Communications Literacy Seminar

08 May 2012

Mr Aubeck Kam,
CEO, Media Development Authority,

Ms Andrea Millwood Hargrave,
Director General,
International Institute of Communications,

Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good morning.

1. Let me start by thanking the Media Development Authority of Singapore and the International Institute of Communications for hosting today’s seminar. I am honoured and heartened to see so many distinguished guests who have come from afar to join us today for what I believe will be a most useful sharing session amongst experts and people who are passionate about communications literacy issues.

2. To kick off this meaningful event, I would like to share with you my thoughts on what communications literacy means in a world of instant, borderless connectivity; the challenges ahead, and what the Media Literacy Council hopes to achieve.

3. On the first of August, 2012, twenty one representatives from industry, community groups and academia were appointed to form the first-ever Media Literacy Council in Singapore. Our charter is to advise government on the emerging media trends and appropriate policy responses, and to spearhead public education on media and digital literacy with the aim of helping the Singapore public to navigate media, especially the Internet, safely and responsibly. Why is this necessary?

4. Singapore, as you may know, is one of the most highly wired countries in the world. 85% of homes have broadband while the mobile penetration rate is 156%. Smart phone penetration is 74%, the highest in the world. Our Telcos have recently introduced 4G services, and we’ve just built a nationwide fibre-to-home network which will offer super-sonic speeds of up to one gigabyte. It is therefore no surprise that our people are taking to the Internet and social media like fish to water.

5. On average, Singaporeans spend 25 hours online per week, with more than 80% of them on social networking sites. Facebook is the most popular, accounting for three-quarters of online users. Another twenty percent are on Twitter while fifty percent visit Youtube. According to Nielsen, besides social networking, the other top online activities are checking email, instant messaging and information seeking, that is, going to news sites and search engines.

6. But there are some indications that not everyone may be adequately prepared to deal with the more insidious aspects of cyber space. In Norton’s Online Family Report 2011, 71% of children and teenagers said they had negative experiences while online, compared to 62% globally. Singapore is one of two countries where cyber-bullying is reported as more prevalent than off-line bullying. In Norton’s latest cyber-crime report, 72% of online adults reported having experienced cyber crime in their lifetime, with half of them having fallen prey on social networking sites.

7. We certainly can’t rid the internet of all that is undesirable. But what we can do is to help address the underlying issue - that is, to encourage and foster communications literacy. To me, to be communications literate means to be discerning enough to be able to critically evaluate information; and to be able to exercise good judgement when creating and sharing content or information, and when interacting with people. I believe encouraging discernment and responsibility is key to nourishing a participatory digital world, and will go a long way towards mitigating the risks in cyber space.

8. Let me illustrate with examples. I suspect many of you have at some point or the other received emails with doctored photos. This is nothing new. Internet lore and urban legends about grisly crimes, ghastly animal attacks, salacious gossip, get-rich-quick schemes - you name it - have been around since the early days of the internet. Initially passed around by email, they are now fuelled by social media, posted and linked to, tweeted about and uploaded onto a myriad of social networking platforms. A spot of harmless fun, perhaps. But is it really fun if people are inconvenienced; or worse, maligned or shamed; and children, especially, are misled.

9. Consider the case of the Essex lion. A couple of holiday makers in the tiny English village of St. Osyth in Essex thought they had spotted a lion roaming freely, just this past August. Based on some fuzzy pictures, the police came out in full force for a lion-hunt. After nearly twenty-four hours of relentless search with armed officers and two helicopters, the hunt was eventually called off as there were no further sightings and no clues like paw prints. Was it really a lion, or was it just a large cat or dog, as the police suspected? Whatever the case, the newspapers, broadcast news, and social media all had a field day with many people claiming to have seen the lion. This incident was a bit of a laugh, with not much harm done except perhaps for the waste of police resources and a little panic in the village. But what I find interesting is the contagious nature of the story - that as the mass media and social media picked up on it, the gossip spread to the point of even generating stories and ideas in people’s minds, that possibly, they too had spotted the big cat. Now, we start to see why there is a need for information or media literacy, especially in today’s Twitter and Facebook age.

10. Singaporeans may have a reputation for being unimaginative, but apparently not when it comes to creating stories online. In June this year, following a spate of break-downs and delays in the public subway system, a citizen journalist thought she could leverage the public unhappiness to generate more discussion, and perhaps more eyeballs for her site, a popular citizen journalism portal known for its scoops. She posted a fake photo of a train moving with one of its carriage doors opened. That caused huge public consternation and an already beleaguered train operator to devote resources investigating the incident when they should have been spending all their available time fixing the real problems.

11. This need to be first, to sensationalize, to get eyeballs is not restricted to social media, online forums, bloggers or journalist-wannabes looking for fame or excitement. It’s what traditional media outlets have been practising for years. It’s just that in the age of instant connectivity, the voices are louder, and the pressures greater; hence, information providers take more risks, but society doesn’t necessarily benefit.

12. Take the case of CNN. Earlier in June, it wrongly reported that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down President Obama’s healthcare plan. That was a landmark decision and one would have thought that CNN would have exercised special care going through the 198-page document. But the news network actually ran its report within minutes of receiving the court document - running the erroneous reporting on its crawlers, news alerts and on Twitter, which were then repeated by thousands of people. In the past, CNN had been criticized for waiting too long to report things, including the death last year of Osama Bin Laden, which most on Twitter already knew before it was announced on television. In the new normal, what are media outlets to do? Strive to be first with the news and risk being wrong, or be slower to ensure that they have got it right?

13. There are a few points I want to make in setting out the cases mentioned. First, that people who create and share information, whether professionals or simply social media users and bloggers, need to reflect on the ethics and implications of their actions. This is an especially crucial component in digital literacy because of the instantaneity and multiplier effects of online communications. Second, it is important for online players and media outlets to ensure that responsibility in content creation should be a priority - that being right with the news is more important than being fast with the news, that being accurate is far more important than sensationalism and eyeballs. The third point - knowing that certain segments of the industry, and especially those on social media, may pay scant regard to my second point - I think the most effective way of moving forward is still to plug away at getting consumers to exercise discernment and critically evaluate information.

14. If it is just harmless pranks and the commercial pressures on information purveyors that consumers need to question, that’s not quite so bad. But the issue gets complicated when communicators with malicious intent start harnessing the power of technology. Consider the ethnic strife and mass exodus of people from the northeast region of India just this past August - massive social problems caused by rumours and misinformation, fanned by traditional media outlets as well as social media. Pitching Hindus against Muslims, the bigoted and divisive tweets, text messages, doctored photos and webpages were designed to inflame ethnic tensions and spread false information - and spread they did, like wild fire, to undermine public confidence and sanity. When the very fabric of society is being torn asunder, what can governments do?

15. In this instance, India had threatened to block Twitter, which the government said had contributed to the panic and exodus as tweets and photos posted on Twitter went viral. In the end, the Indian government blocked access to about 300 websites and imposed a fifteen day ban on bulk SMS and MMS. It would also set up a review committee to monitor online content. Mr Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, was quoted as saying that a strategy was needed to counter propaganda on social media, but it should not infringe on the right to freedom of expression.

16. Therein lies the rub. In the world of social media and the internet, it is a delicate balance between the right to freedom of expression and the need to protect society and ensure stability. There are suspicions on both sides - those who put a premium on freedom are wary about the encroachments of potential regulation on the internet space. Governments on the other hand, have to take a more encompassing view of society and to protect everyone, not just those online. So the approach a government takes is more pre-emptive and cautionary, especially since the spreading of false information, extremist views and even excessive insults have all become social issues, with dire consequences in some cases.

17. So is there a middle path, a way to get to the optimal balance? What’s the best way forward when dealing with irresponsible content generation and sharing? Is it to ban anonymity and require real names to be used - the idea being that people are likely to be more responsible with what they say if they can’t hide behind anonymity. Is it to regulate online media and social platforms so that it becomes their business even if it is not them but their users who misbehave - but this will not work if the most popular service providers are outside of the country’s jurisdiction. Is it to encourage industry self-regulation - but industry can’t always be expected to put the interests of consumers first. Or should government just step aside and let online vigilantism do the work of say, shaming the trolls? But citizen vigilantism can often cut both ways because of the danger that some vigilantes may overreact.

18. Earlier this year there was an incident in Singapore where a prominent local blogger, who was being flamed for her political leanings and outspoken ways, decided to hit back. In typical tit for tat fashion, the blogger trawled Facebook for photos of the perpetrators - in some instances, including family shots - and ridiculed them in her blogpost headlined “The Face of Haters”. The incident got Singapore all agog and chattering about the “an-eye-for-an-eye” approach and the ethics of dragging innocent family members, especially children, of the perpetrators, into the incident.

19. The establishment of the Media Literacy Council, a body independent of Government, is Singapore’s attempt to think about these issues through engagement with all stakeholders. The Council has just begun its work and there is much for us to do and learn. As such, I offer two preliminary thoughts. The first is that we should not instinctively think that regulation is the answer. The dynamic and fluid nature of the internet and social media will pose significant challenges to attempts at regulation and may also create a situation where there are perverse outcomes. Second, in the real world where there is a great deal of personal contact, we rapidly learn that certain types of behaviour are frowned upon and there is a cost to such behaviour. Those older and wiser than us, also through their examples and advice, reinforce perceptions of what is socially desirable.

20. The online world operates differently for a variety of reasons, which all of you are familiar with. Yet as I have mentioned previously in a different setting, it is also possible to discern in the online world certain lofty values and good practices. I think the Media Literacy Council can, as part of its public education efforts, promote and encourage these values and best practices.

21. And so it is that we are gathered here today to share the approaches we’ve taken, from pushing literacy and awareness programmes to regulation. In an increasingly complex world where the rules of communication are no longer the same, I am excited to learn what works, and what doesn’t, and what the best practices are.

22. I thank the MDA and the IIC for organizing a very timely seminar on the very important topic of communications literacy, an issue I believe every country around the world is grappling with.