You get what you pay for

I don’t know about you but if I don’t have to I do not want to pay for my news, my online entertainment or my study material – but maybe I should. Since the dawn of digital publishing, we have been conditioned to want our media for free. When online email emerged on the digital stage everyone was pleasantly surprised that Hotmail was free. When Facebook opened itself up to the general population users of all ages flocked to this free service. As recently as 2014 only one in ten daily newspapers in the US had instituted a paywall or subscription plan (Vara-Miguel, 2014). This roughly correlates with a more recent study that showed as few as 11% respondents to an online survey in the US paid for online news in 2017 (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017). This raises the obvious question, who is paying digital media content? It also raises a more urgent question, what affects has this “culture of free” had on online learning.

In a perfect world, digital media would be free to access, readily available and reliably uninfluenced by commercial interests. Unfortunately, this is clearly not the case today. In their 2011 critique of the suitability of commercial social media platforms for learning Friesen and Lowe identify that although sites like Facebook and Google provide free access to readily available information their business model is to “bring eyeballs to advertisers” and this can change traditional models of learning for users (Friesen and Lowe p 187). They suggest that with the evolution of Web 2.0 and its increasingly interactive nature the ‘personal learning environment’ is expanding and blurring the boundaries between teacher and student. Consequently critical aspects of conversation, dialogue and debate are fading for online learners. In this environment, biases emerge and are perpetuated in what some refer to as echo chambers.

Friesen and Lowe also point out that social media audiences are being targeted with personalized information delivered with pinpoint accuracy based on their digital user patterns. We have all seen this with the washlet ads we suddenly encounter on our news feeds after we go shopping for a toilet online (this is an actual screenshot from my visit to the NYT yesterday).

In essence, Friesen and Lowe caution that these corporate media organizations are controlling content and since they do not charge their audiences we can expect that their “advertising interests become inseparable” from the media they deliver. (p. 193) I think digital media is experiencing a race to the bottom and its reliance on advertising is what is dragging it down. I also feel that Friesen and Lowe’s article understates the problem and overlooks another digital media model that allows for two way exchange and attempts to reduce corporate influence.

In addition to our educational concerns everything we are worried about with companies like Twitter and Google, such as political interference and the spread of misinformation, can be directly attributed to a reliance on advertising revenue. Even the best news organizations and journals now resort to click-bait headlines designed to maximize traffic because they have to market across media traffic to survive (Filloux, 2016). What we need is a new ethic and culture of sponsorship allowing us to support work we value. I think a possible solution lies in a business model being used by bloggers, podcasters, application developers and increasingly news agencies. I am referring to the freemium model.

Even though the culture of free continues to permeate much of the digital media market, recently some services have been able to subvert this trend by providing basic content for free and premium functionality for a subscription fee. In doing this, companies like Linked-in, Spotify and the New York Times have been especially persuasive in getting younger users to spend their money (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017). One reason for the growing popularity of the freemium model is likely due to the large numbers of people that are growing weary of free, and sometimes unsolicited information, and believe that subscription news, entertainment, and literature offer something more reliable, more factual and better quality.

For educators perhaps this is the best possible solution to integrate social media and social networking into the class. By incorporating more effective models, such as podcast lectures or interactive live discussions, into modern course management systems students will be more likely to develop the flexibility to work in both worlds, and a discerning outlook on digital content (Alexander, 2009).

References

Alexander, B. (2009). Web 2.0 and Emergent Multiliteracies. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 150-160. doi:10.1080/00405840801992371

Filloux. 2016, F. (2016). Clickbait is devouring journalism but there are ways out. Retrieved from https://qz.com/648845/clickbait-is-devouring-journalism-but-there-areways-out/

Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2017). Paying for Online News. Digital Journalism, 5(9), 1173-1191. doi:10.1080/21670811.2016.1246373

Friesen, N., & Lowe, S. (2011). The questionable promise of social media for education: connective learning and the commercial imperative. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(3), 183-194. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00426.x

Vara-Miguel, A., Sanjurjo-San Martin, E., & Diaz-Espina, C. (2014). Paid news vs free news: Evolution of the WSJ.com business model from a content perspective (2010-2012) Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10171/36276

Willinsky, J. (2017). Dr. John Willinsky on the future of Open Access: IM Public Lecture [Video file]. (2017, October 30). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/RiovIhvO7kA