The politics of journalistic creativity: expressiveness, authenticity and de-authorization

This article begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matter of guile and ingenuity to being about expressiveness, and that this reflects a broader cultural shift from professional expertise to the authenticity of personal expression as dominant modes of valorization. It then seeks to unpack the normative baggage that underpins the case for creativity in the cultural industries. First, there is a prioritization of agency, which does not stand up against the phenomenological argument that we do not own our own practices. Second, creative expression is not necessarily more free, simply alternately structured. As with Judith Butler’s performativity model, contemporary discourses of creativity assume it to have a unique quality by which it eludes determination (relying on tropes of fluidity), whereas it can be countered that it is in spontaneous, intuitive practice that we are at our least agencical. Third, the article argues against the idea that by authorizing journalists (and audiences) to express themselves, creativity is democratizing, since the always-already nature of recognition means that subjects can only voice their position within an established terrain rather than engage active positioning

Hunched over their laptops: phenomenological perspectives on citizen journalism

Donald Matheson (2003) writes of war correspondents ‘scowling at their notebooks’, and this is not meant as caricature but the corporeal expression of an epistemological orientation to the world in which facts have to be wrestled into submission. This article takes a phenomenological approach to ask whether there is a distinct orientation of citizen journalism and blogging, exploring the corporeal, temporal and spatial aspects of non-professional practices of media production. Hunching over a laptop suggests an epistemology in which facts and opinions are urgent and potentially subversive, though it is also tied to the romanticised individualism with which citizen journalism in particular is associated

The case against the democratic influence of the internet on journalism

Book synopsis: Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship provides a much-needed analytical account of the implications of interactive participation in the construction of media content. Although web journalism is a fast-changing technology this book will have sustained appeal to an international readership by seeking to critically assess Internet news production. … With the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, it is a commonplace to observe that interactive participatory media are transforming the relationship between the traditional professional media and their audience. A current, popular, assumption is that the traditional flow of information from media to citizen is being reformed into a democratic dialogue between members of a community. The editors and contributors analyse and debate this assumption through international case studies that include the United Kingdom and United States. … While the text has been written and designed for undergraduate and postgraduate use, Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship? will be of use and of interest to all those engaged in the debate over Web reporting and citizen journalism

Journalism and critical engagement: naiveté, embarrassment, and intelligibility

This article explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of critical engagement, drawing on Rancière’s conception of dissensus as organized disagreement over the conditions of understanding. It begins by assessing the status that worthiness and naiveté have as negative symbolic capital in the journalistic field, before asking whether journalists’ ambivalent detachment from the objects of their inquiry hinders their ability to engage critically with experts in other fields. It argues that journalism’s role in marshaling dissensus amounts to making clear the limits and absences of intelligibility in journalism and other fields, in distinction to disseminating knowledge as such

The uses of seriousness: Arab journalists tweet the 2011-12 uprisings

Book synopsis: The answers to these questions reflect the themes of this book. The chapters are by experienced journalists, academics and practitioners in the field. They unravel and clearly present the recent and on-going developments in journalism and the press around the globe, including the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. Chapters deal with the phone hacking and data thefts in the UK that provoked a major inquiry into press ethics and standards. Twitter is examined and found to be a valuable tool for reporters in the Arab world and research shows how, in Australia, readers use Twitter to pass along news topics. Chapters also explore the use of the mobile phone to access news in sub-Saharan Nigeria, the role of media magnates in presenting political views in Europe, and Wikipedia’s representation of conflict. This collection of fourteen chapters by leading authors examines journalism as practised today and what we might expect from it in the future

Review essay: Social media, politics and protest

Invited review of three recent titles on social media and protest cultures: Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert (eds), Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs (eds), Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard (eds), Civic Engagement and Social Media: Political Participation Beyond Protest. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Mediating Subjectivity through Materiality in Documentary Practice

This chapter discusses my documentary film practice, which explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity through the materiality of the pro-filmic event and the materiality of the film text. One of the major challenges for documentary filmmakers lies in the identification and mediation of subjective experiences and their expository degree of traits unique to the person being filmed. But, how can a spatiotemporally highly localized, first-person phenomenon like “subjectivity” be turned into a “collective” subjectivity that is experienced by an audience

The public connection project ten years on

Book synopsis: Los trabajos de este libro reúnen una serie de experiencias concretas en cinco países sobre las formas en que las personas, en su vida diaria, se aproximan y apropian de diversos asuntos “de interés general” de los que no sólo opinan e intercambian, sino de los que eventualmente participan de distintas formas en la vida pública. Esta obra explora nuevas posibilidades de participación política a partir de métodos de investigación innovadores y congruentes con realidades más complejas, fluidas y cambiantes. Es una lectura obligada para todos aquellos interesados en la comunicación y sus intersecciones con la cultura y la participación cívica

Towards an epistemology of digitally mediated temporality: from ethics to empiricism

The aim of this article is to lay the epistemological groundwork for investigating how the digital present is experienced as present. This is significant because, given the ontological priority of the present in phenomenological inquiry, this gets us closest to capturing digitally mediated experience itself. It will be argued that this does not mean pathologizing the pervasive digitisation of everyday life, and the digital age affords researchers an abundance of resources previously unavailable or elusive. The temporal experience of the unfolding present cannot be made a direct object of conscious cognition, which raises two serious concerns. The first is the possibility that digital actants such as algorithms can intervene in, exploit and modify temporal experience in ways that fly under the radar. The second is the challenge of constructing an epistemology and empiricism up to the task of investigating such phenomena in the pursuit of ethical principles including autonomy and accountability. In theoretical terms the article takes a phenomenological approach in which the present is always ontologically prior to any notion of an origin: in short, we always begin from the experience of finding ourselves thrown into a present – including a presently embodied self – that exceeds our grasp. The experience of temporality is the unfolding of that grasping, of disclosing the world by navigating and acting in it, and that means that understanding it is not a matter of excavating or working backwards to account for how we got to where we are, but mobility from the present

Affective solidarity and mediated distant suffering: In defence of mere feltness

In recent media and political theory the idea of affective solidarity has been treated as a contradiction in terms. Any relation to the other consisting in sympathy or pity cannot form the basis of full subjective recognition of the other, and in practice is often actively dehumanising. Further, there remains the notion that solidarity is contingent upon a rupture of habitual being-in-the-world that produces a revelatory consciousness of the subjectivity of the other. In journalistic contexts this leads to practices that aim at intensive or extensive encounters that transcend the affective livedness of everyday routines. Against these conventional wisdoms, this article argues that solidarity with distant others is not clinched in spite of the merely felt experience of the other in everyday life – an experience characterised by distraction, ambivalence and unreflexive sentimentality – but instead is predicated precisely on that mere feltness. Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of findingness, Withy’s disclosive postures and Levinas’s ascription of ethics to the fundamental priority of co-existence, it is proposed that feeling the right way about distant suffering may be immaterial. In practical terms, it concludes with a call to shift our empirical focus away from the question of how media can produce meaningfully solidaristic encounters between distant others, to ask instead what kinds of ordinary mediated affect already existing in the world might afford solidarity