Illustration by Richie Pope
In my day job, I am a sociologist. Part of that job includes sharing the sociological imagination with the world. That means that I have almost all of the requisite social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. My favorite is Twitter. It is the platform that best suits my communication style and it shows: I have just 1,100 followers on Facebook, three on Snapchat, eight on Instagram and 33,000 on Twitter.
I have used social media to speak directly to people about the issues I care about, using the expertise I have developed. These are issues that speak to our democratic well-being, such as poverty, racism, educational inequality and economic security. When I speak directly to readers on these various platforms, I am living the promise of the networked society. This is the idea that modern societies are no longer defined by the families we are born into or the cities and towns where we make our lives. Modern societies are defined by the web of people that we are connected to, our own networks and the networks that engage when we go to school and work, build families, and form social bonds. In a networked society, anyone can talk to anyone else. Expertise isn’t about the piece of paper one has earned from an institution, like a university, but about the esteem one has developed among others. In the networked world, I am a media company every time I tweet, blog or Instagram.
As much as I love the freedom of new media, I am not ready to swap social media and networks for media companies and institutions. If anything, my work in media and as media has made me value the expertise of traditional media all the more. Still, traditional media is living in challenging times. Ours is a society increasingly skeptical of science, fact and expertise. In these times, traditional media is more important to a strong democracy and not less. But, I have also come to believe that traditional media must mean diverse media if we are to live up to the promise of democracy’s gatekeeper.
What do I mean by “diverse media”? There is the superficial diversity, where a media publication hires someone who represents a “diverse” group. And that can be a fine goal. But I am aiming for something bigger, deeper and ultimately more substantial than cosmetic diversity. What I have seen in the new media landscape is that people crave expertise, despite protestations about elitism. Our lives are complex. We have to trust others to help us navigate the world. We want to know whom to trust.
We have historically turned to religious leaders, and later to educational institutions, to tell us whom to trust. In the age of social media, where everyone with a connection can play at being an expert, it has become easier to find information, but harder to trust anything that you find. Still, people flock to these platforms when the stakes are high. One need only look at our recent presidential election, when millions of voters turned to Facebook and independent media and blogs and social media personalities to help them make sense of geopolitics, public policy and presidential power.
People want expertise. But people also want the promise of a networked society. That promise is that expertise can be a democratic endeavor, not reserved for the elite few who went to the same colleges and the same high schools and attended the same clubs and are members of the same socioeconomic group. What social media and a networked society promises — and what people seem to want — is a diverse media institution that reflects our pluralistic society. That means diversity of people, sure, but also diversity of institutions, social groups, norms and ideological beliefs.
As a new Richmonder, one of my first forays into learning about my community involved looking for the city’s independent media. I knew where to find the network news and local paper. I was looking for more than the official local expert; I was looking for the heart and soul of Richmond. I expected those media to be in different languages with media makers who spanned age groups, races, ethnicities and beliefs. I went looking for black media and Hispanic media and neighborhood media and alternative media. I found some glimmering lights, but I had to work harder to find a handful of publications than I would have expected in a city as vibrant and diverse as Richmond.
This is a city with a thriving arts scene, a diverse working class, a burgeoning creative class, a struggling poor class, a historical black community and a rapidly expanding immigrant community. When I am looking for expertise, I want media that reflects those groups. Diversity encourages trust in institutions and in their democratic value. Diversity also makes media stronger. Diversity means making fewer misidentifications of important social issues. It means seeing a social problem from various perspectives and therefore writing something that is more engaging and more important. Diversity means making fewer mistakes in representation and creating more space for meaningful dialogue. And, in these political times when every citizen is called to make our communities better places for all of our citizens, a diverse media can be trusted to guide us.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Follow her on Twitter @tressiemcphd.
