Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter works towards creating a general portrait of the state of news journalism today. Following Raymond Williams's analysis of the historical transformation of forms of electronic mediation, ...
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This chapter works towards creating a general portrait of the state of news journalism today. Following Raymond Williams's analysis of the historical transformation of forms of electronic mediation, it offers five reflections on how news journalism has been impacted both by the development and institutionalization of digital communication and information technology, and by the intensified legitimation of late and neoliberal worldviews in the past quarter century. It discusses in particular how the rebalancing of the radial and lateral potentialities of electronic communication with the institutionalization of the Internet and the popularization of mobile telephony has massively impacted and destabilized the mid-twentieth-century regime of news journalism.Less
This chapter works towards creating a general portrait of the state of news journalism today. Following Raymond Williams's analysis of the historical transformation of forms of electronic mediation, it offers five reflections on how news journalism has been impacted both by the development and institutionalization of digital communication and information technology, and by the intensified legitimation of late and neoliberal worldviews in the past quarter century. It discusses in particular how the rebalancing of the radial and lateral potentialities of electronic communication with the institutionalization of the Internet and the popularization of mobile telephony has massively impacted and destabilized the mid-twentieth-century regime of news journalism.
Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This introductory chapter briefly examines the practices, institutions, and implications of newsmaking at a time that is equally imprinted by the hegemony of neoliberal politics and worldviews ...
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This introductory chapter briefly examines the practices, institutions, and implications of newsmaking at a time that is equally imprinted by the hegemony of neoliberal politics and worldviews brought about by the diverse institutionalization of digital communications technology. News journalists of today are engaged in the process of redefining their senses of agency, expertise, and authority given the new ecology of forces. The chapter suggests that digital news is an interlinked constellation of differently scaled nodes (organizations) that interact via variously sized and speeded channels to connect a galaxy of newsmakers and news users. It concludes with a discussion of the methods used in the book's study and an explanation of why Germany was chosen as the center of study.Less
This introductory chapter briefly examines the practices, institutions, and implications of newsmaking at a time that is equally imprinted by the hegemony of neoliberal politics and worldviews brought about by the diverse institutionalization of digital communications technology. News journalists of today are engaged in the process of redefining their senses of agency, expertise, and authority given the new ecology of forces. The chapter suggests that digital news is an interlinked constellation of differently scaled nodes (organizations) that interact via variously sized and speeded channels to connect a galaxy of newsmakers and news users. It concludes with a discussion of the methods used in the book's study and an explanation of why Germany was chosen as the center of study.
Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.003.0003
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter explores, T-Online, an online news portal that does little of its own reporting but specializes in recrafting and recirculating news agency content. It investigates new modes of user ...
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This chapter explores, T-Online, an online news portal that does little of its own reporting but specializes in recrafting and recirculating news agency content. It investigates new modes of user feedback that are characteristic of online publicity and how the growing (spectral) presence of the end user in news organizations has unsettled traditional relations of journalistic expertise and authority. Using the news coverage of the crash of Air France Flight 447 (AF 447), it comments on the practices, self-understandings, temporalities, and interfaces of an online news department. The extra journalistic labor, attention, and coordination that AF 447 demanded illuminated more routine issues of sourcing, timing, feedback, competition, and audience that are vital for understanding online news journalism.Less
This chapter explores, T-Online, an online news portal that does little of its own reporting but specializes in recrafting and recirculating news agency content. It investigates new modes of user feedback that are characteristic of online publicity and how the growing (spectral) presence of the end user in news organizations has unsettled traditional relations of journalistic expertise and authority. Using the news coverage of the crash of Air France Flight 447 (AF 447), it comments on the practices, self-understandings, temporalities, and interfaces of an online news department. The extra journalistic labor, attention, and coordination that AF 447 demanded illuminated more routine issues of sourcing, timing, feedback, competition, and audience that are vital for understanding online news journalism.
Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, ...
More
News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? This book offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is an account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information. The book's findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based “screenwork” (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon the book puts forth the notion of “digital liberalism”—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. The book offers scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.Less
News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? This book offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is an account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information. The book's findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based “screenwork” (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon the book puts forth the notion of “digital liberalism”—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. The book offers scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.
Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.003.0006
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This epilogue returns to the question of how studying the impact of digital information and communication on contemporary news journalism brings into focus a parallel legacy of digital mediation and ...
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This epilogue returns to the question of how studying the impact of digital information and communication on contemporary news journalism brings into focus a parallel legacy of digital mediation and digital thinking in anthropology. It first explores the concept of “digital reason” through Sigmund Freud, examining how digital thinking has seeped into the foundations of epistemic activity in anthropology and the human sciences; indeed in discovering the ways that it has informed entire theoretical paradigms and analytical styles without disclosing its true intuitive basis. It then turns to the mechanization of computation in the early twentieth-century which led to the information theory. The theory paved the way for a new phase in the industrialization of computation and communication. The chapter concludes with a discussion of when the first signs of digital reason become visible in anthropological knowledge and how this eventually led to the study of the informatics preconscious.Less
This epilogue returns to the question of how studying the impact of digital information and communication on contemporary news journalism brings into focus a parallel legacy of digital mediation and digital thinking in anthropology. It first explores the concept of “digital reason” through Sigmund Freud, examining how digital thinking has seeped into the foundations of epistemic activity in anthropology and the human sciences; indeed in discovering the ways that it has informed entire theoretical paradigms and analytical styles without disclosing its true intuitive basis. It then turns to the mechanization of computation in the early twentieth-century which led to the information theory. The theory paved the way for a new phase in the industrialization of computation and communication. The chapter concludes with a discussion of when the first signs of digital reason become visible in anthropological knowledge and how this eventually led to the study of the informatics preconscious.
