At the beginning of the academic year The Malta Independent asked University students about the Panama Pa­pers, the name of the President of the Republic and of the Bishop of Gozo, the date of Malta’s Independence and other such stuff that the newspaper, quite rightly, thought University students should know. The paper was shocked that several students did not have a clue. On the other hand all University students were very well informed about the Brangelina divorce!

Truth be told, I was relieved when I saw the whole video and not just the printed report, as more students than I thought got the right answers.

I can recount some ‘horror’ stories of my own. On more than one occasion while lecturing about media ethics I referred to Aristotle as an Australian archaeologist of the 18th century and to Confucius as a Spanish scientist of the 14th century. Students took copious notes as hardly anyone had heard of either philosopher.

Last Thursday I was told that Confucius was German! When the Wikileaks revelations were making headlines around the world only a small percentage of my students in media ethics had an inkling of what Wikileaks were.

These black holes do not only swallow our students, for a colleague told me that some of his Italian students in Malta on Erasmus programmes do not have a clue of what the Risorgimento is all about.

This situation reflects society at large and not just in Malta. I watched vox pops with Italian parliamentarians whose knowledge of the world around them was abysmally low. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for presi­dent of the US, did not know what Aleppo is and could not mention a living leader of a country that he admires.

It is no laughing matter that many people are misinformed, uninformed or simply do not care about current affairs, politics, economics and other subjects that make a big difference to their and their children’s future.

Worse still, according to a study by political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, many times when a person who is misinformed is faced by the facts, that person tends to cling more passionately to his opinion. This ‘backfire effect’ is due to a number of reasons, among them the fact that people do not like to be shown up as being uninformed.

Besides, finding the truth can take time and effort that people often do not want to invest in, particularly if the matter is not considered to be of immediate concern or if it conflicts with beliefs they staunchly adhere to.

This state of affairs did not just happen.

Hours spent on Facebook create the illusion of knowing but in fact these hours are investing in moving people away from knowing as they are deprived of authentic information

Politicians should shoulder more than a fair share of blame. Jennifer Hochschild of Harvard and Katherine Levine Einstein of Boston University found that several politicians prefer voters who are uninformed but politically active, especially if this misinformation supports the politicians’ policy positions or legislative goals.

Brexit politicians, for example, feasted themselves on such misinformation. It was very convenient for them that many British voters believed that citizens from other EU countries make up 15 per cent of the UK population, when in reality it is just five per cent.

But the main culprits responsible for this sad state of affairs are the media, mainly television and the internet, predominantly the social networks. The number of television stations increased exponentially and the internet is accessible from gadgets we keep in our pockets. But this does not necessarily provide us with the variety of sources that we think we are provided with. Search engines are programm­ed to reinforce pre-existing search patterns. Algorithms create ‘filter bubbles’, and as a result, users will not be exposed to information that varies from or goes against their viewpoints, thus effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.

As a result of the rabid commercialisation of the media, everything that features on television – politics, religion, culture, the economy and relationships – has been reduced to entertainment. There is nothing wrong with entertainment per se, but a lot is wrong when one of the most popular media of our culture reduces everything to entertainment of the least common factor type. Commercially driven entertainment led to, among other things, the Hollywoodisation and tabloidisation of the news, thus drowning us in a sea of irrelevances and trivialities.

Serious journalists are mortified when they notice that a story featuring a photo of three rats in a window at a dilapidated house at St Julian’s is frantically shared and liked on Facebook while an investigative story about government corruption is largely ignored.

Within the commercialised media milieu, serious topics have been reduced to sound bites, content to form, reality to perception, and truth to crude spin. Complex subjects are generally shunned while television programmes that want to delve deep into multifaceted subjects are relegated to late evening, past most people’s bedtime.

Our history books condemn dictators or inquisitors who nefariously burnt books that intelligently challenged the status quo. We do not need such ilk to prevent people reading books. Many simply do not read them. They prefer to read and post comments on news websites or Facebook, which is fast becoming the locus par excellence of inanity and trivia as well as irrelevant and fragmented information.

Hours spent on Facebook create the illusion of knowing, but in fact these hours are investing in moving people away from knowing as they are deprived of authentic information. Many intoxicated users of Facebook who uncritically gobble up all stuff on different timelines take ignorance to be knowledge.

People my age used to think that if something is not on television, then it did not happen or was irrelevant. Facebook is today the infamous heir of this arrogance.

It is shameful that these two communication technologies are being massacred on the altar of Mammon. Instead of being effective instruments empowering people to develop their dignity and all their potential, they exploit humans’ infinite appetite for distraction, thus hastening the race to the bottom. This is not right, as life is not a cabaret, old chum.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

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