I’m still attending conference in Cebu, Philippines. Will be back to Thailand on Friday night. In the meantime, here’s the speech I gave in a session this morning titled “Blogging and the Net: Challenges to Media Freedoms and Responsibilities”
Blogging and the Net: Challenges to Media Freedoms and Responsibilities
Sarinee Achavanuntakul
Thai Netizen Network, http://thainetizen.org
28 October 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,
It is an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at the 2nd Southeast Asia Media Legal Defense Network Conference on the topic that lies very close to my heart. It is also a very timely one given the explosive growth of the Internet as social media, and the new landscape that traditional media find themselves in.
The topic of this session is “Blogging and the Net: Challenges to Media Freedoms and Responsibilities.” The term “challenges” may suggest that blogging and the Net constitute mainly challenges to be overcome. But I believe that these challenges are also opportunities in disguise, and that professional journalists have an important role to play in a new world – the world in which it is easier than ever before to find information and form groups for collaboration or collective action, but at the same time also perhaps more difficult to separate between facts, lies, and opinions, and reconcile the interests of different groups.
I would like to start by describing several distinct characteristics of the Internet as social media, how it challenges traditional media, and summarize what I see as the situation in Thailand based on my experience as blogger and work with Thai Netizen Network. I will close with a few thoughts on how the media can turn these challenges into opportunities.
I’m still attending conference in Cebu, Philippines. Will be back to Thailand on Friday night. In the meantime, here’s the speech I gave in a session this morning titled “Blogging and the Net: Challenges to Media Freedoms and Responsibilities”
Blogging and the Net: Challenges to Media Freedoms and Responsibilities
Sarinee Achavanuntakul
Thai Netizen Network, http://thainetizen.org
28 October 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,
It is an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at the 2nd Southeast Asia Media Legal Defense Network Conference on the topic that lies very close to my heart. It is also a very timely one given the explosive growth of the Internet as social media, and the new landscape that traditional media find themselves in.
The topic of this session is “Blogging and the Net: Challenges to Media Freedoms and Responsibilities.” The term “challenges” may suggest that blogging and the Net constitute mainly challenges to be overcome. But I believe that these challenges are also opportunities in disguise, and that professional journalists have an important role to play in a new world – the world in which it is easier than ever before to find information and form groups for collaboration or collective action, but at the same time also perhaps more difficult to separate between facts, lies, and opinions, and reconcile the interests of different groups.
I would like to start by describing several distinct characteristics of the Internet as social media, how it challenges traditional media, and summarize what I see as the situation in Thailand based on my experience as blogger and work with Thai Netizen Network. I will close with a few thoughts on how the media can turn these challenges into opportunities.
I need not tell you that the Internet has become a part of everyday life for the vast majority of people in developed countries, and increasingly so for developing countries. Web-based social networks and tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube have become indispensable for “digital natives,” which is basically anyone under the age of 20. In Thailand there are currently 16 million Internet users, or 1 in 4 of the population. Some say that this is a low penetration rate, but I think it’s more important to realize that this number can only go up.
By its very nature, every expression or conversation on the Internet is a publication. In contrast to traditional media, Internet publication precedes filtering: we say or post what we want online, and then find ways to filter all the information afterwards. That is why powerful filtering technologies such as Google and applications that use tags cleverly are so popular – they help us make sense and extract value out of the information jungle.
I would like to quote from the “Internet Manifesto” which was written by a group of German bloggers and translated into 15 different languages. You can read the full version online at www.internet-manifesto.org.
2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.
The web rearranges existing media structures by transcending their former boundaries and oligopolies. The publication and dissemination of media contents are no longer tied to heavy investments. Journalism’s self-conception is—fortunately—being cured of its gatekeeping function. All that remains is the journalistic quality through which journalism distinguishes itself from mere publication.
The absence and impossibility of “gatekeeping” function on the Internet has many implications and far-reaching consequences. I think the positive consequences far outweigh the negative, especially if we consider how conversation on the Internet is filling up the gaps left by traditional media.
In Thailand, there is a growing disconnect between crucial matters of public interest and what the media offers as “news.” I think this disconnect is driven by the media’s conflict of interests that exists on three different levels.
The first conflict of interest comes from the fact that the media rely more on advertising revenues than subscriptions to survive. This has always been true, but the media’s reliance on advertising is much more acute today because more and more people cancel subscriptions in favour of free online news. Since the government and business sector are major advertisers, the media are often reluctant to publish anything that is critical of the government or business.
The second conflict of interest is the media’s sense of survival or political leanings that lead to self-censorship on topics that the authorities consider matters of “national security.” In the past 4 years of intense political conflict in Thailand, the police or government would claim that any alleged defamation of the monarchy or royal family is an issue of “national security,” and therefore even those who express honest opinions or disseminate academic papers on this topic are at risk of being accused of “mounting an anti-monarchy movement” and charged with lese majeste, a criminal offence that in Thailand carries jail term of 3-15 years. Speculations about succession to the throne and the monarchy’s alleged or imputed role in the current political conflict are both matters of great public interest. Therefore, the media’s choice to remain silent on these issues compels many Thais to flock to the Internet. It is ironic and more than a little sad that the only mainstream media that publish stories about the monarchy or lese majeste cases are all foreign media such as The Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Bloomberg.com.
The third conflict of interest comes from the fact that some media moguls have openly entered politics, or have “taken sides” in favour of either side in the current political conflict. This sows deeper distrust among the public and makes more and more people feel that the media is not as objective or independent as they claim.
All of these conflicts of interest mean that if you want to find information or discuss freely about important issues such as the monarchy’s role in modern Thai society, the government’s performance, faulty products, or harmful conduct of big business, the Internet is pretty much the only place to go. You cannot find these issues in mainstream media.
Although much of the disconnect between what the media portrays and what the public should know stems from these conflicts of interest, I think a part of this disconnect is unavoidable. That is simply because the Internet has several inherent advantages over traditional media in the production of basic, who-what-where-when-how kind of news. We humans are social animals. “Publication” on the Internet is immediate and has no space or time constraint. This means it is much faster to create and gather basic news on the Internet, and in fact, journalists themselves are now using the Internet regularly in their job.
Many professional journalists in Thailand, and I suppose elsewhere as well, are still uncomfortable with the idea that ordinary citizens can say anything they want online, often anonymously, without being held accountable. But that is not wholly true. Behaving irresponsibly on the Internet – and by that I mean doing the same kinds of things that are frowned upon in the “real world,” such as violating people’s privacy – does not come without costs.
Reputation is the currency of the Internet. You can post what you know to be lies and try to pass them off as facts, but once you are caught, you will be exposed or even forced out of the community. While the vast majority of bloggers are not professional journalists, every blogger who is famous as “citizen journalist” and held in high regard got there because he or she writes in the public interest, cites sources, and is careful to separate facts from opinions – in other words, adhering to the basic tenets of journalism.
I believe that rights come with obligations, but we should never use one as an excuse to suppress the other. The best way to promote responsibility is to promote responsibility, not to suppress or curtail people’s rights on the assumption that they will behave irresponsibly if they are free to exercise those rights.
Unfortunately, the authorities in Thailand by and large still have this misconception. They enforce a vague and overly broad Computer Crime Act in ways that make no distinction between opinions and crimes, arrest Internet intermediaries based on the assumption that the mere appearance of offending content online is potential proof of intent to aid alleged criminals on the part of every party involved, from forum moderator, to hosting company, to ISP and data center.
As a result, ISPs spend more time advising their clients on how to avoid running afoul of the law and self-censor by blocking webpages which they feel the authorities might deem offensive, than protecting their clients’ privacy and freedom of expression. The police and Ministry of ICT spend more time dealing with frivolous lawsuits, such as parents of 14-year-olds suing someone who created a fake profile of their children on hi5, than going after the real cybercriminals.
The outcome of this heavy-handed approach is that it has a chilling effect on public discourse, particularly on matters of “national security,” which pretty much means anything that the government dislikes. So on one hand, Thais have a strong urge to meet and discuss these issues on the Internet, but on the other hand, the authorities make it difficult to do so. What should be a more open platform than real life to exercise the freedom of expression and freedom of assembly becomes just as restrictive – not only because oppressive social norms are applied to the Internet, but also because the law facilitates this oppression.
Given this situation, how should the media respond?
I think we should first recognize that a new “information ecosystem” is being born: an ecosystem where professional journalists cohabit the same space as amateurs and ordinary citizens. This is not the future. It is already the present. Traditional media should see bloggers and Internet users as their partners. The best bloggers create that are in public interest, honestly and without malice. The Internet as social media contains a huge amount of first-hand data, including videos and photos of events as they unfold. Professional journalists should make more use of it, giving credit where credit is due, because it frees up their time to do higher value-added activities that bloggers cannot easily do, such as investigative journalism and exclusive interviews with high-profile public figures.
Professionals should also teach citizen journalists how to do their job better, especially at the local level, because community-produced local news helps enhance participatory democracy and sometimes spur positive changes in the community. Professionals can help us think of ways to protect and promote freedom of expression on the Internet, mount a public campaign to convince people that expression is not a crime, and push for a meaningful legal reform, so that the law will push people for criminal acts, not for thinking out loud.
Lastly, I think it is important to note that special “media freedoms” guaranteed by law may need to be redefined in a world in which anyone can publish. As Clay Shirky observes in his excellent book Here Comes Everybody, today’s freedom of opinion is freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly. To quote the Internet Manifesto again:
The Internet overrides the technological boundaries between the amateur and professional. This is why the privilege of freedom of the press must hold for anyone who can contribute to the fulfillment of journalistic duties. Qualitatively speaking, no differentiation should be made between paid and unpaid journalism, but rather, between good and poor journalism.
Thank you.