The election of Donald Trump decreed the overtaking of new media over traditional media. Twitter has become more important than television in political communication, and not only in that. Facebook has become the foremost opinion-former and has vastly outgrown the reach of the mainstream press. The latter, paradoxically, instead of being erased by its manifest and shocking detachment from the real country in describing the "Trump phenomenon", recorded an unexpected and surprising influx of readers and subscribers who, evidently, are looking for a counterweight to the information circulating on new media. The game is not over and there is a very lively confrontation in public opinion on what is happening in the media.
The hegemony of new media has also been sanctioned in terms of economic value per GDP. Online attracts more advertising investments than television, the undisputed queen of advertising. This overtaking also occurred in continental Europe which generally travels with a certain delay.
This change of hegemony has produced something shocking in the world of information and journalism. The new media, in the name of freedom, have torn up the old rules and the ancient paradigms and are moving without brakes in cyberspace. A space that can be truly frightening as Tom Friedman, a dean of "great journalism," writes. We have entered the era of post-journalism not only in the contents and ways in which information is constructed and served, but also in the ways in which democratic societies and their institutions relate to the phenomenon of radical transparency and lack of regulation and self-regulation of the new media which no longer have filters between the producer of information and its consumer. The whole weight of judging the quality of what is offered falls on the latter.
RIGHT OF NEWS OR PRIVACY?
Almost simultaneously with the emergence of the "Trump phenomenon" one of the most emblematic cases of the conflict between the "new information" represented by one of its most advanced and penetrating manifestations, Gawker media, and the people who considered themselves damaged in their privacy from the action of Gawker, wrestler Hulk Hogan and tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The result was a conflict between two sacred principles of every civil society: the right to report and privacy. In the age of the mass media it was always the right to report that won once the veracity of the news had been ascertained. In the age of the new media, legislators and the judiciary tend to re-evaluate the value of privacy and the person with respect to the right to report, even if this adheres to the principle of truthfulness, as in the case in question. The ruling of the Tampa court in Florida sentenced Gawker to compensation which led to its closure.
This shift in the center of gravity emerged precisely in the sentence that gave reason to the wrestler Hulk Hogan, backed by Thiel, in the lawsuit against the information site Gawker. A story in its essence rather squalid and of little interest to any reasonable person, but which brought to light one of the crucial themes of our time. That of the relationship between the right to report and privacy.
A book, Post-journalism. The Hulk Hogan/Peter Thiel vs. Gawker. Privacy or right to report? (goWare publisher), discusses, through the interventions of some big names in global journalism, the consequences of this story.
Below is the text of the introduction by Thomas Friedman, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes and columnist for the New York Times.
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CYBERSPACE, SOMETHING SCARY BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It happened that in the winter of 2016-2017 the world reached a point of no return thanks to the action of a handful of unlikely actors: Vladimir Putin, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Macy's department store. Did you hear the bang?
And what was this point of no return?
It was the moment we realized that a critical mass of our lives and work had slipped away from the terraqueous world into the realm of cyberspace. Or rather, a critical mass of our relationships have moved into a territory where everyone is connected but no one is in charge.
After all there are no searchlights in cyberspace, there are no policemen patrolling the streets, there are no judges, there is no God to punish the wicked and reward the good and certainly no helpline to call if Putin robs the US presidential election. If someone is slurring on Twitter or Facebook, unless it contains a mortal threat, good luck if you want the post taken down, especially if it's anonymous, which often happens in cyberspace.
And cyberspace is the territory in which we now spend hours and hours of our day, where we do most of our shopping, most of our meetings, where we cultivate our friendships, where we learn, where we do most of our business, where we teach , where we inform ourselves and where we try to sell our goods, our services and our ideas.
It is where the President of the United States as well as the leader of ISIS can communicate equally easily with millions of followers via Twitter, without the need for editors, verifiers, law firms and other filters.
And, I'm sure, 2016 will be remembered as the year we saw how terrifying it all is, how easy it is for a presidential candidate to tweet lies and half-lies before someone can debunk and correct them, how easy it was for the Russia to intervene on Trump's behalf and hack Democratic Party computers and how unnerving it was to hear Yahoo!'s security chief, Bob Lord, declare that his company is unable to identify who in 2103 hacked its servers by taking over than one billion Yahoo! with their sensitive information.
Even President Obama has been blown away by the speed with which this tipping point has been reached. "I think I underestimated the degree of impact on our open societies of this new age of information, or rather of misinformation and cyber hacking."
A NEW SOCIAL BLOCK IN CYBERSPACE
At Christmas, Amazon.com taught traditional commerce a hard lesson by showing how merciless the tipping point of cyber commerce is for them. Macy's has announced it is cutting 10 jobs and closing dozens of stores because, according to the Wall Street Journal, "Macy's is unable to handle the migration of consumers to online shopping."
Initially Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, insisted that the false information circulated on Facebook "definitely had no impact" on the elections and that to say otherwise was "a rather crazy idea". But as the elections approached, this idea was not crazy at all.
Facebook, which aims to capture all the readers and advertising investors of the big press without wanting to deploy editors and information controllers, is now taking its role as information provider in cyberspace very seriously.
Alan S. Cohen, chief commercial officer of cybersecurity firm Illumio, noted in an interview with siliconAngle.com that this tipping point from cyberspace has come sooner than expected because many companies, governments, universities, political parties and individuals have concentrate the critical mass of their data in data centers by outsourcing it to enterprises of c.
Ten years ago, Cohen continues, the bad guys didn't have the possibility to access this data and extract it, but now they can do it and it also happens that creative tools such as big data and artificial intelligence can become lethal weapons. This is a huge problem of a moral and strategic nature and will require, in Cohen's opinion, "a new social bloc" to solve it.
YOUNG PEOPLE AND CYBER INFORMATION
The work to build this new block begins with teachers who are responsible for disseminating civic education. And it must begin by making young people aware that the Internet is an open-air sewer of unverified, unfiltered information that must be taken with inventory and with a critical spirit by the law and produced with a minimum of civic decency by the of whoever writes them.
A Stanford Graduate School of Education study released in November 2016 found “an embarrassing inability of students to reason about the information they read on the Internet. Students, for example, have difficulty distinguishing advertising from news or identifying its source… Researchers at Stanford gave middle school students a task asking them to explain why they should not trust an article about a financial project written by an executive bank and sponsored by a bank. They found that many students do not cite the source or sponsor of an article as a compelling reason to take it seriously."
Sam Wineburg, the head of the research, said: “Many people think that kids who are good with social media are equally able to know how to discern what they find there. Our research proves otherwise."
In an age where our lives are increasingly moving into the digital realm, this is downright scary.
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THOMAS FRIEDMAN
He is one of the most admired and followed commentators in global journalism. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes, two as a correspondent in the Middle East – first for the Washington Post and then for the New York Times – and a third, in 2002, for his reporting from Italy. Originally of a Jewish family from Minneapolis (where he was born in 1953), one of the world's leading experts in Middle Eastern politics, in the last ten years he has turned his attention to the issues of globalization and climate change. On globalization he has written three books translated into Italian by Mondadori. One of these, The World is Flat, has won numerous international awards. Steve Jobs, who had developed a strong aversion to journalists who used to punch fish in the face, often sought Friedman's opinion on ethical and general political issues. In the last part of 2016, Friedman's latest book Thank you for being late: an optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations was released. The thesis of the book is this: our ability to adapt will be severely tested by the three accelerations that are imposing themselves with the logic of Moore's Law: the acceleration of technology, that of the market and that of climate change, but, in the end, we will make it again. An optimistic message elaborated before the election of Donald Trump which was experienced very badly by the New York Times journalist.
