Obstinate ignorance
In my column last Tuesday, I suggested that it's time to promote a public discourse on the complexities and dangers that we face in the digital age of information. I wrote about the perils of unfettered social media and recent efforts by Facebook to reform its platform in order to weed out fake news and secure the privacy of its users.
I want to go into some detail about why and how we should educate ourselves about how information technology works and its impact on how information can be manipulated.
Digital media literacy is understanding how to "use digital technology to engage in self-directed enquiry, discriminate between multiple sources of information and participate safely and effectively in an online environment."
While media literacy analyzes various forms of media, digital media literacy focuses on forms of digital media, mainly those using the online platform whose building blocks are the various coding languages like HTML (HyperText Markup Language) enhanced by technologies like CSS and Javascript.
Without the basic technical skills to navigate this emerging digital culture, one could easily be persuaded to believe what they read and watch online. A case in point is the fake video announcement of "Mark Zuckerberg" that Facebook will no longer be free, urging users to spread the video in order to continue using the social platform for free. The video appeared in my Facebook newsfeed, shared by a friend, but I immediately dismissed it as a hoax.
While it showed a video of the real Mark Zuckerberg speaking, I instantly suspected that it was a splice of Zuckerberg's previous video where he indeed uttered some of those words. But then it becomes obvious to an adept lip reader that the succeeding utterances were a supplanted audio by another person whose voice was digitally altered to mimic that of Zuckerberg. If you look closer at the video, you'll notice that the words in the audio and Zuckerberg's lips in the video do not exactly match.
A popular US magazine, the Scientific American, had already reported about such advances in audio technology in its May 2017 issue. Although voiceenhancing technology had long been features of leading audio editing software brands, a Montreal-based startup has recently succeeded in developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that learns to mimic a person's voice. It is done "by analyzing speech recordings and the corresponding text transcripts as well as identifying the relationships between them." This advancement, the Scientific American noted, raises ethical questions about how the technology might be used and misused.
In a lecture I delivered before a Communication Theory class at the University of Philippines Cebu last year, I changed some texts and characters embedded in between the codes of a page of news website I downloaded online, using the basic Notepad software. There I demonstrated how authentic website interfaces can be easily altered by tinkering with the codes. Of course, I did everything offline so no harm was done to anyone.
As the internet becomes a fact of life, our ability to think critically must be held important lest we get lost or confused in the maze of the digital information age. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that misinformation and disinformation have become more and more difficult to detect not just because of the advanced digital enhancing tools available but also because of the enormous data about us that propagandists have in their hands to get around our usual defenses.
But the more important issue at present is not about the existence of these sophisticated tools and methods to deceive. It is that our obstinate ignorance of the nature of digital information technology and its impact in our world is serving into the wishes of miscreant communicators and their powerful principals.
We must move to correct this now with digital media literacy.