Liquid Journalism

by Mark Deuze

News is a product that commercial corporations sell to target audiences as defined by marketing departments. As a commodity, it has always competed with the tendency of people to make their own news: pirate radio, alternative media, using the office photocopier as "the people's printing press," activist newsletters pasted on city walls, gossiping in the local pub or market tavern.   Yet much of this mediamaking behavior remained conveniently invisible to the journalists of the 20 th century heyday of mass media - a period Hallin (1992) called the "high modernism" of (American) journalism. Reporters and editors convinced themselves they could enact the people's wants and needs through a self-professed doctrine of social responsibility, allowing them to forge a seemingly "unified identity" and "centrality" in a public sphere largely devoid of cultural complexities or social diversity (Hallin, 2006: online). It is during this time that journalism, according to Hartley, emerged as the primary sense-making practice of modernity (1996: 12). In terms of journalism's "modernist bias of its official self-presentation" (Zelizer, 2004: 112), its scholars and its practitioners came to see the work and product of professional journalism as the cornerstone of modern society, and more particularly: the nation-state and its institutional elites. As Carey (1996) has noted explicitly: "Journalism is another name for democracy or, better, you cannot have journalism without democracy. The practices of journalism are not self-justifying; rather, they are justified in terms of the social consequences they engender, namely the constitution of a democratic social order" (online).

Much has changed since those days. Consider the following conclusion from a series of research projects by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in 2005: "Sitting down with the news on a set schedule has become a thing of the past for many time-pressured Americans [...] More people are turning away from traditional news outlets [...] At the same time, public discontent with the news media has increased dramatically. Americans find the mainstream media much less credible than they did in the mid-1980s. They are even more critical of the way the press collects and reports the news. More ominously, the public also questions the news media's core values and morality." Reports in most well established democracies around the world signal similar trends. Corporate journalism has lost its "sense of wholeness and seamlessness" observed by Hallin (1992: 14), but not necessarily because of the collapse of political consensus or increasing market forces, as he suggests. What journalism has lost, as it is produced within the confines of mainstream news media corporations, is 'touch' with what sociologists like to call reflexive or liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000). The contemporary condition of everyday life can best be understood as a process of radical "modernization of modern society" (Beck, Bonss & Lau, 2003: 1), where "liquid modern society and liquid life are locked in a veritable perpetuum mobile" (Bauman, 2005: 12). The key to these assumptions is the common perception among people of all walks of life that we live in times of fast-paced, uncontrollable, and unsettling radical change. In today's global society such a widely shared sense of accelerated change is no longer a break in the otherwise fairly stable routine of everyday existence; instead, it has become the structural condition of contemporary 'liquid' life: "We live today under conditions of permanent revolution . Revolution is the way society lives nowadays. Revolution has become human society's normal state" (Bauman, 2002: 17).

On the one hand, social philosophers like Beck, Giddens, Rorty and Bauman see the role media play in this process as a mere mirror of the changes taking place in world society. On the other hand, theorists like Manovich (2001), Levy (1997) and Fidler (1997), see a more independent role for media's impact on economical, political and cultural trends. Fidler, for example, attributes much of our sense of continuous change to "the unexpected cross-impact of maturing technologies" (1997: 2). This process, which Fidler calls 'mediamorphosis', suggests how a sense of revolutionary change is a given in the social shaping of technologies, even though the way people organize (and are organized by) the social exchange of information has not changed much in the history of news. Stephens (1988: 289), for example, has noted how the main differences between news through the ages has been its increased amplification, in turn largely facilitated through the introduction and development of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is in the way people engage disruptive new ICTs such as Internet that the conditions of permanent change get expressed. Technological innovation and adoption processes can be seen as evolutionary in a Darwinian sense, in that whichever technology - as in: device, code or protocol - is dominant at any given point in time is not necessarily the 'best', but rather the more 'fitting' with the prevailing culture. This in turn suggests that the various ways in which certain cultural industries - such as the news media - adapt and adopt new media tend to reinforce and perhaps subtly modify existing power relationships. The fascinating dilemma of understanding 21st century technological and social change thus must be how to reconcile a common sense of permanent revolution with a macro-theoretical observation of adaptive evolution. The key, I would argue, lies in the reciprocity of the two concepts, and this may be what makes our liquid modern times exciting as well as deeply unsettling. For the purposes of this essay, I aim to establish the mutually enabling characteristics of old versus new media as the basis for my consideration of the future of news.

Remediation

Bolter and Grusin (1999) dub the transitory process of old to new media as one of ongoing 'remediation', where old media are refashioned in new media which in turn force previous media to redesign themselves accordingly. Their work builds on the insights of McLuhan, stressing the mutual implication of old and new media. Extending such a definition of media, I would like to argue that 'media' in this context refers to its artifacts (cf. the hardware and software of ICTs) as well as its uses and social applications, as this allows us to see the symbiotic relationships between technological and social change when, for example, studying how news organizations refashion themselves to meet the demands of technology and society. Sennett (1998: 96) argues that "it takes institutions a long time to digest the technologies they ingest." This may be true. But it underestimates the perception and sense of continuous change the rapid introduction of new media bring to the workfloor of media industries, as noted by scholars of news production around the world like Singer, Boczkowski, Cottle, Domingo, Heinonen, Quinn, and Deuze. It is thus important to note that any consideration of the future of news and political communication has to involve not only an awareness of how the social systems of journalism and politics self-organize to adapt to new circumstances while maintaining their internal power structures, but also how the contemporary condition of liquid modernity and its sense of permanent revolution wreaks havoc on the very foundations of these institutions - at the same time.

The constant tweaking, revamping, developing, adopting as well as abandoning of new media in the office (as well as at home) is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it has accelerated in the last decade or so. It is exactly this period when contemporary observers have seen all kinds of rapid changes and feverish developments occurring in the realm of the social, particularly pointing towards the parallel trends of increasing globalization and individualization permeating all aspects of everyday life. Although people and social systems around the world respond to such sweeping changes differently, the impact of permanent revolution on society manifests itself most clearly in our increasing uncertainty, anxiety and disagreement about the exact meaning, role and function of such well-established features of modern life as the role of the state, the church, the family, and of professional journalism (Bauman, 2000). The added value of a social perspective offers media theory an important marker for understanding this status quo. The ambiguity of liquid modern life extends to the way we respond to and interact with new media. Fidler notes that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new media, failing to fully appreciate the complex and evolutionary trends expressed in the maturation processes of information and communication technologies. A more nuanced perspective, advocated by most contemporary scholars of new media, would move beyond such feverish expectations or delusions and look at new media in terms of how they take root next to and in a symbiotic relationship with existing media. Following Bauman, let me emphasize that these (r)evolutionary trends do not lead to some kind of 'new' stable media ecosystem as suggested by such media-centric approaches; no, disequilibrium and liquidity are the permanent condition, and get expressed both in the social as well as the technological.

Journalism and "high modernity"

Media as social institutions do not escape the sense of accelerated, unsettling change permeating liquid modern life, and it is exactly this notion of volatile, uncertain (global and local) flux that professional journalism fails to come to terms with. If we look at the various ways in which the news industry has tried to integrate, or at the very least give some kind of coherent meaning to, disruptive technologies like Internet and social trends like individualization or globalization, one can see how journalism still depends on its established mode of production, through which it largely (and unreflexively) reproduces the institutional contours of high (or: 'solid') modernity. Thus journalism, as it moved online in the late 1990s, consistently offered shoveled, repurposed and windowed content for free, cannibalizing on its core product while treating its Web presence as an advertisement for the offline product. In doing so, it remediated not only its product, but also its production process online, including but not limited to its established ways of doing things, its news culture, and its occupational ideology (Deuze, 2005). The primary function of the multitude online thus became the same as people were expected to behave offline, as publics : audiences to be sold to advertisers. In the same vein, journalism has engaged the individualized society in terms of its presupposed "audience fragmentation," which in turn has reified professional journalisms' position as the primary gatekeeper and information provider in society. Globalization has a particular impact on the making of news, as it forces journalists to translate events occurring all over the world involving all kinds of people to their local constituencies -communities made up of peoples, religions, and cultural practices with roots in different parts of the world. For most of the 20 th century journalists have ignored the complexities when covering 'the world', combining narrow-minded frameworks like Orientalism (as eminently argued by Edward Said), and ethnocentrism and small-town pastoralism (following Herbert Gans).

A new media ecology

The 21st century can tentatively be seen as a period when the developed world enters the second 'liquid' phase of modernity, where all existing modern social, economical and political institutions - organized religion, the nuclear family, professional journalism, the nation-state - have become what Giddens (2002) sees as hollowed out 'shell' institutions. Beck (2002) goes a step further, suggesting that most academic and professional observers of second modernity tend to interpret every social phenomenon within the gaze of the social institutions of 'solid' modernity - particularly the gaze of the nation-state - and thus have been guilty of practicing a 'zombie sociology'. Reinterpreting Beck's argument for the purposes of this essay, professional and high modern journalism can be considered to have been clinically dead for a long time - but it is unable to die. In this perspective, journalism makes a product without consumers, delivers news without effect, and claims social responsibility without a constituency that would legitimate such representation. Instead of being able to rely on such institutions for providing some automatic or consensual function in our lives, it is up to each and every one of us to enter into a complex and ongoing negotiation with them, of which the outcome will always be uncertain. This process coincides with the emergence of a post-industrial information culture, typified by Manovich (2001) as a global remix between culture and computers. The establishment of a global network society, as Castells (2000) has shown, further erodes the traditional foundations of a nation-based informed citizenry on which the social responsibility of the press is premised. As Castells would have it, the 'hypersociability' of networked individualism is the new form of postnational social cohesion, "enhancing the capacity of individuals to rebuild structures of sociability from the bottom up" (2001: 132). What is expected of us in such a society is to acquire the skills and resources necessary to navigate complex and interactive social and technological networks on our own. This shifts our core competencies away from so-called 'expert' systems - like journalism or the academe - to what Levy (1997) sees as a form of collective intelligence particular of cyberculture, where knowledge about any given topic or subject is based on the ongoing exchange of views, opinions and information between many rather than pulling the wisdom of a few. In this context, Hartley (2002) predicts the emergence of a global 'redactional' society, where the core competences once exclusively associated with professional journalism are increasingly necessary for every citizen to guarantee survival in a networked information age. Journalism has become not so much the property of what journalists do in order to sell news, but what people all over the world engage in on a daily basis in order to survive, coping with "modernity's extreme dynamism" (Giddens, 1991: 16), and the permanent revolution of liquid life (Bauman, 2005).

It is in this context that a new media ecosystem (Bowman & Willis, 2005), or new media ecology, is taking shape. I have previously drawn distinctions between different and recombinant functions of journalism in such a new media system, where its news professionals will have to find ways to strike a balance between their identities as providers of editorial content, and of public connectivity (as in providing and amplifying a platform for what Carey has posited as the discussion society ideal-typically has with itself). Secondly, the profession would have to articulate an equilibrium between its operationally closed working culture strictly relying on a ruling elite of 'experts', and a more collaborative, responsive, interactive or even dialogical journalistic culture (Deuze, 2003: 219). Of such a complex new media ecology one can see Internet (and all what we do online) as a primary manifestation, where people empowered by increasingly cheaper and easier-to-use technologies participate actively in their own 'newsmaking'. People engage each other and the global network of computers in a wide variety of ways, from responding via e-mail to a breaking news story to collectively producing 'citizen journalism' Websites powerful enough to influence presidential elections -as in the case of Ohmynews in South Korea. What is particularly salient about these trends is a further blurring of the carefully cultivated dividing lines between professional and amateurs, and between producers and consumers of media. Jenkins (2003) describes this development as the emergence of a 'convergence culture', indicating a shift within media companies towards a more inclusive production process fostering "a new participatory folk culture by giving average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate content" (online). There is no doubt that a future news system will be based - at least in part - on an interactive and connective mode of production where media makers and users will co-exist, collaborate and thus effectively compete to play a part in the mutual (yet never consensual, as Niklas Luhmann has noted) construction of reality. On a concluding hopeful note, Balnaves, Mayrhofer and Shoesmith (2004) consider such a shift towards a more engaged, emancipatory and participatory relationship between media professionals and their publics an example of a 'new humanism' in the domains of public relations, journalism and advertising, constituting " an antidote to narrow corporate-centric ways of representing interests in modern society" (p.192).

Liquid journalism

For journalism, all of this means, in part, that value attributed to media content will be increasingly determined by the interactions between users and producers rather than the product (cf. news ) itself. However, the real significance of the argument outlined here is that we have to acknowledge that the key characteristics of current social trends - uncertainty, flux, change, unpredictability, or perhaps: 'kludginess' (paraphrasing Jenkins, 2004: 34) - are what defines the current and future state of affairs in how people make and use journalism all around the world, even though we can at the same time see how the traditional hierarchical organization of society extends into the information culture of the global network society. In terms of business praxis, this means we will see a bewildering variety of top-down, hierarchical and extremely closed-off types of corporate enclosures of the commons existing next to peer-driven forms of collaborative ownership regarding the manufacture of news. In terms of media production processes, we will continue to witness a mix of "one-size-fits-all" content made for largely invisible mass audiences next to (and infused by) rich forms of transmedia storytelling including elements of user control and 'prosumer'-type agency. In a way, it will be a mess - which makes the careful and socially realistic study of what people in their shapeshifting identities as consumers as well as producers of (news) media actually do all the more important.

Instead of lamenting or celebrating this process, or trying to find a fixed point somewhere in the future in our failed predictions of where we are going, we should embrace the uncertainty and complexity of the emerging new media ecology, and enjoy it for what it is: an endless resource for the generation of content and experiences by a growing number of people all around the world. Part of what will happen will reproduce existing power relationships and inequalities, for sure. Yet we are also witnessing an unparalleled degree of human agency and user control in our lived experience of mediated reality. A journalism that successfully embraces and engages this ecology will have to become fluid itself: a liquid journalism . The future of news will be determined by the extent of its liquidity, its ability to navigate the different and sometimes conflicting expectations of a world citizenry, and our willingness - as journalism scholars and educators - to teach students more than just the tools of a dead (or dying) trade. In its dominant, Western, and professional form, journalism is a zombie institution, incapable of dealing with the unsettling complexity of the problems and challenges in contemporary liquid life. So let me end on this slightly utopian note: to earn its legitimacy as one of the key sensemakers of liquid modernity, journalism (studies, education and praxis) has to evolve, and become a liquid journalism.

Mark Deuze is Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University.

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