On Information Literacy In The Middle East

As we are exposed to the raw feeds of information in our interconnected world, we are increasingly forced to a much greater degree of editorial responsibility than was previously the case. We need to filter what it is we're seeing and hearing, what we're being told. As mainstream media outlets struggle to keep up with the need to beat 'real time', we see that not only do 'context and analysis' frequently suffer, but also the movement of information is also prone to network effects.

Worryingly, if a newspaper, say The Guardian as an example, publishes a story with a duff fact or premise and you manage to get that story corrected, it's too late. Because fifty other outlets have picked up The Guardian's story and happily repeated it. In the inexorable march to harvest clicks, the most dramatic and counter-intuitive stories are snapped up and media outlets are happy cannibals. Your chances of getting that genie back into the bottle are pretty much zilch.

We're not - despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary - stupid, us humans. We've quickly worked out that this network effect can be used to great benefit. If we're first out with something nice and dramatic sounding, by the time anyone gets around to saying, 'Wait, wat?' the world's already chowing down on our spurious claims. Think Trump.

Even Google is now experimenting with fact checking features, adding fact checking links to news search results.

Now we take all that stuff and we squeeze it into the oddly shaped bottle that is the Middle East, where media have long been cowed and access to unfettered opinion and anything else generally regarded as 'dangerous' for our social well-being and morality has been repressed. This has arguably resulted in societies which lack the practice in questioning and critical faculties to handle the sudden cornucopia which social media and the real time news cycle have unleashed.

We have already seen how the initial reaction to this bounty resulted in tectonic change in the region, I have argued before that Occupy Wall Street started in Lebanon. But if we look at where we are today and at the challenges of understanding and processing all of this information, we can not only see the problematic aspects, but also the opportunities this stuff represents.

It is those very opportunities which have driven veteran journalist, founder of AUB's journalism training program and all-round journalism trainer Magda Abu-Fadil, together with fellow editors Jordi Torrent & Alton Grizzle to produce Opportunities for Media and Information Literacy in the Middle East and North Africa, a report (actually the 2016 Yearbook from the International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media) which highlights the need to teach information literacy in the region's schools. The report makes fascinating reading for anyone who cares about media, the flow of information within society and the need to enhance the critical faculties of a young generation brought into a world where the dizzying flow of fact and fallacy can sometimes threaten to sweep us away.

What I like about it is that the report doesn't sit on its hands and bemoan the parlous state of things, but makes concrete recommendations for positive social change which can be relatively simply and effectively implemented. The time, as the report notes, has never been so propitious...

Turkey - Social (Unrest) Media

(Photo credit: vpickering)

Once again, a nation's people has taken to the streets protesting its government. This time around it's Turkey, now into the third day of protests sparked by government plans to build a shopping mall in a public park. A swift and draconian reaction by police to the original protest (a relatively small scale affair) saw tear gas canisters being fired directly at protesters, with images of badly injured people quickly making their way online.

The demonstrations quickly swelled as people took to the streets. Quite who those people were and what their motivation, we'll probably never know. Some undoubtedly were thugs, looters and anarchists bent on using the protests to their own ends. Some probably represent a disaffected opposition, beaten at the ballots recently with mutters of alleged irregularities.

But the overwhelming majority were people like you and me, angered and feeling disempowered by their government, driven to action by reports of shocking police brutality. Those reports moved fast - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Quora among other platforms used to get the word out when 'traditional' media was slow on the uptake. Even now, 72 hours into protests that have filled the streets and squares of Istanbul and Ankara, international media coverage is surprisingly muted - although Turkish media apparently have ignored the protests altogether, which is a worry. I first started seeing the reports and images from Istanbul online on Friday - you're always waiting for 'major media' to come in and back them up, always wary of buying images that purport to show events that could be slanted or weighted by vested interest. It's the same problem an editorially minded observer faces with the footage from Syria.

And yet the images kept coming, the reports of people shut in tube stations with gas canisters lobbed in after them, young people with horrific wounds from canisters and rubber bullets fired into the crowd. Yesterday, as the damage increased and images of bloodied civilians flowed, Turkish authorities throttled the Internet, specifically Facebook and Twitter. This report from TechCrunch explains more. Apparently the police pulled back - a mixture of reduced confrontation and information flow combined to take the heat off the demonstrations.

We'll see today whether that has worked - the protests have been more focused in the afternoons so far . But the sight of a wannabe European, secular democracy shutting down the Internet to better control its people as they're bludgeoned by massive force is not one that sits comfortably. You can follow the hashtag #direngeziparki..