Is the media making the future, or is the future making a new form of media? That was the key question posed to panellists on a media-focussed session at the third annual Knowledge Summit, organised by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation (MBRF) – member of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives – held in Dubai from December 5 to 7 at the Grand Hyatt.
Titled Media and Making the Future, the session was moderated by vice-president of Arabic Services, CNN, Caroline Faraj, and comprised personalities from both traditional media and new media.
Opening the spirited debate, the dean of the Mohammed Bin Rashid School For Communication of the American University in Dubai and Group TV Director, MBC, Ali M Jaber, said: “Technology has transformed how we learn, how we do things, how we discover. But change is so fast, adapting won’t easy, and won’t be enough.”
He was especially concerned about how news consumption was being affected. “Journalism is a process – you search for your story, then you fact check and fact check and fact check, and they write the story,” he said. “The problem today is that fact checking has been removed from the process. So the question is: how do we fortify our journalists against the hatred spread across new media?”
The Emmy-nominated host of National Geographic Channel’s Brain Games, and creator of the web series Shots of Awe, Jason Silva, agreed that the “filter bubble effect” was a serious issue facing media. “Social media democracy has become a double-edged sword,” he said. “Through the filter bubble – through clicks and algorithms – new media becomes a ‘reality tunnel’, reinforcing your own worst views, and warping your view of the world.”
Photographer and creator of the popular website HONY (Humans of New York), Brandon Stanton, said that social media was failing to live up to earlier utopian ideals. “I grew up when Facebook was just getting big,” he said. “I had this thought that it was going to connect everyone, encourage empathy. We would be unable to be divided anymore – technology would outpace tribalism.
“It’s sad that this dream is now in question. Social media has been used to spread the worst of ourselves. Ten years from now, I don’t think morality will keep pace. The revolution in consciousness won’t keep pace with the revolution in technology,” he added.
TV reporter for BCC, CNN and Al Jazeera, Riz Khan, said: “Technology has outpaced ethics. At CNN, at the BBC at Al Jazeera, of course, people came with their own biases. People bring baggage. The trouble is with information that is unfiltered. My father used to say of something he was sure of that he’d ‘read it in the newspapers.’ But of course, newspapers back then filtered news through trained journalists. Now it is: ‘It must be true, I saw it on the Internet.’ Unless people educate themselves on how to filter this, it’s a problem.”
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