Towards Social Journalism: Rediscovering the Conversation

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the sale of printed texts as commercial and immutable products, which has been disrupted again by digital and online technologies that make texts malleable and shareable once again. This disrupts the mass-media model, and introduces new logics.

Advertising-based media funding models corrupt, and paywalls discriminate in the distribution of news; even the alternative charity model of The Guardian and others can only take us so far, because charity is finite. If we cannot find new models for news and related industries, then, what we are left with is simply scorched earth. This kills the mass media, and ultimately kills the idea of the mass.

Perhaps the mass was always a fiction, and always a dystopian fiction at that – masses don’t have a very good image in the first place. If we have academic programmes organised around mass media, perhaps this needs to change – we need to think beyond mass, post-mass.

Another fiction is perhaps that journalists are storytellers: we are addicted to explaining the world through stories, but perhaps we have fooled ourselves into believing that we can understand the motives of people by telling ourselves stories about them. So, if the story doesn’t work, where does this leave us? We may instead need to talk about social trends, about social Darwinism as a way of explaining human behaviour – or possibly about what David Weinberger has called ‘everyday chaos’.

This is where machine learning comes in: algorithms capture the complexity of and recognise patterns in the universe without seeking explanations for it – but this does not help our understudying of why these patterns occur, of course. We are robbed of the idea of purpose in our lives, and this leads to a crisis of cognition: a world that is too complex to understand. This leaves us at a pivotal point, and in retrospect that point is marked by the introduction of the Internet.

But the Internet is not a medium, and we should not understand it as such. It is not simply a structure for manufacturing content, like print and broadcast; rather, it sucks in media, communication, retail, finance, crime, education, sociality, transport, and politics. In the sense, it is an ecology, a connection machine that connects people, information, and machines with each other. We are only just beginning to learn what this does.

This not a technologically determinist argument, but the availability of such technology does change us and our environment. Fundamentally, we return from Gutenberg’s print to the notion of conversation: cacophonous and noisy conversation, but necessary conversation nonetheless. In the Gutenberg age, conversation was strictly mediated, and now that the model has changed we are facing growing pains that explain the deep problems with current societal conversations – but this is a learning process.

Eventually, this may have positive outcomes, if it can generate what Carey has called an active, remembering public freed of the straitjackets of the mainstream media. We should not misunderstand this as mere content creation: we are not simply sharing our content, but in doing so we are saying that ‘this speaks for me’, and we are thereby using our content as social tokens. Journalists must not ignore this, because it is here where everyday life experiences are being expressed – as witnessed most exeptionally in recent times through through hashtags like #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, or #livingwhileblack.

The Internet is also not simply a technology, therefore – the Internet is the story of society, it is us. From this perspective, much recent regulation on the Internet, like hate speech and ‘fake news’ laws in Germany, France, and Singapore, is misguided: it seeks to control human content, human speech, and human behaviours online, and this does not help us. Such regulation tells the platforms to remove illegal speech as well as legal but harmful speech, and this is problematic.

We as researchers might therefore also need to learn from other disciplines. If the problem right now is the demonisation of the other, the stranger, then the challenge is to make strangers less strange. We may be able to learn from anthropology here, by taking others seriously. Media studies has too often not done so, but instead focussed on the deindividualised mass. Similarly, if the problem at this point is propaganda and polarisation, what might we learn from neuroscience: what makes people believe such ‘alternative facts’, in spite of all the evidence against them?

This is also a teaching challenge. We must re-teach listening – media were made to speak, for the few and the elite, but now anyone online can speak, but who will listen? Such listening is a message in itself, an act of communication that confirms the identity and importance of the speaker. Therein lies the essence of the media, reconsidered. Journalism then becomes the convening of communities into respectful, informed, and productive (yet not necessarily civil) conversations – it becomes social journalism.