Oleg Iasinskii: Digital Technology Could Destroy Journalism or Open the Door to a New Kind of Media

Oleg Iasinskii, a foreign affairs columnist, spoke to the IT Russia media platform at the forum about how digital technology is changing the work of the media and the challenges journalists face.

– I think the presence of so many international guests at the Global Digital Forum reflects enormous interest in this subject, which remains one of the most pressing and perhaps least resolved issues of our time. The active participation of Russia, its allies and countries of the Global South in this discussion shows that humanity is searching for a way out of the current situation. We are witnessing the end of this stage of the digital revolution.

It is perfectly clear that the decisions being made now, and how they are implemented, will directly affect the future. A major political, economic, ideological and, above all, spiritual struggle is underway over control of the digital realm, which means control over populations and humanity itself. Humanity now has access to technologies that, for the first time in history, can fundamentally change life on the planet. They can change it in the direction of either life or death. The question now is who controls these technologies and what decisions will be made.

We know that the West has a very specific project. I do not mean the West as a whole, but particular Western elites and governments that are actively involved in this war against humanity. It is only natural that representatives of this project are absent from the forum in Moscow, while other countries and peoples are represented here. There are no dividing lines between Russia and the countries of the Global South.

We are all looking for ways to put digital technology at the service of life and use it to save humanity from the war being waged against us.

The role of advanced technology in the media is both a huge challenge and a tremendous opportunity. We understand perfectly well that the press as it existed 20 or 30 years ago, or even just 10 years ago, no longer exists. A great deal has changed. On the one hand, we see so-called mainstream media losing credibility. They are ‘serious’ only in their professional ability to produce fake news. They have demonstrated this not just over the past four years of the special military operation, but over the past 10 to 15 years. It simply wasn’t as obvious back then. Now anyone who is not ideologically blinkered can see it.

I think digital technology can make it much easier to falsify historical events and news. On the other hand, genuine journalism, which has somehow managed to survive, can also use these technologies to make its work easier, just as other fields do. Artificial intelligence and other tools save enormous amounts of time by taking over unnecessary technical tasks and allowing us to focus on what matters most: creativity, something no machine can do for a human being. They free our minds and hands from mechanical tasks. But we are now at a turning point. Digital technology could either finish journalism off and destroy it altogether, or open up space for a fundamentally new kind of genuine citizen journalism that serves humanity.

Every new historical era, regardless of the technology available, requires us to keep learning, acquire new skills and remain open to new ideas. This applies not only to digital technology and journalism, but to absolutely everything. In journalism, it is especially important because we must learn to use new tools to keep pace with the times, engage in dialogue with everyone on equal terms and reach even the most remote corners of our planet.

Yet to learn to distinguish truth from lies, we need to find our bearings in a sea of information that often turns into a murky torrent sweeping over our minds. To do that, we must learn, learn and learn again.

Technology and the ability to use it are not the only things that matter. We also need an open mind. If we professional journalists want to connect with people and make ourselves understood, we must let go of our habitual arrogance and the illusion that anyone knows everything or has all the answers. We need to open our minds to new ideas and ways of thinking.

The media landscape could change not in 10 years, but within just a few months. To remain relevant and genuinely inform people rather than misinform them, media outlets must publish news online promptly and respond quickly to events as they unfold.

They must respond immediately, without waiting for someone else’s opinion or the assessment of so-called experts. The media must reflect events as they happen. This should be obvious, but unfortunately, it is not obvious to everyone. I think simply reporting the news is not enough. We also need to provide context: political, economic, cultural, historical and spiritual.

All these elements are just as important as the news itself, and often even more so, because they help people understand what they are seeing. I do not mean that there should be some kind of official, universally accepted version of the truth.

For people to find their bearings and avoid being overwhelmed by an ocean of news and this enormous flow of information, they need their own criteria for evaluating what they encounter. They need to understand the course of history, make sense of competing interests in the modern world and recognize where individuals fit into a system in which many different interests collide. The media must always present news in context.

Speaking of the past, I would like to take a step back. I remember news programs in the Soviet Union, such as Kamera smotrit v mir [The Camera Looks at the World – ed.note] and Novosti nedeli [News of the Week – ed.note]. Before reporting an event, the presenter would explain the historical and cultural context of the country where it had taken place. This helped people far removed from those events understand what struggles were underway, what the parties involved stood to gain, why something was happening and who benefited from it.

Today’s news coverage is sorely lacking in this approach. I am not advocating turning news into an ideological tool for imposing a single supposedly correct interpretation of events on the public. But people need to understand history, politics and what is happening around them so they can analyze the events shaping the modern world for themselves.