M. Schreiber u.a. (Hrsg.): Journalism and Technological Change

Cover
Titel
Journalism and Technological Change. Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Trends


Herausgeber
Schreiber, Martin; Zimmermann, Clemens
Erschienen
Frankfurt am Main 2014: Campus Verlag
Anzahl Seiten
291 S.
Preis
€ 36,90
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Martin Conboy, Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield

There seems to be a misapprehension in the world of critical media studies. The misapprehension is that there are no techno-determinists left out there. Alas! I teach scores of them each year and each cohort needs reminding that the evidence strongly suggests that media technologies are adopted through human agency, driven by a combination of professional context, political self-interest and economic strategy. In order to get this point across, history is an essential exhibit. This excellent new book provides plenty of reasoned demonstration of how technological adoption within journalism in particular has always been a complex process of negotiation. It acts as a valuable counterweight to techno-centric accounts which often emerge from the mainstream professional discourses within the media as well as from early adapters of technologies carried on the crest of a wave of enthusiasm for an isolated present.

The editors have chosen to bring a variety of outstanding critical writers to forge a wide-ranging perspective on these themes emanating from a conference in Saarbrücken in 2013. The volume reinforces the fact that collective discussion of these sorts of contemporary themes is often the best way to establish a public discourse at a decent pace. A valuable aspect of the book is the transnational comparisons that it generates through its choice of authors. The Anglo/American-German axis that this sets up is a particularly productive one and yet is one of the most sorely neglected.

The book opens up a captivating set of discussions on the social construction of technology within the practice and consumption of journalism. Although this is perhaps not quite as novel as the editors claim, it certainly is a much under-represented critical approach. It is innovative in both its historical contextualization and its rounded view of news media as professional as well as industrial enterprises. It provides a very sophisticated assessment of journalism and its relationship to changing technologies across twelve chapters ranging from historical explorations to the contemporary application of technology in newsrooms. The editors have concentrated on a period of one hundred and fifty years and although some authors usefully contextualize this period by sorties back to the development of printing and woodcut illustration, it is a temporalization that suits the subject matter well.

The opening chapter identifies the gaps in traditional scholarship on the main themes of this book. These gaps include a lack of perspective on journalists’ own assessments of how technology has been deployed to reconfigure the work that they do. However, despite this opening remark, rather than taking a brief and inadequate glance at each of the chapters, it seems better and a fairer reflection of the editorial ambition of the book to consider the core themes which run throughout it.

Speed is one of the driving themes of the discussions here and not in any narrow teleological narrative. Several authors give due prominence to the claims made on behalf of the increased rapidity of news dissemination via various technologies and the paradoxes which it has often brought in its wake, from the re-emergence of compensatory slow-gestation media of reflection to the de-skilling of many jack-of-all-trades which contemporary media technologies seem to promise.

Radio, an oft-neglected technological medium for journalism, is dealt with indicating the consequences for newspapers of its interruption of the monopoly of print. The range of discussion further departs from a narrow focus on writing within journalism to appreciate the gestation of the visual within news discourse. These chapters are infused with a range of reflection by and on journalists about the roles that they play within communication. On the contemporary plane, the editors have done well to include work that demonstrates a good empirical basis to the consideration of how technology is actually being used within news environments and what this might mean for users as well as consumers. Rita Gudermann provides an account of the longer trajectory of periodical illustration and in particular the emergence of competing technologies of image reproduction in the nineteenth century. The image becomes, in this view, a site where the democratic potential of cheap illustration meets the commercial potential of media owners to syndicate images to increase profitability.

Kevin G. Barnhurst deals with the implications of speed of delivery analysing the ‘interpretive turn’. In extending his analysis of technological change, he does well to stress that our contemporary news media culture is in the process of ‘emerging’ and therefore potentially influenced by the sort of public discussion that this book and its feeder seminar provide. John Nerone highlights the continuities in our expectations of news content and asserts that there is a robust syntax of news which appears to have survived several changes of technological regime. Both Nerone and Barnhurst in their separate chapters stress the structural demands of interpretation as it needs a slower pace of gestation than the attractions of instantaneous media can provide while Jürgen Wilke provides an explicit corrective to any overemphasis on the technologies themselves by reinserting an invaluable emphasis on the function of content production into our deliberations of how journalism has strategically deployed technology.

The later chapters in the book deal well with the implications for questions of quality and journalistic identity. John Pavlik provides a counter narrative to the liberation by technology espoused by some enthusiasts while acknowledging that from an informed historical perspective a shift to an open paradigm has occurred which ultimately leads him to a sense of optimism. Likewise, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen provides a full account of the shifts in journalistic epistemologies engendered by recent technological developments.

None of these chapters fully engages though with the problematic issue of ‘professionalization’ which can certainly be considered a barrier to understanding some of the complexity of the challenge posed to traditional quality journalism by informed and enthusiastic outsiders. Indeed, one of the minor flaws of the book is the acceptance by most of the authors through most of the book that journalism is fully professionalized and understands itself as such. This is one of the main barriers to understanding the current plight of journalism as it is encroached upon by competent ‘non-professionals’. Another criticism of assumptions of professionalism is that apart from one brief mention, the potential discussion of technology and its gendered aspects are ignored.

A further slight concern is the lack of sustained attention paid to the political economy of journalism, particularly in the light of technological innovation. Without careful consideration of who owns, sells, takes decisions on which technologies to develop, the ‘co-construction’ of mediated realities does sound naively optimistic as if there is not already a severe imbalance in effective representation in the development of technologies.

Nevertheless, this is a vibrant account of how history can be deployed to understand the ways in which technology has been incorporated into journalism practice and products. It is a credit to both the publishers and the editors that they have managed to include such a wide range of entirely appropriate illustration to complement the critical analysis in this volume and this will make it even more worthy of a place on any reading list which deals with the complex inter-relationships between journalism and technology in the present.

Redaktion
Veröffentlicht am
Beiträger
Redaktionell betreut durch
Klassifikation
Mehr zum Buch
Inhalte und Rezensionen
Verfügbarkeit
Weitere Informationen
Sprache der Publikation
Sprache der Rezension