Building a More Honest Internet

A new movement toward public service digital media may be what we need to counter the excesses and failures of today’s internet. A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.

The question isn’t whether a public social media is viable. It is if we want it to be. The question is what we’d want to do with it. To start, we need to imagine digital social interactions that are good for society, rather than corrosive. We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.

[Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and associate professor of the practice at the MIT Media Lab.]