In “Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies,” John Hartley analyzes the historical uses of media from print, through broadcasting to the internet, and attempts to make suggestions on how we should study media and journalism going forward. He gives us a look at the various uses of media by users and consumers and provides new theories of communication that account for social media today.
Hartley says that the “mid-20th century was the high water mark for totalitarianism in politics as well as capitalist monopolies in the media marketplace, so it is no wonder that cultural and media studies were founded in suspicion of those who own and control the media” (p.8) I believe there’s been a decisive and powerful shift in the media we utilize and in how we view the media. We depend far less on the NBC’s and CBS’s of the world for dissemination of news than we did just a few years ago. Now we rely much more heavily on social media like Facebook and Twitter for our news blasts. Most people get updates about our world from other people, including friends, family and acquaintances. And we participate in the process, too, by posting, sharing, and spreading information about what’s going on in the world and telling others what we should be concerned about.
With the emergence of digital, interactive, and participatory media we are more than just media consumers. We’re media users. Hartley suggests it is timely to rethink the model of communication we so commonly study because of these changes. He urges us to shift from the linear communication model that Claude Shannon popularized, and we discussed several weeks ago and take a closer look at the ‘dialogic’ model of communication. Here, he says the idea of a ’consumer’ disappears altogether. He says that ‘meaningfulness,’ ‘social networks,’ and ‘relationships’ surface as the crucial components of the communication process. He says they’ll replace ‘content,’ ‘information,’ or the ‘message’ with human interaction based on self-expression (p.9).
When discussing digital media this semester, we’ve explored the idea that everyone who utilizes digital media is a “producer” and not merely a “user.” That’s why Hartley suggests that we extend the study of media and culture to a “population-side focus on how all the ‘agents,’ individual or institutional, in a given communication, media, or cultural system act and are acted upon as they use it (i.e. the ‘people formerly known as the audience’)” (p. 9). He further discusses in chapter three the role of popular culture becoming the “subject’’ rather than “object” of journalism. Hartley describes popular culture as the “place where individually and collectively, ordinary people get to speak for themselves” (p.90). He summarizes things succinctly by stating that journalism takes on different forms depending on whether you look at popular culture as
the “they” or the “we” in the process of production.
Hartley suggests that journalism studies would benefit from a different approach -- taking a page from cultural studies by considering both the subjective and objective viewpoints equally. That would mean equally weighing the impact of YouTube with the “newspapers of record" today. As
he says, the emergence of digital online self-made media requires it. And I tend to agree. But…
All this discussion about popular culture and journalism makes me further question what exactly is journalism once again? Who is a journalist? Is it the reporter at the newspaper? The blogger? Is it both?
Clay Shirky says that ‘publishing’ by users, online, ‘has become the new literacy,’ and Hartley agrees. Hartley also notes that the internet marks the most important evolution in the growth of knowledge technologies since the Gutenberg press. He says we don’t yet know how to harness all the new ‘public thought’ that’s already out there. He says we know even less about how to stimulate, improve, or propagate its ‘quality.’ (p.52). Isn’t this the next big challenge in communication that we’re facing? While figuring out how to harness this power and ability we have to be our own content producers for better or for worse.
Everyone is in love with the newest methods of distribution, and that’s really what the internet and social media are, the newest delivery system for information. The focus now is to get what we want to say out on a splashy web page faster than the other guy. We’re less concerned about whether what’s being put out there is accurate. And for this reason, when we rethink the digital future, I agree that we must study it from both the objective and subjective viewpoints and find ways to embrace emerging technology as Hartley suggests.
Does all of this mean digital will necessarily be better? I’m not sure about that. But what I am sure of is the way we receive and distribute news and facts seems to be changing almost daily. And that is a trend I expect will continue for quite some time.
0 comments: