Many of those who grew up only consuming media filtered through journalistic gatekeepers never learned how to determine what sources are trustworthy. Instead, they want to intuit it. “Use their gut”, etc., and this method was sufficient when the majority of the media ecosystem was protected by gatekeepers who effectively maintained its epistemic health.
Then along comes the internet, social media, and their inherent lack of gatekeepers, and everything changed.
Consumers’ abilities and education are often overlooked when we discuss the qualities or ethics behind a gatekeeper-less media ecosystem. Underdeveloped trust systems may be a temporary side effect but one with potentially drastic consequences. It is like discussing whether sheep are better off wild or domesticated when we have just dropped them off on the doorstep of the wolf’s den.
These poor folks – those who base their trust on intuition social queues rather than track record – are so efficiently manipulated by modern, ungatekept media that they end up in perfectly self-insulating echo chambers that are based on nothing but notions targeting ideologies and, in turn, these ideologies are made more and more extreme by the same cyclical systems.
The tropes used by these media bubbles are crass and cult-like but highly effective. The core assertion of the majority of these tropes is that information can be – and ought to be – assessed on its isolated merit. However, information can be false, and determining its veracity requires either direct access to the primary source (not often available) or reliance on an effective system to maintain a reasonable amount of credibility and baseline integrity. This trust system is precisely what gatekeepers used to provide and exactly what those who developed their media skills in a gatekeeper-protected environment lack when confronted with the 21st-century media ecosystem.
There is much discussion regarding whether any of this is new. I think there is a good case that the gate-kept ecosystem evolved slowly over time and that during the 1900s, it became extremely effective at maintaining a baseline level of credibility in the vast majority of news and media, and then, with the proliferation of social media around the turn of the century, this ecosystem was very abruptly interrupted, leaving those who relied on it adrift in a much more perilous (though similar feeling) ecosystem. This state of affairs, I believe, is a unique development unlike what we have seen historically. It deserves some alarm, and our society is underestimating the risks it has created.
