More than 4.6 billion people, or around 60 percent of the world’s population, have access to digital networks and social media (Statista 2023). Basic use of social media like TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube Instagram, Facebook and so on is free and accessible in most countries, and users create and consume extraordinary amounts of content. Private individuals create their own content — occasionally professionally, with the goal of building a brand and revenue stream and becoming influencers. Most companies have an online presence in order to reach customers, recruit talent, or to lobby politicians. Governments and public institutions use these platforms to inform, and politicians use them to influence. News organizations and broadcasters present journalism in order to reach new audiences.
The result is a series of platforms speaking with a cacophony of voices, commenting, informing, advertising. Sometimes also providing misleading or false information. Russia is widely reported to be actively spreading disinformation (Treyger, Cheravitch, and Cohen 2022). The existence of “fake news” has led to the term being used as an accusation in situations where it has seemed unwarranted; some say we live in the “post-truth” era (Coen et al. 2021).
At present we have a crisis of trust (Sterrett et al. 2019). Who can we believe? The individual reporting about conspiracies from a bedroom somewhere, politicians in polished studios, news anchors who work in media companies that reportedly lie, or a relative who has heard something from a friend?
Do we have any way of evaluating the quality of the information we are given? At the beginning of the social media wave, I saw more people asking for references to scientific articles and research then I do today. Since those early days, we have seen several cases exposing fraudulent research and coverage of corporate-funded studies that misrepresent data. We have had whistle-blowers leaking data that exposed fraud and lies from what has been thought to be reputable organizations. These stories that expose abuses of information spread wider and more quickly than ever before.
Although these cases are generally exceptional, and probably not representative of the vast majority of news organizations or published research, they still prove that there is reason to doubt what seem like reputable sources. Trust in science and research is declining (Nadeem 2022). I catch myself thinking that news articles containing a link or two to scientific studies are also to be taken with a grain of salt, and that other studies that have different conclusions can probably be found with a quick Google search.
The previous decades of research into global warming is one such example. Public debate has been ongoing for years, and scientists as well as others whose scientific credentials are less reputable have produced documentation that has been used to both support and deny warnings about climate change (Coen et al. 2021). Many people seem to have needed to personally experience dramatic weather changes before they start to believe that global warming is actually occurring.
Has access to so much information and so many different claims from so many different sources trained us to believe that nothing can really be trusted? Is this fundamental distrust making us numb?
The Gallup study called “American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy” documents a significant decline of trust in news media in recent years. In 2019, 39% of Americans said they only pay attention to one or two trusted sources; 30% try to consult a variety of sources to see where those sources agree; 18% go to the extreme of ceasing to pay attention to news altogether; and 9% rely on others to help them sort out what they need to know (Gallup 2020).
We need information to guide our choices and actions. What are we left with if everything can be questioned and nothing is certain?[1]
We seem to turn towards persons we feel we know and can trust – whether in real life or after having followed them online over a long period of time.[2] These people can be celebrities, news anchors, or influencers, often with aligning political views (Knight Foundation 2022). Maybe we hope that they have access to reliable information and therefore decide to adopt what they serve as truth. Then we can tell ourselves that we are responsible citizens because we at least chose to listen to someone with better insight than we ourselves have.
This development scares me. We give up thinking for ourselves and start following others. This leads to echo chambers. ‘What we believe’ is transformed into ‘where we belong’ — who we follow and which community we identify with. This change makes it emotionally very hard to reflect on issues and make up our own minds, since doing so might entail breaking out of a community that is based on the belief of its members in the same things. C. Thi Nguyen’s compares echo chambers to cults:
“In echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave ‘the facts’ in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.” (Nguyen 2018)
Truth becomes a question of identity rather than facts. This development is the reason why I think we need to find new ways to communicate that can motivate active reflection and create insights we can believe in. We need to think more about creating trust than pushing messages that people have a hard time believeing.
These thoughts have shaped the motivation behind the exploration of interactive media in this artistic research project, in which I study the use of emotionally-charged interactions to communicate non-fiction in new ways.
