Digital media, content providers, grassroot contributors, and yet selective information users get.

It seems like an effective solution to the challenge of oversupply of information humanity experiences in the digital age. Somebody filters, selects, choses the chunk of news which are potentially interesting and present it in a brief, compact way. Somebody is not necessarily another person. The same is nicely done by smart algorithms of any social and media platform.

The feeds and dashboards of Twitter, Instagram, facebook as well as playlists of Spotify, Netflix or youtube are the A class examples. They create a lot of value for the companies which owe them and sometimes are even considered as key success factors. Powered by sophisticated analytics, using big data and machine learning, those algorithms heavily impact the way we understand the world. They made and have been maintaining all those cognitive, digital bubbles we complain about still finding them quite useful and comfortable.

Just a bit lower in the data stream management hierarchy are numerous vertical services, organizing access to the specific information for their users. They are also, as their bigger and more influential peers, take advantage of technology to optimize the selection of data served to the audience. Politics, economy, job market, sports, culture and art with many other fields of human interest are subject to that mechanism. Convenience and speed of digital media made them leaders of the information exchange on global scale. We all benefit from their existence and continuous development, and we all depend on their ways of selecting information. At the end we are getting the bespoken content directly to our mobile devices, meeting our needs, including desires we are not aware of. The most perfect match anybody could look for.

Doubts come with the simple understanding, that those managers of public news stream, are business-oriented entities, who, in general, are designed to bring profits to the stakeholders. Therefore, if anybody finds their newsfeed appropriately shaped and matched with their needs, it should remember it is just a side effect a business pursuits. Do we have any viable alternative? The self-driven browsing the internet is not the realistic way to get truly relevant information. The major tool internauts of western world are using for that purpose – Google search engine – is a commercial enterprise and selects the search result accordingly. And, let’s be honest, who is frequently checking google results which does not fit in the top ten or twenty entries? Can anybody search internet manually, by their own? I bet there is no viable, useful method for that.

The one example of dealing with the challenge is Wikipedia.org. The crowdsourced platform of information, created by multiple contributors, with apparently no profit goals and non-profit operational model. A bit of paradox is that Google consequently delivers Wikipedia entries on the top of its searches, which is probably one thing to recognize among too many fake attempts of digital oligopolist to pretend being neutral and unprejudiced. Of course, the reach of the largest crowdsourced digital encyclopedia is incomparable to the reach of the biggest digital platforms, it also significantly varies depending on the language version. Apart from the flagship Wikipedia there are plenty of specialized wikis, usually related to the subject of great interest, including movies, books, alternative worlds, hobbies etc. The extreme opinions are equally represented as moderate ones and the coronavirus pandemic with its social restrictions and vaccination debate is the great example of global, but polarized, virtual community. Still, some professional panels, news portal, discussion forums appear to be a good alternative for commercial information sources for those who value their “data independence”.

The weakness of non-profit media, which was already a concern in the pre-internet era, today poses critical risk for citizen freedoms. The way some enthusiasts are fighting for more representative selection of data can be compared to the guerilla strategy. Millions of the Internet users create their own data sets, on the blogs, social platforms, personal websites, and any other available digital medium. This grassroot movement brings hope and courage for another millions of followers. I am one of them. My digitalbankology.com microwebsite is based on the original content I write, but other activities, like on Twitter, facebook or Linkedin, are in part based on the data selecting. I trying to pick up the interesting information and spread a word across my network. Does it work? I guess it does, but in microscale. No dream to change the global trend whatsoever.

There is a huge obstacle in the way of changing media by engaged, independent individuals: money. The only anyone starts making a difference, increasing their reach, becoming recognized, the commercial media get involved. The career of influencer is a natural next step of the free media activist. Being a influencer means one gets more recognition, more respect, enhance one’s reach, and gets paid. In this moment the story of free data selection turns into commercial content adjustment. This is how it usually works.

The resources commercial companies can mobilize and use to deliver information they selected are a powerful advantage over no benefit projects. Personally, I experience it few years ago when I took on the project of delivering a weekly selection of linkedin posts. Very niche area of interest and additionally limited by another selection criterion: the post had to be published by American contributors. That four-month long journey taught me a tough lesson. The results are not worth of the effort put into the preparation, traffic and interest I got was not satisfactory, and the weekly occurrence appeared too challenging for a single author. It does not mean I think the grassroot editorial work has no sense. It means that the way I took was not the right one. At the end of the day, we are the creators and consumers of the digital information, what could be possibly more right that claim our rights for it back?