Is Information Knowledge in the Digital World?

Dr. Steve Gennaro,
Professor in the Humanities department at York University (Canada)

In his piece “About The Rank Of Sources And The Reliability Of Data In The Scientific Study” David Procopio “introduced a classification that makes it possible to have a clear understanding of sources used in the research” and to help to differentiate “scientific work from a journalistic one.”[1]  Although I am not a scientist, as a critical theorist and philosopher of technology who works in the area of critical media literacy, the points raised by Procopio do not go un-noticed.  In fact, the concerns raised by Procopio, if extrapolated and used as a meta framework for the exploration of knowledge, information consumption, and technology — provide us with an important series of questions that all interactions with media require — and not just those by scientists!  More specifically, how has the expansion of social media impacted our consumption of information as knowledge? How have the actions of certain individuals on social media altered the notion of what is fact or who is a trusted source?  An example here would be American President Donald Trump’s use of social media to by-pass the mainstream media, whom previously were the primary disseminators of information as knowledge.  This has altered the very process by which information gets fact checked or verified before being consumed by the general public. And, of importance to this paper, how have changes to the technological apparatus — whereby the iPhone now lives almost entirely inside of our bodies as extensions to our very selves — altered how we consume information as knowledge?

Before I go further, perhaps I should say a few words of clarification about the distinction between “information” and “knowledge” as I want to deliberately separate these two terms.  In separating these terms, I am attempting to engage with the classification system that Procopio gives to us in his article on scientific sources, whereby Procopio argues that not all information is knowledge because not all sources are equal distributors of credibility.  The same is true for the consumption of media by the general public through smartphones, mobile devises, and handheld technologies.  Not all media information is knowledge because not all media information is actively decoded when consumed. To draw a comparison to Procopio’s classification system with an analogy to eating a healthy diet, some “information” when consumed can be immediately digested as “knowledge.”  These healthy foods would be what Procopio classifies as “reliable sources.” However, I would argue, that even healthy foods can come in unhealthy packaging.  Think of an apple that has been grown in a field that relies heavily on pesticides for maximum growth and then the use of further chemicals to preserve freshness for transportation from farm to supermarket.  Even when we consume reliable sources, we must always be aware of the impact of the container of that information when we consume it as knowledge.

In addition to what Procopio terms “reliable sources,” other sources, he argues, require multiple levels of verification to establish their credibility. These sources require action on the part of the reader to turn “information” into “knowledge.”  Returning to our food metaphor, some foods require “more chewing” for digestion.  What is clear from Procopio’s hierarchy is that the more reliable the source, the less effort required in the consumption of that source to take its “information” and digest it to “knowledge.” Sometimes the process of verification requires an individual to seek out the producer of the information and their bias.  Other times this process of verification requires a clearer understanding of the pathway of dissemination to properly establish the extent to which it can be considered credible. In this way, we can think about tracing the reliability of a source, much like eating a walnut; it requires the penetration of the hard shell to find the source protein located inside.

Karl Marx once argued that information disguised as knowledge acts like an opium for the masses.[2] This idea was further extended by Theodor Adorno’s description of “the culture industry” as pablum for the masses.[3] For Adorno and his Frankfurt School counterparts, the expansion of mass media as the disseminators of information packaged as knowledge was problematic since the very structure and profit based goals of the culture industries emptied media of any nutritional value despite being packaged as healthy for consumption.  Adorno and Horkheimer beautifully foreshadowed (unbeknownst to them) the current moment where social media empties “information” of “knowledge” by its very structure, when they posited that “the diner must be satisfied with menu.”[4] In all cases, Marx, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Procopio — the point remains clear: information is not always encoded with knowledge regardless of the packaging or container. Therefore, the decoding of information required to transform it to  knowledge — what Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share have termed “critical medial literacy” — is a requirement for healthy digestion.[5]  I would like to propose here as an extension to Procopio’s classification of the reliability of sources is another lens for viewing the credibility of the information we engage with, and one that is often over looked.  Here, I argue that the container is as important as the contents and requires the same level of scrutiny for classification.

In the current media environment, the content of social media: be it friends’ lists, posts, tic tocs, tweets, likes, etc. all require critical media literacy for decoding. However, the same could be said about earlier advancements in communications technology (i.e./ print, radio, television, etc.). One of the primary differences between the current transformations in media and earlier historical examples are the intimacy, expediency, and primacy of the mediums themselves across which media travels. An overabundance of texts and encoded images surround us. We interact with so many of these texts — so frequently —  that it is impossible to immediately decode all of the symbols, texts, and images we encounter at the point of interaction. Therefore, we passively naturalize encoded messages of multiple symbols without even knowing it.

A political economy of media would suggest an exploration of the objects, apparatus, and physical spaces that translate and transpose digital images, messages, and ideologies, to emphasize and expose unequal power relations, which encode media at the stage of production with embedded inequalities that are portrayed as normal, obvious, or even invisible when received at the point of consumption. In the current media environment, the mediums that transport media content to users requires increased decoding.  What is unique to the current moment is the primacy, intimacy, and expediency of the technology apparatus (aka the mediums) for accessing information packaged as knowledge in 2020— e.g. smartphones, iPads, and tablets. This therefore requires an additional step to previous approaches of political economy of media. Here “medium” or “container” can refer to hardware like iPhones, software: and this includes internet browsers or search engines, platforms like social media spaces such as Twitter or YouTube, and even cellular service, cable and telephone companies, and Wi-Fi providers.  Anything that acts as a conduit through which digital information travels from the point of production to the point of reception is a medium or container.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have not only reshaped how we communicate with others, they have also shifted how we interact with knowledge. Here, I am referring to the processes by which Americans use handheld technology and social networks to access “news information” as “knowledge.” According to The Pew Research Center “[o]verall, 81% of Americans say they go online on a daily basis. That figure includes the 28% who go online almost constantly, as well as 45% who say they go online several times a day.”[6]  There has been a trickle-down impact for smartphone ownership, whereby a PEW Research Center report on Teen use of social media and technology by Anderson and Jiang noted that 95% of American teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online “almost constantly.”[7] Despite arguments surrounding a digital divide, the research data suggests that mediums play a prominent role in the daily lives of most Americans. Since the smartphone or tablet is often the first point of media contact for many individuals — whereby news or information is first received by the user via their handheld devices — understanding the primacy of the medium is a key requirement for critical media literacy.

In addition to an increase to the amount of time Americans spend on their devices, there has also been an increase in how the American public use these devices to access “news” — remembering of course that news has historically acted as “information” packaged and delivered as “knowledge” to the general public. In September 2012, a report from Pew Research noted how 1/3 of all Americans reported accessing their daily news information via their smartphones or tablets.[8]  In 2020, according to PEW, not only do more Americans have smartphones and use them as their primary source for news media, but1/4 of adult Americans noted how they get their news primarily from YouTube. And almost 3/4 of respondents noted that YouTube was an important way to get news.[9] But here is where the consumption of information as knowledge becomes challenging with social media, like YouTube. For this recent survey, PEW noted that of the most popular news channels on YouTube, those with at least 1000,000 subscribers in 2019, only 49% were associated with news organizations and a startling 42% were independent!

This brought with it a series of other factors from:

• Shape: 70% of these independent YouTube channels with over 100,000 subscribers center around an individual personality, “YouTuber,” influencer, or public figure.
• Tone: independent YouTube channels were twice as likely to produce stories with a negative tone when presenting their information.
• Conspiracy theories: a higher number of topics discussed in YouTube videos by independents engaged with topics that centered around conspiracy theories.

So, to summarize, we have a scenario where close to 90% of information consumers are holding smartphones or handheld devices, and 3/4 of these individuals believe that YouTube is a valuable space to get this information from, but also, almost half of that information is being packaged as knowledge but would never meet the classification of “reliable source” according to Procopio.

In 2005, I explored the shift in news coverage from what I termed real news — traditional news centers like CNN or The Washington Post — to comedy news shows such as The Colbert Report or The Daily Show.[10]  What was notable at the time was how many Americans in the lead up to the 2004 Presidential Election treated comedy news as a reliable source to gather information on key issues before voting. And while I speculated how this shift was troublesome for democracy, in retrospect we see how it was actually part of a more significant process whereby news coverage was shifting — from Norman Mailer type essays that expressed and explored convergent views on issues, to simple one-liner headlines, which sensationalized information for audience pleasure. The one-liner news coverage in the world of Twitter has become the standard, even for news organizations like CNN or The Washington Post. On social media, news organizations and independents uses simple one-liners or a basic image to stand in for an entire news story and to hook the smartphone readership who access their news from digital spaces — often sacrificing the knowledge component of the news story for the shock statement that will result in the click that redirects the viewer to the website, blog, or YouTube channel. When news is sent directly to our phones, it is sent there because we have actively subscribed to receive it; either through an RSS feed for particular story types that interest us, through an app (either free or paid) that sorts our likes and dislikes and then sends them to us, via search engines that uses algorithms to predict our “real desires,” or even through a paid subscription to a news provider of choice.  In all cases, a selection of what information we will receive as knowledge happens before we ever see the stories — and in many cases before we even see the topics! What is unique about this process to social media versus television or home newspaper delivery, is the primacy and intimacy of the information packaged as knowledge via the smartphone medium.  When news is sent directly to our phones, the personification of that news immediately suggests to us that its content is real, legitimate, trustworthy, and unbiased; and that it fully represents the world — locally and globally — it purports to cover. But how well does Twitter’s one-liner news coverage actually stand up to critical media literacy? When news arrives in one-lined tweets, if the reader does not click to read the entire story or spend time unpacking who the source is and what the context of the story may be, then the news itself gets digested without being chewed. The sensationalized one-liner headline that was written to lure the reader to the news corporation home site or independent YouTube channel becomes naturalized as news itself and takes on the perception of truth — even when the perception is an empty and hallow symbol.

Apparatus like smartphones are handheld, mobile, are generally kept close to one’s personal body at all times. In addition to their close physical proximity to users, the type of applications downloaded to the device and used multiple times daily — such as messaging, status updates, calendar, news, and even weather information, allows the apparatus primary status in our lives as it now perform many of the social roles previously occupied by friends, partners, assistants, and other trusted individuals in our daily lives. Since social media messages are sent and received instantaneously and often without censor by the sender and without sorting by the receiver, an active participation from the individual to access knowledge and not just information requires a critically media literacy that looks to the medium as the first point of access in need of decoding.  The iPhone is not simply a hand-held device that aids an individual in the process of communication. The iPhone is communication itself.

In separating media and medium into two distinct terms we see a vital reconceptualization of Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message![11] It is about form as much as function. It is about container as much as content.

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Dr. Steve Gennaro has a PhD from McGill University that explores intersections of media, technology, psychology, and youth identity. He completed a Postdoc in Philosophy of Education at UCLA with Douglas Kellner. He is one of the founding members of the Children, Childhood, and Youth Studies Program at York University and is the author of Selling Youth, co-editor of Youth & Social Media (forthcoming 2021), and co-author of The Googleburg Galaxy (forthcoming 2022). Dr. Gennaro regularly publishes in areas related to the philosophy of technology, education, critical theory, and media studies of youth, identity, and politics.

Dr. Steve Gennaro was an early adopter to e-learning in higher education having helped to design and deliver courses in blended, fully online, experiential, and gamified formats dating back to 2005. His innovative approach to pedagogy is internationally recognized and he is a global leader on best practices for student engagement, course design, and digital teaching and learning. In addition to his own teaching, Dr. Gennaro works as the Instructional Designer for Canada’s largest Liberal Arts Faculty at York University in Toronto.

 

Reference:

[1] Procopio, David. “About The Rank Of Sources And The Reliability Of Data In The Scientific Study” Jewish Review, June 2, 2020,  https://jewishreview.co.il/about-the-rank-of-sources-and-the-reliability-of-data-in-the-scientific-study-10202/.

[2] This quote originally appeared in the “Introduction” of Marx’s 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right when discussing religion. Marx noted “it is the opium of the people.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

[3] Adorno furthers this idea in his 1944 essay with Max Horkheimer “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment when he notes “There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm. He also returns to this notion in his 1967 “Culture Industry Reconsidered” noting “though the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would like to have us believe, not its subject but its object.” Theodor Adorno and J. M. Bernstein, The Culture Industry Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), 99.

[4] Adorno and Horkheimer in “The Culture Industry” argue “The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm.

[5] Kellner, Douglas, and Jeff Share. The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education. Leiden: Brill Sense, 2019.

[6] Perrin, Andrew and Madhu Kumar.  “About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online,” PEW Research Center, July 25, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/25/americans-going-online-almost-constantly/.

[7] Anderson, Monica and Jingjing Jiang, “Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018,” PEW Research Center, May 31, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology-2018/.

[8] “Future of Mobile News,” PEW Research Center, September 30, 2012, https://www.journalism.org/2012/10/01/future-mobile-news/.

[9] Stocking, Galen et al., “Many Americans Get News on YouTube, Where News Organizations and Independent Producers Thrive Side by Side,” PEW Research Center, September 28, 2020, https://www.journalism.org/2020/09/28/many-americans-get-news-on-youtube-where-news-organizations-and-independent-producers-thrive-side-by-side/.

[10] Gennaro, Steve. “The Daily Show: The Face of American News in 2005.” Kritikos, Volume 2, (April 2005). https://intertheory.org/gennaro.htm

[11] McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.