Bruger:The Poly-Factual Society
The poly-factual society (a society without a centralized agent providing facts) is a criticism of the concepts of post-truth politics, the post factual society or the general idea of fake news stating that these concepts have developed into symptoms of powerlessness and a way to denounce facts that are provided by someone with an opposing worldview or different set of cultural assumptions. The claim, that we live in a poly-factual society is an argument stating that society's institutions, including the news media, have lost a unifying monopoly on "truth telling". Who gets to tell the news in society is being renegotiated and re-institutionalized as we see a change in our communication infrastructure form centralized broadcasting technologies to more distributed network technology.
The concept of the poly-factual society was originally coined in the article "For meget faktuel viden forvirrer samfundet" (Too much factual information distracts society) in Politiken in september 14th, 2016 by Lars Holmgaard Christensen. Associate Professor at Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark. The term was a core discussion at the Future of Publicism conference 2017
The poly-factual society is a society without a centralized gatekeeper[redigér] With a democratization of media technology, anyone can now publish material and opinions. In a situation where anyone can publish we end up in a situation where we have too much factual information in society. The overload of information we get from various news outlets diverge to an extent to which it confuses and distracts the public.
We are let in a situation where previously trusted institutions in society have lost the power to set the agenda or control the political debate. The loss of definition power can be explained by a number of changes in society:
1. Access to producing and distributing data, numbers and visualizations has changed significantly so the struggle to be the most factual authority is at stake all the time. It creates a natural distrust and lack of acceptance of numbers and statistics. As there is constant struggle about who has legitimacy to provide solid factual information, we never reach a point where we as society agree on a common set of trustworthy facts. Hence, political debates become a boxing match with self-produced factual figures and statistics.
2. Ad hominem arguments prevails in the current news climate such as: 'you want to save the world, so we cannot use your numbers for anything'. Information and news is constantly exposed to distrust, as it is linked to the people who deliver information and news. Expectation of manipulation and spin is the new normal when looking at numbers and statistics.
3. In the struggle to be an authority that can present the truest factual knowledge, we see tribal bickering both between politicians and between news media. We also see a tendency of polarization where people support likeminded people in a fight to define 'the facts'. In a situation where people constantly have to defend themselves with affirmative factual knowledge, we give way for a society where no one listens because everyone is busy seeking out more factual ammunition. A political discussion can never be won by the best argument because we no longer discuss and argue on the basis of common factual assumptions. And in a society that ideally should aim at balance and cohesion, it means losing such important qualities as the ability to find common solutions.
4. News media have gradually been politicized and marketed to a degree where news media undermine quality journalism. The focus in legacy news media on dividing readers into segments and communicating clearly and targeted to these single groups has contributed to factual confirmation bias. In a time when social media has become a dominant distribution channel for news this tendency is amplified. Consequently journalists are dismissed in several news media agencies in favor of employees who have more knowledge about social media than public affairs and democratic institutions. The new types of employees are to speed up ways to exploit social media, not necessarily to improve journalism in collaborative networks with the population, but for marketing and revenue reasons. It provides a shift from journalistic news criteria to performance criteria for content. News content should create awareness and provide digital traffic. As a consequence, the role of news media outlets as a central contributor with factual reasoning to a unifying debate on public issues has been eroded.
As a news provider it is no longer possible just to assert factual superiority just because you are a news media institution. No specific actors in society can automatically claim higher believability. In digital media, facts are constantly being contested by other sets of facts. This is reconfiguring the public sphere from consensus to contestation (Lincoln Dahlberg 2007: Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation; New Media & Society, Vol9(5):827–847 )
Put differently; common sense is not so common anymore. In the struggle to be an authority that can present the truest factual knowledge, we see tribal bickering both between politicians and between news media. We also see a tendency of polarization where people support likeminded people in a fight to define 'the facts'. Instead of looking for news from particular institutions, news production has become an aesthetic and a rhetorical strategy for spreading information, a strategy for ‘factionalizing’ information.