Locating the conversation

Feb 03, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – It should be stated upfront, that there is no substitute for the mainstream press. The structure, training, discipline and administrative capacity that constitute the average news entity, are critical to ensuring that the Fourth Estate plays its role in ensuring that the three arms of government play their own rule in maintaining a fair and functional society.
That said, a mainstream press comes with the biases, preferences and prejudices of its controlling interests, whether those biases are overt or implicit; when the controlling interests of a press outlet finds alignment with political or economic or tribal interests.
When the Internet began to evolve first messaging boards, and then chat groups, there came a sense that the Internet was democratizing human communication, not just moving the power of mass communication from an increasingly exclusive elite, but also defining what was being prioritized in this vast conversation in this brave new World Wide Web. With the creation of podcasts, a new dimension, sound, was added to the primarily text-based forums, and then came YouTube. The name has become so ubiquitous that most people give little thought to the brand name, a combination of “You,” the individual user, and “tube,” the American idiom for television.
And then social media, most notably, Twitter and Facebook, appeared. What that has led to has been a proverbial double-edged sword. A decade ago, social media – Facebook and Twitter, in particular – played a critical role in what was dubbed The Arab Spring, a series of massive political upheavals that rocked primarily autocratic regimes in the Arab Middle East and Northern Africa. Not only did dissidents use social media to highlight the excesses of the governments trying to suppress them, sharing pictures, text and video from the middle of the uprisings where mainstream, established media outlets could not or would not reach social media was also used to coordinate the uprisings.
Of course, soon after came the attempted subversion of social media for subversion by the United States, using – of all organizations – the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), with the attempted creation of a Cuban version of Twitter. According to a 2-14 UK Guardian story on the scheme:
“In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet. Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAID document put it, ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society’.”
Fast forward to 2021, and it is no doubt a cruel irony to the intellectual authors of that programme that external subversion of American social media – by Russia if that were not clear – decided the outcome of the 2016 election giving Donald Trump the victory, and that social media was instrumental in the Trump-instigated mass attack on the American legislature and on American democracy itself.
The key function of mass media has always been for a society to engage in a credible conversation with itself. Even as traditional news agencies – like this one, for example – are faced with a legion of other critical challenges, there has to be serious consideration placed on how they treat social media and contestation it represents for space at the conversation table. In Guyana, we have had serious issues thrown up, discussed, analyzed, and resolved, conversations involving thousands of people that never make any mainstream media outlet. Society is ever evolving – there was a time when that credible mass conversation was located in exclusively mainstream media; it is probably time that there is recognition that much of that conversation is relocating elsewhere.

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