Dear Colleagues of the ASEAN Regional Symposium in Bangkok, Thailand,
Congratulations on the success of your ASEAN Regional Symposium on 20 March 2024, entitled ‘Unveiling Insights into the Region’s Digital Literacy’. I want to thank you again for inviting me. I enjoyed participating in the panel discussion you organized and am delighted to provide a few additional comments in response to your question:
“On a global scale, have you identified similar challenges, especially concerning the digital divide among underprivileged communities in relation to disinformation? Could you share insights and recommendations that are applicable or adapted to the regional level?”.
I will try to briefly elaborate on my comments in the discussion to better develop the ties of disinformation to digital divides and media literacy, all of which featured in the discussion.
Media Literacy
On media literacy, your focus on its significance is right on target. It is not a new topic, but it is being redefined in major ways. But let me preface my thoughts on its scope by noting that media literacy or multimedia digital literacy is not only a regional issue. It is key within a global context as well. If anything, the ASEAN region might well be providing leadership for other regions by identifying media literacy as a central focus. Moreover, not all aspects of digital literacy are tied to older or younger people or even to those least well-to-do. Digital literacy is an issue across the entire population, if understood in multiple dimensions.
Skills
First, as in the early days of the internet, digital literacy entails the skills of value in using digital information and communication technologies. Here age and economic divides can make a substantial difference as older people sometimes lack experience in using digital media and the least well-to-do can lack access and therefore the experience with using technologies. As I have argued over the years, the best way to understand the internet and related digital media is to gain experience in its use. The internet is an experience technology (Dutton and Shepherd 2003).
Norms
But digital literacy is more than an issue of skills as it entails several other major issues. One is norms or standards of behavior online, what might be called norms tied to communicating, living, and working online. Such norms include issues of a communication etiquette and norms of civil and respectful communication. In an early electronic city hall, I wrote about the need for ‘network rules of order’ (Dutton 1996). Hate mail, toxic debates, and shouting online lack basic elements of civil public communication. But it might well go beyond civility to also entail an openness and critical perspective on information, such as in the case of disinformation.
Awareness of the Shift to Cognitive Influence
This opens another issue of media literacy, which I will call ‘cognitive influence’. Traditionally, the study of public opinion and propaganda focuses on attitude change, and efforts to change the attitudes of voters and other actors. Increasingly, there has been a shift to what I have called cognitive politics versus an attitude change.
Cognitive politics involves efforts to change your beliefs rather than your attitudes – what you perceive to be the truth. Our research on Russian propaganda in its war on Ukraine often involves efforts to change the facts, such as, for example, the borders of Ukraine. Even when such propaganda fails to convince, it can often sow doubt about the facts, which is a win for the propagandist.
Awareness of our Confirmatory Biases
In all these ways and more, media literacy is more important than many other explanations concerning disinformation. First, too many critics have blamed technology for a perceived rise of disinformation online. Search engine algorithms have been taken much of the blame for creating filter bubbles that polarize debate. Social media have been blamed – routinely – for creating echo chambers that support polarization and the toxicity of public communication. These fears are technologically deterministic and misplaced. Our own research challenges the significance of filter bubbles and echo chambers as the digital media are enabling networked individuals to gain access to more diverse sources of information than ever before possible (Dutton et al 2017).
Instead, it is people – feeding their own political biases – who are most often key to disinformation. The greatest filter of information is the person not the search engine. As people so often have a propensity to confirm their existing biases, what has been called a ‘confirmatory bias’, we need to find ways for people to learn how to challenge their own biases and be critical of information they read, and see and provide, even if – especially if – it reinforces their own prejudices. In fact, I would argue that a key issue of digital literacy is the ability to avoid this confirmation bias by being open minded and understanding how to use technologies like search to help challenge their prevailing viewpoints. This is not simply an issue of education, as even scientists are not immune to a confirmatory bias. But it is an issue of awareness raising, which could be addressed by education and training that focuses on this issue.
Digital Divides
On the digital divide, I really liked the way the ASEAN conference was extending the digital divide beyond mere access to technology and its use to such issues as self-efficacy and to knowledge about the internet. Young people are often comfortable with the internet because they feel efficacious and can be patient with new technologies as they like most others learn by doing. But as suggested in the meetings, if we don’t have that broad base of digital literacy, it’s not only going to undermine the economy. It is not only a socioeconomic divide that reinforces existing economic divides. Digital divides need to be seen as increasingly a political divide. Digital literacy can reinforce the power of network individuals.
I think that might be the key message is that you have to recognize the ways in which digital technologies are enabling the power shift of the digital age, what I have called the rise of a Fifth Estate (Dutton 2023). Digital media enable networked individuals to have a greater degree of informational or communicative power relative to other individuals and institutions. Digital literacy can translate into socioeconomic advantages but also political advantages.
With this understanding, networked individuals need to balance any fear they have over disinformation or fear over toxicity online to realise that being online and literate in all the aspects I’ve noted provides an opportunity for people to empower themselves. The term of ‘empowerment’ is in the text describing this conference. Wonderful. I would only underscore that as much as you can.
The Power Shift of the Digital Age
In my work, it’s clear that the biggest change in the internet over the last decades has been the power shift to network individuals. Individuals are becoming relatively more powerful in the digital age, because of their ability to: search for and source their own information; originate content, from text to video; network with others; collaborate locally and globally; and, yes, leak information when necessary to hold institutions more accountable. When people source their own information, and curate their own information, they can post it online so that they can become an authentic source of credible information, such as when they are witnessing an event. They can share and collaborate with others online, and in that way, they can play a role of what I call the Fifth Estate, and thereby hold the press, government and other institutions of businesses and civil society more accountable. In analogous ways, network individuals are equivalent to the press in an earlier era. In this role, as a Fifth Estate, they are going to be able to exert a powerful and positive role in society (Dutton 2023).
Critical Mass v Ubiquitous Use
In the early days of the internet, few academics focused on the political implications of the internet. I know this because I was one of the few. The rationale for dismissing its political significance was that If only a small proportion of the population used the internet, how could it be politically important? You can’t vote on the internet if only a small fraction of the public is online. But that view was naïve. It did not recognize the degree that the internet and related digital media could empower networked individuals. Recognizing this, it is not essential for everyone to be online, but for a critical mass of individuals to be online. Today, there are over 5 billion people are online – and that is a critical mass. And it is being used for everything. Across the ASEAN region, large proportions of people are still not online, but many people are. Take Indonesia. Many in Indonesia are not online, but over 250 million are online. That is a critical mass of economic as well as political significance.
In Conclusion
It is important that governments, civil society, business, industry, and even parents do not scare people about using the internet. To the contrary, it is more important than ever before that you show them that this is a tool for empowerment. They should embrace – not fear – the internet, as it is the way in which they will communicate in the future, while gaining skills and norms of digital literacy, and be aware of the role of cognitive influences along with the need to challenge their own confirmation biases, to empower and protect themselves and others online.
References
Dutton, W. H. (1996), ‘Network Rules of Order: Regulating Speech in Public Electronic Fora,’ Media, Culture, and Society, 18 (2), 269-90.
Dutton, W. H. (2023), The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the Digital Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dutton, William H. and Shepherd, Adrian, Trust in the Internet: The Social Dynamics of an Experience Technology (October 1, 2003). OII Research Report No. 3, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1308502 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1308502
Dutton, William H. and Reisdorf, Bianca and Dubois, Elizabeth and Blank, Grant, Search and Politics: The Uses and Impacts of Search in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United States (May 1, 2017). Quello Center Working Paper No. 5-1-17, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2960697 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2960697