Journalism and Citizenship

New Agendas in Communication

Zizi Papacharissi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135230944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Journalism is in the middle of sweeping changes in its relationships with the communities it serves, and the audiences for news and public affairs it seeks to address. Changes in technology have blurred the lines between professionals and citizens, partisan and objective bystanders, particularly in the emerging public zones of the blogosphere. This volume examines these changes and the new concepts needed to understand them in the days and years ahead.

With contributions from up-and-coming scholars, this collection identifies key issues and paves the way for further research on the role of journalism in today's world. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, and advanced students in journalism, communication, and media studies, and will also be of interest to those in public affairs, political science, and government.

Part I
Journalism’s Evolution in the Era of the Active Audience

Chapter 1
Journalism, Citizenship, and Digital Culture

Mark Deuze

During the Summer of 2007 temporary or “transient” nightclubs were built in Barcelona and Lisbon (after an earlier 2006 try-out in Berlin) under the brand name Kubik. “Designed by Berlin-based urban design agency ModulorBeat and light artist Andreas Barthelmes, Kubik is built from stacked, reused water tanks […] Kubik’s 275 illuminated cubes house a bar and lounge from Sunday through Wednesday, and a club from Friday through Saturday.”¹ Earlier in 2007, marketing agency Herrmann International Asia together with the Australian arm of Brown-Forman Beverages Worldwide organized the SoCo Cargo Experiment, created for the Southern Comfort brand. This equally temporary club concept consisted of 12 metre long shipping containers stacked side by side and on top of each other, with adaptable interiors containing a bar, and stage and lounge areas. The container club premiered on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island in October 2006, and then popped up at festivals in Melbourne (February 2007) and Adelaide (March 2007).² A similar re-use of shipping containers comes from Singapore-based Venue VBOX, offering clients a portable store in a shipping container, which can be set up anywhere temporarily.³ In May 2007 the Russian vodka brand Stolichnaya launched a Stoli Hotel in Los Angeles, working with different agencies such as TTC PR, Legacy Marketing Partners, and Fly Communications.⁴ This 10,000 square-foot “pop-up” hotel was designed and built within an empty garage or hall space, and was taken down after a month to be moved to other cities like New York, Chicago, and Miami.⁵Marketing firm Trendwatching explains the growing popularity of “pop-up” retail, hotels, clubs, and other forms of consumerist leisure with the concept of “transumerism”: designing and implementing novel and innovative shopping and entertainment opportunities aimed at consumers that are always on the move, “as consumers are slowly but certainly mirroring travel behavior in daily life. After all, in our Experience Economy, the temporary, the transient, is increasingly being valued if not worshipped on a daily basis.”⁶

Of course, it would be easy to critique the choice of venues and materials for these marketing efforts. Shipping containers, empty or abandoned urban spaces … it all invokes disturbing images of refugees suffocating (as has happened in cargo containers at U.S. and European harbours), of homeless people seeking shelter, of tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees forced to temporarily live in the Houston Astrodome. What is a more salient issue here, though, is the shift in focus on living, eating, and socializing towards experiences that are intrinsically temporary, transitory, a moment in time that cannot be relived or revisited. As such, these examples underscore contemporary modern life—a life lived from moment to moment, always in the here and now, in a context of seemingly constant and disruptive change, restlessness, and overall anxious feeling of being part of a “runaway world,” as Anthony Giddens (2002) states. In this essay, I would like to couple this crucial observation with a critical debate on the (future) role of professional journalism in developed democratic societies for, as many keen observers of the profession note, it is impossible to conceive of journalism (and the work of journalists) without the larger political and social context within which it operates. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2001, p. 23) similarly argue, that “[w]hether one looks back of three hundred years, and even three thousand, it is impossible to separate news from community, and over time even more specifically from democratic community.” The pop-up phenomenon thus is a tool to express my concern with the role of public information and journalism in the experience of community at our particular phase of modernity.

If, as John Hartley (1996) has put it, journalism is the primary sense-making practice of modernity, what kind of modernity does it make? Scholars and practitioners alike often use a normative notion of journalism as providing the social cement of democracies as a point of departure in their work. In journalism, the consensually preferred way of achieving this classical role is through monitoring of bureaucracy, industries, and the state as modernity’s key institutions. It is what scholars and newsworkers alike tend to describe as “hard” news—the apex of journalism’s informal hierarchy. Presumably, political and economic news forge and reinforce the foundations of social organization. However, contemporary society is anything but solid or socially cohesive. Under conditions of worldwide migration and capital flight, moveable businesses, global conflicts, and widespread environmental apprehension, most people sense a precariousness in everyday life, whether real or perceived. As a response, citizens increasingly retreat into “hyperlocal” enclaves (suburban ghettos or guard-gated communities) and “hyperindividual” personal information spaces (connecting with the world without actually physically engaging with it through online social networks such as MySpace and Second Life). A fundamental question is whether journalism adds fuel to these flames or effectively patrols the fragile fences of modernity.

As self-proclaimed gatekeepers, journalists have only their occupational ideology and news culture to rely on as a defence against either commercial intrusion or special interests (Deuze, 2005). In doing so, journalism’s representation of society tends to stay the same while simultaneously reporting on a rapidly changing world. Considering the tendency among newsworkers to reiterate and reproduce age-old news values, while at the same time surfing on the waves of permanent change amplified by the attitudes and behaviors of the global financial and political elites, journalism makes sense of a modernity that seems unsettling at best, and out of touch with the everyday lives of most of its inhabitants at worst. A key to reorienting journalism studies to the rapidly changing human condition can be found in the works of Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman’s confrontations with modernity led him in his most recent writings to see contemporary society in terms of a “liquid” modernity (2000). Bauman defines a liquid modern society as “a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines. Liquidity of life and that of society feed and reinvigorate each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern society, cannot keep its shape or stay on course for long” (2005, p. 1). A liquid modern society is one where uncertainty, flux, change, conflict, and revolution are the permanent conditions of everyday life—indeed, as exemplified by the SoCo Cargo Experiment or the Kubik nightclubs. Bauman makes a compelling argument how liquid life is neither modern or post-modern, but rather explains how the categories of existence established and enabled by early, first, or solid modernity are disintegrating, overlapping, and remixing. It is not as if we cannot draw meaningful distinctions between global and local anymore. The same goes for other modern categories of everyday life, such as between work and non-work, between public and private, between conservative and progressive, or between mediated and non-mediated experiences. It is just that these and other key organizing characteristics and categories of modern life have lost their (presumed or perceived) intrinsic, commonly held or consensual meaning. As the trendwatchers excitedly proclaim about transumerism: everything (and everyone) is always on the move. Using Bauman’s work as an anchoring framework, the challenges to our understanding of the role of journalism are discussed in terms of key political changes articulated with a liquid modern life. The purpose of this approach is to open up new or refreshing ways to ignite the discussion about, for and especially with (young and aspiring) journalists about their role and position in contemporary democratic society.

Politics and Citizenship

The meaning of citizenship has changed in the last few decades. Michael Schudson (1999) argues how most people still tend to be seen by politicians, scholars, and journalists alike as citizens that need to inform themselves widely about all political parties in play, so that they can make an informed decision come election time. However, Schudson also shows how this model of citizenship is a thing of the past—an unrealistic and rather elitist notion of how people should make up their minds, and what political representation means to them. Another reason for the inappropriateness of the “informed” citizen as a benchmark for democratic theory is its reliance on a worldview that is premised on media access in the context of channel scarcity. Whereas the 1950s model of citizenship could be based on a notion of people wishing to inform themselves having access to only a few sources and channels of information, in today’s mixed media ecology such an assumption seems rather ridiculous. Media have come to be integrated into every aspect of peoples’ daily lives, particularly facilitated by the worldwide proliferation of the Internet and similar services that connect subscribers to a global, always-on, digital information and communication network. The whole of the world and our lived experience in it can indeed be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by pervasive and ubiquitous media. This world is what authors such as Marc Schuilenburg and Alex de Jong (2006), and Roger Silverstone (2007) consider as a “mediapolis”: a mediated public space where media culture underpins and overarches the experiences of everyday life.

The behavior of the citizen in our contemporary mediapolis is what Schudson calls primarily “monitorial”: scanning all kinds of news and information sources—newspapers, magazines, TV shows, blogs, online and offline social networks, and so on—for the topics that matter to her personally. People are not necessarily disengaged from the political process—they just commit their time and energy to it on their own terms. This individualized enactment of citizenship can be linked to the act of the consumer, browsing the stores of the shopping mall for that perfect pair of shoes, comparing prices and sizes with online offerings. Monitoring is indeed the act of the citizen-consumer, participating in society (whether that “society” equals virtual, topical or geographical community, one’s role within a democratic nation-state, or within a translocal network) conditionally, unpredictably, and voluntarist.

The way people perceive and enact their role as citizens and consumers increasingly develops in the context of mediated and networked environments, which process loosens—but not destroys—what John Thompson (1996, p. 207) has described as the connect...

Table of contents

• New Agendas in Communication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Journalism’s Evolution in the Era of the Active Audience
• Part II The Public’s Relationship with Digital Content
• Part III The Impact of the Citizen as Mass Communicator
• Index