GE 6: THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

MODULE 9: GLOBAL MEDIA CULTURE

PROF: J FUNDIMERA-DELLOSA: FACILITATOR, NAVOTAS POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE

Readings and Viewings:

 Sheffield, Korotayev, and Grinin (2013). Globalization:
Yesterday, Today and Tommorrow. Emergent Publications,
Litchfield Park, A
 Stagger, Battersby, and Siracusa, (eds). (2014).The SAGE
Handbook of Globalization. Two vols. Thousand Oaks: SAGE
 Media and Globalization - YouTube
 Global Media Culture and History - YouTube
 The History of Social Media - YouTube
 Globalization and Media: Part 1 - YouTube
 Globalization and Media: Part 2 - YouTube

Week Covered: No. 9 (First Week January 2022)

Lesson Objective:
 Analyze how various media drive various forms of global integration
 Explain the dynamic between local and global cultural production
Lesson Summary:
The Evolution of Media

In 2010, Americans could turn on their television and find 24-hour news channels
as well as music videos, nature documentaries, and reality shows about
everything from hoarders to fashion models. That’s not to mention movies
available on demand from cable providers or television and video available online
for streaming or downloading. Half of U.S. households receive a daily newspaper,
and the average person holds 1.9 magazine subscriptions (State of the Media,
2004) (Bilton, 2007). A University of California, San Diego study claimed that U.S.
households consumed a total of approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in
2008—the digital equivalent of a 7-foot high stack of books covering the entire
United States—a 350 percent increase since 1980 (Ramsey, 2009). Americans are
exposed to media in taxicabs and buses, in classrooms and doctors’ offices, on
highways, and in airplanes. We can begin to orient ourselves in the information
cloud through parsing what roles the media fills in society, examining its history in
society, and looking at the way technological innovations have helped bring us to
where we are today.

What Does Media Do for Us?

Media fulfills several basic roles in our society. One obvious role is entertainment.
Media can act as a springboard for our imaginations, a source of fantasy, and an
outlet for escapism. In the 19th century, Victorian readers disillusioned by the
grimness of the Industrial Revolution found themselves drawn into fantastic
worlds of fairies and other fictitious beings. In the first decade of the 21st century,
American television viewers could peek in on a conflicted Texas high school
football team in Friday Night Lights; the violence-plagued drug trade in Baltimore
in The Wire; a 1960s-Manhattan ad agency in Mad Men; or the last surviving band
of humans in a distant, miserable future in Battlestar Galactica. Through bringing
us stories of all kinds, media has the power to take us away from ourselves.

Media can also provide information and education. Information can come in
many forms, and it may sometimes be difficult to separate from entertainment.
Today, newspapers and news-oriented television and radio programs make
available stories from across the globe, allowing readers or viewers in London to
access voices and videos from Baghdad, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires. Books and
magazines provide a more in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. The free
online encyclopedia Wikipedia has articles on topics from presidential nicknames
to child prodigies to tongue twisters in various languages. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted free lecture notes, exams, and audio and
video recordings of classes on its OpenCourseWare website, allowing anyone with
an Internet connection access to world-class professors.

Another useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum for the
discussion of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to the
editor allow readers to respond to journalists or to voice their opinions on the
issues of the day. These letters were an important part of U.S. newspapers even
when the nation was a British colony, and they have served as a means of public
discourse ever since. The Internet is a fundamentally democratic medium that
allows everyone who can get online the ability to express their opinions through,
for example, blogging or podcasting—though whether anyone will hear is another
question.

Similarly, media can be used to monitor government, business, and other

institutions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the miserable
conditions in the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry; and in the early
1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered
evidence of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually
led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. But purveyors of mass media
may be beholden to particular agendas because of political slant, advertising
funds, or ideological bias, thus constraining their ability to act as a watchdog. The
following are some of these agendas:

1. Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination

2. Educating and informing
3. Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues
4. Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions

It’s important to remember, though, that not all media are created equal. While
some forms of mass communication are better suited to entertainment, others
make more sense as a venue for spreading information. In terms of print media,
books are durable and able to contain lots of information, but are relatively slow
and expensive to produce; in contrast, newspapers are comparatively cheaper
and quicker to create, making them a better medium for the quick turnover of
daily news. Television provides vastly more visual information than radio and is
more dynamic than a static printed page; it can also be used to broadcast live
events to a nationwide audience, as in the annual State of the Union address
given by the U.S. president. However, it is also a one-way medium—that is, it
allows for very little direct person-to-person communication. In contrast, the
Internet encourages public discussion of issues and allows nearly everyone who
wants a voice to have one. However, the Internet is also largely unmoderated.
Users may have to wade through thousands of inane comments or misinformed
amateur opinions to find quality information.

The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan took these ideas one step further,
famously coining the phrase “the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964).” By
this, McLuhan meant that every medium delivers information in a different way
and that content is fundamentally shaped by the medium of transmission. For
example, although television news has the advantage of offering video and live
coverage, making a story come alive more vividly, it is also a faster-paced
medium. That means more stories get covered in less depth. A story told on
television will probably be flashier, less in-depth, and with less context than the
same story covered in a monthly magazine; therefore, people who get the
majority of their news from television may have a particular view of the world
shaped not by the content of what they watch but its medium. Or, as computer
scientist Alan Kay put it, “Each medium has a special way of representing ideas
that emphasize particular ways of thinking and de-emphasize others (Kay, 1994).”
Kay was writing in 1994, when the Internet was just transitioning from an
academic research network to an open public system. A decade and a half later,
with the Internet firmly ensconced in our daily lives, McLuhan’s intellectual
descendants are the media analysts who claim that the Internet is making us
better at associative thinking, or more democratic, or shallower. But McLuhan’s
claims don’t leave much space for individual autonomy or resistance. In an essay
about television’s effects on contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace
scoffed at the “reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an
innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit
there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes….
Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster
with pictures (Wallace, 1997).” Nonetheless, media messages and technologies
affect us in countless ways, some of which probably won’t be sorted out until long
in the future.

A Brief History of Mass Media and Culture

Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the movable type printing

press, books were painstakingly handwritten and no two copies were exactly the
same. The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not
only was it much cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation
technologies also made it easier for texts to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to
overstate the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped usher in
massive cultural movements like the European Renaissance and the Protestant
Reformation. In 1810, another German printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media
production even further when he essentially hooked the steam engine up to a
printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed media. In 1800, a hand-
operated printing press could produce about 480 pages per hour; Koenig’s
machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing presses could
publish 3,000 pages an hour.)

This increased efficiency went hand in hand with the rise of the daily newspaper.
The newspaper was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans
of the 19th century, who could no longer get their local news merely through
gossip and word of mouth. These Americans were living in unfamiliar territory,
and newspapers and other media helped them negotiate the rapidly changing
world. The Industrial Revolution meant that some people had more leisure time
and more money, and media helped them figure out how to spend both. Media
theorist Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers also helped forge a sense
of national identity by treating readers across the country as part of one unified
community (Anderson, 1991).

In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new threat from the rise of
penny papers, which were low-priced broadsheets that served as a cheaper, more
sensational daily news source. They favored news of murder and adventure over
the dry political news of the day. While newspapers catered to a wealthier, more
educated audience, the penny press attempted to reach a wide swath of readers
through cheap prices and entertaining (often scandalous) stories. The penny press
can be seen as the forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids.
In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major nonprint form of mass
media—radio—exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than
telephones and widely available by the 1920s, had the unprecedented ability of
allowing huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. In
1924, Calvin Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people.
Radio was a boon for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive
audience. An early advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio
were “a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales
propaganda” because of “a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking,
enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes
(Briggs & Burke, 2005).” The reach of radio also meant that the medium was able
to downplay regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American
lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly driven and defined by consumer
purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size
clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen
to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round
(Mintz, 2007).” This boom in consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s and also
helped contribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s (Library of Congress). The
consumerist impulse drove production to unprecedented levels, but when the
Depression began and consumer demand dropped dramatically, the surplus of
production helped further deepen the economic crisis, as more goods were being
produced than could be sold.

The post–World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by
the introduction of a seductive new form of mass communication: television. In
1946, about 17,000 televisions existed in the United States; within 7 years, two-
thirds of American households owned at least one set. As the United States’ gross
national product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, the
American home became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit; along with a
television, the typical U.S. household owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all
of which contributed to the nation’s thriving consumer-based economy (Briggs &
Burke, 2005). Broadcast television was the dominant form of mass media, and the
three major networks controlled more than 90 percent of the news programs, live
events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans. Some social critics argued that
television was fostering a homogenous, conformist culture by reinforcing ideas
about what “normal” American life looked like. But television also contributed to
the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the nation’s first televised
military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protesters helped
intensify the nation’s internal conflicts.

Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a hold on the
American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves
having to adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and
easily archived, and it allowed users more flexibility in terms of time—once a
person had purchased a magazine, he or she could read it whenever and
wherever. Broadcast media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed
schedule, which allowed it to both provide a sense of immediacy and fleetingness.
Until the advent of digital video recorders in the late 1990s, it was impossible to
pause and rewind a live television broadcast.

The media world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with
the spread of cable television. During the early decades of television, viewers had
a limited number of channels to choose from—one reason for the charges of
homogeneity. In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of all
television viewing. By 2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of
total viewing, thanks to the spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed
viewers a wide menu of choices, including channels specifically tailored to people
who wanted to watch only golf, classic films, sermons, or videos of sharks. Still,
until the mid-1990s, television was dominated by the three large networks. The
Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster competition by
deregulating the industry, actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts that left
most of the control of the broadcast spectrum in the hands of a few large
corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened
regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single
market (up from 25 percent in 1982).

Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries

New media technologies both spring from and cause social changes. For this
reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution of media into clear causes
and effects. Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio
become wildly popular because it appealed to a society that was already
exploring consumerist tendencies? Probably a little bit of both. Technological
innovations such as the steam engine, electricity, wireless communication, and
the Internet have all had lasting and significant effects on American culture. As
media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came
with “a change in historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the way people
thought about time because work and play were no longer dependent on the
daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset; wireless communication collapsed distance;
the Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve [Link]
contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph,
patented in the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph,
communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages;
it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel 5 or 500 miles. Suddenly,
information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as
telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of World
Wide Web. In this way, the telegraph acted as the precursor to much of the
technology that followed, including the telephone, radio, television, and Internet.
When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing nearly instantaneous
communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times described it
as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given to
the sphere of human activity.”

Not long afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the

development of radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an
extension of telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors,
including Nikola Tesla, were involved in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-
born Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first practical
wireless radio system. Many people were fascinated by this new invention. Early
radio was used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the
home. The burgeoning interest in radio inspired hundreds of applications for
broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news outlets, retail stores,
schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926,
they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had
risen to 30 percent.

In addition to the breakthroughs in audio broadcasting, inventors in the 1800s

made significant advances in visual media. The 19th-century development of
photographic technologies would lead to the later innovations of cinema and
television. As with wireless technology, several inventors independently created a
form of photography at the same time, among them the French inventors Joseph
Niépce and Louis Daguerre and the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In
the United States, George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888,
anticipating that Americans would welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera
into their homes as they had with the radio and telephone. Moving pictures were
first seen around the turn of the century, with the first U.S. projection-hall
opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood had already created its
first stars, most notably Charlie Chaplin; by the end of the 1930s, Americans were
watching color films with full sound, including Gone With the Wind and The
Wizard of Oz.

Television—which consists of an image being converted to electrical impulses,

transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into images—
existed before World War II, but gained mainstream popularity in the 1950s. In
1947, there were 178,000 television sets made in the United States; 5 years later,
15 million were made. Radio, cinema, and live theater declined because the new
medium allowed viewers to be entertained with sound and moving pictures in
their homes. In the United States, competing commercial stations (including the
radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC) meant that commercial-driven programming
dominated. In Great Britain, the government managed broadcasting through the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Funding was driven by licensing fees
instead of advertisements. In contrast to the U.S. system, the BBC strictly
regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired. However,
U.S. television (and its increasingly powerful networks) still dominated. By the
beginning of 1955, there were around 36 million television sets in the United
States, but only 4.8 million in all of Europe. Important national events, broadcast
live for the first time, were an impetus for consumers to buy sets so they could
witness the spectacle; both England and Japan saw a boom in sales before
important royal weddings in the 1950s.

In 1969, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major
technological innovation would be an electronic appliance that would
revolutionize the way people lived just as thoroughly as Thomas Edison’s light
bulb had. This appliance would sell for less than a television set and be “capable
of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate access to
all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.”
Although Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical
machine, he was prescient about the effect these machines—personal computers
—and the Internet would have on education, social relationships, and the culture
at large. The inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and
microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps to the Internet age. As Briggs
and Burke note, these advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of
components could be carried on a microprocessor.” The reduction of many
different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film,
recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now
being thought of increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as
convergence, is a force that’s affecting media today.

Globalization

The media industry is, in many ways, perfect for globalization, or the spread of
global trade without regard for traditional political borders. As discussed above,
the low marginal costs of media mean that reaching a wider market creates much
larger profit margins for media companies. Because information is not a physical
good, shipping costs are generally inconsequential. Finally, the global reach of
media allows it to be relevant in many different countries.

However, some have argued that media is actually a partial cause of globalization,
rather than just another globalized industry. Media is largely a cultural product,
and the transfer of such a product is likely to have an influence on the recipient’s
culture. Increasingly, technology has also been propelling globalization.
Technology allows for quick communication, fast and coordinated transport, and
efficient mass marketing, all of which have allowed globalization—especially
globalized media—to take hold.

Globalized Culture, Globalized Markets

Much globalized media content comes from the West, particularly from the
United States. Driven by advertising, U.S. culture and media have a strong
consumerist bent (meaning that the ever-increasing consumption of goods is
encouraged as an economic virtue), thereby possibly causing foreign cultures to
increasingly develop consumerist ideals. Therefore, the globalization of media
could not only provide content to a foreign country, but may also create demand
for U.S. products. Some believe that this will “contribute to a one-way
transmission of ideas and values that result in the displacement of indigenous
cultures (Santos, 2001).”

Globalization as a world economic trend generally refers to the lowering of

economic trade borders, but it has much to do with culture as well. Just as
transfer of industry and technology often encourages outside influence through
the influx of foreign money into the economy, the transfer of culture opens up
these same markets. As globalization takes hold and a particular community
becomes more like the United States economically, this community may also
come to adopt and personalize U.S. cultural values. The outcome of this spread
can be homogenization (the local culture becomes more like the culture of the
United States) or heterogenization (aspects of U.S. culture come to exist alongside
local culture, causing the culture to become more diverse), or even both,
depending on the specific situation (Rantanen, 2005).

Making sense of this range of possibilities can be difficult, but it helps to realize
that a mix of many different factors is involved. Because of cultural differences,
globalization of media follows a model unlike that of the globalization of other
products. On the most basic level, much of media is language and culture based
and, as such, does not necessarily translate well to foreign countries. Thus, media
globalization often occurs on a more structural level, following broader “ways of
organizing and creating media (Mirza, 2009).” In this sense, a media company can
have many different culturally specific brands and still maintain an economically
globalized corporate structure.

Vertical Integration and Globalization

Because globalization has as much to do with the corporate structure of a media

company as with the products that a media company produces, vertical
integration in multinational media companies becomes a necessary aspect of
studying globalized media. Many large media companies practice vertical
integration: Newspaper chains take care of their own reporting, printing, and
distribution; television companies control their own production and broadcasting;
and even small film studios often have parent companies that handle
international distribution.
A media company often benefits greatly from vertical integration and
globalization. Because of the proliferation of U.S. culture abroad, media outlets
are able to use many of the same distribution structures with few changes.
Because media rely on the speedy ability to react to current events and trends, a
vertically integrated company can do all of this in a globalized rather than a
localized marketplace; different branches of the company are readily able to
handle different markets. Further, production values for single-country
distribution are basically the same as those for multiple countries, so vertical
integration allows, for example, a single film studio to make higher-budget movies
than it may otherwise be able to produce without a distribution company that has
as a global reach.

Foreign Markets and Titanic

Worth considering is the reciprocal influence of foreign culture on American

culture. Certainly, American culture is increasingly exported around the world
thanks to globalization, and many U.S. media outlets count strongly on their
ability to sell their product in foreign markets. But what Americans consider their
own culture has in fact been tailored to the tastes not only of U.S. citizens but
also to those of worldwide audiences. The profit potential of foreign markets is
enormous: If a movie does well abroad, for example, it might make up for a weak
stateside showing, and may even drive interest in the movie in the United States.

One prime example of this phenomenon of global culture and marketing is James
Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic. One of the most expensive movies ever produced up
to that point, with an official budget of around $200 million, Titanic was not
anticipated to perform particularly well at the U.S. box office. Rather, predictions
of foreign box-office receipts allowed the movie to be made. Of the total box-
office receipts of Titanic, only about one-third came from the domestic market.
Although Titanic became the highest-grossing film up to that point, it grossed just
$140 million more domestically than Star Wars did 20 years earlier (Box Office
Mojo). The difference was in the foreign market. While Star Wars made about the
same amount—$300 million—in both the domestic and foreign
markets, Titanic grossed $1.2 billion in foreign box-office receipts. In all, the
movie came close to hitting the $2 billion mark, and now sits in the No. 2 position
behind Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster, Avatar.
One reason that U.S. studios can make these kinds of arrangements is their well-
developed ties with the worldwide movie industry. Hollywood studios have
agreements with theaters all over the world to show their films. By contrast, the
foreign market for French films is not nearly as established, as the industry tends
to be partially subsidized by the French government. Theaters showing Hollywood
studio films in France funnel portions of their box-office receipts to fund French
films. However, Hollywood has lobbied the World Trade Organization—a largely
pro-globalization group that pushes for fewer market restrictions—to rule that
this French subsidy is an unfair restriction on trade (Terrill, 1999).

In many ways, globalization presents legitimate concerns about the

endangerment of indigenous culture. Yet simple concerns over the transfer of
culture are not the only or even the biggest worries caused by the spread of
American culture and values.

Responsible Social Media Usage

Mark Zuckerberg has posted a manifesto on his view of social

media's role in global events and what they can do about it.
On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building
and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important
question of all: are we building the world we all want?
History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater
numbers — from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social
infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to
achieve things we couldn’t on our own.
Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now
global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and
understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our
greatest challenges also need global responses — like ending terrorism, fighting
climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity
coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.
This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer
together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not
controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a
positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by
globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are
questions about whether we can make a global community that works for
everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.
This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can
have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about
technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we
underestimate what we can do in ten years.” We may not have the power to
create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long
term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do
is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global
community that works for all of us.
For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families.
With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure
for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic
engagement, and for inclusion of all.
Bringing us all together as a global community is a project bigger than any one
organization or company, but Facebook can help contribute to answering these
five important questions:
How do we help people build supportive communities that strengthen traditional
institutions in a world where membership in these institutions is declining?
How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during
crises and rebuilds afterwards in a world where anyone across the world can
affect us?
How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new
ideas and builds common understanding in a world where every person has a
voice?
How do we help people build a civically-engaged community in a world where
participation in voting sometimes includes less than half our population?
How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective
values and common humanity from local to global levels, spanning cultures,
nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?
My hope is that more of us will commit our energy to building the long term social
infrastructure to bring humanity together. The answers to these questions won’t
all come from Facebook, but I believe we can play a role.
Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while
mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness
and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning
and improving. We take our responsibility seriously, and today I want to talk
about how we plan to do our part to build this global community.
Supportive Communities
Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of
smaller communities and intimate social structures we turn to for our personal,
emotional and spiritual needs.
Whether they’re churches, sports teams, unions or other local groups, they all
share important roles as social infrastructure for our communities. They provide
all of us with a sense of purpose and hope; moral validation that we are needed
and part of something bigger than ourselves; comfort that we are not alone and a
community is looking out for us; mentorship, guidance and personal
development; a safety net; values, cultural norms and accountability; social
gatherings, rituals and a way to meet new people; and a way to pass time.
In our society, we have personal relationships with friends and family, and then
we have institutional relationships with the governments that set the rules. A
healthy society also has many layers of communities between us and government
that take care of our needs. When we refer to our “social fabric”, we usually
mean the many mediating groups that bring us together and reinforce our values.
However, there has been a striking decline in the important social infrastructure
of local communities over the past few decades. Since the 1970s, membership in
some local groups has declined by as much as one-quarter, cutting across all
segments of the population.
The decline raises deeper questions alongside surveys showing large percentages
of our population lack a sense of hope for the future. It is possible many of our
challenges are at least as much social as they are economic — related to a lack of
community and connection to something greater than ourselves. As one pastor
told me: “People feel unsettled. A lot of what was settling in the past doesn’t exist
anymore.”
Online communities are a bright spot, and we can strengthen existing physical
communities by helping people come together online as well as offline. In the
same way connecting with friends online strengthens real relationships,
developing this infrastructure will strengthen these communities, as well as
enable completely new ones to form.
A woman named Christina was diagnosed with a rare disorder called
Epidermolysis Bullosa — and now she’s a member of a group that connects 2,400
people around the world so none of them have to suffer alone. A man named
Matt was raising his two sons by himself and he started the Black Fathers group to
help men share advice and encouragement as they raise their families. In San
Diego, more than 4,000 military family members are part of a group that helps
them make friends with other spouses. These communities don’t just interact
online. They hold get-togethers, organize dinners, and support each other in their
daily lives.
We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members
of what we call “very meaningful” groups. These are groups that upon joining,
quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an
important part of our physical support structure. For example, many new parents
tell us that joining a parenting group after having a child fits this purpose.
There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be
meaningful social infrastructure in our lives. More than one billion people are
active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own
— friends send invites or Facebook suggests them. If we can improve our
suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities,
that can strengthen our social fabric.
Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on
meaningful groups, not groups overall. This will require not only helping people
connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to
create more meaningful groups for people to connect with.
The most successful physical communities have engaged leaders, and we’ve seen
the same with online groups as well. In Berlin, a man named Monis Bukhari runs a
group where he personally helps refugees find homes and jobs. Today,
Facebook’s tools for group admins are relatively simple. We plan to build more
tools to empower community leaders like Monis to run and grow their groups the
way they’d like, similar to what we’ve done with Pages.
Most communities are made of many sub-communities, and this is another clear
area for developing new tools. A school, for example, is not a single community,
but many smaller groups among its classes, dorms and student groups. Just as the
social fabric of society is made up of many communities, each community is made
of many groups of personal connections. We plan to expand groups to support
sub-communities.
We can look at many activities through the lens of building community. Watching
video of our favorite sports team or TV show, reading our favorite newspaper, or
playing our favorite game are not just entertainment or information but a shared
experience and opportunity to bring together people who care about the same
things. We can design these experiences not for passive consumption but for
strengthening social connections.
Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together
online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new
communities, transcending physical location. When we do this, beyond
connecting online, we reinforce our physical communities by bringing us together
in person to support each other.
A healthy society needs these communities to support our personal, emotional
and spiritual needs. In a world where this physical social infrastructure has been
declining, we have a real opportunity to help strengthen these communities and
the social fabric of our society.
Safe Community
As we build a global community, this is a moment of truth. Our success isn’t just
based on whether we can capture videos and share them with friends. It’s about
whether we’re building a community that helps keep us safe — that prevents
harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards.
Today’s threats are increasingly global, but the infrastructure to protect us is not.
Problems like terrorism, natural disasters, disease, refugee crises, and climate
change need coordinated responses from a worldwide vantage point. No nation
can solve them alone. A virus in one nation can quickly spread to others. A conflict
in one country can create a refugee crisis across continents. Pollution in one place
can affect the environment around the world. Humanity’s current systems are
insufficient to address these issues.
Many dedicated people join global non-profit organizations to help, but the
market often fails to fund or incentivize building the necessary infrastructure. I
have long expected more organizations and startups to build health and safety
tools using technology, and I have been surprised by how little of what must be
built has even been attempted. There is a real opportunity to build global safety
infrastructure, and I have directed Facebook to invest more and more resources
into serving this need.
For some of these problems, the Facebook community is in a unique position to
help prevent harm, assist during a crisis, or come together to rebuild afterwards.
This is because of the amount of communication across our network, our ability
to quickly reach people worldwide in an emergency, and the vast scale of people’s
intrinsic goodness aggregated across our community.
To prevent harm, we can build social infrastructure to help our community
identify problems before they happen. When someone is thinking of committing
suicide or hurting themselves, we’ve built infrastructure to give their friends and
community tools that could save their life. When a child goes missing, we’ve built
infrastructure to show Amber Alerts — and multiple children have been rescued
without harm. And we’ve built infrastructure to work with public safety
organizations around the world when we become aware of these issues. Going
forward, there are even more cases where our community should be able to
identify risks related to mental health, disease or crime.
To help during a crisis, we’ve built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let
our friends know we’re safe and check on friends who might be affected by an
attack or natural disaster. Safety Check has been activated almost 500 times in
two years and has already notified people that their families and friends are safe
more than a billion times. When there is a disaster, governments often call us to
make sure Safety Check has been activated in their countries. But there is more to
build. We recently added tools to find and offer shelter, food and other resources
during emergencies. Over time, our community should be able to help during
wars and ongoing issues that are not limited to a single event.
To rebuild after a crisis, we’ve built the world’s largest social infrastructure for
collective action. A few years ago, after an earthquake in Nepal, the Facebook
community raised $15 million to help people recover and rebuild — which was
the largest crowdfunded relief effort in history. We saw a similar effort after the
shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando when people across the country
organized blood donations to help victims they had never met. Similarly, we built
tools so millions of people could commit to becoming organ donors to save others
after accidents, and registries reported larger boosts in sign ups than ever before.
Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building
artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is
happening across our community.
There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day,
and since it’s impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is
reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events — like suicides, some live
streamed — that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized
what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and
harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out.
These stories show we must find a way to do more.
Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching
systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should
review. This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look
at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the
team that reviews content for our community.
It will take many years to fully develop these systems. Right now, we’re starting to
explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about
terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone
trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization. This is technically
difficult as it requires building AI that can read and understand news, but we need
to work on this to help fight terrorism worldwide.
As we discuss keeping our community safe, it is important to emphasize that part
of keeping people safe is protecting individual security and liberty. We are strong
advocates of encryption and have built it into the largest messaging platforms in
the world — WhatsApp and Messenger. Keeping our community safe does not
require compromising privacy. Since building end-to-end encryption into
WhatsApp, we have reduced spam and malicious content by more than 75%.
The path forward is to recognize that a global community needs social
infrastructure to keep us safe from threats around the world, and that our
community is uniquely positioned to prevent disasters, help during crises, and
rebuild afterwards. Keeping the global community safe is an important part of our
mission — and an important part of how we’ll measure our progress going
forward.
Informed Community
The purpose of any community is to bring people together to do things we
couldn’t do on our own. To do this, we need ways to share new ideas and share
enough common understanding to actually work together.
Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public
discourse because it increases the diversity of ideas shared. But the past year has
also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality. It is our responsibility to
amplify the good effects and mitigate the bad — to continue increasing diversity
while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the
greatest positive impact on the world.
The two most discussed concerns this past year were about diversity of
viewpoints we see (filter bubbles) and accuracy of information (fake news). I
worry about these and we have studied them extensively, but I also worry there
are even more powerful effects we must mitigate around sensationalism and
polarization leading to a loss of common understanding.
Social media already provides more diverse viewpoints than traditional media
ever has. Even if most of our friends are like us, we all know people with different
interests, beliefs and backgrounds who expose us to different perspectives.
Compared with getting our news from the same two or three TV networks or
reading the same newspapers with their consistent editorial views, our networks
on Facebook show us more diverse content.
But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just
alternate perspectives. We must be careful how we do this. Research shows that
some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite
perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as
foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people
see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they
think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a
complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.
Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and
even outright hoax content on Facebook, and we take this very seriously. We’ve
made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to
do. We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between
hoaxes, satire and opinion. In a free society, it’s important that people have the
power to share their opinion, even if others think they’re wrong. Our approach
will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional
perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item’s
accuracy.
While we have more work to do on information diversity and misinformation, I
am even more focused on the impact of sensationalism and polarization, and the
idea of building common understanding.
Social media is a short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified
many times. This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this
focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it
oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes.
Polarization exists in all areas of discourse, not just social media. It occurs in all
groups and communities, including companies, classrooms and juries, and it’s
usually unrelated to politics. In the tech community, for example, discussion
around AI has been oversimplified to existential fear-mongering. The harm is that
sensationalism moves people away from balanced nuanced opinions towards
polarized extremes.
If this continues and we lose common understanding, then even if we eliminated
all misinformation, people would just emphasize different sets of facts to fit their
polarized opinions. That’s why I’m so worried about sensationalism in media.
Fortunately, there are clear steps we can take to correct these effects. For
example, we noticed some people share stories based on sensational headlines
without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a
story after reading it, that’s a good sign the headline was sensational. If you’re
more likely to share a story after reading it, that’s often a sign of good in-depth
content. We recently started reducing sensationalism in News Feed by taking this
into account for pieces of content, and going forward signals like this will identify
sensational publishers as well. There are many steps like this we have taken and
will keep taking to reduce sensationalism and help build a more informed
community.
Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from
getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something
Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we
have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have
dialogue about what we disagree on. When we do this well, we give billions of
people the ability to share new perspectives while mitigating the unwanted
effects that come with any new medium.
A strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community. Giving
people a voice is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new
information and analyzing it. There is more we must do to support the news
industry to make sure this vital social function is sustainable — from growing local
news, to developing formats best suited to mobile devices, to improving the
range of business models news organizations rely on.
Connecting everyone to the internet is also necessary for building an informed
community. For the majority of people around the world, the debate is not about
the quality of public discourse but whether they have access to basic information
they need at all, often related to health, education and jobs.
Finally, I want to emphasize that the vast majority of conversations on Facebook
are social, not ideological. They’re friends sharing jokes and families staying in
touch across cities. They’re people finding groups, whether they’re new parents
raising kids or newly diagnosed patients suffering from a disease together.
Sometimes it’s for joy, coming together around religion or sports. And sometimes
it’s for survival, like refugees communicating to find shelter.
Whatever your situation when you enter our community, our commitment is to
continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience. By
increasing the diversity of our ideas and strengthening our common
understanding, our community can have the greatest positive impact on the
world.
Civically-Engaged Community
Our society will reflect our collective values only if we engage in the civic process
and participate in self-governance. There are two distinct types of social
infrastructure that must be built:
The first encourages engagement in existing political processes: voting, engaging
with issues and representatives, speaking out, and sometimes organizing. Only
through dramatically greater engagement can we ensure these political processes
reflect our values.
The second is establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in
collective decision-making. Our world is more connected than ever, and we face
global problems that span national boundaries. As the largest global community,
Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at
scale.
The starting point for civic engagement in the existing political process is to
support voting across in the world. It is striking that only about half of Americans
eligible to vote participate in elections. This is low compared to other countries,
but democracy is receding in many countries and there is a large opportunity
across the world to encourage civic participation.
In the United States election last year, we helped more than 2 million people
register to vote and then go vote. This was among the largest voter turnout
efforts in history, and larger than those of both major parties combined. In every
election around the world, we keep improving our tools to help more people
register and vote, and we hope to eventually enable hundreds of millions of more
people to vote in elections than do today, in every democratic country around the
world.
Local civic engagement is a big opportunity as well as national. Today, most of us
do not even know who our local representatives are, but many policies impacting
our lives are local, and this is where our participation has the greatest influence.
Research suggests reading local news is directly correlated with local civic
engagement. This shows how building an informed community, supportive local
communities, and a civically-engaged community are all related.
Beyond voting, the greatest opportunity is helping people stay engaged with the
issues that matter to them every day, not just every few years at the ballot box.
We can help establish direct dialogue and accountability between people and our
elected leaders. In India, Prime Minister Modi has asked his ministers to share
their meetings and information on Facebook so they can hear direct feedback
from citizens. In Kenya, whole villages are in WhatsApp groups together, including
their representatives. In recent campaigns around the world — from India and
Indonesia across Europe to the United States — we’ve seen the candidate with
the largest and most engaged following on Facebook usually wins. Just as TV
became the primary medium for civic communication in the 1960s, social media is
becoming this in the 21st century.
This creates an opportunity for us to connect with our representatives at all
levels. In the last few months, we have already helped our community double the
number of connections between people and our representatives by making it
easier to connect with all our representatives in one click. When we connect, we
can engage directly in comments and messages. For example, in Iceland, it’s
common to tag politicians in group discussions so they can take community issues
to parliament.
Sometimes people must speak out and demonstrate for what they believe is right.
From Tahrir Square to the Tea Party — our community organizes these
demonstrations using our infrastructure for events and groups. On a daily basis,
people use their voices to share their views in ways that can spread around the
world and grow into movements. The Women’s March is an example of this,
where a grandmother with an internet connection wrote a post that led her
friends to start a Facebook event that eventually turned into millions of people
marching in cities around the world.
Giving people a voice is a principle our community has been committed to since
we began. As we look ahead to building the social infrastructure for a global
community, we will work on building new tools that encourage thoughtful civic
engagement. Empowering us to use our voices will only become more important.
Inclusive Community
Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for
citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can
explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.
Facebook is not just technology or media, but a community of people. That means
we need Community Standards that reflect our collective values for what should
and should not be allowed.
In the last year, the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our
existing processes for governing the community. We saw this in errors taking
down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter and police violence, and in
removing the historical Terror of War photo from Vietnam. We’ve seen this in
misclassifying hate speech in political debates in both directions — taking down
accounts and content that should be left up and leaving up content that was
hateful and should be taken down. Both the number of issues and their cultural
importance has increased recently.
This has been painful for me because I often agree with those criticizing us that
we’re making mistakes. These mistakes are almost never because we hold
ideological positions at odds with the community, but instead are operational
scaling issues. Our guiding philosophy for the Community Standards is to try to
reflect the cultural norms of our community. When in doubt, we always favor
giving people the power to share more.
There are a few reasons for the increase in issues we’ve seen: cultural norms are
shifting, cultures are different around the world, and people are sensitive to
different things.
First, our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and
friends to now becoming a source of news and public discourse as well. With this
cultural shift, our Community Standards must adapt to permit more newsworthy
and historical content, even if some is objectionable. For example, an extremely
violent video of someone dying would have been marked as disturbing and taken
down. However, now that we use Live to capture the news and we post videos to
protest violence, our standards must adapt. Similarly, a photo depicting any child
nudity would have always been taken down — and for good reason — but we’ve
now adapted our standards to allow historically important content like the Terror
of War photo. These issues reflect a need to update our standards to meet
evolving expectations from our community.
Second, our community spans many countries and cultures, and the norms are
different in each region. It’s not surprising that Europeans more frequently find
fault with taking down images depicting nudity, since some European cultures are
more accepting of nudity than, for example, many communities in the Middle East
or Asia. With a community of almost two billion people, it is less feasible to have a
single set of standards to govern the entire community so we need to evolve
towards a system of more local governance.
Third, even within a given culture, we have different opinions on what we want to
see and what is objectionable. I may be okay with more politically charged speech
but not want to see anything sexually suggestive, while you may be okay with
nudity but not want to see offensive speech. Similarly, you may want to share a
violent video in a protest without worrying that you’re going to bother friends
who don’t want to see it. And just as it’s a bad experience to see objectionable
content, it’s also a terrible experience to be told we can’t share something we feel
is important. This suggests we need to evolve towards a system of personal
control over our experience.
Fourth, we’re operating at such a large scale that even a small percent of errors
causes a large number of bad experiences. We review over one hundred million
pieces of content every month, and even if our reviewers get 99% of the calls
right, that’s still millions of errors over time. Any system will always have some
mistakes, but I believe we can do better than we are today.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year reflecting on how we can improve our
community governance. Sitting here in California, we’re not best positioned to
identify the cultural norms around the world. Instead, we need a system where
we can all contribute to setting the standards. Although this system is not fully
developed, I want to share an idea of how this might work.
The guiding principles are that the Community Standards should reflect the
cultural norms of our community, that each person should see as little
objectionable content as possible, and each person should be able to share what
they want while being told they cannot share something as little as possible. The
approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine
standards with AI to help enforce them.
The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to
set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence?
On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal
settings. We will periodically ask you these questions to increase participation and
so you don’t need to dig around to find them. For those who don’t make a
decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region
selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your
personal settings anytime.
With a broader range of controls, content will only be taken down if it is more
objectionable than the most permissive options allow. Within that range, content
should simply not be shown to anyone whose personal controls suggest they
would not want to see it, or at least they should see a warning first. Although we
will still block content based on standards and local laws, our hope is that this
system of personal controls and democratic referenda should minimize
restrictions on what we can share.
It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text,
photos and videos to judge whether they contain hate speech, graphic violence,
sexually explicit content, and more. At our current pace of research, we hope to
begin handling some of these cases in 2017, but others will not be possible for
many years.
Overall, it is important that the governance of our community scales with the
complexity and demands of its people. We are committed to always doing better,
even if that involves building a worldwide voting system to give you more voice
and control. Our hope is that this model provides examples of how collective
decision-making may work in other aspects of the global community.
This is an important time in the development of our global community, and it’s a
time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the
most positive impact.
History has had many moments like today. As we’ve made our great leaps from
tribes to cities to nations, we have always had to build social infrastructure like
communities, media and governments for us to thrive and reach the next level. At
each step we learned how to come together to solve our challenges and
accomplish greater things than we could alone. We have done it before and we
will do it again.
I am reminded of President Lincoln’s remarks during the American Civil War: “We
can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we
all do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the
occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, act anew.”
There are many of us who stand for bringing people together and connecting the
world. I hope we have the focus to take the long view and build the new social
infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.
It’s an honor to be on this journey with you. Thank you for being part of this
community, and thanks for everything you do to make the world more open and
connected.
Lesson Activity and Assessment:
It an effort to promote responsible Social Media usage, create an Infographics
that has 10 ORIGINAL rules/advice that clearly state responsible social media use.
In a separate paragraph, explain those 10 rules/advice.

Sample of Infographics
Rubric
2 point per item, 20 points all in all
 2 point (1 logical idea + 1 logical explanation)
 1 point (1 logical idea + 1 illogical explanation)
 No points (No answer or illogical idea and illogical explanation)

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