DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS

As the saying goes, long-time CBS TV news anchor Walter Cronkite would look into the camera a few seconds before he went on air, shove is coffee cup out of view and meet the nation-wide audience with words like these: Hello, I am Walter Cronkite. This is CBS News and this is the world tonight. That and many other worthwhile insights can be found in a book that by now is forgotten by many, but still retains a status as a classic for students of US media: David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be. It was written at a time when what was reported on TV was considered true, trustworthy, believable, relevant, informative. The world was broadcast into the living rooms, first in black and white and then in color. First among the nation-wide conglomerates was the mighty CBS – Columbia Broadcasting System.

About the same time that CBS was gearing up to become a nation-wide broadcasting company, researchers at DARPA in California were making headway in the area of satellite communication, envisioning the linking of mainframe computers and rethinking defense strategies from the point of view of a decentralized network of information relaying data centers.That decentralization for defense was in part borne out of models on computer networking, where the sum of networked nodes would be stronger than a single or a few hubs.

Is there a relevance to be noted, for our discussions on the digital transformation of news and journalism? Let us consider some more:

Science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, were contemplating extra-terrestrial life, virtual reality, human existence in an AGI –  Artificial General Intelligence – future. Long before Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Terminator had franchised the popular perception of future robotics, scholar and fiction author Clarke had begun to reflect on the human condition in a high-tech world. Human society has always employed technologies for communication. So again: Is there something here of relevance to our thinking about the digital disruption of journalism?

Clarke  was not alone: The “three laws of robotics” – that came to penetrate into robotics research – came from scholar and sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, in a series of novels set in a very distant future but raising quite contemporary concerns. What is it that gets transformed when advanced technology re-structures and augments human interaction?

What happens when human intelligence is out-competed – if that is what is happening – by artificial intelligence? What happens when boundaries between reality and technically produced virtual reality starts to blur, if that indeed is what is happening?

Is that what is happening? Is science fiction becoming science fact? Does it affect our understandings, assumptions and model ideas when it comes to truth?

An eerie reminder of our contemporary condition of a COVID pandemic was articulated by both Clarke and Asimov already in the 1950’s:

Today we call it “social distancing”. Late in his career Clarke, returned to the narrative of his 2001 A Space Oddyssey. What he envisaged in that futures fable was this: As people moved into space stations for entire life-spans, they were incapable of returning to Earth, resulting in a kind of social distancing from family and friends, connecting only virtually.

Asimov went further: In a series of “space and future murder mysteries” a New York policeman, Elijah Bailey, visits the planet Aurora, settled by “Earthmen” who refrained from having “Earthmen” visit, due to contamination fears. Aurora was more advanced. People lived longer. They had perfected a kind of human-like robot that more or less ran Aurora. The planet Solaria had gone further. Solaria in Asimov´s story-telling is a planet of 20 000 people and many-fold that number of robots. On Solaria every human being is isolated on their own estates, meeting others only virtually on large wall-to-wall screens. The robots were the majority. They looked like humans. And they never rebelled.

Elijah Baily was barely tolerated. He never met a single on of the Solarians in person. Asimov marveled at the idea of human beings being capable of remaining in isolation and still retaining their humanity.

If they did. That was Asimov’s philosophical question.

What makes this fascinating for reflections on the digital disruption of journalism is one simple thing as far as GjC dialogues and reflections is concerned: Time: These fables were written in the 1950’s, in the early age of robotics, space travel, satellite communication, visual mass media, and intelligent automation. And they were written with a perspective that is quite philosophical: The human condition. Clearly we can point to Fritz Lang and the classic movie Metropolis, from 1927. Equally interesting would be the link to Carel and Joseph Kapek’s Czech theater play R.U.R. from where we have the theme of ‘robot vs. human’. The Czech word ‘robota’ translates into English as ‘forced labor’. And in R.U.R. the robots rebelled.

Sound familiar? Do we recognize the theme? On Solaria, the robots did not rebel. In a society with advanced technology and comprehensive AGI, the robots were servants, forced labor. Check any documentary today on AI and AGI – the question is neither irrelevant nor easily answered. What is in store? Do we really think we have the conceptual language in which to discuss future journalism? What key questions might we ask, informed by fables and distant futures? There might be none, but then again there might be many…

From then to now – from fiction to fact

As a scholar of journalism one might perhaps ask why this long introduction to a contemporary concern with challenges and ailments facing journalism as we know it? Might we not want to retain a more practical, down-to-earth and concrete conversation?

A first answer would be that ‘journalism as we know it’ does not exist and never has, other than as an imagined common consensus on what journalism is.What fables and fictions from the future might add of value is perhaps a means of understanding ourselves right now in the contrasting perspective of questions that are more perennial, transcending times, places, situations of the present, situations of the recent past or futures now in the coming?

Roughly speaking, the word ‘journal’ means a ‘report of the day’. It is what journalism does. It reports the day. But it does so in ways defined by culture, convention, history, economics, politics, and technology. Sometimes the very far future adds color, as does the very distant past.

Accordingly, when we speak of the ongoing digital transformation of society and how it affects journalism, we are not only referring to impacts on journalism in terms of organization, content, relay, and consumption: We are, more profoundly, referring to antecedent factors, latent catalysis and institutional transformations of the roles and functions of journalism in society. Distance provides a sharp lens on some issues, although maybe not on all: It might be that we address the normative foundations of what journalism is and can be a bit more nuanced if we let that narrative imagination loose?

A few elaborations

Let us consider a few relevant illustrations. We might list them as:

1. 1: The challenge of shifting boundaries
2. 2: The collapse of time
3. 3: Networked man
4. 4: ‘Robotomized’ journalism

Boundaries in flux

Words like boundaries, borders and territory are typically geography-related words, as is the word topography. Topos, in ancient rhetoric, is also a word for a ‘conceptual geography’, if you will. And what it refers to for us in this particular context is the simple fact that terms like ‘local’, ‘national’, and ‘international’ or ‘foreign’ have ceased to have the kind of meaning that they once had.

In her well-known book Making News, from the 1970’s, Gaye Tuchman outlined a theory of ‘news beats’, of ‘framing’, and of ‘the social construction of reality’, which we find parallels of in Mark Fishman’s work, as well as in Herbert Gans‘ classic book Deciding What’s News. All of these dimensions concern conceptual topography articulated in news selection and presentation. News beats refer back to boundaries, of course. Boundaries that are set through culture, convention and the implicit rules and regulations involving how journalism organizes itself. Those kinds of boundaries we can understand and we can also perhaps appreciate at some level how these mentioned works combine to give us a sense of journalism as a culturally ‘bounded’ and ‘territorialized’ epistemology. We also speak of ‘the north’ and ‘the south’ when typifying journalism realities and journalism research on global imbalance, for instance. Is it not the same thing? Applying categories to understand certain phenomena which in turn presupposes and understanding of the categories and where they come from?

There is yet another aspect of the ‘boundaries in flux’ issue that addresses something other than the questions of how journalism is organized and the resulting expressions of that organized co-production. It addresses the concept of ‘frames’ in quite familiar ways, from Robert Entman, Shanto Iyengar, and others.To frame something in the ‘local’ lens, in the ‘national’ or an ‘international’ lens might be what for Entman gets defined as a ‘cascading frame’. Once the narrative is set along a paradigmatic axis like that, a lot of things just follow: In the words of Stuart Hall a story gets encoded and no encoding is possible without an implicit or explicit frame. In the words of Benedict Anderson, the ‘nation’ is also an aspect of an ‘imagined community‘. So the question becomes what we imagine when the local, national and international meld together in ways that defy established conventions and cultural practice? Considering what John Urry refers to as ‘the new mobilities’, one question for future journalism research is how one frames the locations, spaces, places, and temporal recongifurations that are fact of our contemporary globalized world.

The question of time

One of the considerations to the above that we already have and have had for a long time, comes from another wave of ‘mobilty’ affecting the boundaries of a time past: Robert E. Park’s studies of immigrant media in the US Mid-West. It might be an apt reminder that globalization is neither new nor unresearched in earlier times. Park was a sociologist who gave word and conceptual meaning to the life and human conditions of early 20th century immigrants in the US seeking to make sense of new lands and circumstances.

Clearly, time and distance ought to be spoken of differently now compared to then. However, it is also clear that – now, just like one century back – when someone moves and re-establishes a life somewhere else, key aspects of time gets ‘frozen’: Memory detached from its origins is still memory, but ‘fixated’ like a still photo from a film — whether in color or in black and white, it is still a fixated image. Accordingly, a future challenge and topic for journalism research and investigation might be those sociological conceptions of memory.

From this we might ask our selves how journalism research becomes relevant in studies of collective memory? What does it have to do with news production, text, articulation, relay, and consumption?

There are surely many answers to this that might be pursued in the context of GjC later, but a short entry would be this: Technological change allow for a completely different kind of time, memory and spatial mobility compared to the ‘migrants’ of older times, but ‘fixation’ of memory is still a fact and therefore just as interesting an element of journalism research now as earlier. An apt case to illustrate could be the roles that are currently played by East-African diasporas around the world, defining their ‘home’ in part through the lens of the media and in part through the lens of combined social relations and articulated memory. These migrants left home but are much more linked with their past, through the media. However, what is left to individual and collective memorization and remembrance is the ‘non-articulated’, real as it is because it impacts on actions.

Half way through 2020 an Oromo protest occurred in Minnesota, USA, that aptly illustrates the matter. An event in Ethiopia fuels a local community in the United States, in ways not possible a century earlier. Technology changes some conditions of connectivity but the fact of memories of home is still the releasing cause. It is up to us in journalism research to conceptualize how the old and the more recent aspects of time can be brought into research focus.

Networked man

The illustration above is a reminder that we are, as Manuel Castells  aptly put it, networked. Again we might ask whether we are probing adequately the concept of networked man – not just networked society?

An interesting essay by Geoffrey Glass is available on the Creative Commons license, here. What it reflects, besides its many qualities, is the ways in which our conceptions of society leads us to models of society. But what about ‘models of man’? If we have models of society why not also models of man, networked man? We have been networked since the dawn of Adam and Eve, but how is the condition of networked exisence different in our day and age? And how does it figure into our journalism research? We might think we know a news audience when we see one. We have ages of research available exploring nationwide audiences, diaspora audiences, global events audiences, and so on. Might it be that our networked times also invites different ways and means of categorizing who we are?

Clearly, there is an agenda here to conceptualize and develop within the GjC dialogues. We are perhaps faced with what C.Wright Mills once articulated as our ‘sociological imagination’. Bringing journalism research a bit further away from journalism and a bit more deeply into society, might result in some new theoretically rich reflections?

Robotomization reconsidered

While it is not really a word, ‘robotomization’ is certainly a scenario that possibly could be made to stand for a particular condition in our thinking about journalism. Today, robots can do many things. Among those things is writing a news story. Hardly a noteworthy phenomenon anymore, key functions of journalism are robotized and have been for a long time. It happens at many levels. Today, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account can set up a relay of information that re-generates titles, photos, texts, formats, references, likes and reactions. Much of this too familiar and too researched to warrant any claim to recency or novelty. Other aspects are not, however:

One one level, the word play on ‘lobotomization’ is both cheap and perhaps too suggestive, but if we were to consider the meaning of films like Metropolis or theater plays like R.U.R. are we not talking about scenarios in which technology intersects with humanity in pathological ways? Like a pick hammer to the brain under the eye lid; or the (metaphorical) incarceration behind technology doors slammed shut; cognition affected; emotion affected: At what level and at what time does critique of the digital electroshock of technology on individuals and society set in? Reading Paul Virilio or Jaques Ellul might be for the few and the tech-skeptics, or possibly not?

In journalism research it is commonplace to think of ‘critique’ in the vein of political economy, the spectrum of power relations at play, economic interests and concerns with power. Critical Theory has and has had its day, for a long time. However, that aspect of Critical Theory that addresses the future of creativity, art, artful expression, individuality, beauty, quality and mass delusion — it might be a thought to make issues such as these key in GjC dialogues and reflections?

‘Dave — we have a problem’:

A documentary on the future of artificial intelligence, available on key streaming services, reflects on how Stanley Kubric envisaged the future, neglecting the fact that it was Arthur C. Clarke and not Kubric who was behind it the storyline of 2001 A Space Oddessy. A small fact, but one attesting to how easily key facts and contexts get lost – it is a human thing, and it ripples down. In the book as in the film, the spaceship pilot Dave  responded to the sophisticated computer HAL by going outside the air craft attempting to figure out a way by which he could short-circuit that fantastic speaking machine. He was literally hanging on by a thin wire. HAL (Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer) was about to take over the spaceship, for perfectly rational and nonsensical reasons. But Dave made a different kind of sense, human sense and sense of purpose. Hal was about to sever the wire, and how that story ends we might leave open for now.

To end with a question: What happens when and if we disentangle journalism from the tragic scientist “Dr. Chandra” who loved his machine H.A.L. in Clarke’s books and Stanley Kubric’s celebrated movie?

If and when we think about the mission of journalism, we might do so from the point of view that the mission of journalism is defined by civic purposes and not technological rationality or efficiency: In which case some of that which we today call journalism is not, and some of that which we today do not recognize as journalism, actually is. Journalism, and the journey, has purpose and a purpose that also refers to an end goal: An enlightened, civil society – neither north nor south, national nor global, but social. In all its purposeful humanity.

Let the GjC discussion take its course. And let’s see whether something comes out of these reflections.