment brings anything new to the discussion. I am not quite sure if this might be a killer application – it wouldn’t kill Facebook – but I believe that it would attract people who are eager to take part in a serious and constructive debate. A respectable newspaper should order the system from an innovative software firm.