In order for democracy to thrive, it needs one thing that has the potential to destroy it; freedom of expression.
And with that freedom comes cancel culture, misinformation and sometimes chaos, says media professor Zac Gershberg.
He examines, with co-author Sean Illing, speech and what we can do to encourage the best of it, instead of the worst, in a polarised political environment in the book The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion.
The Paradox of Democracy Photo: supplied
The pace of change within communications in the last 200 years has been exponential, Gershberg told Jesse Mulligan.
“This is a theme I write about throughout the book; basically you have speech and writing and the printing press come about in a 2000 year span in human history.
“But in the last 200 years, we've had the telegraph, the photograph, the daily newspaper, television, radio, cinema, the telephone, internet, social networking, and smartphones.
“And in so I think the rate of change in communication over the last 200 years is really unprecedented in human history. And so, what happens is, culture changes faster than politics.”
This has ramifications for democracies, he says.
“That can be dangerous, but at the same time can facilitate communities and how they talk to one another.”
Everyone now has the potential to be a mass communicator, he says.
“Just several decades ago, you had to be in a position as a host, or a producer or publisher, to have access to disseminate content to the public. But now everyone has that opportunity through social networking.”
Media is now ultra-fragmented, he says.
“People are getting content in a variety of different ways, not by going to a newspaper or a magazine, but seeing a feed of just a total communication. So, it's an overwhelming feeling.
“We're dealing with an issue of scale and volume, where it just fills up, there's just so much. So, it's very hard to filter through this communication, as opposed to the days in which we were limited to print radio and television.”
This makes teaching media literacy more important than ever, he says.
“I am very much in favour of media literacy education happening very early on, that people study communication and the role of speech, and journalism and public relations as early as possible, because I think that can actually help with this information overload.
“Sometimes our discussions about media literacy just devolve into this is accurate, and this is inaccurate.
"And those are very useful and very helpful. But in some ways, we need to see how all the different ways in which we communicate are these overarching structures in our lives, especially in the 21st century.”
Liberal democracy cannot be taken for granted, he says.
You can have politicians come along and use persuasion that says, I'm against the system, I want to do away with the system.
“And we see this pop up. throughout the history of democracy. I mean, there was a point in ancient Athens, where the assembly just voted itself out of existence to allow an oligarchy to take over.
“And so that was neither the first nor the last time that took place.”
