Eyes Wide Open
(Digital Media Literacy doc)

Try the whole routine again.

Okay.

Eyes wide open, take one.

Is my position okay?

Yeah, this is good.

This is media. And this is media. This is media. And this is media. This is media. This is media. Media, media, media. Unfortunately, also media. And of course, this is media. Right now, we're doing it. You and me. For the next 30 minutes, minus commercial interruptions, we'll talk about who's making our media, how these roles are being rearranged, and who might be looking over our shoulders. We'll talk with a few experts along the way, and we'll talk with a few non-experts. But much of this is going to sound like it's just me, one guy, talking to you. But it's not that simple. This is the product of a television network, production company, a director, a writer, a media team, a crew. You don't know who we are. You don't know what our motives are. You don't know our agenda. We create, we edit, we curate, we include and exclude. We present a vision. We are media producers, and we're going to try to alter the way you think.

We aim to seduce you, to provoke you. We want you to share what we've told you. We want you to buy what we're selling.

You could say we're trying to manipulate you.

But believe us, we're good people. And we are only one of many. There are many, many more like us out there. Websites, news programs, blogs, books, ads, movies, magazines, music, and on and on and on. Matter of fact, you could even say that you are one of us, because you too are now a media producer. And for that, you can thank or blame the internet.

If I want to get onto the internet, how do I do it? How do I get into internet? It allowed everyone with web access to add their voices to the cultural conversation. You've been listening to Geek of the Week on internet talk radio. You have joined our ranks. You're not just a viewer, you're a creator. I'm most active, probably evolved outlets on my Instagram. Facebook, email. The Facebook will come around eventually. You can just go on and find any little niche market for whatever your thought process is. Like a five-year-old kid can make a video and show it to me. And I'm like, whoa. If someone were to read what you Google search, that's like reading your diary in a way. A lot of media vendors get a lot of information from you, but without your actual knowledge or without your consent. You can't escape it. And pretty soon, it's like, ah. But there once was a simpler time, a time before most people even had cable TV, a time called the 70s. Back then, the media universe consisted almost entirely of these attractive elements, the television, newspaper, the radio, books, magazines.

And that was about it.

A regular person could wrap their head around media coverage. You could read the paper with your cereal, watch the evening news, hear a little radio in the car, and you'd feel up to speed.

Information was concentrated. It was managed. It was curated. Um.

Cable television started to shift. Throughout the 1980s, there were more and more channels, more voices, more opinions, more perspectives. Audiences became addicted to instant coverage and nonstop entertainment.

Some channels ran 24 hours a day, which was unheard of. Networks used to go off the air at night.

That'll do. Even with the new beast that was cable TV, something was missing. It was hard for a regular person to join the cultural conversation. Information worked mostly in one direction, from them to you. News came from the media makers to the media consumers. It was hard to make your voice heard until the 90s. The web was born, and everything changed. It allows you to simply, what we call net surf, looking for cool stuff. That's what the kids say they're doing. Information could start with you and make its way to them. With an internet connection and an exciting thought, you could get the attention of the world. The early web pioneers thought utopia was just around the corner. We had reached an era of pure democracy and freedom. The time and space constraints of our normal communities are not there. After 20 years of web growth, over two years of web growth, over two billion people were connected and publishing on their own. A huge chunk of the global community had all become producers. This was good. This was really good, right?

A perfect storm of information, open access, competing viewpoints, and nonstop activity blew across the land. Even though somewhere in this whirlwind is more news and entertainment than anyone could ever hope for, it's kind of hard to hear anything.

It's tricky to know what to trust, what to ignore, what to think about anything. Strangely, with all that media trying to get your attention, it's easier than ever to tune out.

How much has life gone digital? Well, starting when I wake up, it's kind of, I guess it's kind of sick. I have an addiction. Like, I check my phone. I go on Instagram. The average American kid spends 7.5 hours a day using a smartphone, tablet, or computer, not including texting or talking. Every day, 699 million people check their Facebook. How many times do people check their Facebook? How many, oh, people in the world. People in the world, like unique people. 400 million tweets get sent. I'm not on Twitter, so I don't know. 45 million Instagram pictures get shared. I just joined Instagram like two weeks ago. One billion get liked. Four billion videos get watched on YouTube per day. That's a lot of YouTube. And 200 billion emails get sent. 200 billion? OK, wow. It's all a little different than the old days. So much connection, connectedness, interconnectivity. So many available sources of information. So why do 80% of young people say they don't know what sources to trust? I think I don't trust anything in IAC digitally, ever. Unless it's something I want to believe, and then I believe it. Why do many feel they've been misled by media in the last month? One issue is that our biggest source of information is each other. I have certain people on Facebook that I trust what they put on mine. Almost three quarters of people under 34 believe themselves to be an important source of information for their friends. But wait, why are we comfortable sharing information if we're unsure of what sources to trust, or where information is coming from? How do we know what to share? The first tip is to consider the source. Where did this information come from?

Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit, the number one media aggregator in the world, able to promote content, sway opinion, and crowdsource news. The site has been on the front lines of every major media event since 2005, and it's built entirely by user contribution. Alexis has learned a lot firsthand about checking sources. Sometimes the speed and unpredictability of Reddit has gotten the site into trouble. Reddit is like the hive mind of the internet.

The fact that we can now create media as easily as we can receive it is revolutionary. So this kind of information is fundamentally different, because it is no longer just one way.

Originally, apparently, there were only three major news networks in America. They sort of had monopoly on our attention on what was news, and they generated it, and we consumed it passively. The entire world will stream into our living rooms with a velocity of light. But simply the fact that we now all have 24-7 access to both the world's infinite repository of information, as well as the ability to add to it, is absolutely amazing. And that's this huge shift that's happening, and we're still trying to figure out. Ultimately, I think competition is good. It's healthy. And ultimately, it's going to mean that in this new era, we are going to hear from voices we have not typically heard from. We are going to have access to ideas that were previously disenfranchised. But at free-form sites like Reddit, truth isn't always the winner. One in four people under 34 say they know they've misled others by posting unverified information. Is this just the price we have to pay for instant media? This is video that just came into us. So this is unedited video. You can see people coming across the finish line there, and there is the explosion one and two. It appears almost as in there in different places. We'll have to figure that out as we learn more about what happened here. But again, the explosion may not be there.

The FBI put out a couple of suspect photos online and said, hey, if you have any information, let us know. Pretty standard stuff. And very quickly, a subreddit was created to help try and track down the Boston bombers. A number of people started sifting through photos and sort of doing internet sleuthing to try and figure out who it was to help the FBI. A young man was identified. So a bunch of people saw the photo, thought it looked similar, voted it up. This got picked up by the BuzzFeed reporter who tweeted about it. A bunch of reporters in Perez Hilton retweeted it. And then within a few hours, some random Twitter user claimed that he was listening to a police scanner and that the police had identified this young man by name. And then this got picked up and retweeted and talked about it. And more and more outlets started giving this credibility. And more and more people started getting excited by it. Unfortunately, it was 100% totally wrong. And it was just very difficult to have the events of that night unfold so aggressively with language that was not based on any actual evidence at all. Again, the problem, it always comes down to humans. We can't control humans. You can only hope that it won't happen again. But ultimately, barring thought police, there's no way to actually prevent that entirely other than encouraging people to exercise best judgment. Some people agree with Alexis. And some folks are bothered that false information might spread so quickly, which just makes considering the source of media even more important. This is a tremendous power that we have now, because like I said, we can be on a level playing field with anyone else with an internet connection. But it can also mean really bad ideas spread. I guess we're all Spider-Men and women now. With great power comes great responsibility.

We spend a lot of time sharing. We blog, we comment, we upload photos, videos, audio clips, we text each other, we email each other, we post, we tweet, we repost, we retweet. We're all outputting all the time, like factories. What are we actually doing? What does it mean to be a source? I generally tend to post things that already, like, agree with my vision of the world. Let's be more specific. Is climate change real? It's a big issue and a popular one. The perspectives run the gamut. On one side, climate change is a hoax, conjured up by Al Gore and the liberal elite to clamp down on the freedom of big businesses. None of this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, gorgate stuff. On the other side, climate change is real. And we are in grave danger. It's not uncommon to see your uncle and your sister arguing their position, both entirely sure that they are right. We hear one thing, we hear another thing, we believe this, but then somebody says the opposite. And we tend to share without a lot of consideration. Every day there's something that you read that's bullshit. You might read that and start to hear something that's not even truthful and start getting these emotions about it and these feelings and these opinions. More than half of young people online aren't always sure about the truth of what they're sharing, though they share it anyway. Whether you think about it or not, whether you use your power wisely or not, whether you know what you're talking about or not, you become a source for other people as soon as you post anything.

Maria Popova understands this better than most of us. She started a mailing list about books, art, and life, an inadvertently built-in online empire that spans multiple media formats. Her site gets 2 million hits a month, over 365,000 people follow her tweets, and another 300,000 subscribe to her mailing list. That is something that my grandmother in Bulgaria keeps very strict track of. Maintaining what she's built rests on what Maria reads, thinks, likes, and of course shares with her readers. I do these end of year reading lists. A lot of books that I write about are not new books, so they're out of print and sort of you can get used copies. When you go on Amazon like a couple of days later, they would be either sold out or people would be black marketing for like $200. And I would also hear from readers saying, oh, thank you for getting a so-and-so book completely checked out of the New York Public Library with a three-month backlog or something like that. And it's not to say, oh, look at my influence. It's more of this awareness of, hey, beyond my private experience of a book, it resonates first through the digital world and then trickles down through the physical, the material world. And that's, to me, very powerful. The obsessive desire to share online, often without fully understanding the subject, is something Maria has become very conscious of since becoming a professional source of information. One of the most embarrassing things today is to not have an opinion. People would rather form a quick opinion, which is essentially a superficial impression that masquerades as an opinion, than suffer the embarrassment of saying, I don't really know about this. And then you see people retweeting this little 140 character package because sharing that, the act of sharing that, would make them seem more intelligent or cooler or smarter for having read it, except they didn't actually read it. Information is a currency in an exchange that ultimately has financial gain at its end. And I think it just pays to no pun intended to develop a level of critical thinking and understanding what the motive is behind media. After all, the future of digital life is still evolving, as is our newfound role as media source. The key thing is that how do we create media structures that are not designed to feed to existing interests, but to get people interested in things that they didn't know they were interested in until they engage with them. Because that is the richness of the sharing economy that we, in theory, could share anything. But sometimes it seems we might be sharing more than we bargained for. A friend's images from their personal life were used in catalogs and online publications. They were using private people's images as stock footage.

We take in information. We share information. We're like revolving doors. We're addicted to the flow. It's delicious. But your actions are being tracked, and you need to remember this. When we share stuff and absorb stuff digitally, we're using someone else's tools. Or more accurately, a large corporation's tools. And that corporation survives by making money off the people who are doing the sharing and absorbing. How much do you think Google makes off your searching and browsing every year? How much financial amount of money?

Man, I don't even-- I couldn't fathom how much. I'm sure it's a lot. Some studies report that your online behavior is worth up to $5,000 a year to Google. But we don't pay many fees, right? The internet feels free. So what are we paying with if it's not money? We are paying with privacy. Media companies are getting all the information, but if you knew that they were going to use it for another reason, to be more comfortable with your content. And we know that some of our privacy is sacrificed for security reasons. They help us prevent terrorist attacks. But where does that line get crossed? I, sitting my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.

Colin Hoback is a documentary filmmaker. He spent two years researching our loss of privacy online and what we have done by agreeing to corporate terms and conditions. So when people say, I have nothing to hide, I can just put it all out there. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. I mean, we all have something to hide. We have to recognize that privacy is a civil liberty. It's something that's worth fighting for. People before us saw that these things were necessary. And there's a reason that it was built into the Constitution. The people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. So having this dossier that's built on you over an expansive period of time can be very problematic. This data could be very valuable to an employer who's looking to hire someone who maybe doesn't have a rebellious side or sees things the same way they do. So what these companies are doing is combining everything into one massive data set. Because they want to know you better than you know. They want to know you super well so they can sell you better. A big majority of people wish there was a better way to stay anonymous online. But it can feel like a lost cause. Privacy sometimes feels like it has been permanently sacrificed. You can't avoid it. It's tracking our movements. It's building digital dossiers. We have become the product. I think we need to move in a direction now where we have control and ownership over our own data sets. Ownership of our data should be considered a right. And we should be able to say I want to get everything from Google. I want to be able to take this one. Else if I want or I want to be able to delete it. I also really think that we should have access to that information. We need to go to Facebook. We need to be able to ask Facebook. I'd like to know how much you have on it. I want every single piece of information. The reality with Facebook is even if you delete it, Facebook doesn't. They can still see it. It's still stored indefinitely. Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is really not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do. How do we incorporate privacy into all new technologies? And if it can't be incorporated, then maybe the technology shouldn't exist. We can work to change the privacy structure, or at the very least, we can be aware of what's going on. Our right to privacy exists in a balance with our role as media producers.

This is media right now. I shared thoughts and facts and opinions with you. And it will immediately be your turn to share, to respond, to produce. This film was intended to make you think and feel a certain way. We have provided you with a source of information. Does this source hold up?

Do you question me? If you post something about this film, who will see the post? What will a corporation know about you? What will the government think your position is? Is it better to know you're being watched than to be blissfully ignorant? Is it better to get famous online than to be invisible? In many instances, we sell ourselves out. We put ourselves out there as much as possible, with the hope that Twitter or Facebook or YouTube will make us famous. And I think that that just prompted a lot of people to give up more than they necessarily should, would, or even know that they're giving up. Historically, if something was on the front page of the New York Times, that was the news of the day. Today, the news of the day could be a YouTube video. Had your kids, had your wife, and had your hug because they're raping everybody out here. We should bring more skepticism to everything. Absolutely everything. I think that is the gift and the curse. Most things that we do as humans are in order to get a sense that we matter. And there's hardly a more intoxicating sense that you matter than having changed someone's perception of the world even a little bit. We call it the internet, like the Interatron. It's this machine.

But it's just these nodes of humans that connect. In the digital age, the barriers between us have fallen. So think about where media comes from. We are all producers now, and we are responsible for what we share. And part of sharing wisely is recognizing the trade-offs. So seriously, keep your eyes open.

I'm almost done. So you might say that as of now, the microphone is yours. Your turn to talk. The world isn't so big anymore. So when you share something, big things can happen. I'm sitting here in the dark, and it seems like I'm alone, but I'm not alone at all. I'm surrounded by my crew, and then digitally, I'm in the company of millions of people watching. It feels like this is private between us, but it isn't. So did you learn anything? Did you know more now? Do you trust me?