Closing The Journalism Parenthesis News
Closing The Journalism Parenthesis News
Closing The Journalism Parenthesis News
Tom Pettitt
Cultural Sciences Institute and Centre for Medieval Literature
University of Southern Denmark
This is a draft paper developed from notes used in presentations delivered less formally under the following
auspices:
October 16, 2013: Columbia University, New York, Graduate School of Journalism;
October 17, 2013: City University of New York, Graduate School of Journalism, NYC
Entrepreneurial Journalism and Media Meetup
and supplied with select documentation. The illustrations include selections from PowerPoint slides
prepared for the above occasions. It will be subject to revision in the light of further research and comments
received.
ORIGINAL VERSION UPLOADED: 28 October 2013
THIS VERSION UPLOADED: 31 October 2013 (following purely technical corrections)
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
What follows is intended as a contribution to discussion of the Future of News, not least
with reference to institutional news mediation in general and the profession of journalism
in particular. It is offered by a contributor whose qualifications as a ‘FON-thinker’ have
been acquired incidentally to the study of medieval culture, its Renaissance
transformations and its survivals in Folklore, not least with regard to early and popular
forms of news.1
I have for example studied folksongs, collected from largely illiterate singers in rural
England and Scotland (and Appalachia and the Ozarks) in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, on the assumption they were survivals from or continuations of medieval
tradition. But while this may indeed apply to the singing contexts (domestic pastime;
social entertainment) and probably the melodies too, the words of the overwhelming
majority of the songs were composed by professional, ‘hack writers’, published on single
sheets by emphatically commercial printers, and sold in vast numbers, thousands or
hundreds of thousands of copies of individual songs, by street vendors in the cities and by
itinerant peddlers at country fairs and other gatherings. Emerging in the late sixteenth
century and expanding rapidly in the seventeenth, such ‘broadside ballads’ are challenged
only by the popular theatre of Shakespeare and Marlowe for the accolade of the earliest of
the ‘mass media’ in the English-speaking world, and having been purchased, sung and
memorized, many such broadside ballads were passed on from generation to generation
over decades and centuries independently of the printed originals, effectively modulating
into folklore.
1
For some of the papers covered in the following, see my production at
http://southerndenmark.academia.edu/ThomasPettitt, in the sections on ”Folk Songs and Ballads”, and
”Folk Tales and Legends”, respectively.
2
More specifically, a large number of such ballads were narrative, and a goodly proportion
of these in turn were (or purported to be) news ballads. Like the tabloid newspapers
which ultimately usurped this function in the Victorian period, they focused on
sensational events with a strong personal interest, typically violent crimes (often with
sexual aspects) and the trials and executions to which they led. Operating in the zone
between the more serious newspapers and spoken rumor, such news ballads (sung to
established popular tunes) were for three centuries the dominant medium for the
reporting of news to a popular semi-literate and illiterate audience.
If still with the ultimate purpose of discerning mechanisms that might have been
operative in earlier times (say the reporting of events by medieval minstrels), I have
subjected such material to investigations qualifying to one degree or another as research
in early journalism:
2) juxtaposing the song(s) of a given case with other (judicial; journalistic) sources to
establish how much and how the popular, commercial auspices and the song format
affected the reporting of the event (typically by bringing it into line with an
established, successful paradigm and selecting the most dramatic personal
confrontations)
3) juxtaposing, with the original, printed text, the words of a song as recovered from
‘folk’ tradition decades or centuries later, often in more than one version. The
changes, far from haphazard or arbitrary, follow distinct patterns which register the
mechanisms of the collective processing or ‘reading’ of news by its recipients.
After the emergence of institutional news mediation, there has of course been a vigorous
interaction between the two delivery systems, with contemporary legends originating, or
3
being reported, in ‘the press’, but (predictably in the light of what is to come) the Internet
has provided a particularly welcoming environment for anxiety legends.2
Parenthetical Perspectives
Any insights into pre- or sub-journalistic news production, mediation and reception these
and other engagements with medieval culture and folklore may have achieved can have
potential relevance for current and future developments in the light of Professor Lars Ole
Sauerberg’s elegant and provocative suggestion that our verbal culture more generally is
in the process of emerging from a four-centuries long period of print-domination which
may usefully be characterized as the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’.3 Understood correctly (in
what is still the predominant British English sense) as meaning an intruded statement
which for a while interrupts an already ongoing statement (as opposed to the punctuation
marks signaling its opening and close – the more normal American usage),4 ‘parenthesis’
captures better than any rival metaphor the paradoxical duality of this developmental
trajectory: for while the beginning of the inserted statement cuts off the progress of the
first, main statement, this latter is resumed when the parenthesis ends. The implication
for scholarly investigation is that the two media revolutions opening and closing the
parenthesis can be usefully juxtaposed for their reciprocal enlightenment, not merely
because they are of commensurate moment, but because the second revolution, in some
significant ways, is reversing the first. And then the conditions ultimately resulting from
the closing of the parenthesis, despite the technological advances involved, will amount in
many ways to a restoration of conditions obtaining prior to its opening. The implication is
that knowledge of or insight into communication and cultural mediation before the
Gutenberg Parenthesis may help to understand or predict the media environment (re-)
emerging as it closes. This also encompasses the segment of cultural mediation known as
news, together with the media technology (including its servants, the journalists) by
which it is achieved: for we may be living through the closing of a Journalism Parenthesis
too. Hence the temerity of a medievalist cum folklorist addressing academic Schools of
Journalism, but of course all of this applies equally in the opposite direction, and after this
brief sojourn among you, I shall return to my familiar haunts hopefully with answers the
medieval material cannot provide, and certainly with questions I would not otherwise
have thought of asking.
2
Jan Fernback, ”Legends on the net: an examination of computer-mediated communication as a locus
of oral culture”, New Media and Society. 5.1 (2003): 29-45.
3
For the current authoritative statement of Prof. Sauerberg and his colleagues on the meaning of the
Gutenberg Parenthesis and its implications, see
http://www.sdu.dk/en/Om_SDU/Institutter_centre/Ikv/Forskning/Forskningsprojekter/Gutenberg_proj
ekt/PositionPaper. Discrepancies between my model and theirs will emerge in what follows. Several
of my earlier presentations and publications are accessible at or via
http://southerndenmark.academia.edu/ThomasPettitt/THE-GUTENBERG-PARENTHESIS. For a
survey and some critical responses, see my “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital
Technologies”, Lecture and Discussion in Comparative Media Studies Forum Series, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1 April 2010, http://web.mit.edu/comm-
forum/forums/gutenberg_parenthesis.html.
4
i.e., thus far, in the sense relevant here, this sentence has deployed two parentheses, not four.
4
Emerging under the auspices of Literary Studies, and although extended by the present
writer to folk tradition and mass media, the Gutenberg Parenthesis concept has not, prior
to preparations for this current expedition, been systematically extended by its originators
to news mediation and journalism. An interview for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab
in 2010 5 has received considerable internet attention, but it was the victim’s first ever
recorded interview, and the responses were off the cuff: luckily Megan Garber selected for
uploading only the brief segment in which I was anywhere near coherent, and
accompanied it with a clear and concise summary. Better prepared for was the interview
with myself and Prof. Sauerberg conducted by Dean Starkman, and subsequently
published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2013: It did not focus specifically on
news and journalism until towards the end, however. 6
Meanwhile, in the period since the concept started to achieve international attention in
2007, a few scholars from within Journalism Studies and/or practicing journalists have
drawn attention to its potential implications. In addition to Dean Starkman (who may
have thought at an early stage that we were actually welcoming the developments
described or predicted),7 the Gutenberg Parenthesis has been repeatedly and legitimately
invoked, in the context of his own agenda for the future of journalism, by Jeff Jarvis,
whose discussions have done much to bring it to wider public attention.8 In one of the
earliest responses, Clyde Bentley, of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute,
University of Missouri, found it an “unnerving but plausible theory”,9 and in one of the
most recent, Katharine Viner, Deputy Editor at The Guardian and Editor in Chief of the
all-digital Guardian Australia, invoked it to open an eloquent and widely appreciated
survey and analysis of “The Rise of the Reader: Journalism in the Age of the Open Web”,
5
Megan Garber, “The Gutenerg Parenthesis: Thomas Pettitt on parallels between the pre-print era and
our own Internet age”, Nieman Journalism Lab, http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/the-gutenberg-
parenthesis-thomas-pettitt-on-parallels-between-the-pre-print-era-and-our-own-internet-age/.
6
“The future is medieval. A discussion with the scholars behind the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’, a
sweeping theory of digital – and journalism – transformation”. Interview by Dean Starkman, “The
Business Audit”, Columbia Journalism Review, 7 June 2013.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_future_is_medieval.php?page=all
7
Dean Starkman, “Confidence Game. The limited vision of the new gurus”, Columbia Journalism
Review (Nov/Dec. 2011), http://www.cjr.org/essay/confidence_game.php?page=all
8
For example “New Molecules”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/10/11/new-molecules/; “Who
says our way is the right way?” http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/11/21/who-says-our-way-is-the-
right-way/, also reproduced at Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/who-says-
our-way-is-the-r_b_786534.html See also “Digital first: what it means for journalism”, The Guardian,
26 June 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/26/digital-first-what-means-journalism?INTCMP=SRCH.
Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) pp. 91-2.
9
Clyde Bentley, “Parenthetically Speaking”, rji, 26 July 2010,
http://www.rjionline.org/parenthetically-speaking.
5
It is widely agreed that journalism in general and newspaper journalism in particular are
facing a crisis of considerable dimensions, and Ross Dawson has prepared and published
a frightening “... Newspaper Extinction Timeline for every country in the world”,11 which
suggests that the newspaper as we know it will have disappeared in the USA by 2017, in
Denmark by 2023, and in Argentina by 2039, after which it seems anyone intending to
make or continue a career in this sort of journalism will need to learn Mongolian.
This is encouraging, except that it transpires the “influence of the past in the present”,
whose exploration will “reverse the present- and future-centric perspectives of
most accounts of the newspaper crisis” is taken to reside in the analog technologies.
‘History’ means the 1950’s, in accordance with the norm in Media Studies generally of
perceiving radio and television, records and film as the ‘Old Media’ with which our
‘New Media’ can be compared and contrasted. Applying the Gutenberg Parenthesis
idea to the Future of News deploys instead what may be termed the ‘Deep History’ of
media technologies, not merely beyond digital to analog, but beyond analog to print;
beyond print to the alphabet and writing; beyond the alphabet and writing to media
pre-history, the technological zero option of the human voice and memory. And
paradoxically the further we go back, the further we are seeing into the Future of News,
for the journalism era was not merely an ‘era’ or a ‘phase’, as correctly perceived by Jay
Rosen,13 it was a parenthesis, and if it is ending we are in some ways picking up where
we left off.
10
The Guardian. 9 Oct., 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-of-
the-reader-katharine-viner-an-smith-lecture
11
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/10/launch_of_newsp.html
12
New Media Society 14.8 (2012): 1375-1394.
13
“The Journalists Formerly known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation”, Press Think,
19 Sept,m 2010, http://pressthink.org/2010/09/the-journalists-formerly-known-as-the-media-my-
advice-to-the-next-generation/.
6
The Model
Communication Technologies
Firstly, and obviously, it is asserted that media history in a given society can usefully be
periodized by the arrival of new communication technologies. But while schematic
presentations may imply that a new, higher technology displaces an earlier, lower one, the
reality is clearly that it more often displaces an earlier medium from primacy in some,
significant, functions, and altogether provokes adjustment to a new configuration in what
has always (from the moment speech supplemented gesticulation) been a poly-media
environment.
Cumulative Culminations
Secondly, some of such reconfigurations qualify as revolutions, but these are invariably
cumulative, resulting from the quantitative and qualitative affordances of the new
technology itself, and their interaction with those already in place. The ‘print’ revolution
is therefore so qualified not only on the basis of what was new and special about print, but
also, for example, its enabling the fulfillment of the potential of the alphabet, the codex
(aka ‘book’) and paper, all of which had been in use for centuries or millennia. The
‘Internet’ revolution will correspondingly comprise the cumulative effect of the Internet
itself and the way it fulfilled the potential of digital technology and earlier electronic
media. And while such complex reconfigurations take time to work themselves out, it is
nonetheless possible to identify moments of culmination (watersheds; lock in points;
points of no return) when it is retrospectively evident (but often also acknowledged by
contemporaries) that decisive change has occurred, as measured in quantitative terms
(the extent to which a new delivery system is adopted) and/or qualitative (the
significance of the cultural systems into which that adoption has penetrated). The Print
Revolution might be said to have reached such a cumulative culmination when the
number of copies of printed books passed (ca 1500?) or tripled (ca 1600?) the number of
manuscript codices copied during the preceding millennium, or when print erupted into
significant cultural systems such as pastime and entertainment (printed narratives;
songbooks), or of course news mediation (those printed news ballads discussed above),
both pointing to the early seventeenth century. In the case of the Internet Revolution, the
cumulative culmination under many headings can be roughly located around 2000
(symbolized by the panic about the ‘millennium bug’ – the first internet urban legend?),
and the same might be said for news mediation, as signaled perhaps by threshold events
such as the foundings of the Drudge Report in 1996 and Huffington Post in 2005.
proportions. And while counter-intuitive, assertions of this kind have now become so
commonplace as to qualify for the status of a topos in the study of media history – that is,
a concept which many have found useful and enlightening, particularly if formulated
with a striking and appropriate metaphor (in which case it also qualifies as a trope): Agent
of Change; Gutenberg Galaxy; Information Highway; Meme. I have suggested that this
one be designated the ‘Restoration Topos’,14 to emphasize that it does not involve an
actual reversion to earlier conditions, but a resumption which nonetheless reflects what
has occurred in the meantime: as the English monarchy discovered after its Restoration
in 1660, and indeed as in a sentence, whose meaning or direction will be affected (in
many instances) by an inserted parenthesis even after it closes.
But among the recent or current versions of the Restoration Topos applied to media
history there is considerable variation in the technologies suggested for the respective
roles of interrupting and restoring revolutions, and in the nature of what, exactly, is
restored.
Within the last few years a clear favorite is emerging in the thesis, particularly relevant for
the future of journalism, that the expanding ‘social media’ of blogs and even more
recently Facebook and Twitter (and others are emerging as this is being written) are
restoring the “unfiltered, multi-directional exchange of information” characteristic of
earlier times. The words quoted, appropriately, are those of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo,
in a 2010 interview cited in Katharine Viner’s lecture mentioned earlier. More
specifically, he is juxtaposing Twitter with news mediation in Ancient Greece, where “the
way that news and information was passed around” was through meeting others in the
market-place or agora.
Other suggestions for the conditions the Internet’s social media are restoring (also with a
certain focus on news mediation) are surveyed by Matthew Ingram in a blog entry
entitled, “Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of
Thomas Pettitt, Media Dynamics and the Lessons of History: The ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ as
14
Restoration Topos”, in The Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. Jean Burgess, John
Hartley and Axel Bruns (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 53-72.
8
if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past
generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style ‘mass media’
isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional
communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and
Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually
returning to one. (emphasis supplied)
The technological advance enabling this revolution was the introduction of steam-driven,
iron presses to replace the wooden, manually operated presses which had been the norm
since Gutenberg. Our Gutenberg Parenthesis, as the name suggests, belongs to a cluster
of transformations of the Restoration Topos which associate the interrupting revolution
15
Matthew Ingram, “Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of history?”
(11 May 2013),
http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/11/back-to-the-future-what-if-the-mass-media-era-was-just-an-
accident-of-history/
16
Ingram supplies a link to a Nieman Journalism Lab report:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/05/diaries-the-original-social-media-how-our-obsession-with-
documenting-and-sharing-our-own-lives-is-nothing-new/
17
Tom Standage, ”The End of Mass Media: Coming Full Circle”, The Economist, 7 July, 2011,
http://www.economist.com/node/18904158. Robert Darnton has made the same juxtaposition of past
and present in relation to blogging in “Blogging, Now and Then”, New York Review of Books. 18
March 2010.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/18/blogging-now-and-then/
18
Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media, the First 2,000 Years (London, etc.: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2013), p. 241, heralded on Standage’s website in “My next book: ‘Writing on the Wall’”,
http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/my-next-book-writing-on-the-wall/.
9
with the earlier introduction and diffusion of print technology itself at the transition from
the late-medieval to the modern periods. Pending a more sustained comparison, it might
be remarked that while the contrast between the cheap, mass-circulation newspapers of
the early nineteenth century and their established, more staid and expensive counterparts
was considerable, this was less the case in relation to the single-sheet news broadsides
(with prose accounts, news ballads, or both) which had been a significant feature of the
media market since about 1600 (and whose sensationalizing function the penny press
took over), suggesting 1833 was a less abrupt transition than 1600.
And while McLuhan’s ‘Galaxy’ supplied a striking term for the interpolated interlude,
Walter Ong, in his much acclaimed 1982 study Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing
of the Word, supplemented it with regard to the phases before and after: an original
‘Primary Orality’ interrupted by textual mediation was now being restored in the
‘Secondary Orality’ of the analog media. As this may suggest, Ong saw writing and the
alphabet as qualitatively a far more significant revolution than printing, but in further
discussion he concurs at least implicitly with McLuhan that medieval manuscript culture
was quantitatively insufficient to constitute a distinct phase in media history (and anyway
exhibited a significant ‘residual’ orality).21
19
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from
First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2011), p. 224.
20
Marshall McLuhan, the Gutenberg galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962; repr. 2008),
the quotations from pp. 45-6.
21
A celebratory 30th Anniversary edition, Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of
the Word (New York & London, 2012), includes essays by John Hartley, “Before Ongism” and “After
Ongism”, the latter considering (pp. 207-9) the relationship between the Gutenberg Parenthesis and
Ong’s theories.
22
John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet. Pathways of the Mind (Urbana, etc.: University
of Illinois Press, 2012; The Pathways Project:
http://www.pathwaysproject.org/pathways/show/HomePage
10
‘oral tradition’ (mediation through human voice and memory), if with a scribal alternative
for a small segment of society. But all involved agree that the Gutenberg Parenthesis is
not a synonym for the Gutenberg Galaxy (as asserted by those who say both are wrong,
not to mention those who say both are right but that McLuhan and Ong said it much
better). The extent of the difference resides quite concretely in whatever has changed in
media technology since 1962 which, for those of us who have lived through it, is quite a
lot, not least the irruption of a digital, internet technology which has not merely fulfilled
the aural potential of the analog media, but is also, among much else, generating a quasi-
oral textuality eroding the distinction between speech and writing. In communicating
and conversing through digital devices (a ‘chatting’ and a ‘tweeting’ which are actually
textual; a ‘texting’ which is as immediate and informal as chatting) we are increasingly
speaking through our fingers (and thumbs): a ‘digitoral’ mode which qualifies as digital in
terms both of the technology and of the fingers that manipulate it.
The form and color-coding of the accompanying illustration were designed for a
presentation in which the subject was how cultural productions -- the living organisms
-- compete in a changing environment comprising both a terrain (media technology)
and an atmosphere (modes of cognition). Its symbolism also signals the final,
culminating assertion of ‘my’ Gutenberg Parenthesis in identifying precisely what it is
that is interrupted by the opening of the parenthesis in about 1600 and then restored
when the parenthesis closes about 2000. This is at the same time my way of
demonstrating the relationship between changes in media technology, cultural
production, and modes of cognition, for all display parenthetical historical
developments which are not only roughly synchronous, but analogous – they all involve
the interruption and restoration of the same quality.
23
Connection vs. Containment
In a theory that combines insights from both Walter Ong and John Foley with evidence
from researchers a variety of historical fields who were pursuing other agendas, I assert
that before the age of print – in the pre-parenthetical period -- media technology,
cultural production and ways of thinking were all predominantly characterized by
connection (in what follows sometimes upgraded intellectually to connectivity), and it is
this quality that is being restored, at all three levels, as the parenthesis closes.
Meanwhile within the Gutenberg Parenthesis, connectivity was both less strong, and
23
For a more argumentation and documentation for the following connection-containment-connection
trajectory see my “Containment and Articulation: Media Technology, Cultural Production and the
Perception of the Material World”, Media in Transition 6 (2009), full text at http://web.mit.edu/comm-
forum/mit6/papers/Pettitt.pdf; “The Privacy Parenthesis: Gutenberg, Homo Clausus and the
Networked Self”, Media in Transition 8, full text available at
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit8/papers/TomPettitt%20Paper.pdf. (Both also accessible via
academia.edu).
12
overshadowed by a distinct quality which is not so much its opposite as its antithesis,
and that is demarcation, which as often as not takes the two-dimensional form of
containment. This statement can also be reversed to say that the pre- and post-
parenthetical periods were characterized both by the presence of connection and the
absence of demarcation/containment. And as most of us are still mostly operating
within the Gutenberg Parenthesis, or at least were brought up with its practices and
assumptions, it may be more effective to start with the parenthetical technology,
production and mindset whose qualities are most familiar – in some cases so familiar it
is disturbing to realize they may not be the natural way of things.
Media Technology
Within the Gutenberg Parenthesis the hegemonic technology for cultural mediation
and much communication is print, not least in the form of the printed book, which
displays the quality of demarcation (and the absence of connectivity) in a number of
ways, not least by containment, i.e. demarcation between inside and outside. Words are
regimented into lines of equal height and length to form a text block which is contained
within the margins between its edges and those of the (exactly uniform) pages. Those
pages (as we sometimes notice) are actually sheets of paper which have been folded (but
later cut open) and stitched/glued to form a block of smaller sheets attached to each
other along one side – technically a codex. It is entirely appropriate that this is achieved
by a ‘press’, adapted from an apparatus originally developed to squeeze juice out of
grapes and into barrels. The containment is reinforced when, invariably, this codex is
bound between covers, soft or hard, sometimes reinforced by a dust-jacket or even a slip
case. This artifact is often kept in a book-case, and if we want to access the ‘contents’ of
this ‘volume’ we have to take it out and open it. This process does not, however, result
in the words escaping from the container, rather the reverse: the reader engages in an
‘immersive’ or ‘deep’ reading in which he or she risks being ‘lost in a book’.
The effects of some aspects of this containment and demarcation can also equate with
the absence of connection, for example the disconnection, which can be problematic,
between that world ‘in’ the book, and the real world outside it, while in contrast
connection, or connectivity (plus weaker demarcation), is the predominant feature of
media technology both before and after the parenthesis. It most often takes the forms of
links, which when conglomerated can be perceived as forming a chain or, more
complexly, a network. Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis, communication and cultural
mediation were constituted by connections between the people who passed material on,
and on a smaller scale by the connection between a given carrier’s
utterances/performances, and together these achieve the diffusion of the material across
space and its transmission through time. Such connectivity was sustained to a degree in
the way manuscript works were transmitted by serial copying (but into manuscripts
individually displaying the containment of books) and most of the connection is being
restored (and containment reduced) in the links which make up both the Internet and
within it the world wide web and many other connective applications (including
hypertext). Even the earliest of these media, e-mail, had a much used sending-on
function.
Cultural Production
This containment aspect of the print medium, in accordance with the notion of media
ecology, is reflected in the cultural production it mediates, and that in various ways.
13
These include the convention, now taken for granted, that what is contained in a book
is somehow complete (material enclosure is accompanied by narrative or thematic
closure). And the physical opening of a book is often followed by an analogous
penetration of the text via an intro-duction (the metaphor clearer in German Ein-
leitung and Danish ind-ledning). Once printed a text cannot be changed (handwritten
additions and deletions clearly lacking the same status as the original printed letters):
but this can also be perceived in terms of containment and demarcation, as all textual
changes ultimately consist of interventions involving the in-sertion and/or ex-traction
of material across its boundaries, to which print is effectively impervious. And this
imperviousness / impermeability operates at various levels. The text is unchanged from
one reading of a book to another (heaven knows what letters get up to when the book is
closed, but when you open it they are always back in the places they had last time you
opened it); the text is unchanged as between one copy of a print-run and another; it is
also relatively unchanged from one printing to another, and if it is changed this will be
signaled by a changed status from re-print to new edition. Demarcation and
containment are also expressions of our expectations of the originality of a work (it is
demarcated from sources), the individuality of a work (it is demarcated from others on
the same subject), its typically specified authorship (it belongs to his canon), and the
restriction to a specified individual or organization of the right to copy it (it is a
possession).
It has been a habit of late (followed for example by Katharine Viner) to express the
absence of fixity in pre- and post-parenthetical cultural production in terms of a fluidity,
or (in the favored formulation of John Foley), as ‘morphing’ ( shape-shifting). But just
as fixity was a manifestation of demarcation (imperviousness to insertion and
extraction), so fluidity and morphing, or other metaphors for textual instability, are
actually made up of multiple additions and subtractions, to which both orally (and to a
degree scribally) and digitally transmitted material is prone. In a more powerful
metaphor we might say that while in parenthetical transmission cultural production is
inert or indeed dead, in extra-parenthetical it is alive, and therefore both growing and
decaying. This also expresses itself in the way oral cultures are comfortable with what
from the perspective of (us) Book People would be considered incomplete works or
even fragments. But when the media technology does not involve enclosure it does not
impose closure – the story can be continued next time (when it need not start at the
beginning). All stories are potentially both beginningless and endless, and medieval
culture was fond of providing alternative endings to unrounded narratives, or sequels
and prequels to ostensibly rounded ones, to supplementing stories of the knights of the
round table with stories of the adventures of their parents and children, or of their own
adventures in between the adventures we knew about already -- a practice of which fan-
fiction will be recognized as a restoration. It is a concomitant of these that narratives
were essentially perceived as chains made up of links, and that such ‘concatenations’
could be extended at will in either end, or by inserting links between the existing ones,
or replacing them with substitutes. Originality, independence, individual authorship
and copyright are virtually inconceivable in these circumstances, most of which are in
the process of restoration under digital / internet auspices.
Modes of Cognition
And finally, within the Gutenberg Parenthesis, a media technology based on enclosure,
in conjunction with a cultural production characterized by closure, autonomy and
14
For example, homo clausus sees the human body, including his own, as comprising an
envelope demarcating his ‘innards’ from its exterior (supplemented by a further
carapace of clothing), passage of material between inside and outside restricted to
function-specific orifices. The same applies to the material world, perceived as built up
of enclosures (of walls; fences; hedges) with only function-specific and carefully
monitored doors and gates. These were both matched on a more cultural level, the
enclosed landscape by social units, from nuclear families to nations, in relation to which
homo clausus was a member or an outsider (alien), the corporeal carapace(s) by a sense
of individual identity based on independence and autonomy. Not surprisingly, homo
clausus suffered from a major existential neurosis, a privacy syndrome, which perceived
as threatening virtually all or any breaches of the multiple demarcations and boundaries
of which he and his world were constituted.
24
The term first used by Norbert Elias in his celebrated study of The Civilizing Process, to represent
“a concept of the individual as encapsulated ‘inside’ himself, severed from everything outside him”.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (original German edition 1939), trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2 vols., 1978 & 1982; one vol. edn. with through-pagination 1994 repr. 1997), p.
211.
15
And it will by now occasion little surprise that when this demarcation-oriented mindset
and its concomitants emerged round about 1600 it did so at the expense of a hitherto
dominant alternative mindset based on connection: which may by the same procedure
be identified and personified in the figure of homo conexus,25 the man of and in
connections. He will perceive (and discern, impose and treat) a line not as demarcating
the areas on either side, but as linking the points at each end, a matrix of lines as
forming not the boundaries of enclosures but a network of links between the nodes at
their ends and intersections. With regard to the specific repercussions we may survey
exactly the same aspects as before. Homo conexus sees the human body, including his
own, as comprising limbs linked by joints, to which the major threat is a breaking or
jamming that would incapacitate movement and action. The same applies to the
material world, perceived as built up of avenues (highways, roads, paths, corridors)
linked by junctions (gateways, crossroads, ports). These were both matched on a more
cultural level, the articulated landscape by social affiliations, which linked homo
conexus to networks of various kinds (genealogical; professional; economic); the
articulated body by a sense of individual identity based on connections and affinity. Not
surprisingly, homo conexus suffered from a major existential neurosis, an honor
syndrome, which perceived as threatening virtually all or any severances of the multiple
networked links of which he and his world were constituted.
Given that homo clausus is a child of the Book People, a denizen of the Gutenberg
Parenthesis, as this latter comes to a close, his predominance is declining, and we can
perceive, or anticipate, the restoration of homo conexus and the predominance of his
connectivity-based mindset. Since this is a restoration or re-birth rather than a reversion
we should properly distinguish him from his medieval forebear as homo conexus
redivivus, but fortunately New Media Studies have already supplied a vernacular
alternative in the form of the ‘Networked Self’. His (re-)emergence can be registered for
example in new forms of navigation (GPS) which in specifying routes (directions and
turnings) resurrect the routiers / ‘rutters’ of medieval sailors, and of networked
organizations such as NGO’s, charitable organizations, multinational companies and
terrorist networks, which challenge contained communities, including the nation state,
as the default mode for social systems.26 In an age of rampant obesity it is difficult to
assert a return to the ‘matchstick man’ model, but the transition may come when it is
appreciated that the performance-enhancing mechanical extensions as yet deployed as
substitutes for missing limbs also work as extensions of existing, complete limbs. Things
are clearer with regard to identity, which is increasingly based on (internet)
connections, and reflected in the growing indifference (among digital natives) to the
threat this may pose to privacy. Meanwhile a digital restoration of the affinity-based
honor syndrome may be discerned in the growing concern with algorithm-based status,
25
I am informed this is the correct spelling, and did not encounter until late in the day the more
common homo connectus / conectus. Both have their origins in media studies, the immediate
inspiration for my adoption being James Fallows, “Homo Conexus. A veteran technology
commentator attempts to live entirely on Web 2.0 for two weeks”, MIT Technology Review (July 1,
2006).
26
This aspect, and its media technology dimensions, have been comprehensively explored by Ronald
J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
16
for example network rankings based on the quantity and quality of a site’s links, the
latter’s quality measured in terms of the quantity and quality of their links ….
I have saved for separate consideration one last and deeper manifestation of the
respective cognitive modes of homo clausus (within the Gutenberg Parenthesis) and
homo conexus / the Networked Self before and after the Parenthesis. Those surveyed
above encompass what might be termed perceptions of the world and the self, but the
same parenthetical trajectory is discernible in changes in conceptions about how the
world works. These include more abstract phenomena which may ultimately belong
under perception, such as time, memory and education, which, I suggest, homo clausus
saw in terms of demarcation and containment: time as rounded units (hours, days,
years); memory as putting information into storage and taking it out; education as
taking information out of one container (the memory of the teacher, or a book) and
inserting into another (the mind of a pupil). In both his (pre- and post-parenthetical)
incarnations homo conexus is more likely to see time as constructed of linked moments;
memory as repeating a journey between different stations, and education as following in
the footsteps (hence ‘grades’ and ‘degrees’) of a master.
What certainly belongs here is the way homo clausus conceives of the world as designed
-- perhaps literally; he will have read in a book that it was designed -- in terms of clearly
demarcated categories: human versus animal; male versus female; black versus white;
organic versus material (including human versus machine); living versus dead. Such
demarcative conception is accompanied by a categorical anxiety which responds
violently to boundary transgressions not merely because they break the rules, but
because they bring the rules (categorical conception) into question.27 All this is beyond
the ken of homo conexus and (I predict) the Networked Self which have conceived (or
will conceive) the world as organized in terms of purely theoretical opposites, between
which anything in the real world occupies one or other intermediate position: between
human and animal; between male and female; between black and white; between
organic and material, between living and dead. Under most of these headings, from the
legitimacy of the transsexual through animal rights to the normality of the cyborg,
recent developments amount to a restoration of medieval conceptions.
What remains of this contribution will explore the implications of the above specifically
for news mediation and journalism, and the coverage will encompass the same three
areas – media technology, cultural production and cognitive modes – if with some
movement back and forth between them -- and in more specific forms: news delivery
systems; news production; news content. 28
27
Categorical conception (no pun intended) is operative both in cases where categorical boundaries
must be crossed (marriage is between persons different sex), and in cases where they must not be
crossed (sex is between two members of the same species).
28
There has not been opportunity within the scope of this presentation to explore the interesting
implications of deploying digital games technology to news mediation: their common basis in
connectivity and networks certainly suggests a potential compatibility. See Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari
& Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010) and the
17
While newspapers as artifacts lack some of the containment aspects of the book
(binding; covers) their production, in reality and in the vocabulary used to represent it,
is intensely redolent of enclosure and demarcation. The best story is a ‘scoop’, even
better if an ‘exclusive’, which makes its way past the ‘gatekeeper’ into the newsroom
and on to the ‘news-hole’ in a publication (sometimes called a ‘magazine’ – because full
of dynamite?), whose front page may be ‘cleared’ to make room for it, perhaps indeed
‘above the fold’. The editor says ‘it’s a wrap’, and the paper is ‘closed’ or even ‘put to
bed’. Thus gathered, bundled, and put through the press, news explodes from this
‘outlet’ in multitudes of identical copies to its ‘readership’, a textual community whose
members receive the same news, in exactly the same wording, at about the same time.
(But it also ends up in the ‘morgue file’.)
It must suffice at this stage to note that pre-Gutenberg news mediation lacks such
containment, and instead displays the connectivity characteristic of the period’s media
in general: news is passed on from person to person and from place to place through a
series of links (in a chain of transmission), and the same applies increasingly to the
internet news mediation via email, blogs, texting, Twitter and the rest. This, the most
practical aspect of journalism will by design be treated last in this contribution, whose
focus in the meantime shifts to cognitive modes and cultural production.
If the old adage that “no news is good news” holds true, then so must the opposite: most
news is bad news – matters of controversy, confrontation and conflict, which it is the role
of news mediation in general and journalism in particular to report on and interpret.
In this case it should be apparent from the above that newsworthy controversies,
confrontations and conflicts can be of two basic and significantly different kinds. There
can in the first instance be simplex standoffs between two individuals and groups with
the same mindset. Within the Gutenberg Parenthesis these would typically involve one
homo clausus versus another, both individuals, or both groups, deploying the same
modes of cognition and disagreeing say on where a given demarcation should be located
(be it the frontier between two nations or the criteria for determining life (in the abortion
debate) or death, or whether different races should be discriminated against or treated
equally or benefit from affirmative action). Before and after the Gutenberg Parenthesis
simplex standoffs between one homo conexus (or one Networked Self) and another
would similarly involve disagreement on the basis of a common mindset, concerning say
the direction of a given line, or on the legitimacy of blocking it – harder to exemplify as
they belonged to a period before the emergence of journalism or will belong to a period
after the ‘Journalism Parenthesis’ has closed.
More important is the circumstance that journalism faces a vastly greater, one might say
definitively other, challenge, in reporting and interpreting complex standoffs between
individuals and groups with different mindsets. The opposing groups come, as we tend to
say, ‘from different planets’, or are not on ‘the same wavelength’, their views and
intentions not merely opposed, but reciprocally inconceivable: imagine say a conflict
between one group which says “the border between A and B must lie here” and another
which says “the track between point a and point b must go here”.29
A modern American illustration might be the debate about the legitimacy of a guard
using violence in responding to the perceived threat of an apparent intruder into a gated
community. A good deal has been said on both sides, but to my knowledge no one has
invoked the pre-Parenthetical, connection-based conception that when you see an
apparent stranger approaching you offer them hospitality (in anticipation of reciprocal
response in due course: it increases and strengthens your connections). Race is a similar
issue: racists and anti-racists are on the same wavelength (deploy the same demarcative
mindsets) if they accept that people can be categorized in terms of race but disagree on
whether one is superior to the other. A connective mindset (of the kind that once existed
and which may return) would simply not demarcate people in terms of race. Shakespeare
was not and cannot have been a racist because he did not categorize people in terms of
race. He almost certainly believed that white skin denoted good and black skin evil, but
did not draw a line, for most people were situated on a grade in between: Othello was
black but not A Black.
Such complex, cross-cognitive confrontations are harder to resolve (the one side simply
cannot get its mind around the views of the other) and harder to report and interpret, but
their incidence will be particularly frequent as the Gutenberg Parenthesis opens and
closes, when homo clausus and homo conexus will live side by side. This also means that
at such times the readership may respond to the reporting in diametrically opposed ways,
although it can be anticipated that readers of news papers will tend to demarcative
mindworking.
A lot of the more serious ‘news’ in the 16th and 17th centuries (and the vigor/ violence of
the confrontations) is explicable in these terms: the agrarian enclosures and enclosure
riots; the witch crazes and witch hunts; moral panics about insubordinate and
‘incontinent’ women; specific aspects of the Reformation such as the respective authority
assigned to tradition (Catholic) and the Book (Protestant); the debate on Purgatory as an
intermediate zone between Heaven and Hell; the debate on Transubstantiation (the
categorically transgressive conversion of what was bread and wine to the real presence of
the flesh and blood of Christ).
29
In preparing the presentation I considered expressing this difference in terms of the collision
between two stones and the collision between two pieces of iron (simplex encounters), which both
make a noise, as opposed to the collision between a stone and a piece of iron (complex encounters)
which produces both noise and sparks.
19
There will be more such complex confrontations between digitally native hackers and
establishment Book People who have yet to fully exit the Gutenberg Parenthesis, but a
tragi-comic illustration is to hand in the antics of the American Tea Party, for whose
containment-oriented cognition the pot with which tea-making is associated is exactly
appropriate (although one may query exactly which tea party is the most pertinent) not to
mention the pejorative ‘tea-bagger’ accolade conferred by their opponents.
Predictably, their mindset cannot cope with a president who is categorically transgressive
on multiple levels, being black, Christian and American merely to a degree. It is entirely
in accordance with the ways of thinking of such Book People (the Tea Party has above
average academic credentials) to be obsessive about the need for a documentary source
(the really real birth certificate) to decide the last issue one way or another – one way or
another is all they have.
But in our times cross-cognitive encounters are also occurring as a result of the discrepant
chronologies of media change between different societies noted earlier. If Western
societies entered Gutenberg Parenthesis ca 1600 others did not; of which some have not
yet done so, or are only now beginning the process, while simultaneously Globalization is
enabling encounters between predominantly parenthetical (demarcative) cultures and
predominantly pre-parenthetical (connective) cultures both at home (through
immigration) and abroad (through western peace- and democracy-enhancing
excursions). The ensuing complex conflicts are better understood from this perspective:30
a further reminder that education does not merely involve the influence on ideas through
30
Such was the main thrust of my message when invited to address a closed meeting of a western
security organization on the security implications of the Gutenberg Parenthesis.
20
the content of books, but the influence on cognition patterns of the form and shape of
books.
This may also be the point to remark that if (still predominantly book-oriented) western
civilization is threatened by both the pre-parenthetical oral cultures of the insurgent and
the post-parenthetical digital culture of the hacker, an additional lesson of the Gutenberg
Parenthesis is that these two may have more in common with each other (in terms of
mediation, culture and cognition) than either has with the Book People. A nightmare
scenario must accordingly be the acquisition of digital competences by the pre-literate
insurgent (who has much to learn, but less to unlearn than homo clausus).31 But whether
confronting pre-parenthetical or post-parenthetical connection-oriented opponents, or
the two in consort, strategies based on containment and demarcation – invading,
occupying, clearing; surging; incarcerating – have no hope of success: a network-based
antagonist can only be damaged by severing his links (or taking out the nodes identified
by intercepting the links).
News Production
31
The insurgent with a laptop in my illustration is piloting a drone towards the Capitol.
21
observer). All such information has always been of two kinds, distinguished by the source
of their delivery: there is official news, promulgated by state (as proclamation) or church
(from the pulpit), and there is popular news, delivered by word of mouth among and
between private individuals. The latter could be true, based on actual events, or untrue,
based on what I have already suggested be termed ‘invents’, but before the Gutenberg
Parenthesis these were effectively indistinguishable, so ‘news’ and ‘rumour’ were not
distinct categories: ‘News’ referred to the content, ‘rumour’ to the medium, i.e. the sound
of the voice.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis saw a shift in this configuration with the emergence of a new
demarcation and the acknowledgement of a category of non-official news which was
accorded almost the same credence and authority as the official (and could even question
the veracity of information promulgated by officialdom). This now became ‘news’,
accepted as based on events, leaving ‘rumour’ to drift in the direction of invention
(derivation from invents).
While very much a symptom of the modern era’s categorical imperative, this is also the
result of more specific, material changes, not least the institutionalization of news
gathering and news dissemination in the form of dedicated, invariably commercial,
organizations – what became known as the ‘news media’, and what has also been called
‘fortress journalism’. This development is sometimes assigned to the nineteenth-century,
with the industrialization of printing and the commercialization of news mediation
explored by Tom Standage, but the change was underway in the early seventeenth
century if not earlier, for example in the form of the printer-publishers of those news
ballads. And at least the image of a commercial, news-mediating institution is in place by
the time of Ben Jonson’s comedy, The Staple of News, of 1622. The result of obsessive
observation and analysis, Jonson’s comic satires are perceptive reflections of and on the
London scene, and while his emporium where news items could be purchased by paying
customers is clearly fictional, it recognizes an inherent potential in the London media
scene.
As it happens, Jonson’s fictional Staple sold news in the form of written manuscripts, but
he is aware of the potential of print, inserting an insightful dialogue between the owner
and a customer on the role of print in news, the latter averring, of items of information,
that “Unto some, / The very printing of them makes them news”, and such people “…
have not the heart to believe anything / But what they see in print” (1.5.51-55).32 The
attitude is reflected a decade or more earlier in the scene in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale
where a group of young country people are examining the wares of a peddler cum ballad-
hawker with a view to purchase: “I love a ballad in print … for then we are sure they are
true” (4.4.258-9).33
Such views clearly reflect the authority conferred by the affordances of print as a medium
(precisely as surveyed, at a much higher cultural plane, by Elizabeth Eisenstein): the
production of multiple copies with identical texts impervious to interference between
production and delivery. And of course the two factors reinforce each other, the capital
32
Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Devra Rowland Kifer, Regents Renaissance Drama (London:
Arnold, 1976).
33
The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, Oxford Shakespeare/World’s Classics (Oxford: OUP, 1996).
22
With the closing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, however, such news mediating
institutions, and with them ‘fortress journalism’,34 are threatened by competition from
amateur, digital news mediation which can at little expense achieve the authoritative
impression (pun intended) of print, but without its authority and integrity, as digital texts
are emphatically subject to interference.35 So if the opening of the Gutenberg Parenthesis
saw the emergence of news as a new category of information, the closing of the
Gutenberg Parenthesis involves a reversal, a de-categorization within non-institutional
news, so that ‘news’ and ‘rumour’ again become effectively interchangeable.36 Katharine
Viner is optimistic that the post-parenthetical restoration will be better than a reversion:
First, there was a whole heap of conversation but no clear version of the truth.
Then, there was a very clear version of the truth, but no space for conversation.
Now, what we have is the truth made better by conversation.37
But the difference between post- and pre-parenthetical conditions may also be greater
confusion, as our current de-categorization of information also seems to encompass the
demarcation between news and advertising, witness the emergence of hybrids such as
‘native advertising’, as also between news and entertainment (witness the entertaining
rumour about the Fox News broadcast license).
So how are post-parenthetical readers to distinguish news from rumor, advertising and
entertainment? Well, how did pre-parenthetical society cope with the uncertainties
involved? One answer at least lies within the cognitive modes at the background of much
of this discussion. homo conexus was not given to categorizing, and true and false news
are categories. He evidently learned to cope, as we may soon, in a media environment
where all news was somewhere on the spectrum between true and false (and more or less
entertaining). It could be assumed that there was at least a grain of truth and an element
34
Peter Horrocks, “The End of Fortress Journalism”, The Future of Journalism. Papers from a
Conference organized by the BBC College of Journalism, ed.Charles Miller (London: CoJo
Publications, 2009), pp. 6-17,
<< http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/future_of_journalism.pdf; c.f. also Steven A. Smith,
“Fortress Journalism Failed. The Transparent Newsroom Works”, Pressthink,
http://archive.pressthink.org/2005/11/23/spk_ss.html
35
For a very systematic account of the role of blogs in news mediation, see Melissa Wall, “'Blogs of
war' : Weblogs as news”, Journalism, 6 (2005): 153-172.
36
This de-categorization is associated with the decline of ‘gatekeeping’ in journalism by Jayson
Harsin, “The Rumor Bomb: On Convergence Culture and Politics”, Flow . 11 December 2008,
http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-rumor-bomb-on-convergence-culture-and-politics-jayson-harsin-
american-university-of-paris/. Their earlier separation (the emergence of categories) is traced by F.J.
Levy, “Staging the News”, Print, Manuscript and Performance. ed. Arthur F. Marotti & Michael D.
Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. 252-278.
37
“The Rise of the Reader …”.
23
In reality, most news is ongoing, in the sense that it consists of a chain of linked
increments, each of which is ‘breaking’ as it becomes known. In the period before both
the Gutenberg and the Journalism Parentheses, these increments will have been reported
serially, arriving at a given location in the same order as a concatenated series (my
diagram below is optimistic about their regularity). The effect is strikingly reproduced by
Shakespeare towards the end of Macbeth and Richard III when the fall of both tyrants is
presaged by the arrival of a series of messenger each bearing more recent news of the
assembly, strength and approach of the opposing forces.
The classic journalistic news mediation within the Parenthesis subjects this connective,
sequential pattern to massive conglomeration, re-ordering and containment. In what is a
mixture of practical necessity (?) and a reflection of demarcative perceptions of time, news
is issued once every 24 hours, that is, in diurnal packages. This requires people in the
employ of the medium, diurnalists, to take whatever increments are available at the
deadline (which for diurnalism marks the demarcation between one day and another).
But because they are writing for a very contained medium which (in conjunction with
demarcative cognition) privileges rounded communications, rather than reproducing the
reports verbatim and in the order received, dyurnalists write (wrap) them up into a news
38
For an anguished, in-depth analysis of the interlacing of truth and untruth in rumour and institutional
news by one of this generation’s leading folklorists, see Carl Lindahl’s “Legends of Hurricane
Katrina: The Right to Be Wrong, Survivor Storytelling, and Healing”, Journal of American Folklore,
125.496 (2012): 139-176; A redacted version of the introductory section setting the scene and
reviewing approaches, “Some Legendary Takes on Hurricane Katrina”, is available in American
Folklore Society Review: Essays (March 07 2012), at http://www.afsnet.org/news/84668/Some-
Legendary-Takes-on-Hurricane-Katrina.htm.
39
For a systematic survey of responses to the truthfulness or otherwise of rumours which will requite
closer study see Gary Alan Fine, “Rumor, Trust and Civil Society: Collective Memory and Cultures of
Judgment”, Diogenes, 54.1 (2007): 5-18, and for a range of specific explorations the essays collected
in G. A. Fine, C. Heath, & V. Campion-Vincent, eds., Rumor mills: The social impact of rumor and
legend (Chicago: Aldine, 2005); there is an acute concluding discussion covering “Seeven Questions”
is rumour and (contemporary) legend research, including “What Does Truth Have to Do with It?” and
“What Does Belief Have to Do with t?”
24
With the arrival of the analogue media, and its typically hourly news broadcasts, many
journalists technically became horalists, that is performing the above wrapping up
exercise on an hourly, rather than a daily basis. Internet news, institutional or otherwise,
is now effectively the business of momentalists, responding to information on an ongoing
news story as it breaks, aided by the fluidity (amenability to addition and subtraction) of
digital texts. Thus far three major techniques have emerged, the first two merely
adaptations of the parenthetical, diurnal wrap-up: as and when the aggregate of new
increments of news warrants it, a new news story can be written; or the old article can be
updated to encompass the new increments (‘corrections’ duly noted at end). But the third
response takes us beyond (and to before) the Gutenberg Parenthesis by adding each new
increment (with little editorial intervention or commentary) as it comes in, typically at
the top of the pile of existing increments. News reception once again becomes, as in the
Greek or medieval market-place, a concatenated sequence of increments in chronological
order.
Currently, even in internet news mediation, the rounded article form remains the default
mode, with the concatenation of news increments reserved for special circumstances. But
all news actually comprises concatenated sequences (which can subsequently be extended
with meta-news of how the news was handled by other mediators), and is therefore
amenable to this treatment. I accordingly agree with Jeff Jarvis that this will soon be the
25
new default,40 with rounded articles as optional auxiliaries (a task which computers are
threatening to usurp anyway41).
News Mediation
Before print, the norm was connection, with news/rumour ‘trans-mitted’ (handed on) in
a series of face-to face (mouth to ear) stages, sometimes bifurcating into a network as one
transmitter passes it on to several others. The common idiom of hearing something ‘on
the grapevine’ captures effectively this process and its characteristics.
“What news?” was the standard greeting on meeting strangers from other parts or
neighbours returning from visits or travels elsewhere . Such news-transmitting
encounters occurred on the road (most people walked), at inns, and at places of customary
40
“The article as luxury or by-product”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/28/the-article-as-
luxury-or-byproduct/; “The orthoxy of the article part II”,
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/12/the-orthodoxy-of-the-article-part-ii/; “The article and the
future of print”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/18/the-article-and-the-future-of-print/; “The
storyteller strikes back”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/17/the-storyteller-strikes-back/. See
also the earlier comments of Kevin Marsh, whose perception of the relationship between the deadline
and the rounded article anticipate (and probably influenced mine): “The Death of the Story”, in The
Future of Journalism. Papers from a Conference organized by the BBC College of Journalism,
ed.Charles Miller (London: CoJo Publications, 2009), pp. 70-88,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/future_of_journalism.pdf
41
Joe Fassler, “Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?” The Atlantic (12 April
2012),
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/can-the-computers-at-narrative-science-
replace-paid-writers/255631/
42
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NP-77.jpg.
26
assembly like wells or the barber-shop. Unexpectedly active nodes for exchange were
provided by bakers: their servants delivered bread to households in a cluster of
communities (and paused for gossip at the doorstep), while local customers brought their
own loaves and pies etc. to be cooked in the baker’s oven, exchanging rumour and gossip
as they waited for their turn. We are extraordinarily well-informed about such grapevines
in the early modern period, as when the authorities got wind of a dangerous rumour, they
set about tracing its transmission with the ardor of a modern folklorist, but advantaged by
coercive techniques to which the latter does not have access.
For example in 1633 a Scotsman staying at the Angel Inn in Stilton, Huntingdonshire,
told the ostler there that Scottish Catholics were on the brink of staging a major rebellion.
The ostler told it to other travelers at the inn, including a Robert Johnson, who on
returning to his own town told it to his brother in law Richard Sawyer, who told it to his
son, Henry Sawyer, from yet another town. He subsequently told it to travelers passing
by the field in which he was working, including Christopher Coursey, who when he
reached his home town told it to his neighbour, John Cooke, who told it to other
neighbours, one of whom told it to a visiting friend from another town, who when he got
back told the parson, who told the mayor, who told the magistrates who instigated the
investigation that revealed the above sequence of links.43
There will inevitably have been a transitional period, as suggested for example by Tom
Standage in connection with the diffusion of Luther’s attacks on the Catholic church, 44 in
43
Adam Fox, “Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England”, Historical Journal. 40.3 (1997): 597-620, the specific instance cited from pp. 607-8. For
further discussion and evidence see Ethan H. Shagan, “Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of
Henry VIII”, in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500 – 1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2001), pp. 30-59; Roger B. Manning, “Violence and Social Conflict in Mid-Tudor Rebellions”,
Journal of British Studies 16 (1976-77): 18-40, e.g. p. 19 for efforts of magistrates to track down
sources of dangerous rumours.
44
Standage, Writing on the Wall, ch. 3, “How Luther Went Viral …”; also available as “How Luther
went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the
Reformation”, The Economist, 17 December 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21541719
27
What has been called ‘stand alone journalism’ also involves demarcating participants into
distinct categories with regard to news mediation, not least the reporters who, together
with the news outlet they serve, stand between the sources of (more direct) information
on a given event, and the readers to whom, duly enclosed, it is delivered.
Among its many effects, digital, Internet technology is dismantling these demarcations,
with the information provided by the sources directly accessible to erstwhile readers, “the
people formerly known as the audience”, in Jay Rosen’s startling formulation,46 many of
whom become hybrid reporter-readers – ‘repeaters’ – who pass the material on to others.
45
E.g. F.J. Levy, “How Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550 – 1640”, Journal of British
Studies, 21.2 (1982): 11-34, esp. pp. 20-24.
46
Jay Rosen, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience”, PRESSthink, 27 June 2006,
http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html.
28
Functional demarcation is replaced by connection, and the reporter risks being by-
passed: Translated into contemporary terms, the news organization risked being reduced
to one node among many in a network system of news mediation, and indeed ‘network
(or ‘networked’) journalism’ is widely agreed to be where news mediation is headed.47
Fieldwork studies in the transmission of rumor49 have discerned that upon entering a
communications network (a large group of people in regular contact) a given rumour
does not percolate evenly through it (like liquid spilt on a cloth), but follows a route of
least resistance (like rainwater over an uneven surface), called a ‘conduit’. It is composed
of people (nodes) who are disposed to listen to, remember, and pass on this particular type
of information. Connectivity, in other words, is dependent on receptivity, and this
‘Conduit Theory’ points to what might be termed a passive survival strategy in which a
news institution places itself athwart one or more of such conduits by gathering and
diffusing news/rumour of kinds which large numbers of the people constituting nodes in
a network would be most interested to hear. The most obvious conduits, exploited by a
number of magazines, are those of feelgood rumours, which make the world seem
brighter, either by promising good fortune or offering vicarious experience of it by
reporting the lives of celebrities. A less obvious, but a more powerful option is suggested
in my own studies in contemporary legends suggesting that most avid attention (and
credence) is accorded to information which feeds on and feeds into deep, but not fully
formulated, anxieties. A combination of these Conduit and Anxiety Theories, together
with the cognitive dimensions of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, suggests that exploiting the
categorical paranoia and other demarcation-based neuroses of homo clausus and the Book
People would be a promising option: but there is at least one American news company
that doesn’t need to be told this. However as a long-term strategy it is doomed: within a
generation, those conduits will follow the altogether different anxieties of homo conexus
in his reincarnation as the Networked Self, and multi-ethnic, rainbow America will have
trouble coming to terms with a monochrome first family.
47
What looks set fair to become the standard work is Ansgard Heinrich’s Network Journalism (New
York: Routledge, 2010), although in speaking persistently of a “journalism sphere” there is a residual
containment aspect, more appropriate to the Gutenberg Parenthesis, in its perceptions.
48
For a succinct survey of rumour research with persistent juxtaposition with news, see Pamela
Donovan, “How Idle is Idle Talk? One Hundred Years of Rumor Research”, Diogenes 54.1 (2007):
59-82.
49
Linda Degh & Andrew Vázsong, "Legend and Belief", Genre. 4.3 (Sept., 1971): 281-304; repr.
Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin & London: Univ. Texas Press, 1976), pp. 93-123, and
"The Hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmission in Folklore", Folklore. Performance and
Communication, ed. Dan Ben-Amos & Kenneth S. Goldstein (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 207-52.
For a survey and discussion see Trevor J. Blank, “Conduit Theory”, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia
of Folktales & Fairy tales, ed. Donald Haase (Westport, CT, 2008), pp. 231-2.
29
For those in quest of a more honorable, proactive strategy, there is encouragement in the
fact that disciplines as distant as Network Theory and Folklore (which might be defined
as the study of cultural transmission through networks) point to the vital importance in
this connection of the hub, also known as the super-node or Connector. While there are
some networks in which all nodes have a comparable number of links, in most networks,
both naturally occurring (e.g. human cells) and man-made (e.g. the internet and global
air travel systems) a few nodes have connections which are orders of magnitude greater
than those of the remainder: hubs “are a fundamental property of most networks”.50 The
first aim for an institutional news mediator in a network news system, evidently, is to
become a hub (a newsmongering equivalent of an O’Hare or a Heathrow) – the second of
course being the development of a business strategy for making a living out of this
function.
Such hubs also figure in the dissemination of rumour and gossip, qualified for this role
independently of rumour content and on the basis of some recognized, intrinsic authority:
people you go to in quest of unofficial news, and to whom you want to tell your own. It is
strangely encouraging that they have been identified particularly among employees of
large businesses, by whose directors they are perceived as a threat. And interestingly the
researchers, Foster and Rostow, who established their existence, labeled them
‘gatekeepers’,51 a term with considerable resonance in Journalism Studies, and which also
evokes interesting differences between the demarcative and connective mindsets
associated with the parenthetical and extra-parenthetical phases of media history. Gates
figure in both perceptions of the material world: for homo clausus as controlled
exceptions to (i.e. gaps in) the enclosures demarcating inside from outside; for homo
conexus as junctions (gateways) between the paths leading up to and away from them.
Indeed the gate may be the precise point at which the two sets of perceptions meet, and
reveal their incompatibility.
As originally formulated (during the Second World War), the notion of gatekeeping was
related to a system perceived in connective terms, a junction at which decisions were
made as to whether material (specifically food products) would proceed, and if so down
which channel. Interestingly, the originator of the concept, Kurt Lewin, was aware of a
potential application to news, but seems to have been thinking more of rumour than of
journalism: “the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a
group”.52 Before long though it was applied to journalism, but in conjunction with the
imagery surveyed above more recent usage clearly envisages the gatekeeper from a
demarcation-containment perspective, as a doorkeeper, like St Peter at the Pearly Gates:
is this item admitted with rejoicing into the newsroom/newshole or is it (like sinners in
50
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It
Means for Business, Science and Everyday Life (New York: Plume, 2003, p. 56.
51
E. K. Foster & R. L. Rosnow, “Gossip and network relationships”, in D. C. Kirkpatrick, S. W. Duck
, & M. K. Foley, eds. Relating Difficulty. The Processes of Constructing and Managing Difficult
Interaction ( Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), pp. 161-180.
52
Kurt Lewin, “Frontiers in Group Dynamics: II. Channels of Group Life; Social Planning and Action
Research”, Human Relations. 1.2 (1947): 143-153, at p. 145,
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/1/2/143.full.pdf+html
30
In order to gauge the current state of play in this transition to network journalism, and
the changing role of institutional news mediation, I undertook the very limited case study
of following the diffusion of a particular news item in the hours immediately following
the event concerned. This was an incident near Times Square, New York, late on the
evening, local time, of 14 September, 2013, in which police officers sought to control a
man behaving erratically in the traffic. At one point he was thought to be taking out a
weapon, and two officers fired at him; they missed, but the bullets hit two bystanders, one
of whom, a disabled woman with a walker, was wounded in the leg and fell to the
ground.
In their coverage, the news websites of the New York Times and other NYC news
institutions in part followed conventional (Journalism Parenthesis) procedures, sending
reporters to interview witnesses (accompanied by a photographer to take pictures of the
scene in the aftermath), to attend the Police Department press conference, to receive a
statement by a hospital spokesman, and to interview an expert in police training methods;
someone also consulted police guidelines for the use of firearms in a public place. But
they also deployed the resources of the new (news) media, particularly Twitter and
YouTube.
One bystander in particular, who unlike the NYT photographer was at the scene and
close to the action as the event unrolled, posted a series of tweets, some accompanied by
53
Standard works on gatekeeping theory and its application to journalism are Pamela Shoemaker,
Gatekeeping, Communication Concepts, 3 (London: Sage Pubications, 1991), and Pamela J.
Shoemaker & Timothy Vos Gatekeeping Theory (London: Routledge, 2009).
54
Steve Buttry, “Gatekeepers need to find new value when the fences have blown away”.
The Buttry Diary. 30 April 2012, http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/gatekeepers-need-to-
find-new-value-when-the-fences-have-blown-away/; Kendyl Salcito, ”Gatekeeping”, Journalism
Ethics for the Global Citizen, ONLINE JOURNALISM ETHICS, Center for Journalism Ethics, School
of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009,
http://www.journalismethics.info/online_journalism_ethics/gatekeeping.htm
55
Axel Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005);
Luigi Manca, “Journalists: Gatekeepers or Gate-openers? A Reinterpretation of the Westley-MacLean
Model Based on MacLean's Unpublished Papers”, Draft of September 15, 1999,
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~pieper/manca-paper.html; Haiqing Yu, “Beyond gatekeeping: J-blogging in
China”. Journalism. 12.4 (2011): 379-393.
56
Ralph L. Rosnow & Erik K. Foster, “Rumor and Gossip Research”, Psychological Science Agenda.
19.3 (April 2005), http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/04/gossip.aspx
31
pictures, including a striking snapshot of the injured woman lying of the ground still
hanging on to her walker.
Other bystanders recorded the event on smartphones, and posted the videos on
YouTube. This material confirms the potential threat of the internet and its social media
to institutional news mediation, for the bloggers and citizen journalists have as direct and
immediate access as the professionals to those tweets and videos (and there must be more,
as the videos indicate clearly that many other bystanders were recording the events). But
surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath, and on the basis of a small but arbitrary
(Google-based) sample, this did not happen:
32
The bloggers went to the institutional news outlets, and later bloggers copied or linked to
the earlier: they did not seem to be systematically accessing the internet sources directly,
but assumed a parasitical relationship to conventional news providers. Some must surely
have done so, but the overall indication is that the websites of the conventional press are,
emphatically, news hubs. It remains to be explored and pondered whether this reflects a
quality of bloggers (say some disinclination to conduct independent research – or even an
independent search) or a quality of the news institutions (more material? faster with the
material? – it was striking that within minutes of her first tweet the lady who uploaded
the pictures was being asked by institutional news media for interviews).
Ultimately there must be two basic factors that might sustain this hub status within a
network journalism system. One is based on content. If the demarcations are fading and
readers can become reporters, then the reporters can usurp the role of the sources,
trawling the internet for material on a given event and asking witnesses if they recorded
it, and putting the whole damn lot on their website (where digital column inches are
unlimited: only paper newspapers have edges), making it the first port of call for at least
the ‘raw’ news. On the other hand this may be making the institution simply a much
larger container, and Jeff Jarvis’s adage, “service not content” sounds more in tune with a
news system based on the absence of enclosure and the growth of connection. Others
have seen the journalist as becoming a navigator, guiding readers through the network of
information sources (technically rather a pilot),57 absolutely in tune with the post-
Gutenberg navigation systems which rather than offering a chart guide the driver by
displaying routes.
Beyond this, for the moment, it is hard to be more specific, not least with regard to
business models. But the message of the Gutenberg Parenthesis in this author’s vision of
it is that every survival strategy should be reduced to its basic metaphor, and the closer
that metaphor is to demarcation and containment, the fewer chances the strategy has; the
closer it is to connection and networking, the greater the hope that can be invested in it.
The pay-wall is as relevant to network journalism as the invasion of Iraq was to the war
on terrorism, and should be replaced by whatever is the digital equivalent of road-pricing.
Abandon copyright; seek linkright.58 News will come in connected increments, not
bundles, and it will go onto a network not into a hole, part of a system not a sphere.
Extension not expansion (networks are by definition limitless; a container will explode);
transmission not diffusion; a hub not an outlet; a lighthouse not a fortress. When the
others have gone as far as they can, go one step further …
57
For example Tom Rosenstiel, in 2008, as reported by Alfed Hermida in “New Roles for Journalists
in a Multimedia World”, http://www.reportr.net/2008/02/19/the-new-roles-for-journalists-in-a-
multimedia-world/.
58
For what this easy generalization might mean in practice see Jeff Jarvis, “Studying the Link
Economy”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/23/studying-the-link-economy/.