Читать книгу Rethinking Digital Native Comunicators Training - Cristina Pulido Rodriguez - Страница 9

LARA VAN DIEVOET ORM, UCLouvain, Belgium

NATHALIE PIGNARD-CHEYNEL

AJM, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland

LOÏC BALLARINI

CREM, Université de Lorraine, France

OLIVIER STANDAERT

ORM, UCLouvain, Belgium

Abstract

This chapter presents a teaching experiment designed to lead journalism students to apprehend the influence of social networks algorithms on news distribution.

Based on a learning by doing approach, this field experiment was conducted three years in a row (2017, 2018 and 2019) with journalism students from three universities from Belgium, France and Switzerland. After having created ad hoc Facebook or Instagram profiles, the students were encouraged to test both general hypothesis and their own assumptions about the way the social networks algorithms work.

The authors discuss the details of this experiment and its teaching method. Feed-back sessions, focus groups and a survey helped assess the exercise. It also lead to a new kind of experiment on a closed and secured news platform created for the purpose of the exercise. This new version is presented at the end of the chapter.

Keywords: Journalism, education, algorithms, infomediaries, filter.

One of the many challenges that journalism faces in today’s changing news environment is the rise of the influence of infomediaries. These platforms –amongst which Google, Apple and Facebook– make content available to the audience using customization algorithms.

The algorithmic filtering of news content has an impact on the visibility of news pieces. A change in the way these algorithms are programmed can lead to a significant drop or rise of traffic on news websites and have a massive impact on the financial health of news organizations. As stated by Smyrnaios, infomediaries “strongly influence the whole ecology of content production, distribution and consumption while, at the same time, they absorb a significant part of the surplus value produced in the internet economy”. (2015) Algorithms and the platforms can therefore be considered as “actants” enrolled in news work. (Lewis and Westlund, 2015)

If it wants to address current challenges, journalism education has to take these new actants into consideration. It is important that journalism students understand how journalism is positioning itself in an increasingly complex online information ecosystem. But how can these issues be effectively integrated into a university program ? How can journalism students be lead to apprehend the impact of algorithms on news consumption and distribution ? How to build awareness amongst future journalists about the use of social networks as sources of information ?

This chapter presents a teaching experiment on Facebook and Instagram algorithms conducted three years in a row (2017, 2018 and 2019) by the authors together with journalism students in three universities from Belgium, France and Switzerland. It discusses the learning by doing approach it is based on and how it enabled a better understanding of the issues at stake. It also presents the limits of this exercise and introduces a new kind of experiment that was conducted in Belgium in 2020 in line with what had been tested.