Freedom of speech and its dilemma
Our young generation has been proving our mastery at utilizing the Internet and social media as a tool to loudly speak up about anything that we are concerned about. The title sounds like it refers to the multiverse movie, but this blog quite doesn’t. Instead, I would like to talk about how media bring us all at once, crossing all time and space.
We already went through the first phase called Web 1.0, which is the unilateral interaction of media in which there were only propaganda, broadcasts, and advertisements aired on televisions. Moving to Web 2.0 as known as the era of the Internet, social media with bilateral interaction with the media like Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube,,.. We are now in this phase, and even though there is a transition from this era to the next phase called Web 3.0 in relation to the technology of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and so on, still, the majority of the world population is not too familiar with Web 3.0.
Social media and the network itself still maintain as a conundrum of its impact on human development either in a good or bad way. On the one hand, we can argue that thanks to social media like Youtube, we have the freedom to speak, raise our voices, and express ourselves on certain topics, as a result, opinions and perspectives are diversified, people can pick up the side they want to stand, or even stand their own sides. On the other hand, the more people speak up about their opinions, the more uncontrollable an event will be. A major problem that we are facing now is fake news. Since we no longer have only one party controlling the news dissemination process, everyone now can take part, it is more difficult to control what kind of news is spread, whether it is confirmed or the sources are verified, but again, the centralization of information dissemination falls back to the logic of the authorization and freedom of speech.
For instance, in South Korea, instead of following the traditional news platform, Youtube now becomes a political news medium despite its flimsy verification process.
Around a month ago, “Taegeukgi rallies” happened and were organized by Park Geun-Hye president’s supporters and other far-right groups. Many of them started political channels on YouTube and propagated right-leaning content to reinforce conservative political parties. (Yoon, 2022)
“(Taegeukgi) rally participants came to regard Park’s impeachment as a national crisis, and rallied out of anger. United by the claims of (conservative) party members and opinion leaders, YouTubers acted as the channel connecting the participants (of the rallies) and the outside world, YouTuber’s role in politics of agora.” wrote Lee Jong-Myung, a researcher for the Institute for Social Science Research at Kyungpook National University. (Yoon, 2022)
‘”Don’t trust the media, trust YouTube”
That is what they believe, and Youtube can even able to confirm their bias based on algorithms and community bubbles
“We found that a high frequency of viewing political content on YouTube tends to reinforce (the user’s) political beliefs, also the confirmation bias tends to be stronger among those who have strong political beliefs. In other words, those who lean strongly liberal or conservative tend to reinforce their beliefs through YouTube videos (compared to those who are politically neutral).”
said Lee Jong-Myung. (Yoon, 2022)
And as a result of the pandemic, everything all at once.
We have seen all transitions of trend, from Y2K in the 2000s, to clean girl in 2022, but it seems like there is no exactly prevalent trend, but rather all the trends are happening all at once, everything is hidden at your scroll.
There is one explanation that I find reasonable for this phenomenon. The fast-paced of the Internet and especially Tiktok in the past two years has made us shorten our attention span, and increase media multitasking behaviors, and the constant update of the information stream has made our brains accustomed to our electronic devices’ notification poppingly, called “popcorn brain”. That is why it seems like we can search for everything on Tiktok. Statistically, Tiktok search engine has now taken over Google for its convenience to become the most used search tool by Gen Z. Most of the Gen Z prefer authentic content with visual representation in 15 seconds rather than reading about it. (Pogue, 2022)
So, the question is: Does social media leave us with more options to handle information? Do they allow us to live in a more diverse world since we can have a unique style of our own?
Reference:
Yoon, M.S. (2022, September 26). [newsmaker] YouTube’s ever-growing role in Korean politics. The Korea Herald. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220926000614
Pogue, W. (2022, August 4). Move over google. Tiktok is gen Z’s go-to search engine. Adweek. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/move-over-google-tiktok-is-the-go-to-search-engine-for-gen-z/
To answer your first question, yes I think that the rise of social media leaves us with more options to handle information. However, whether the information that is given to us with these media is of good or bad quality is, as you said in your post, highly debatable. That being said, maybe we should take a step back. I mean that even if the information relayed through these outlets is not to be trusted, being able to record so much information from such a terribly wide audience (aka any and every individual with internet) is absolutely invaluable. The information yielded from these platforms is thus not so much of interest in their capacity of relaying turhtful information as they are a very useful tool to record how people percieve the world.
answering your first question: yes, in a way, social media gives us more options on handling mountains of informations that are circulating the internet. However, it is not always in a positive way. I have a deep concern on how the majority of population cannot handle fake news in a more critical way. Or even mainstream news at all. In a country where the human development index is rather low, fake news are spreading easily and creating a toxic behavior of it’s reader, most of the times.
Second question of yours: I believe the world is not becoming more diverse. Instead, people are becoming more and more aware of how diverse our world actually is. It means that the social media has becoming the prominent medium to open every windows which shows different kinds of views about different kinds of lifestyles, human’s perpectives, ideas, school of toughts, etc.
All in all, exciting topic. Thank you for your post! 🙂