53 pieces.
50,091 words.
33 videos.
That’s the haul after one year and a week of Media Buddhi. There were also tens of thousands of views for the written stuff, and a couple of million views for the videos. (But these I can’t fully control, so it’s the numbers that represent the effort that gives me the most satisfaction.)
So.
Where are we today with Media Buddhi?
One way to solve a devilishly difficult puzzle is to view it through a different lens or frame, and see if you’re asking the right question.
For example, I can approach the problem of a long, daily commute by defining it in different ways: Do I want to go faster? (Don’t take the bus, take the train.) Do I use the commute to get some alone-time? (Drive a car and seal myself off from the world while driving.) Do I want to spend the commute listening to podcasts or audiobooks? (Invest in noise-cancelling headphones.) And so on.
Sometimes it also helps to use an analogy or a metaphor. One way to understand the climate crisis is to think of the world “as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity”, as James Lovelock framed it when he formulated the Gaia Principle. (This quote is from The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells.)
You can see where I’m going with this.
Over the past year, Media Buddhi has been my attempt to address the brain-exploding 🤯 information/misinformation/polarization thing that blights our lives all the time.
But way before that, I had to figure out whether I was asking all the right questions. Here’s a quick summary of how my thinking evolved in the past few years:
2016: I started NetaData which attempted, among other things, to provide safe spaces for debate.
2017: As a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists, I began to study misinformation and realised that fact-checking alone wasn’t going to be enough to address it.
2018: I came up with the #5pFramework and identified at least five stakeholders that needed to be involved in a solution: technology platforms, policies by governments, the media, the research community and motivated individuals.
2019: At Stanford University I argued for a global ‘Information Consensus’ [Medium subscription link.]
What this cumulative experience taught me was that there were three good ways to understand the misinformation crisis.
Three comparisons/analogies/frames
As a human rights issue. Reliable information being as important as any other human right.
As a health issue. Access to ‘clean information’ being as important as clean air or clean water. This leads us to frame the crisis as one of ‘information pollution’.
As a supply and demand issue. Viewing the crisis as comprising those who ‘supply’ the problem. (This includes both bad actors who manipulate people using ‘fake news’, conspiracy theories and propaganda + people who unknowingly share it with others.) And then viewing the crisis as a ‘demand’ problem. This includes all of us who, in some form or the other, fall prey to our biases and group instinct and allow ourselves to be manipulated.
And so, armed with these insights, I decided that I’d tackle a problem that other journalists weren’t tackling. There were of course plenty of people addressing the supply-side of the misinformation crisis, such as fact-checkers. But there didn’t seem to be anybody tackling the demand-side of the problem, at least from a journalistic point of view. This demand-side was by and large left to educators specialising in media and information literacy (MIL). They conduct workshops offline and online but the problem (and opportunity) was that training is more difficult to scale than journalism.
Enter Media Buddhi.
As part of BOOM, I was in good company. Govindraj Ethiraj founded it in 2014 and in 2016, he, along with Jency Jacob (Managing Editor), Karen Rebelo (Deputy Editor) and others began fact-checking operations. Unlike other forms of journalism, fact-checking is unique in that the burden of proof for us is very high. Not only do we have to fact-check something, we also have to explain how we did it. (Govind is also the founder of IndiaSpend, a pioneer in data journalism.)
Anyway, one year down the line, Media Buddhi involves writing pieces here, doing videos and training people. On the newsletter, I tackle the problem of information pollution one idea at a time.
Here’s a selection of posts, arranged by theme:
Misinformation
Yes, there is such as a thing as ‘objective truth’
A god helps me think through information disorder
Lateral Reading: a key way to protect yourself from 'fake news'
Politics and polarization (#PoliticsBuddhi)
Are you a liberal or a conservative? Chances are you’re both.
Dog-whistles: A key part of your political vocabulary
Gaslighting: How politicians manipulate us
Journalism
What about Scroll, The Quint, The Wire and The News Minute?
What sort of a journalist are you? (And what sort do we need?)
Newspapers: Can you trust their online avatars?
Media consumption
Propaganda, Opinion, News, Advertising: Can you tell them apart?
Bad information is cheap, good information is expensive.
Teach your kids media literacy right from the beginning
Technology (#TechBuddhi)
What ‘Big Tech’ owes us. And why.
On ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’.
Behavioural science
Bias: A four-letter word that explains the world.
Confirmation Bias is one reason why facts don’t move us.
Frameworks and the information landscape
How the unsayable becomes the sayable
The case for doing nothing
As you can see, I’ve written on a variety of topics. Every once in a while though, I find myself going back to the same questions:
- What is the problem we are trying to solve?
- Is this the best way to solve it?
I also think a lot about the impact of the work. However much I achieve, anything I do feels comically and infinitesimally small, especially when you think of the information universe we live in. I call it a supernova-cluster**k.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. Four and a bit years ago, the ‘fake news era’ was officially recognised with the election of Donald Trump. Trump is now gone, but the world essentially looks the same. If anything, the problem of hate speech, misinformation, polarisation and manipulation is even worse.
Going forward then, we have two choices for Media Buddhi: expand the work even more or super-specialise in one aspect of information literacy. Or both.
To help us decide, I’ll be reaching out to you all. Thank you for reading and being part of this journey!
Congratulations on one year!!