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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the mediated digital era, communication is changing fast and eating up ever greater shares of real-world power. Corporate battles and guerrilla wars are fought on Twitter. Facebook is the new Berlin, home to tinkers, tailors, spies and terrorist recruiters. We recognize the power shift instinctively but, in our attempts to understand it, we keep using conceptual and theoretical models that are not changing fast, that are barely changing at all, that are laid over from the past.
Journalism remains one of the main sites of communication power, an expanded space where citizens, protesters, PR professionals, tech developers and hackers can directly shape the news. Adrienne Russell reports on media power from one of the most vibrant corners of the journalism field, the corner where journalists and activists from countries around the world cross digital streams and end up updating media practices and strategies. Russell demonstrates the way the relationship between digital journalism and digital activism has shaped coverage of the online civil liberties movement, the Occupy movement, and the climate change movement. Journalism as Activism explores the ways everyday meaning and the material realities of media power are tied to the communication tools and platforms we have access to, the architectures of digital space we navigate, and our ability to master and modify our media environments.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
From medium to space
Media vanguard
Hacking the news and recoding media power
From logics to sensibilities
Shifts in the scope and nature of political action
Networks, tools, practices (redux)
Notes
2 Networks
Media shifts
The public sphere and the mediapolis
Method: investigating online networks
Nuts and bolts
Occupy, climate justice, and internet freedom
In sum
Conclusion
Notes
3 Tools
Myths and values in technologies
Popular commercial platforms
Alternative tools and platforms
Conclusion
Notes
4 Practice
Shifting boundaries, practices, notions of public good
What are new-style activist journalists doing?
Conclusion
Notes
5 Power
Looking back
Interface and infrastructure
Today
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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To J.T.
Journalism as Activism
Recoding Media Power
ADRIENNE RUSSELL
polity
Copyright © Adrienne Russell 2016
The right of Adrienne Russell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-5095-1132-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Russell, Adrienne.Title: Journalism as activism : recoding media power / Adrienne Russell.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016002257 (print) | LCCN 2016004987 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745671260 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745671277 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509511310 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509511327 (Epub)Subjects: LCSH: Journalism--Political aspects. | Press and politics. | Citizen journalism--Political aspects. | Digital media--Political aspects.Classification: LCC PN4751 .R88 2016 (print) | LCC PN4751 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/4932--dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002257
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
In the age of the global network and crowd-sourcing, it would feel more genuine to print all the names listed below on the cover of this book as co-authors. As every author knows, there are debts racked up in the contemplating, researching, writing, and rewriting that simply cannot be repaid.
Thank you to the University of Denver for providing me with the time and money to research and write, and to my colleagues and students in the university’s Media, Film and Journalism Studies Department and in the Emergent Digital Practices program. Special thanks to Peggy Marlow for being so good at what she does. Thank you also to the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science for hosting me in the spring of 2015 as a visiting fellow. Thank you to Microsoft Research New England for hosting me as a visiting scholar in the spring of 2012; to the media makers who shared their experiences and insights with me and whose work makes the world a better place; to Andrea Drugan and Elen Griffiths at Polity; and to Fiona Sewell, freelance editor. Thank you very much to Jay Duchene and to Robert and Anne Russell for all of their support and encouragement.
Thanks to my friends and colleagues who discussed this research as it unfolded, read chapter drafts, offered me tips, sharpened my arguments, invited me to give talks, and welcomed me when I traveled to their cities. Those generous and talented people include Mike Ananny, Michela Ardizzoni, Veronica Barassi, Stephen Barnard, Charlie Beckett, Lance Bennett, Rod Benson, Chris Braider, Bart Cammaerts, Nick Couldry, Stephanie Craft, Waddick Doyle, Nabil Echchaibi, Louise Edwards, Elisabeth Eide, Liz Fakazis, Geoff Gilbert, Deirdre Gilfedder, Ted Glasser, Jayson Harsin, Heikki Heikkilä, Andreas Hepp, Nadia Kaneva, Stafania Milan, Pierluigi Musarò, Zizi Papacharissi, Danny Postel, Anna Roosvall, Jane Sovndal, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Silvio Waisbord, and Barbie Zelizer. And thanks to Matt Tegelberg, Emilano Treré, and Dima Yagodin, for always going the extra mile. All of your work inspires my work. Thanks also to the MediaClimate family for years of productive collaboration that has taught me a great deal about journalism around the world.
Without Jenny Filipetti’s skill as a thinker and tinkerer, chapter 2 would not exist. When we needed new mapping tools to answer our questions, she made them. She brought a much-needed hacktivist sensibility to the book. Thanks to Carley St. Clair for the research assistance. Thank you to Lynn Schofield Clark for reading and rereading my very rough drafts, for meeting regularly to discuss research ideas, and for typing up things in real time that I said about my work that otherwise would have been lost forever. Thank you to Risto Kunelius for inspiration, for the ambitious and always fun research projects, for sharing ideas, and for always finding time to read my work and offer one-of-a-kind valuable feedback. Thank you to Erika Polson, an excellent colleague and friend.
And a huge thanks to Sammy and Sofia, who give me great reason to believe media will be a more powerful vector for social justice in the years to come. Ages ago Sammy began thinking about and drawing ideas for the cover. I held all of those images in my head as I wrote. In the end, Sofia dropped the code into the rainbow. Thanks to Mustafa Hacalaki, whose image made a perfect fit.
Finally and especially, thanks to John Tomasic. I see what you did there.
1Introduction
Everyone now has a license to speak. It’s a matter of who gets heard.
Aaron Swartz1
Civil rights champions and Americans across the country in 2015 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the voting-rights marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama. The marches were hailed as political and cultural victories. But they were also and first a media victory, and they came in an age of media transition.
King rallied citizens and activists in a series of three marches to protest racial injustice and to win for black Americans, especially in the Old South, the unfettered right to vote. According to contemporary reports,2 King worked with President Lyndon Johnson to intensify the impact of the marches by drawing reporters from national news outlets to Selma to produce coverage that would draw attention beyond Alabama’s borders to the state’s anti-democratic racist policies. The strategy succeeded remarkably well. Television networks and the nation’s top newspapers ran images and reports of troopers and state-conscripted possemen riding in riot gear on horseback through crowds of peaceful marchers, beating them bloody. The news stories rocketed around the country, horrifying the public and providing the political momentum Johnson needed to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Although the law was enforced in fits and starts in the beginning, it marked a turn for the larger civil rights movement, mainly by raising awareness that changed majority attitudes in the United States. That activist media strategy – staging actions to draw the attention of news outlets – has been a model ever since, but it is evolving in significant ways in the digital-networked age.
In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters sought to draw attention to the rogue high-finance industry that had been fueling vast inequalities in the global economy and destabilizing it as well. The protesters filled New York’s Zuccotti Park in the financial district. One of the activists, Tim Pool, began recording events on the ground using his cell phone. In a feed called “The Other 99,”3 he live-streamed footage using the internet video platform Ustream. When police raided the park on the night of November 15, removing and arresting protesters, including a number of journalists, Pool recorded the action. Millions of people around the world watched his marathon in-the-scrum reporting. His work was also picked up on news sites, including sites run by NBC, Reuters, CNN, and Al Jazeera. Pool was both protester and roving news outlet. He was “being the media,” as the contemporary slogan goes, and for that reason the message the protesters aimed to send – about Wall Street and its sympathetic, some say captured, political and police authorities – was more directly conveyed. In the moment, the message and the meaning of the coverage Pool was delivering were lost to many news outlets covering the story of the Occupy movement. The narrative developed by mainstream outlets was that the message of the Occupy movement was muddled and too broad to result in concrete change. But, for better or worse, one of the animating ideas at the heart of the global movement was that the time had come to seize the levers of control from the “1 percent” – the elite in finance, in government, in media – and the first victory Occupy achieved was a media victory. The activists who broadcast news of the movement from the moment it began never seemed to doubt that the traditional news media eventually would take up the story.
Indeed, the movement’s internal reporting on the movement was part of the movement. Two decades into the digital-media era, there was defiant confidence in the ability of “amateurs” to make the news media they wanted to see about their movement. They were sure they could better convey their message by telling it themselves, in part because they would be demonstrating that, in general, “doing it yourself” – instead of relying on institutions they saw as failing to serve the public interest – was the message of the movement. Working from the middle of the fray in Zuccotti Park, Pool captured the emotion and spirit of the movement, the sense of widely shared frustration at the status quo. He was one of thousands of Occupy media makers working the story as it unfolded. Journalist Nathan Schneider’s early stories on Occupy were published in major US news publications such as Harper’s and the New York Times. Like Pool, Schneider was an occupier. His book on the movement, Thank You, Anarchy, was widely praised and even more widely influential. It was criticized and lauded as “not objective reporting,” an interpretation that underlined the ambiguity of traditional journalists toward the book, the larger Occupy coverage, and the state of journalism more generally. “I agonized a lot about the participant-reporter thing,” Schneider said in 2013, but then he added, “probably more than I should have.”4
Pool and Schneider and many others broadcast the story of the movement across the networked-media environment – on video sites and on blogs and on social media. They occupied the news media, or, in the vocabulary of the era of computer code, they “hacked” the news. The movement and the story of the movement, which are the same thing, continue.
From medium to space
Media in the digital era constitute a new kind of space, an environment that “provides at the most fundamental level the resources we all need for the conduct of everyday life,”5 as Roger Silverstone put it. Communication scholars have conceptualized communicative space in the past. Jürgen Habermas wrote about the public sphere. Marshall McLuhan wrote about the global village. Henri Lefebvre said media space was neither subject nor object; he described it in the 1990s as a social reality.6 Recent scholarship across disciplines has followed Lefebvre’s line of thought, discarding the dominant understanding of space as something locational and considering space instead as something social.7 Jason Farman, for example, rejects the notion of space as a container that can be filled. “Space needs to be considered as something that is produced through use. It exists as we interact with it – and those interactions dramatically change the essential character of space,” he wrote.8
In today’s networked space, publics are hyper-connected to connective media9 feeds, email inboxes, information streams. Large segments of the waking population only fleetingly exist completely outside of what used to be more widely referred to as cyberspace. Indeed, the term is beginning to feel anachronistic, as offline and online spaces merge. Networked experience is shaped by communication tools, platforms, architectures, and by our ability or competence to master and modify our media environments. Mediated publics faced with limited resources, structural restrictions, and varying degrees of competence manage nevertheless to wield symbolic, material, and structural power. They can work more immediately and for larger audiences today to shape representation of people and events, to hack media tools and move around communication barriers, and to challenge and alter legal, economic, and governmental machinery.
Pre-digital media were once similarly celebrated for their potential to revolutionize human relations, but the hailed radical potential of the radio, telegraph, television, telephone, fax, and so on was at one point or another “interrupted.” Those media went through what Tim Wu calls “the cycle,” in which technologies evolve “from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system.”10 Why would digital media be any different? Perhaps because, unlike media of the past, networked media are a “multimedia” environment, characterized by the ability to host many different media and to spur the creation of more media. The diversity of styles, forms, interfaces, and skills that come together online may make it an open system that could prove particularly resistant to closure.
Digital media, as they evolve, force scholars to rethink media theory. Scholars like Nick Couldry see digital media as testing the usefulness of present thinking around media logics; for example, the concept commonly and often intuitively used by scholars when considering how processes tied to particular media distinctly shape content – the organizational, technological, and aesthetic determinants that make television journalism different than newspaper journalism, and so on. “Do all media have a logic?” Couldry asks. “Is it the same logic and, if not, what is the common pattern that unites their logics into an overall ‘media logic’ (this problem only becomes more acute with media proliferation)? Alternatively, when media change over time (as they are doing intensively today), do they acquire a wholly new media logic or does something remain constant?”11 The concept of media logic is most meaningful when tied to a solid institutional framework, such as the one that shapes 24-hour cable news. It is less plausible to see any singular logic shaping the networked environment. In this book, I argue that what scholars are calling logics might more usefully be seen as sensibilities – less tangible, more instinctual and fungible ways of understanding and assessing practice in news, or any given genre. Sensibilities can be used as a lens through which to view the full range of actors, genres, and forms at play in the contemporary media environment.
To explore networked media and the sensibilities that help shape it, this book draws on Roger Silverstone’s12 concept of mediapolis, a space where political life is carried out and where the material world is influenced through public discourse. It is a space of potential and of increased equity. Taking Hannah Arendt’s view of the polis as transcending the geographical,13 mediapolis is a national and global mediated arena. It is a “space of appearance” characterized as much by cultural difference and the absence of communication as it is by recognition and connection, as much by the homogenization of corporate conglomerates as by the pluralism of civic voices. Although Silverstone’s mediapolis refers to electronic mediation, not necessarily or exclusively digital networks, he recognized the internet as being potentially “hospitable” in ways broadcast media could never be. He described hospitable media as media that fulfill an obligation to welcome the stranger and to listen and hear, not just speak.14 “The internet is … a media space of global proportions with still an extant commons, but one constantly at risk both of its self-violation (pedophile and terrorist networks) and its enclosure (by transnational corporations and political controls).”15 Whether or not the internet fulfills this potential, he argued, depends on the role played by the user or audience in the networked space, on the regulations that shape the infrastructure of the space, and on the expansion of media literacy more broadly.
The networked space provides unprecedented levels of access to the content-interface front end and the architectural back end. There is also unprecedented power in the networked space to create content on user screens and to build and rebuild the infrastructure over which all the content travels. For now, the internet – all of its platforms and access points – remains a site of struggle. Corporations win battles, governments win battles, but publics win battles, too, like the one fought in 2015 over net neutrality in the United States. That victory was the result of massive internet-fueled public opposition to so-called net metering, where telecommunications corporations lobbying government officials would have gained the power to choose which kind of content flowed fastest to consumers. President Obama and Federal Communication Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler acknowledged that connected publics won the day by pressing the issue, by logging comments with the commission, by emailing legislators, and by taking down popular internet sites in an historic digital-media strike.
Journalism as Activism explores changing media power by focusing on media space generally, on the expansion of the journalist and activist communication within that space, and on the people at the forefront consciously and semiconsciously altering the space. Media scholars are writing about how the boundaries of media work and professionalism are being renegotiated in light of evolving technologies, economic models, and ideas about how to define communication professions in the digital era.16 The research presented in this book invites readers to consider the role mediated representation plays in constructing our realities, the circumstances under which media become malleable or rigid, and in whose interest.17 Writing about journalism, Seth Lewis suggests that what we’re witnessing is “not so much the wholesale collapse of legacy borders, but rather a whole series of disruptions, all varying in scope and source, coalescing into one vast and complicated terrain of contestations.”18 So-called boundary work highlights ways power is being negotiated by the media makers working the borders and going through what Zizi Papacharissi describes as “a transitional, but essential stage in finding one’s own place in the story.”19 She documents ways people use digital and networked technologies to plug in and contribute to political events. Members of what she terms “affective publics” participate in connective media versions of events, create related but separate events, and often use emotion as a way of knowing and sharing in the larger story. Affective publics are global publics, they demonstrate the way local and national and international experience mixes in the network, and how the private influences the public and vice versa, to shape how we understand and connect with news.
Journalism as Activism explores the expanding network terrain where activism and journalism mix. Activists use and create new communication tools and take up the work traditionally ascribed to journalists, expanding what it means to be involved in the production of news and, in the process, gaining influence over how traditional news stories and genres are constructed and circulated. Activists are part of an informal movement in which journalism is being taken up beyond the professional centers of news production and in which a wider, more diverse set of actors influence the flow and content of news. Activists are in that way, and by design, influencing the means by which we engage with one another and with those in power. And as activists take up the practices of journalists and as the media activist field becomes increasingly professionalized – adopting a corporate template of editorial norms, training, and business strategies – journalists look to activists for information and for ideas on how best to report the stories of the day.
This book contributes to scholarship that argues for a wider approach to exploring contemporary media power. It considers how people interact with mobile digital media and how they are shaping the infrastructure of our digital-network societies. It examines evolving networks of journalist and activist media, the way journalists and activists are using and developing communication tools, and how old and new practices from journalism and activism are mixing. The book builds on Couldry’s social-oriented methodological approach, which views media as open-ended and calls on scholars to examine what people are doing in relation to media, and how what they do is related to their wider agency, rather than merely looking at media as texts, institutions, or processes.20 The book argues for an approach that examines how people are using media and that asks how their media practices relate to their wider power to shape their realities.21 Couldry’s work is related to a growing body of research that takes a practice-based approach to exploring the nature of contemporary media activism. Recent practice-based studies have examined ways communication spaces or flows mix and form a sort of continuum between mainstream and alternative media;22 the relationship among activists engaged primarily in connective media work and those who place more value in offline engagement;23 and the fact that media activists within movements can be some of the most engaged members of the movements.24
Journalism as Activism highlights online and offline media practices aimed at social justice.25 It maps the coverage produced by overlapping networks generated around three major transnational protest movements: the Occupy movement against economic inequality; the movement to act in the face of climate change; and the struggle to bolster online civil liberties and internet freedom. The book also explores the way global media activists and journalists are creating and using new communication technologies, and highlights the roles these tools play in how change is being imagined and the tactics being adopted to try and bring about change. Finally, the book investigates practices being taken up by what I call a news-media vanguard of political activists and innovative traditional reporters who are changing the way reporting the news works to serve the public interest.
Media vanguard
Media anthropologist Jon Postill has highlighted the significance of what he calls a “global techno-libertarian vanguard” made up of hackers, lawyers, and journalists. Taking a cue from Postill, I identify and highlight the work of a media vanguard – generally journalists, activists, communication-technology hackers – exerting significant influence in today’s media environment through innovation and media competence. The vanguard includes popular journalists working at mainstream outlets that are integrating activist material and using their distribution channels. It includes Muslim women bloggers working to debunk myths about their lives. It includes international technology activists setting up mobile internet hubs and developing anti-snooping software. Media competence today is about the ability not just to write and produce new kinds of content but to contribute to communication architectures and tools, in ways that make for more robust and dynamic news. Media competence involves not only technical facility – the ability to use and create new tools tailored to specific needs – but also a sophisticated understanding of media power.
It is about leveraging convergent media to tell stories across platforms and possessing the ability and willingness to push beyond existing practices and genres. It is about being aware and scrutinizing the ways news shapes reality. And it is about seizing on the malleability of networked communications to move beyond the boundaries of what scholars have called the “media logics” of the mass-media era and consciously embedding sociopolitical values into the network and its expanding platforms and genres.
The media vanguard blends a sort of techno-libertarianism with popular demands for social justice.26 Those in it are top news-media makers as well as top news-media consumers. They are our news-media critics, tastemakers who teach us what to value in networked journalism. They show and tell us what to look for when deciding whether the journalism we are taking in is worth our time, money, effort, and trust. The point is that networked news is different and that it is changing expectations among the public about how the mediated news experience should look and feel. This kind of evolution is likely to continue to have dramatic effect in the coming years.
E. H. Gombrich, a founding figure in the field of art history, noted that one of the “most important events” in the post-World War II history of art was the change in attitudes regarding experimental work.27 He quoted critic Harold Rosenberg, who in writing about this change identified the influential role played by a new kind of public he called the “vanguard audience.”28 Gombrich argued it was the changes in interests and expectations on the part of the new vanguard audience, made up of artists, art writers, and gallery-goers, that fueled the wider revolution and that so quickly laid waste to the status quo, paving the way for the rise of abstract art, pop art, found art, and conceptual art. “It is the interest in change that has accelerated change to its giddy pace,” he wrote.29 The central feature of the revolution, according to Rosenberg, was that interest in the “tradition of the new reduced all other traditions to triviality.”30 The fact that men and women with no obvious mastery in drawing or painting or sculpting are accepted as great visual artists today would have seemed absurd and unimaginable in 1900. For the networked-media vanguard, the time has already arrived when a reporter’s ability to publish smoothly edited stories under the banner of the New York Times that include quotes from celebrities of officialdom means less than an ability to expertly aggregate and translate tweets in real time from a riotous square in Tehran, or to verify and post leaked files to a speedy cell-phone platform.
The power to influence how we assess journalism springs partly from an ethos that has shaped network technologies from the beginning, a so-called hacktivist sensibility, which emphasizes sharing, openness, decentralization, and low-threshold access.31 In exploring this sensibility, this book leans for examples on relatively high-profile actors in the expanded networked-era journalism field. By looking at the set of actors who are vying every day, whether consciously or not, to shape message machinery and the media landscape, we can better understand the new order of engagement that has replaced the one that was in place when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. courted the mass-media news industry.
The new dynamic highlights the changes taking place in the way struggles for social change are being represented – a key aspect of media power. When protesters are vilified or ignored by reporters, when they have been championed or glorified, their message has often been misinterpreted or co-opted and they have lost effectiveness.32 In the networked era, an expanded set of actors in the news-media space are changing its scripts, forms, genres, and public expectations and experiences. My last book, Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition,33 traced the transformations that took place with the widespread proliferation of the web and mobile technologies since the early 1990s. I argued against assertions that new technologies were eroding the quality of news and by extension the quality of public culture. I wrote that new journalism tools and practices seemed to be improving the quality of journalism by reviving past core values such as dialogue and pluralism and strengthening existing core values such as watchdogging power. Journalism as Activism extends the arguments laid out in Networked by exploring the ways social actors are leveraging new media tools and new media publics to expand more distributed grassroots power. They are specifically doing vanguard media work to change the way we think and act in relation to pressing issues such as social inequity, climate change, and internet freedom.
Throughout the book I employ an expanded definition of journalism and of journalists. The field I am writing about refers to a hybrid environment in which a wealth of news-related information, opinion, and cultural expression, in different styles and from various producers, together shapes the meaning of news events and issues.34 As Matt Carlson puts it: “Journalism is not a solid stable thing to point to but a constantly shifting denotation applied differently depending on context.”35 Journalism clearly has extended far beyond stories created for television broadcast outlets or for publication in traditional commercial newspapers and magazines. Today, news arrives in a dizzying array of forms and content – as a conversation that takes place on a connective media platform; a crowd-sourced investigative activity; a photo-sharing exercise; an unearthed, freshly posted database; a multi-player video game. Journalism isn’t being practiced just by people paid to gather information and create stories. It’s being practiced by those professionals along with members of the much broader category of people who interact with content not as audiences but as producers of media and messages and tools on a systematic and continuous basis. The blurred boundaries between information and affect, news and entertainment, professionals and publics, are part of a media environment marked by what Andrew Chadwick calls “subtle but important shifts in the balance of power” that shape news production.36 To Chadwick, “hybridity is creating emergent openness and fluidity, as grassroots activist groups and even lone individuals now use newer media to make decisive interventions in the news-making process.”37
The media vanguard identified in this book is made up of activists, technologists, and reporters whose work is informed on some level by hacker-activist or hacktivist sensibilities, and they are gaining increased media capital across fields, including in journalism, activism, and government. They are at the crest of a wave that is changing how media power is being negotiated in the hybrid media environment.
Over the past several years, I have talked to many activists working almost exclusively to produce new media tools and new kinds of content. The book is informed by the work and experience of journalists, activists, and developers, including Caroline d’Esson, a trained journalist who works for global activist network Avaaz. She designs, tests, and executes social justice campaigns launched each week. Adam Groves is a former editor with the London-based climate justice organization OneClimate, which produces live coverage of climate summits that informs the work of professional journalists and has been picked up by global commercial outlets. Isaac Wilder of the Free Network Foundation uses peer-to-peer network technology to create global wireless networks that are community-maintained and resistant to censorship. It is glaringly obvious from their work, the work of others I interviewed for this book, and its influence on the mediapolis, that news production has spread far beyond what we used to call the newsroom.
The news-media landscape of course is also now populated by the work of spontaneous media activists and potential activists. “Here comes everybody” was the phrase borrowed to great effect from James Joyce by media analyst Clay Shirky in 2009 to suggest the coming organizing power of the digitally networked “hive mind.” Four years after Shirky published his book came a set of two photos that famously articulate the extent and potential of the phenomenon as applied to networked news-media making. Corky Siemaszko at the New York Daily News placed a photo of the Vatican on the day in 2005 when Pope Benedict assumed the throne above a photo of the same Vatican square in 2013 when Pope Francis assumed the throne. The 2005 photo is a sea of heads and shoulders with a solitary flip-phone visible in the bottom right-hand corner. In the 2013 photo, the square is a sea of lights, smartphone and iPad screens twinkling as far as the eye can see.38 In taking on the role of documenters and reporters – delivering news to their social networks and making the case for the value of the moments they capture – networked publics39 are exhibiting a new sensibility in terms of how they relate to news events.
The work of producing media content and tools has become central in shaping how we experience life.40 To many people, a good meal or a house party have become as much about performance of participation for connective media feeds as about participation itself. At rock shows, school performances, skateboard parks, museums, papal coronations, scenes of crimes and protest – wherever we are and almost whatever we might be seeing – we view through the lens of our cameras, the ones in our hands or in our heads, connected to the media feeds of our lives. In December 2011, Anjali Appadurai, a US college student attending the United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, took a page from the Occupy protest movement playbook when she “mic checked”41 chief US negotiator Todd Stern. “You’ve run out of excuses! We’re running out of time! Get it done!” shouted Appadurai during a summit meeting. Her words were not only repeated by other protesters in the room, they were amplified by networked news publics spread across the globe. The Appadurai mic check was rebroadcast on cell phones and activist websites and Facebook – and also on mainstream media news sites in countries around the world.
Professional journalists have readily expanded their go-to sources beyond the largely bureaucratically credible news source of the past to include activists and citizens creating media that can’t be ignored. When news organizations have as a resource high-quality video of Appadurai speaking up amidst international climate negotiators, or of the confrontations in the heart of Zuccotti Park streamed by Pool, they use it and they lean on it, too, to push stories forward, to do more reporting, and to gain greater numbers and more diverse sets of readers and viewers and online “followers” and “friends.”
As news and politics analysts have documented, the enormous international protests in 2000 against the Iraq war were relatively ignored by US mainstream outlets and played a very small part in the coverage of the run-up to military action. The Occupy protests a decade later were similarly ignored for weeks, discounted in much of the news media, yet the story wouldn’t die. The movement spread across 600 cities and towns in the United States alone and to nearly 1,000 cities around the world. The story was fueled for months by its own media network of websites and through social media.
The 2012 proposal of US legislation that would have compromised net neutrality in addition to providing more robust legal responses to copyright infringement saw activists similarly take control of the story – a complex news story the mainstream media struggled to effectively report. Activist media makers effectively bypassed mainstream news media. They launched coordinated online actions against two proposed US laws, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect IP Act, or PIPA). New media industry giants like Google and popular discussion site Reddit (owned by Conde Nast) joined forces with activists. On the day before the Acts were set to be debated in Congress, more than 75,000 websites went dark or posted messages opposing the legislation and encouraging users to contact lawmakers. More than 8 million Americans looked up congressional contact addresses, 4.5 million signed a Google petition against the bills, 350,000 emails were sent to representatives via Sopastrike.org and americancensorship.org. Twitter reported that 2.4 million related tweets went up between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. And new tools were created to support the campaign. The next day, lawmakers shelved the bills. Six months later, the European Parliament faced the same kind of protest and rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the European version of the US bills.
This book explores the values of the hacker ethic and the norms and practices it feeds – what I’m calling hacktivist sensibilities. The book teases out the tensions that arise when these sensibilities mingle with and run up against the norms and practices of professional journalism – norms and practices developed to win credibility among the public, produce exclusive content, and maintain control over product delivery.
Hacking the news and recoding media power
Professional journalism norms have long been challenged by alternative or radical media products and practices.42 New-media technologies and products, from the printing press to satellite television, have been touted for their revolutionary capacities.43 In that light, this book explores continuities and shifts in the current networked era and the extent to which alternative forms, and the sensibilities that help shape them, are proliferating and overlapping with mainstream forms within the media landscape. In other words, the book explores an expanding section of the field of journalism that has been hacked and recoded.
The notion of hacktivist sensibilities is a launching point from which to identify and analyze a set of common values that run through the practices of the influential activist media vanguard working outside and inside traditional journalism settings. Members of the vanguard believe – generally, to different degrees, and sometimes just instinctively – that information should be free, authority
