This video explores the critical reaction to Facebook's 2021 decision to take down Australian news sites in the wake of new legislation, demanding payment for the use of Australian news content. The video describes how the event revealed how a diverse cross-section of Australian life had become Facebook dependent. The video also explains how these dependencies represent a number of central principles regarding media technology and social change.
Audio TranscriptAuto-generated
Let's think a little bit mawr about the Facebook incident
in Australia.
And let's think about how it represents a set off
general themes that a useful and can be applied in
thinking about a range of media issues, particularly about the
way that media have a social influence.
What now a good place to begin to think about
the Facebook story is to return to a theory that
MMA quail Onders mentioned a while back.
And this is James Kerry's theory of media rituals.
One of the big ideas in the theory of media
rituals was it drew on the argument that when you
change the dominant media in society, when you change how
most of us interact with each other most of the
time, you actually transform society itself.
The idea is that technological change changes involved the whole
range of social changes as well.
And it's really only in relation to these social changes,
to the way that new kinds of social relationships were
formed to the way that existing social relationships are changed
through the institution of new media practices, that we can
really begin to understand how digital media have affected society.
So again, the interesting point is, is, it doesn't really
have a lot to do with the technologies in and
off themselves.
But it has a lot to do with the way
that those technologies that deployed by different individuals, groups of
people and institutions and one of the things that we
immediately see, um in the wake off the Facebook stories.
So we're gonna look now a little bit mawr at
some of the new stories that came out after Facebook's
announcement that it was going to remove Australian news from
its servers.
And what we see, what we saw very quickly in
the press the day afterwards was the way that that
business decision, I guess an economic decision, something that was
that was argued, was kind of an economic business.
Had decision on the behalf of Facebook had a whole
range off social consequences, and the important thing about those
social consequences was that they really illustrated how deeply Facebook,
as a dominant digital media platform, had worked its way
into almost every aspect off society and had created a
kind of unexpected social dependency on its service is something
that no one had ever imagined.
Not even Mark Zuckerberg I imagine when he began Facebook.
And so this underlines, um, important lesson that digital media
teachers, which again is a part off all media technologies,
is an argument that could be applied to all media
technologies, which is that media technologies.
When you have a change of technologies that people use
on a daily basis, this brings about our whole range
of unimagined social consequences.
And it's really the social consequences off new media practices
that were most concerned with.
So what we saw in the immediate I mean the
day after faith.
The Facebook decision was a range of stories, talking about
the impact on the consequences of that decision that really
demonstrated the multifaceted social nature off off digital media platforms,
but also the a wide range of social dependencies that
have very quickly developed in the Oh, I guess what,
13 years or so since Facebook became a significant media
player. So one of the things that we see and
this is this is two by way of illustrating some
of the points that McQuillan does make about new media
bringing new players into the world of social power.
And certainly there were some questions about there were some
stories about that.
So, for example, one of the responses, of course, was
that the argument that Facebook had bean extremely irresponsible in
banning not just news links but also a set of
pop important public information resources around the covert 19 vaccine
rollout, but also things like bushfires.
But also a lot of people complained that, effectively, Facebook
has surrendered itself to conspiracy theorists that in Australia at
least, there were no responsible professional news media organizations that
could now be trusted to relay important information about important
issues to the public.
This in a world where a significant number off the
Australian public turned to Facebook as a news platform.
So what does this tell us?
Well, it tells us that that what one of the
things that Facebook represents is a significant shift towards the
privatization off the public.
Good eso There are a range of policy issues here.
Essentially, what was happening was the realization that the communication
of health information is a public good, and Australia had
effectively surrendered the power to determine those roots of information
to a private offshore media company.
So this does indeed raise all kinds off important policy
questions. The fact is, is that if you a tw
the moment Facebook or in 2021 Facebook had a significant
grasp on the news public had become the go to
resource for a lot of Australians for news that they
could trust on dhe that raised all kinds of important
public value issues.
So there are questions about whether existing media policy is
equipped to deal with a new sort of media player.
Because underneath all of this, of course, was an argument
about what Facebook is.
Isn't a news provider?
Is it simply a gateway?
Thio Thio Information for other people?
What is it?
And of course, one of the arguments that Facebook made
was that Australian attempts to regulate Facebook as a media
content provider misunderstood what it waas.
So one of the ways that we can talk about
digital media provoking changes that they really create situations where
existing media policy that's very much based around broadcasting and
mass media quickly becomes obsolete.
We also see the way that the Facebook story that
digital media have struck up new types of relationships.
So, of course, one of the other things that happened
around the same time, Waas Google decided Thio be more
cooperative. Andi actually began struck up a new agreement with
Australian news broadcasters.
News news.
Industry news companies Thio pay for the content and Thio
work in partnership with news media outlets so or less
adversarial, uh, less adversarial relationship on DSO.
What we saw here was the way that particularly things
like the Murder Corporation, existing players in the media industry
extended their power by forging new partnerships with new kinds
off media companies such as Google.
So what we see here is an example of how
Facebook represents how media technological change can not only mean
change, but also the the ongoing power of existing media
outlets who learned to adapt to existing media environments.
Of course, the idea that News Corporation's film companies so
on and so forth radio stations have learned to live
very comfortably alongside new digital players.
We also saw the emergence of new issues.
One of the things you could bet your bottom dollar
on is that whenever a new technology becomes the thing
that everybody turns to, there are gonna be a range
of new social issues that crop up around it.
We never quite know what technology is going to do
in society until people start using them.
So one of the things which was an issue around
Facebook deciding to ban Australian news was the way that
this was targeting particularly vulnerable populations, particularly the elderly, on
those living in rural areas.
Again, things that people that we don't quite often when
we think about social media players, we think of younger
people, urban people, cooler people where in fact, there are
significant numbers off older people and people in regional, on
developing areas that are just as if not more dependent
on social media users on dhe.
What this does is it raises a really, really important
point that when we're thinking about the benefits and the
costs of media environments it there's really very little point
in trying to determine whether something like Facebook is ultimately
good or ultimately bad.
It's kind of a stupid question.
We got what because it's far more effective to ask
who something like Facebook.
How is Facebook good for some people under some circumstances
and not so good for others on DSO?
What we see is the way that the Facebook story
alerted new perhaps less thought about forms of media dependency
and really brought them to light in ways that we
hadn't thought about before.
So ah, lot of the discourse over the last, or
I suppose, 20 years or so has been about young
people and technology.
But this was here was a reminder that that older
people have their needs and their vulnerabilities to.
And that was something that the Facebook story created a
public visibility for their new media practices.
I said in the previous slide that we never really
know what media technologies they're going to do in society
until people start using them.
And that's true for pretty much any any technology you
can think off.
It's kind of funny now to think that when newspapers
first came out, a lot of people were really worried
that newspapers were gonna harm the public, because the fear
was that if you got used to reading things, then
you forget the skill of remembering things, and it would
be bad for people's memories.
Um, so but in any rate, we know that that's
not what happened.
But if you think of a range of things like
the mobile phone, the telephone, the radio or the TV.
What those technologies eventually became, as social entities really didn't
have so much to do with the way that they
were designed by designers or promoted by companies as how
they were used by users.
And one of the things that will find again and
again when we look at how people use media in
real situations is people are remarkably inventive and can exercise
all kinds of agency and make really surprising choices around
the things that they do with media on.
This idea was activated in the Facebook the Facebooks saga,
because one of the arguments that was made is well,
we don't have to accept this.
We are socially dependent on face, but we don't have
to be.
We can vote with our feet, we can turn to
other platforms.
Maybe now is a good time to think about how
we've become media dependent on social media.
And maybe we want Thio rethink the sorts of media
that we use and just have a think about that,
um, sort of, you know, the popularity of the digital
detox, which I think is a problematic and rather silly
term in a lot of ways because you can't stop
using technologies that everyone else is using its just not
possible. But nevertheless, there is the idea here that we
do have some kind of power to determine the sort
of relationship that we do have with media technologies on
dhe. That's true social media, Um, but it's also true
of other major as well.
This was particularly something that a lot of people talked
about with regard to television.
But nevertheless, again, the point is, is that when we're
thinking about digital transformations, an important part off that thinking
involves looking at how people are actually learning to live
with digital media.
So the point of all of that is to show
how the Facebook story shows how vory vory quickly.
Australia as a nation has become dependent on a digital
platforms such as Facebook for a wide range off political,
social and cultural needs, Um, and that to investigate those
technologies. What we really do need to think about is
how the effects off social media relate to a truism
that could be applied to all media through the idea
of culture, which is that media ultimately affect society through
a range off practices whereby people deploy media through a
range off economic, political, cultural and social relationships