Just as our culture is beginning to take a second, hard look at internet “journalism” and its link to our broader understanding of what’s happening in our hyper-digitized and chaotic world, along comes a piece of social science that seems both instructive and damning.
A group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, recently published a study in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. The study looked at reader comments about an Internet story, revealing the dramatic effect those comments can have on subsequent understanding of the news item.
When a split-half sample of almost 1,200 persons was presented with a fictitious, but highly plausible, Internet news story with different reader comment strings attached, the results were striking. One group read the story with what was termed “civil” reader commentary; the other with what the authors termed “uncivil.” Turns out the group absorbing the story with “uncivil” comments missed the story’s point. As the authors wrote such incivility “…not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”
The fictitious story presented a supposed new technology in a cost vs. benefits analysis. The negative content associated with the “uncivil” string led readers to exaggerate the reported downside of the technology. Worse, it led readers to draw highly polarized conclusions about the “good/bad” narrative presented in the story and those who disagreed with them about the story’s interpretation.
With all the caveats we must attach to a single study this seems an insightful look into the impact of some “social media” when contemporary journalism intersects with consumer interactivity. The whole notion of journalism is that skilled, ethical persons work to provide a perspective on the topic at hand. The reader’s interactivity with such journalism means commentary may come from those equally skilled and ethical or, it may also mean it comes from those who range anywhere from ignorant to sinister to simply stacking the deck in their favor for news content that supports a vested interest.
That this dimension of “internet” journalism lives, I guess, is natural given the aims of journalism and the sometimes overly-inflated promises of digital connectivity. But any journalism that ultimately fosters more ambiguity is itself, in the classic sense of Jefforsonian Democracy, counter to what benefits should be had about open-source commentary of the days news.
That anyone has the talking stick about anything the Internet might gurgle up as “news” is good. That such comments might heighten our ignorance and ultimately, make us more divisive, is bad and undermines every promise given to us by journalism, digital communication and the Democratic concept that all voices have a right to be heard. All voices do have a right to be heard—even ignorant ones. But when commentary becomes largely a roiling pot of snarkiness and anonymous potshot taking then the point of the original “news” is lost; contorted or hijacked to the backseat of the day’s ideas. This benefits no one.
_____
John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
