The passage of time and the passing of the different decades which numerically structure our existence determine, in a large majority of people, an emotional mutation towards desire: from the exaltation of the future as hope to the reclamation of the past as authenticity. The verse … Manriqueña that any moment in the past was better is very beautiful and uncertain, although sometimes it is not a lie either. And perhaps when it comes to evaluating current journalism, both in terms of information and opinion, a past era, not so long ago, seems better.
And it’s not because today’s journalists are worse than yesterday’s. That they have fewer resources, less preparation. Today’s ones are extraordinary, comparable to the best pens of decades ago. But they are no longer alone.
The ecosystem of information and opinion has been considerably modified by the digitalization of reality. There are now too many bad journalists. And now we are all journalists. Our Constitutional Court already underlined this five years ago, when it noted (STC 27/2020) that users have moved from a stage where they were considered simple consumers of content created by third parties, simple passive subjects of information, to the current stage where contents are produced by themselves, becoming real active subjects who prepare, modify, store and share information. And the same court adds in the most recent sentence 83/2023 that digital communication and interaction are characterized by being supported, among other characteristics, by the immediacy and speed of the dissemination of content, the greater difficulty of establishing controls prior to this dissemination, and the multiplication, reiteration and transmission between third parties of content hosted on the network, potentially extensive and difficult to control.
Thus, networked communication produces a modification of the roles traditionally occupied by informants and citizens. Now the citizen assumes a new role that all members of the community know perfectly well is not real, that of a so-called information and opinion professional, but, despite this, we treat the information and opinions provided to us through this new channel in the same way as those that come to us from professional media. It is no longer strange to find in the debate on certain events the confrontation between professional information and simple opinions of laymen without any journalistic qualifications or experience on the subject under debate. We are moving from the mass communication established by Castells to “mass self-communication”, with each individual being able to create the information ecosystem themselves. The classic consumer of information becomes a “prosumer”, both producer and consumer (Arias Maldonado).
The digital transformation of the public space produces a blurring of the profession and, as a result, the border that marks truthfulness is blurred, lies are naturalized, communicative animosity is increased, extremist speeches are normalized, with a more rapid production and dissemination of false news or conspiracy theories (Arias Maldonado).
And we must not forget, when it comes to professional roles, that if the journalist is subject, at least, to a code of ethics, the citizen informant and opinion giver does not even know it. And the same is true of the collective work of deliberative rationality which is carried out in the editorial staff of a traditional media before the dissemination of the information. This is shared carefully with other colleagues before communicating, which does not happen with information that citizens distribute directly or with digital media which responds to an unstructured model without an editorial board.
In addition, the Internet generates two other effects: à la carte information in which the consumer is not subject to the systematization of the information offered by the media, but is the one who chooses. Information becomes a simple matter of choice, and what ends up making the task difficult is the formation of a public opinion foreign to the consumer market. The individual is not necessarily informed of newsworthy facts, but of simple preferences. Reading news on the Internet does not follow the systematic approach of traditional media. Information will now be a simple expression of individual preference. It becomes a sort of Swedish “buffet”.
On the other, a flood of information, with the overflow situation that this entails. And this feeling of being overwhelmed generates a situation with two apparently opposite but coexisting psychological characteristics: on the one hand, exposure to such an enormous mass of information makes individuals vulnerable, due to the impossibility of being able to verify it in a minimal way, something that younger generations have not learned either. On the other hand, the accumulation of information allows for confirmation bias, whereby we all tend to accept what we already know or what we believe. And with so much information on the Internet, it’s hard not to find an opinion or assessment that doesn’t satisfy our biases. Our rationality is now a rationality constrained not to question our preferences. We cannot take in large amounts of information and choose what satisfies us.
We therefore find ourselves, due to the expansion of the Internet, in a hyper-communicating village, a society, in the words of the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, with communication but without community and, we might add, inundated with information that does not contribute to forming real public opinion. Community is replaced by a kind of group narcissism with an irrational belief in the greatness of one’s own group, accompanied by contempt for other groups. And new forms of information, neither formal nor professional, skillfully serve this belief. Collective narcissism requires a high need for cognitive closure, a desire to rigidly cling to simplistic and inadequate beliefs rather than accepting uncertainty, with very low reflexivity. A new public square full of daffodils and secular informers.
And if the public square is filled with misinformed daffodils, what future awaits our representative democracies that maintain a symbiotic relationship between truthful information and rational opinion?
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