Diving into the informational turbulence
(Text based on an original Brazilian article, translated by Google Translator)
It is already clear that we are entering a period of news turmoil generated by the worsening political battle between two worldviews, in a social environment, where there is a growing relevance of the so-called information literacy, that is, the knowledge necessary to identify what is not evident in the publication of journalistic news.
The term informational turbulence expresses the intensification of the differences between versions and contraversions, news bias, decontextualization of data and facts, the concealment of political or economic interests, deliberate omissions, fake news, half-truths, and several other pitfalls that make up what we know as disinformation.
It is a super complex picture that is transforming reading newspapers, visiting social networks, or tuning in to news programs into a kind of minefield adventure. The old tranquility of trusting what is published in the press or on TV is being replaced by an uncomfortable feeling of insecurity and uncertainty as it becomes increasingly difficult to know whether we are being deceived or not, who is speaking the truth or not, what interests are hidden behind every news.
It is a new reality that emerged from the news avalanche on the internet where the diversification of information sources and the intensity of news flows are pushing to the limit our capacity to develop knowledge from new data, facts, and events published in the communication vehicles.
We can deal with this veritable onslaught of information in two ways: simply ignoring it or trying to understand it. The first option is the easiest and most peaceful, but it’s like burying your head in the sand like rheas do when they don’t know what to do. The other possibility requires effort, time, study, and perseverance. It’s not easy at all, but it’s what will allow us the minimum conditions to survive in the world we live in.
It is what is conventionally called information literacy, the set of knowledge that will allow us to identify the DNA of a journalistic news item and thereby help us to make decisions that meet our desires, needs, and concerns. But this information literacy, known in academic circles as literacy (1), is something that needs to be learned as if it were a school subject. We had already intuitively developed some ability to tell right from wrong, but new digital technologies have dramatically increased the complexity of our information ecosystem (2).
The press and literacy
Informative literacy in the digital age is a process that involves automating the concern with the identification, location, evaluation, application, and checking of sources in the news read, heard, or seen by us. Of course, this does not happen overnight, but it is a new need that takes us out of the comfort zone we are used to when we watch television, access a social network, or visit a news site. Informative literacy is the most efficient tool that has come up so far to combat the mass spread of false news, which in tense periods like the ones we are experiencing now in Brazil, can lead us to serious errors in the perception of our political, social, and economic reality.
The press should be directly interested in facing the information turbulence, but what we are currently seeing is the contamination, whether deliberate or not, of major newspapers by the news bias virus, especially those related to the change of government at the federal level. It is a posture that can trigger unpredictable processes, especially in a context in which ideological polarization tends to worsen in the country. The press and journalism need to realize that they are now dealing with highly flammable and potentially lethal raw material, such as news.
(1) Literacy, the ability to interpret news, is an anglicism inspired by the expression literacy, level of education. The term initially covered only school issues but is now increasingly used in communication and journalism. The tonic accent is on the last syllable.
(2) Information ecosystem, is a term used to express the geographic, political, economic, ethnic, and cultural elements that condition the way a person obtains information.
