“The rise of digital media has arguably meant democratization to allow more voices to be heard. It has also created opportunities for abuse and digital assassination. In the past year, we have witnessed a sharp rise in “false news”, echo chambers, and the number of people who now get their “news” from social media platforms such as Facebook. This week we look more closely at the ramifications. We will also look at digital literacy and how we can better critique what we read and foster credible information flow online.” https://posiel.com/outline/full-semester-outline/
the rise of the network society, mainstream media, can be thought to be a democratic space, however, many factors lead to the dismantling of that observation. The amount of people viewing media through second-party sources and social media pages as listed in Fact Sheet’s article (2022) theorizes that amongst just how people may be influenced by these apps. In the future, the need for alternative media is extremely prevalent and should be used more frequently due to the marginalization that many groups go through on social media (racism, sexism, classism etc.).
The overall lack of consideration for other beliefs and great inequality in the media space, as gathered from the source above, contributes to a non-democratic online dialogue as it does not constitute the requirements for that kind of political system. The consistent flow of misinformation as noted by the “partisan gaps emerged in views” (Mitchell et. al, 2021) establishes a clear distinction between the people following certain media sites that pertain to specific political views, causing many people to become immersed with fake news and misinformation. This overall discrepancy calls for alternative media, if people are going to primarily use media sites instead of original speakers and news platforms there needs to be a way for people to share information without the money-grinding agenda of the mainstream. This may be helpful because “alternative social media sites say they support free speech; none declare left-pr right-leaning political orientation” allowing people to learn via their interpretations (Stocking et. al, 2022) without the misconstrued media that is put out there by major companies, to generate the most funds. While these consequences of the mainstream media are documented, the article, “Social Media and News Fact Sheet”(2020), demonstrates just how many apps and popular sites people are using to get their information.
