Goodbye ‘good citizen’, welcome ‘citizen communicator’
Dear reader, you probably haven’t realized it yet, but things are starting to change intensely and quickly when we deal with information in our daily routine. One of the new features is the changing role of ordinary people in the so-called public communication space(1). Until now, for someone to be considered a ‘good citizen’, and committed to democracy, it was essential to be well-informed, a condition achieved by reading papers and magazines and watching TV news programs.
But since the arrival of the internet and social networks, things have started to change slowly and irreversibly. It is no longer enough to have information. The most important thing became the spread of data, facts, events and ideas capable of expanding people’s knowledge. Democratic life began to be influenced by a new type of citizen, the communicator.
The change can already be seen in the behaviour of social media users, a universe that today brings together almost four billion human beings across the planet. Three billion on the Facebook network alone. It is in this digital environment that 2.5 quintillion pieces of data bytes(2) are published daily, distributed in 41.6 million posts per minute on WhatsApp; 306.4 billion daily email messages, the equivalent of 300 hours of video, are published per minute on YouTube; and two million pieces of news are posted daily in the biggest newspapers in the world.
The overwhelming amount of information available on the internet has surpassed the ability of journalists and the press to contextualize and give meaning to this entire mass of data. In addition to the news avalanche, there is an unstoppable crisis in the business model of printed news outlets. In the United States alone, the country with the most advanced press in the world, 26% of journalists lost their jobs between 2008 and 2020. In Brazil, according to the National Federation of Journalists (3), almost 13 thousand journalists with a formal contract were fired (21.3% of the total). Around the world, it is believed that approximately 1/3 of printed newspapers and magazines have stopped circulating since the beginning of the century. According to North American researcher Erik Peterson, it is possible to figure out that between 300 and 500 political news stories are no longer investigated journalistically, every day, due to the unemployment of professionals and the closure of newspapers and magazines.
The agony of the ‘good citizen’
This shows how the press industry is facing an unsuccessful uphill struggle to supply the citizenry with the adequate amount of news and information needed for the survival of the conventional ‘good citizen’. On the other hand, the public has been empowered by digitalization and social networks on the internet, becoming an increasingly proactive protagonist in society as a whole. The inevitable conclusion is that there is an urgent demand for a new relationship between journalism and the public, a possibility that, according to researchers such as fellow American Nikki Usher (4), will end up materializing through the ‘citizen communicator’.
The new relationship between journalism and the public reduces the participation of reporters and editors in collecting and processing current news because ordinary people, business owners, governments and politicians use social networks and applications to publicize what is happening or announce decisions that affect society. But, on the other hand, it extraordinarily increases the importance and responsibility of journalism professionals in investigating complex issues and patrolling governments, companies and public entities, missions that have traditionally been affected by the commercial interests of owners of journalistic companies.
What is journalism for today?
The rise of the ‘citizen communicator’ does not reduce the importance of journalism in the field of public information. It simply makes it necessary to adapt the functions of reporters (in text, audio and images), editors, commentators, illustrators and programmers to the new social, political and economic logic of the digital era. New functions such as news curation, to reduce information disorientation, and tutoring on the use of information to combat fake news, misinformation and the misuse of artificial intelligence on the internet.
All this is also happening due to changes that are still barely perceptible to the general public in the dynamics of democracy. In the analog era, information was fundamental in the incorporation of citizens into the democratic system. Now the key piece becomes communication. At a time of scarcity and slow news supply, those who had information had power, which drastically reduced the number of those who could interfere in crucial decisions for society.
Today, in the era of the news avalanche, real-time information (live) and the processing of immense volumes of data through artificial intelligence, disseminating knowledge, experiences and realities has become much more important than storing information. This is the main reason why so-called digital influencers have gained so much importance on social media.
(1) Public space is a general concept to define open physical (squares, for example) and digital (social networks) environments where people can interact with each other.
(2) A quintillion is made up of 18 zeros.
(3) Source: https://fenaj.org.br/mercado-de-trabalho-formal-no-jornalismo-demite-mais-do-que-emprega-em-2023/
(4) Nikki Usher is the author of the work Post-Newspaper Democracy and the Rise of Communicative Citizenship: The Good Citizen as Good Communicator, to be published by Cambridge University Press on a date not yet defined.
(*) Text translated from a Portuguese original with the help of Google Translator and Grammarly.
