#48: tricky moral questions about information
questions about Spotify, Forbes, creators and democracy
Time Spent is a series of letters exploring how and why we should read the news, do care work and spend our time. Each letter includes 1) a thought, interview or tidbit from research and 2) a “how might we…” prompt to help us explore our own relationship with consumption and care. It’s free, published weekly-ish, and part of a book project I’m working on called Taking Back the News. (Hi, I’m Jihii.)
In This Issue:
📌 4 tricky questions that emerged from my readings this week
💡 How might we begin to build trust between actors in our information ecosystem, knowing that ultimately, everyone is looking out for themselves?
References:
The crisis in journalism is a wicked problem (Heather Chaplin)
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener on Communication, Control, and the Morality of Our Machines (The Marginalian)
Prisoners of Scale (Mike Solana)
Spotify says it’s a creator company now (The Verge)
Spotify CEO says cancelling Joe Rogan ‘isn’t the answer’ (AP News)
Book: You Are Here
An incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism (Nieman Lab)
Is the “journalism crisis” just a capitalism crisis? (Popula)
Research on Trust (collected by Trusting News)
Good morning,
I skipped writing online last week because I've been writing so much offline and needed to stay in that space. There is something wonderful about writing slowly and privately every so often.
If anyone here is working on a longform project and in need of some encouragement, this lovely little piece of writing advice from Yanyi has helped me stay the course:
Your art is your thoughts, your feelings, and your outlook in history. It is already unique. Your only task, then, is to begin noticing your own thoughts. Notice your mind drifting and start writing it down. Write until you get to the end of what you’re wondering.
I am nowhere near the end of what I'm wondering about journalism. This letter, in fact, is a quick list of new questions about journalism that have emerged for me over the last two weeks.
First, let's go back to 2018, when Heather Chaplin, founding director of the journalism+design program at the New School wrote about why journalism's crisis was a wicked problem:
In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, design theorists at the University of California, Berkeley, coined the term “wicked problem.” They were referring to problems that had reached such complexity and were so unstable that traditional problem-solving techniques weren’t sufficient.
...Rittel and Webber came up with ten defining features of wicked problems. One of the most intriguing is that they have “no stopping rule,” meaning there will never be a point when your work on the problem is done. Wicked problems are not engineering problems. They can’t be solved.
I couldn’t agree more. The more research I do, the farther away I move from questions about the industry’s crisis. It feels as though first, we have to understand the ecosystem of everything around journalism before we can go back and decide what its future is.
Here are my newest questions about that and some related clippings.
First, a quote from Norbert Weiner in this very thought-provoking piece by Maria Popova:
Society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
And now our questions:
1️⃣ How big does one's audience have to get before they should be held to ethical standards around information distribution?
From Prisoners of Scale:
It’s obvious we need social media tools designed for different social outcomes, but we also need new social technology. The internet used to be a thing we occasionally entered, like an amusement park. Now it’s a digital world we live inside that shapes our physical reality. What is the new social code of conduct for this new world? Sharing stories about a bad date to your five best friends over brunch seems fine. Sharing stories about a bad date to the entire country? No one wants to live like this.
The question of morality is related to so many internet dramas going on right now, but I’m particularly interested in the question of journalism-y ethics.
2️⃣ Is it fair to force everyone in society to play by the rules of journalism just because consumers have been socialized to expect fair, unbiased, factually accurate information because of the industry?
At the end of Joe Rogan’s IG reaction to the Spotify debacle about featuring controversial scientists on his podcast, he said that from now on, he will:
Try to get more experts with differing opinions on back to back in order to balance out controversial viewpoints.
Do his best to make sure he researches topics ahead of time and has all the facts.
Which is what journalists do. At the same time, he said he started the podcast to have interesting conversations and mess around with friends. To be clear: I believe in not spreading misinformation (even if you didn’t mean to, even if you are just curious about stuff) because to me, caring for your fellow humans is more important. But, no one is obligated to act this way.
If you’re curious about this question and in for a heavy read, consider Stephen Ward’s 2004 book, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, about where objectivity came from, how messy it is and what we can learn from its use in other professions.
If Rogan represents the creator side of the issue, then Spotify represents the publisher side of it1, and the same question applies.
3️⃣ Should creator platforms be beholden to ethical standards for the impact of the content they distribute and if so, based on what?
So far, it looks like we are going down a familiar path as more and more misinformation and hate speech issues emerge on social platforms: censorship for the sake of the greater good. This push and pull between PR and censorship, whether implemented directly on content, or insidiously, through funding structures, is old. Ultimately, changes are made in order for companies to not fall out of favor with the public (or, in most media, advertisers).
An alternative approach that is growing on me is an ecological one. I’m currently reading You Are Here by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner, and they frame our information issues as one of dealing with pollutants in an ecosystem.
It has been making me think: what does morality look like when we view our information landscape as an interconnected whole, rather than as a power struggle between platforms and creators who both want to maintain their audiences/customers? If the core issue was a public health one, would that change anything?
This also opens an important set of questions about things that do look and feel like journalism but don’t necessarily play by its rules. For example: I’ve long wondered if Forbes readers are aware that pretty much anyone can be a Forbes contributor and come off as an expert/journalist while following none of the rules that journalists have to play by. This came up in a big way this week when one such writer turned out to be at the center of a potential crypto laundering scheme.
So I was glad to see Joshua Benton put together an incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism.
Which brings me to my last question.
4️⃣ Is a nation built on both a free press and free market capable of democracy?
Last week, I wrote a summary of Nikki Usher’s News for the Rich, White and Blue for the RQ1 newsletter, and its core dilemma has stayed with me: National journalism cannot tell the stories of place as well or as often as local news media, and yet, American political power is tied to geography.
I also read Kate Harloe’s Popula piece from last year, Is the “journalism crisis” just a capitalism crisis? and this line from Victor Pickard has been turning over in my head: “It’s becoming so glaringly obvious that the market can’t support the level of journalism that a democratic society needs.”
I don’t have answers to these questions, so if I stick with Yanyi’s advice, I’ll be writing till the end of time.
I know I already shared a lot of questions today but here’s the prompt: How might we begin to build trust between actors in our information ecosystem, knowing that ultimately, everyone is looking out for themselves?
One way to begin thinking about information ethics is through the lens of trust. Whether built through a heart-to-heart or strategic perception manipulation, trust is what gets people to stick with a storyteller, whether you are Joe Rogan or the New York Times. Unpacking what that trust is built on is crucial.
So here is a resource I have been enjoying: Trusting News, an organization that rounds up the latest research on how journalists can build trust with audiences, has a fantastic slide deck that rounds up trust research. It’s aimed at journalists, but really worth a read for anyone who consumes or distributes information.
To my fellow writers, keep going!
Jihii