I. The Need to Develop New Skills to Face A New Communication Environment
How can an audience be independent in the media society? This is a classic question of the man vs. media relationship. Analysis of the media's influence is related to this in one way or another, and concerns about its effects can be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th century. As McLeod(1991) pointed out, concern about the effects of the press at that time produced works of Max Weber(1910), Walter Lippmann(1922), John Dewey (1927) and so forth. Since then, many approaches have been proposed by many researchers and many kinds of theoretical and practical findings have been presented.
Studies and activities related to media literacy is a current development in this area. The approach has been attracting the attention of citizens and scholars, who promoted critical views of the mass media in the 1970s and 1980s. They introduced a new way of understanding the man vs. media relationship. Media literacy further stresses the importance of understanding the structure of the media. The world presented by the media is somehow affected by the structure of the media, which reflect their own motivations, ideology and so forth. The audience must be aware of this process and be able to interpret the material supplied by the media. This practice, essentially directed to understand what factors affect the world presented by the media, is most important for the audience to be independent in the media society.
Communication technology has approached a new stage of development in the last ten years. It seems that the audience needs new methods to be independent in this new environment. One of the distinct characteristics of this technological revolution is that individuals now have a means to disseminate messages to a larger audience. Until recently, technology to communicate messages to large audiences was restricted to a small number of people because the media were very costly to own and operate. For these reasons, there are regulations and requirements for major media. The media system is organized in such a way that we can expect some degree of ethics and professional competence in the handling of media messages.
However, now any individual can disseminate messages to a large audience through the network. On one hand this capability can be an important step towards a more advanced system of democracy where every individual voice their opinions to an enormous number of people. On the other hand, this capability could also very seriously threaten the way we get information. As there is no rule regulating the activity of individuals, a message disseminated on the network can be anything: rumors, slander, infringements on privacy, and so forth. It is possible to spread a rumor to manipulate the stock market or to spread slander against a political candidate during an election campaign. The list is endless. In short, we are entering an age of information anarchism. People may be swamped by a flood of information that may or may not be true. In this situation, there will be an urgent need for individuals to develop skills to handle the information they receive as they are facing the risk of being exposed to junk information flowing on the network.
We must question again how we can keep our independence in this chaos. Knowing only the structure of the media will not be enough, as we are not able to know the structure and background of the individuals or small groups acting as information disseminators. In this world-wide information network, only information flows, and it is difficult to know who the disseminators are. However, even if we do not know the disseminator, sometimes we are forced to pay attention to some kinds of information flowing on the network. For example, we are attracted to information pertaining to our personal interests and fears and so forth.
Since individuals will always be interested in certain information, if this information is available on the network, attention will always be paid to it. This kind of situation can be compared to the spreading of rumors, since they both consist of information which attracts people's attention from an unknown source. Then how does one go about checking the reliability of the information ? As we are not able to know the disseminator, we need to develop other practices to check the reliability of information before recklessly believing it.
II. Findings of "Invasion from Mars"
To face this information chaos, we can utilize what we learned from the analysis of the mass panic caused by radio broadcasting in 1938. Cantril(1940) made detailed analyses of this panic and some of his findings are still valid today. In the fall of that year, the American radio audience was exposed to news releases inserted during a broadcast of a popular music concert from a downtown hotel. The insert was repeated several times as things proceeded and, then the program switched to full, on-the-spot reporting which announced that Martians were invading Earth. The program was a well organized drama using the format of news. Many in the audience, however, received it as an authentic news report and believed that Martians were actually invading the entire world, killing and destroying everything they met. The number of people in the audience who were struck by panic is not clear. Cantril estimated that about six million listened to the broadcast and about a million panicked. Later analysis by Rosengren (1975) indicates that the number of audience members who were struck by panic was much less.
The important point here is that we find different kinds of audience reaction. Cantril grouped these reactions into four groups.(1)
Reexamination of these categories is very useful for us today. In order to discourage the fourth category of no attempting to check, citizens and media scholars today are working to promote the practice of media checking. At the time of this occasion, about one-third of Cantril's respondents fell into this category, and efforts have been made to reduce this category.
There are certain characteristics for successful and unsuccessful checks. Among those who found the internal evidence of the program, the following cases should be noted.
One listener stated , 'within a couple of minutes, smoke and gas spread miles. It couldn't spread so fast'.(2)
The other listener had been in the army and 'knew that there were no three regiments of infantry in the vicinity which could be rushed to the scene of disaster'.(3) Another listener found out it was a play as 'people moved 20 miles in a couple of minutes'(4) These were the cases of successful checks. What the people in this category did was to combine and utilize the knowledge and information they already had and found out the program was a drama. Among those who made a successful check using other information, the most frequently reported behavior was to check other radio stations to see whether they were reporting about the invasion. This was the easiest and most obvious practice. Some of them then turned to the newspaper and checked the radio program guide.
Among those whose checks were unsuccessful, the most typical behavior was to look out from the window or to go outdoors. Some saw a jam of cars and thought that everyone was running away. Some saw empty streets and thought that the road had already been destroyed and thus cars could not approach. A common characteristic here is that they put personal interpretation to the new information they obtained. Personal interpretation is not rationally induced. Rather, it is emotional and irrational, and induced the fear and panic people were feeling.
III Logical Induction
Two kinds of methods the audience may use to check information is derived from above. One is logical induction. This is an intellectual process to check received information using the knowledge and information the audience already possesses. Combining and collating them, the individual checking procedure develops.
The best example of this procedure is the examination of UFO encounter reports. Knowledge of elementary mathematics easily leads to the conclusion that UFO encounters are extremely difficult although not 100% impossible. It is probable that intellectual creatures exist somewhere in the universe. According to some calculations, it is supposed that a planet with intellectual creatures may exist within some hundred light years. The speed of the Pioneer rocket, the human-made outer space craft, is a few miles per second, i.e. about 1/40,000 of light speed. This means that this speed level will not meet the requirement of outer space trips as it takes 4,000,000 years to go to a planet that may have life on it. This means that we need at least one-tenth of the light speed, i.e. about 20,000 miles per second, for this outer space trip.
According to the reports, UFOs usually fly at several hundred yards per second. To accept this, we must assume that aliens built a space craft that can go more than 20,000 miles per second in outer space, is able to come into the earth's atmosphere by solving the problem of heat caused by friction, is able to fly in the air with the speed of several hundred yard per second, and then, as it can not keep flying forever, it must also have controls for landing and take off. We must also consider the large amount of fuel needed for launching a space shuttle. We know that it takes a tremendous amount of energy fuel to go up into orbit. Since it is much easier to move in orbit, it is much easier for the aliens to stay in orbit.
Once they come down, it requires huge energy to return to orbit. Also, as long as they stay in orbit, the surrounding conditions in space are almost the same, wherever they may be. If they go down to the surface of a planet, the conditions differ from planet to planet and adjusting becomes a serious problem.. Should we suppose that UFO pilots collected the information of the surface condition of the earth from several hundred light years away and built a craft that can function in that condition? The logical answer should be negative. However, UFO reports do exist and there are many who believe the encounter reports. In June 1997, US Air Force officially denied the Roswell alien crash story. Newspapers reported that even after this announcement, there are still people who believe the story. Probability is high that intellectual creatures exist somewhere in the universe, but it is almost impossible to meet, because the distance is beyond our imagination. The same kind of logical induction can be applied to much of the media-supplied information.
There was a supernatural power demonstration on TV in Japan in which the performer rubbed a tea spoon by his finger and made it bend. Many people watched the television program and believed in his supernatural powers. Some began saying that they, too, had the power and appeared on TV to demonstrate it. The interesting thing was that they all bent a tea spoon just as the first performer did. Critics of the performers commented that if they had supernatural powers, why didn't they bend something not necessarily hard, such as a thin wire, and without touching it.
Another performer, an Aikido (Japanese martial art) expert, demonstrated that he could knock down two men at one time without touching them, using only his psychic powers. In this case critics requested the man knock down much lighter and easier objects, such as a cat.
When McDonald's first opened business in Japan, there was a rumor that they used cat meat in their hamburgers. Logical induction suggests that it is much more costly to use cat meat.
Japan is occasionally hit by a big earthquake. In many cases, rumors of possible aftershocks abound. Typically, these warnings state the time and scale of the aftershocks and call for caution. Victims of the earthquake are especially receptive and vulnerable to this information and are easily struck by panic. However, technical attempts to predict earthquakes have so far failed to predict the specific time of tremors in advance. This means that information specifying the exact time of aftershocks is all rumor.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor catastrophe took place in 1986. At the initial stage, there was a report that 2,000 people died by the accident. Some newspapers treated it as big news. However, other newspapers did not treat it as big news because their editors claimed the reports were untrustworthy. There were two reasons for this. First, the area surrounding the nuclear reactor was sparsely populated and it was hard to assume that 2,000 were killed by an explosion. Second, it was hard to assume that the exposure to radiation was the cause of death. This is because death caused by the radiation begins a few days after exposure and, therefore, 2,000 people could not be the victim of radiation. As they could not be the victims of explosion either, logical induction lead to the conclusion that the report was not reliable. This again is an example of a check using another source and common understanding of related matter.
As we are going into the era in which a variety of information flows on the network, and we are not able to know the background of the disseminator, we must check the information itself using the knowledge and information we already possess. Logical induction is a procedure for this activity.
IV Cross Media Verification
Another procedure which an audience may use to face the information chaos is cross media verification. As Cantril pointed out, a simple and easy way to check information is to check it across several media. The audience must avoid relying on a single source. Media literacy promotes the practice of comparing the structure and motivation of different media. In our information environment today, we need to compare the media that have different backgrounds. In Cantril's case, some people checked other radio stations. Although the checking was effective at that time, they were checking only the same kind of media. What we need today is to compare the media that have different dimensions. Examples of comparison pairs are electronic media and printed media, popular media and quality media, international media and domestic media, main stream media and alternative media, and so forth. In this sense, those who turned to the newspaper in Cantril case were very wise. Two points are important here. One is the function of alternative media and the other is the function of public service media.
Ishikawa (1982) analyzed the function of leaflets circulated by a Japanese consumer organization. During 1960s and 70s, there were many issues on the safety of food additives. Many of those followed a typical pattern to become public issues. At the initial stage, the danger of food additives was reported by chemists and was taken up by the major Japanese media. These media had an ability to search what kinds of studies were going on and when warning came out, they made a quick report of it. However, they did not release follow-up information as those issue often had connection with the big businesses of Japan, who were the major media's sponsors. Major media even gave space to big businesses for their comments. Contrary, the alternative press, which initially picked up the information from the major media, released follow-up information from different viewpoints which caught the public's attention.
The alternative press were not able to survey all the warning and study results, nor did they have enough access to information sources. Rather, they picked up important information from major media and focus on certain part of it. Major media did distribute those warnings as they had responsibility to the readers, but they allowed only a small space for them. The alternative press were the ones fulfilling this information shortage. Therefore, there was a big information gap between those people who were using only major media and those people who were using both major media and the alternative press. As a result, some were much better equipped to protect their health.
The above example of the use of cross media verification demonstrates that information is treated differently according to different media. What we need today is to develop skills to utilize a variety of media for information checking. As people get into the habit of this kind of checking, they will find that some media more than others meet their needs and provide information which is valid and useful for them. In time through this procedure, citizens will gradually form a repertoire of media for their own needs. When they need to check a particular piece of information, they will turn to one of their favorite media to verify it. Desirably, the repertoire will include major media as well as alternative media as they have different backgrounds.
At this point, we must discuss the new responsibility of public service broadcasting as it should function as one of the important confirmation sources.(Ishikawa 1996) Public service broadcasting will be uniquely qualified to fact-check junk information on the network, because it is independent and possesses the necessary professional skills. In many countries today, all public service broadcasters are facing very severe situations. They should develop new methods to demonstrate their new role as a confirmation source. If they succeed in this field, they will earn their place even in the new media environment.
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