This is a time of profound change in the way we inform ourselves as societies. The digital
revolution is challenging the old media – print, radio and television – creating a situation of peril
and vast new opportunity.
Many traditional media organizations are struggling. Across many countries, dozens of
newspapers have gone out of business during the past decade. Even where the print media is
thriving, it faces disruption from digital technology. In the United States, those newspapers that
are still succeeding are the ones that are using the Internet as a distribution channel – they have
embraced interactive and social media, mobile devices and other new platforms. Magazines,
radio, non-fiction book publishing and even television are all in various stages of upheaval. The
media of the industrial age – one-to-many, one-size-fits-all, centralized and controllable – is
beginning to unravel.
How do we inform ourselves in a world where our traditional media and tools for doing so are
declining or even collapsing?
The new media landscape provides new promise for societies to be better informed. Thanks to
the Internet, mobility and the inexorable digital revolution, people in many parts of the world have
unprecedented access to data, information and knowledge. They can inform themselves through
collaboration like never before. They can have access to tools and communities for learning
anywhere in the world; a student in a ghetto of Mumbai can study artificial intelligence from
Stanford University.
People by the millions can contribute useful knowledge for everyone to share, as in the case of
Wikipedia. Hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers can help map the heavens through
Galaxy Zoo and inform the world of their findings. Observers of street violence can document it
and inform the world as citizens did during the 2007 post-election riots in Kenya.
The upshot is that there are tremendous new opportunities for societies to be better informed,
more open and more successful than their industrial age counterparts. This creates many
profound challenges. How do we handle information overload? How do we sort through all the
misinformation spewed when a billion people essentially have printing presses at their fingertips?
How do we ensure quality news, investigative reporting and good journalism? How do we avoid a
Balkanization of news where we each simply follow our own point of view, placing each of us in a
self-reinforcing echo chamber where the purpose of information is not to inform us but to give us
comfort? What will happen to the media industries? How can school and universities take
advantage of the new tools and media to transform pedagogy and themselves?
The change is no less profound than the transition precipitated by the printing press from agrarian
economies to the industrial age. It raises profound and far-reaching issues for every government
and for each one of us.