A Babel Fish Bookshelf
Understanding Social Facts
The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World by John Wihbey
Something important became clear after the redacted Mueller Report was made public. It turns out a lot of journalists got it right. Stories they reported have been confirmed by the investigatory work of the Special Counsel. Of course, there will still be a large percentage of Americans who believe it was all a witch hunt and now it’s time to hunt down some Democrats to even the score, but that’s the reality of the world we live in, where evidence and facts are up for debate and the very basis of determining what’s true is contested through our social networks, online and off.
I’m mulling this over while reading John Wihbey’s new book, The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World. (Full disclosure: Wihbey worked on Project Information Literacy‘s 2018 News Study and I’m working with PIL on a new project, but our involvement hasn’t overlapped.) The book is about the role of journalism in our networked world, how our current information technologies and the networks that form in and through them impact knowledge, as well as what we could do to make the sharing of knowledge healthier and less susceptible to distortion and manipulation. Wihbey does this through giving readers clear and helpful primers on things like network science and artificial intelligence as they relate to the flows of information, all anchored in the history of journalism and network technologies – especially helpful because it shows the questions we face today aren’t entirely different from ones that have been asked and answered in the past. I find that reassuring.
What does Wihbey mean by “the social fact”? It’s “media content accompanied and influenced by information indicating social attention or approval.” It’s the ways we understand the world influenced by the filters and recommendations built into our social systems – not just algorithmically but as part of how humans make sense of the world and how journalists play a role in finding and telling stories, and how those stories find an audience. A lot of attention has been paid to the ways social media and search platforms have become intermediaries that deny they have a journalistic role even as they filter and present news. A lot of attention, too, has been paid to the gutting of newsrooms and the difficulty of finding new business models as readers want news for free and advertising goes digital, with Google and Facebook sweeping up most of the profits. What I like about Wihbey’s approach is that he digs deeper into more fundamental questions: what does it mean to share information? What role does the public play in creating shared knowledge? What role should journalists play in this networked world, and what can we learn from journalism’s past? Most pressing: What do we need to do now to create better conditions for an informed democracy?
Journalism educators will be especially interested i