Today's Edition
Khaled Al Khawaldeh (Abu Dhabi)
In an age of increasingly saturated information, where every person with a phone can effectively become a content creator, and AI threatens to flood our servers with ever more unverifiable material, can the traditional forms of information exchange hold up?
This was the question pondered by an esteemed panel of renowned experts at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Summit on Sunday in front of a crowd of enthusiastic creatives at the Manarat Al Saadiyat.
“It is a challenge to the mainstream media. We have two faults, first we are too boring, and second we are too negative,” Wolfgang Fengler, CEO of World Data Lab, told the panel.
Fengler was responding to a series of questions about the massive influx of new media on applications such as TikTok, and the impact that this could have on decaying the quality of information exchange.
In Fengler’s opinion, the issue is not the increasingly democratised nature of content creation, but the lack of innovation in established media. Having launched population.io as well as worldpoverty.io, two real time interactive sites that tell the story of the planet’s population growth and fight against poverty in real time, Fengler shared his insights into the power of using innovative techniques and big data to tell important stories.
“If you look at our world emissions clock, you will find there is a good story along with the bad, as 43 countries have declining emissions,” he said.
“We don’t need to repeat that there is a climate crisis; we know that we need to find a better way to tell the story.”
This was echoed by Nanjira Sambuli, a Technology and International Affairs Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who said that there is a need to curate a more diverse range of content and viewpoints, which are currently not being captured enough in mainstream media.
“We have a saying in Kenya, stories are just data with soul…We need to listen more to these voices,” she said.
Anthony Gaffen, CEO and Creative Director of the award-winning Atlantic Productions Group, had a more critical opinion of the rise of hyper short form content. As a highly successful documentary maker himself, he believed the short form content of today is decaying the art of storytelling.
“So much now is not about storytelling, it’s about sensationalism… people actually have a long attention span,” he said.
“Storytelling is a craft; we don’t want to lose it,” Gaffen added.
Reflecting on his time working with David Attenborough on nature documentaries, he said he did not believe that people truly craved instantly gratifying 30 second clips and believed long form content still garnered audiences when done correctly.
“Not everyone has the attention span of a newt,” he remarked.
Gaffen believes that immersive technologies would be the next frontier to bring back more engaging and detailed content. Agreeing with Fengler’s points about the need to innovate, he predicted that a flood of technologies in augmented and virtual realities would usher in a new age of storytelling.
“In the next two to three years, we are going to go through a rapid change, we will go from the smartphone generation to the immersive generation”’ he said.
“This opens the way to a very different type of storytelling.”
