Anette Novak - Media Literacy
Anette Novak is the Director General of the Swedish Media Council - the governmental agency in charge of empowering children and youth to navigate an increasingly complex media landscape - both online and off. That organisation’s role says a lot, not only about the changing nature of media in general but also about Sweden itself.
MTF Director Andrew Dubber met with Anette over coffee in her office at the Film Institute in Stockholm and spoke about why Sweden has zero censorship, how technologies like facial recognition, AI and immersive games raise ethical rather than moral questions, and the sheer degree of high-level research that goes into fostering a healthy, curious and literate society.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
media, sweden, information literacy, legislation, media landscape, organisations, swedish, understand, technology, world, important, ethical, moment, people, tech fest, agency, child, question, freedom, area
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Anette Novak
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. When MTF moved its base from the UK to Sweden A few years ago, we worked closely with what has now become rise, the Research Institute of Sweden. That’s where I first met Anette Novak, who was the National Research agency’s CEO for five years. She’s now the director general of the Swedish media Council, the governmental agency in charge of empowering children and youth to navigate an increasingly complex media landscape both online and off. That organisations role says a lot, not only about the changing nature of media in general, but also about Sweden itself. I made up with an ad over coffee in her office at the Film Institute in Stockholm, and had what was for me a fascinating and in depth conversation. We talked about why Sweden has zero censorship, none at all, how technologies like facial recognition, Ai, and immersive games raise ethical rather than moral questions, and the sheer degree of high level research that goes into fostering a healthy, curious and literate society. Hope you enjoy. Anette you’re the director general of the Swedish media Council. What does that mean?
Anette Novak
That means that I am I lead a national authority or agency in who has the government’s instruction to empower young people and children, when it comes to giving them the tools and the perspectives the awareness to be able to navigate a more and more complex media landscape. We also are supposed to protect, which is more difficult term, I would say and something that we have a difficult relation to that term. But we do that through assessment of films where we give, we put age limits to on films, which is I would say it’s the remnant of what used to be the Swedish censorship. But there’s no more censorship, but there is this this proactive sifting of not wanting to expose the really young children to the very violent content.
Andrew Dubber
Okay, so there’s a lot to unpack there. But I’m what I’m really interested in is your journey. Because this is this is not a logical next step in your career, because your background is research and innovation. And and how did those things? Do you want to talk a little bit about what you were doing before you did this? So I’m
Anette Novak
a journalist as from background and training, and my whole career has been within digital transformation, I would say, well, mainly the last 10 15 years of my operative career within media was within digital transformation, which led me to dig deeper and deeper into what drives innovation. What blocks organisations and industries from one thing to innovate from one thing to transform. And, and, and then eventually, I was headhunted to this position as CEO of the Research Institute, Rise interactive, which works with applied ICT and design research. And that was also a kind of a sidestep from what I had been doing. But I saw media as one of the application areas in which you could apply these experimental theories or whatever, it’s not even theories, it’s like we build the things very much like you do to try and understand what what happens when we try and build this and how can we incorporate it into daily activity? So yeah, so as from there, I was also apparently working with a governmental inquiry into the media landscape. So my mind relationship to working for the government started there. And so I was assigned by the Minister of Culture to do this big inquiry, which I did for almost two years. And having left that I, one of the major conclusions of that work was with all that’s going on in the media, landscape, hate and algorithms that filter our realities, so we don’t no longer have the same picture of reality. We need the only thing that would sustainably address this is education. And then so I wrote in that conclusion that we need a massive national movement towards strengthening media and information literacy in the Swedish population. And since that was part of my conclusions, when I got the question, if I wanted to do this, and this is operation, doing operationalization of that suggestion is like, Okay, what if you would do it? How would you do it? Here you have an agency, think about how you would do it.
Andrew Dubber
So you haven’t done your own recommendation. That’s
Anette Novak
where I am now. Not really knowing it. On recommendations, but we’ve got a special assignment also at the same time as I started, which was, how can how can we find a methodology that would strengthen the coordination or because many people are into this area, but it’s not coordinated. So we have there is a, there has been a huge work done into looking into what’s going on within media and information literacy in Sweden. And from there, we can just withdraw that it’s very fragmented, and therefore not as strong as it could be if it was more coordinated. And we got the the assignment to try and see, is there any way we could play a role in coordinating this in a way so that we could make this happen much faster? Because the need is out there, and everybody has seen it now. So to me, it started that much back to your question, not that much of a side move, but actually our very logic, from the inquiries, conclusions, where they said, Okay, you’ve talked about it in theory, we saw the need, and let’s do it. But how should we do it? Because it’s not an easy task, of course,
Andrew Dubber
what does media mean, in the context of the Swedish media council? Obviously, there’s, there’s film ratings on that. But media, in my head is, you know, as VR and AR as games, it’s music. It’s radio, it’s, you know, it’s very wide. Do you does that encapsulate everything within the Swedish media council?
Anette Novak
I would say that we were I mean, I started two months ago. So one of my first of course, discoveries is that a lot of the legislation that we depend on or that frame our work is very limited to the old legislation. And and Swedish media legislation is very channel oriented, very technically bound, which is the case I think, in many European countries. And we need to get that was also conclusion from the media inquiry that we need to release ourselves from the from those boundaries and become, like, technical, technologically agnostic, so that we can start talking about the effects of media on relationships and know realities, and, and the social contract, instead of just being locked into how do we transmit television programmes to the audience. That’s, that’s not interesting anymore. And less and less, but I think the legislator is, is lagging behind. Unfortunately,
Andrew Dubber
this notion of media effects is really interesting. It’s been really controversial since the 1940s. You know, this allows us well, staff and all that, you know, is there this kind of perception within Sweden, particularly, that if you show people violent things, they become violent themselves? Or is it more sophisticated than that?
Anette Novak
Well, there’s no, I would say, if you go to science, I mean, we have scientists looking at these things. There’s no evidence of what you just said. There’s no evidence that says that there is a causality between those things. We know that that that you can see that there’s a linear relationship between but there’s no research that has shown that if you look at violent programmes, you become violent, we know that there is a higher degree of violent people playing violent games. But we don’t know why it works both ways. So there’s that there’s no proof of that,
Andrew Dubber
I would say and what presumably, I mean, you said protecting young children, particularly presumably, that’s more to do with trauma, then.
Anette Novak
And we the way we, in practice, have interpreted this. And I should be really careful now, because I’ve only been here eight weeks. And these are people who’ve been working with this for decades. So I mustn’t say anything that they say this is wrong. But I think that Sweden very much so is not some countries in the world, bring in morality into this. And and Sweden has definitely not done that. We, we know that there are extreme, extremely violent scenes can hurt children under certain ages, even if they just see them once. as others. It’s a question of how repetitive it is. Like for instance, if we would say, take the image of the very thin woman that doesn’t hurt a child if it sees it once. But if a young woman has seen only those images for a very long time, during her whole childhood, it will skew her image of what is normal. So it’s a very, it’s not as binary, it’s very many nuances to this discussion. But if I should say anything short about it, Sweden, of course, wishes to protect children from damage from damage as we should as parents and caretakers or whatever you want to call it, that we want to take care of our younger generations without stifling any freedom that they might have. And this is a very difficult balance and to to not blocking them from having access to information, which is access to information legislation is part of Swedish constitutions since the 18th century. So it’s extremely important to weigh those against each other and I think that we are rather unique in the world with no other Nordic countries to not bring in morality questions into this, we show a lot of nudity, nudity, even to younger children and we don’t see that as problematic. It’s natural, how people look at something and what people do when they’re naked. It’s not something that we put any any. It’s about parental guidance, of course. And that’s why we have, there’s been a new twist to the Swedish legislation recently, where we say we can take, we can put a lower age limit, but then say, then together with your parent, in order to also say that this is not the state shouldn’t enter into this discussion that much, it’s more about maybe a child, it’s very individual, also how a child and it’s about what the child the child’s capacity and what it has experienced personally, that will make it very difficult to say something general about how a certain movie scene will affect a certain person. But a parent has definitely a role to play in catching any thoughts or debriefing or reactions that might
Andrew Dubber
occur. The distinguishing morality from ethics. For instance, if you talk about social media, as we did before we started this conversation by the idea of forming sort of ethical parameters within which people can do things with with, you know, personal information and those sorts of things. So there’s there’s no morality dimension to this, which legislation, but is there an ethical dimension to it?
Anette Novak
I would say that I mean, first of all, I’m it’s important to say that I’m an non political, civil servant here. So I can I can tell you how the Swedish legislation looks like. And and one aspect that we do have is, of course, that there is an ethical scientifical ethical committee, that if if there’s anything that should be weighed ethically that the researcher considers could have ethical challenges to it, it needs to pass that type of scrutiny before you’re allowed to start, which of course, in certain in innovative in certain, I would say, academic disciplines, like let’s take design, it is difficult, because part of it is actually doing something new. That hasn’t happened before. So it’s, it is it’s kind of a catch 22 situation, sometimes like doing design within let’s say, patient, patient experience within an actual environment makes it very difficult when you have that type of framework. Another another. Part of that is, of course, that we have, we are part of European Union. And the Swedish position at the moment is very much that one wants to work together with European partners, in order not to in all, I mean, if you want to keep Europe together, it’s very important that that is not always drawn apart. And each question that we deal with, and that’s been the current with the past, now we’re waiting for a new government. But the past government’s position has been very much so that we act within the European Union these questions. So GDPR, of course, is one of the one of the stations coming out of this type of discussion, and where the intent of the legislature of course, is to strengthen the users control and awareness. Now one can of course, have a lot of views on such a young legislation and how it will be interpreted, we don’t really know yet there has been no, no rulings that would be guiding us to understand how they will, how it will be interpreted by the courts. But I think that the the movement, of course, so if we look at from our agency’s point of view, where we’re about the empowerment of the user, of course, any legislation that will assist the user in giving them the mandate to be be, we’re gonna say more aware of how they as media users can be exploited and what they can do about it, it’s it’s moving in the right direction.
Andrew Dubber
You talked before about media literacy being very important, and particularly in education. And I know, most legislators internationally, when they talk about media literacy, they mean the ability to read and not necessarily the abilities right. And so this idea of literacy, I find really interesting because this the way in which we communicate the way in which we use these tools, not just to take in information, but to express ourselves I think is very important. And the maturity of a media format is the extent to which you start to get a literature and that are we seeing any new literature’s coming in a new media.
Anette Novak
And I it’s it’s a really good question, but I would say that media information literacy is extremely wide area and is widening as we speak, because it’s it’s also about the digital contents. It’s about understanding power, power logics, business logics within the digital landscape. It’s about understanding how technology can skew perceptions. can skew what your perception of reality is or your perception of a material. In Sweden, we talk a lot about the extended definition of reading, were reading today is also understanding a picture or the movie, meeting the movie and the moving pictures and and many, many, many things more, it’s the gaming world and, and and the immersive worlds that the children meet, or even even us, of course, as adults, so so media and Information Literacy To me, it’s it’s more, it’s an area which has a lot of traction at the moment. But a lot of the people who are in I would say the debate don’t understand how wide it is. They a lot of I think, teachers and librarians that I meet, they talk a lot about source criticism, which is good, but source criticism in their interpretation is very much leaning towards the old media landscape. Source criticism today means that you have to understand that the certain data sources are owned by big conglomerates, that the data you see is been filtered in a way that you don’t understand and you don’t know and it has business logics in it. And one talks a lot about the platform companies, they give you the user experience that you want. But you don’t make informed choices. It’s something that you don’t you there’s no transparency into how the algorithms work, all these things are something that aware media, consumer needs to to learn. And if you don’t know, and if you don’t learn these things, you you cannot be I would claim that you will not be able to, to exercise your your citizenship, you can easily become useful idiot of someone. And I think unfortunately, that some of the forces that that is moving the world at the moment is way ahead of the democratic forces who wants the citizens to be empowered in this sense. They’re making a lot of money on it. And and of course, that’s why it’s important that that we that represent democratic states, and they’re in those positions who wanted to guard the the common good, if I, if I may say so it’s a big word, but still some kind of idea of, we’re doing this for you guys, we want to have expertise so that we can try and make you make you understand what you need to learn.
Andrew Dubber
Is there potential for that to impede innovation in any particular way? I mean, are there things that aren’t being developed? Because there is this kind of caution about effects or or those sorts of things? Or? That’s not your experience?
Anette Novak
And I think that is I think that that some of the technologies that that are being invented as we speak. And I think what you might find a good example is the facial technology, facial recognition technologies. And, and for instance, in that sphere, the the companies in the occidental world, they they face, of course, directly, as soon as they show what they can do, they will face a debate on is that good is should we do that, and are now on the ethical committees and all that which of course, stalls or at least reduces the speed of our innovation capacity, where were the states that only see the what can be which can be used for and they don’t have any ethical argumentation, because that doesn’t enter into their their world picture. They will, they will fund those companies very strongly, and it will just let them move ahead very, and of course, then block that technology within the state. So they will technology wise, they will win. And I would say that they are winning the race at the moment because of this. However, I think that in the long run, I don’t believe that, that I always believe that that love will conquer hate and that freedom will conquer control in the long run. But I think short it within the short term that we can overlook at the moment the negative forces the anti democratic forces using technology against the populations are winning at the moment,
Andrew Dubber
democracy’s losing the battle, but you know what?
Anette Novak
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, the little battles at the moment, but I think the war the war is about citizenship and freedom and and that is stronger forces in the long run and technology. I think also that demo democracy, the the democratic powers are stronger. And but they’ve been behind in this because they haven’t seen how they can exploit this and they’re not organised together. Because that’s part of democracy, it should be fragmented. There should be lots of different ways of seeing things and freedom is also through no speech makes those voices very fragmented, whereas the anti democratic forces are have been able to organise themselves and thus, they have moved ahead for a while.
Andrew Dubber
This whole area of media and technology and you know, content if you like and literacy in that it touches on art touches on science touches on policy industry, you know, design research all of these things, how well do those things work together? Or are you having different types of conversations and differences? That’s an
Anette Novak
excellent question. And I think it’s about I think it’s definitely you know, the answer yourself, it’s about we are in silos and academic academia is in silos, governments are in silos, and the future is more matrix, networked and flatter organisations. So there is a challenge here, which we have to, we have to be able to overbridge if we have to do something about this. But there’s also the difficulty coming from innovation in innovation, you don’t want to, if you have a Research Institute, which is, let’s say, focused on AI, they want to have deep knowledge on AI, they don’t want to use half of their work time to coordinate with others, because they might lose them, they lose a lot of the edge that they have. So there’s also it’s not as easy to say, let’s change the silos for the matrix and the network. It’s much more complicated than that. But it is a it’s a shift in I would say in world history where we need to understand how we’re going to do that, that transformation without losing the speed in the edge of each area. And that each area should be pure in their thinking, and still be able to communicate with the others. But I believe that media to go back to your very initiated question on media definitions, which are not adequate, the way they that legislation is written today, very often attached to the old distribution techniques, where we need to find new media definitions which media in a sense, also, if you Mark Deuze says, We live in media life. I mean, how can media at all be used? I would say in a future where everything is media where everything is connected, and everything is part of the same world. I think that’s difficult. But yeah, how to move the how to move the silos into working together in more trance, more cross disciplinary means and groups. I think that’s we have been working in those environments, all of us, I think, and there’s a strength in that there’s a tremendous strength in in moving the thought, when you get inspiration from many different areas. But to to create, create sustained activities. Like for instance, let’s go back to a meeting information literacy. It’s easier to do that in a product organisation we do projecting close it down, you do something else, when the state has decided that the population needs to lift its understanding within this domain, it’s something that has to be sustained over generations, it has to have a structure. And I think that’s something that I’m thinking a lot about these days, like how can we take the best out of the trance, the cross disciplinary, agile organisations but still not lose the the sustained effort and the long term the 50 year planning horizons and things like that, that you have to deal with when you deal with population education?
Andrew Dubber
50 years is a long time you’ve been doing this two months? How? How will you know you’ve done a good job?
Anette Novak
Um, oh, god, that’s the first question. I hope that we can that we can be a facilitator to to create a movement where a lot of actors move, start moving in the same direction. I don’t think that we can. coordination is not no longer about putting everybody together and synchronising and becoming efficient. It’s about finding ways to to create movements, where many, many different from different disciplines from different agencies from different what not that we actually move in the same direction that we see the same picture of the success, which is median information literacy, what is that? What do what we need to know, in the future in order to not break down the land winnings of democracy? I mean, we are one of the when it comes to media illustration, I think we have the oldest freedom of expression legislation in the world from 1766. Let’s not break that down. How can we how can we mould that into the digital current and future without losing what we’ve gained so far of knowledge, because that’s what’s happened. I think in this it’s like a bump on that. That’s what I would like to be a little part of doing
Andrew Dubber
that. Thanks very much for your time. Thank you. Anette Novak, Director General of the Swedish media Council. And that’s the MTF podcast if you have any thoughts about any of this, and that is the whole reason we do this, please do give us a shot where Music Tech Fest on Twitter, Music Tech Fest on Facebook Music Tech Fest on Instagram, and Music Tech Fest on LinkedIn. And I’m Dubber at Music Tech Fest dotnet. If you want to drop me a note and say hi. And of course, if you haven’t subscribed, please do. And also take a moment to send the song to the one person you think should really hear it. We’d really appreciate it and so will they all the best and have a great week. Cheers.
