event mechanics

Nikki Usher‘s 2010 article in New Media & Society “Goodbye to the news: how out-of-work journalists assess enduring news values and the new media landscape” examines the goodbye letters, emails, speeches, columns and blog postings — “final musings” — of journalists who have been laid off, taken a ‘voluntary buyout’ or who have left the industry. Usher’s piece is somewhat polemical in tone at times, not that this is necessarily a problem, it just needs to be taken into account when digesting her arguments:

[A]ll these goodbyes reveal a silver lining – those that are being let go may be let go for business reasons, but they may also be the people failing to see the opportunities for new media and those who are unable to help newspapers be entrepreneurial in their attempts to come through the crisis they face. (924)

Usher analysed 31 ‘final musings’ as presented on the Poynter.org blog by Jim Romenesko. The terrific irony of this for anyone following the current state of journalism in the US is that Romenesko resigned from the Poynter Institute late last year after being accused of improper attribution by allegedly not using “quote marks” appropriately. The Romenesko blog was rebranded Romenesko+ and is now simply Media Wire. It is a brilliant example to use in my first lecture for my Online News unit this semester, in concert with Usher’s piece as a set reading, as we introduce and explore with students the role of ‘online news’ in the tensions of the current journalism industry.

Usher’s piece is a useful way to frame traditional understandings of journalism in the context of structural change. The analysis is useful for locating the prevailing culture of legacy print journalism in terms of the relation between individual experiences and the structural shifts that in part form their context. From a Foucaultian perspective Usher is isolating a ‘discourse event’ in the point of inflection between two discursive regimes and correlative compositions of power relations (dispositifs). Usher draws on Fredric Jameson’s conceptualisation of ‘nostalgia’ and Barbie Zelizer’s notion that rather than ‘profession’, US journalists should be understood as belonging to an ‘interpretive community’.

Usher’s use of Jameson’s ‘nostalgia’ begins with her arguing that journalists now work in a ‘post-modern news era’ (914). (What would be absolutely fascinating for me would be to revisit the so-called ‘Media Wars’ of the late-1990s in light of such a description. On the face of it, Keith Windschuttle and his ‘traditionalist’ supporters have lost.) She is mostly describing the shift Fordist modes of news production, which includes changes to reliable occupational routines of ‘newsroom’ work practices and changes to the status and function of the audience. The inherent double movement of Jameson’s nostalgia is that it is backwards oriented and forward directed. Nostalgia produces collective memories of the past while at the same produces a potential of a better future. The nostalgia of journalists, Usher suggests, also masks reality in that bias, corporate control and so on are not constitutive elements:

They are nostalgic for a time when journalism meant stability and economic security, and deeply believe that traditional print journalism contributed to democratic discourse and public service – masking the reality, perhaps, that their work may have helped sustain and perpetuate power structures. The old way of doing newspapers is threatened, and journalists are uncertain about the future. But significantly, they also fail to be forward-looking even as they are backward-looking: their nostalgia is self-limiting because it fails to produce a vision of the future that catapults traditional journalists into the new media world and new media economics. (923)

The current transformations to the legacy news industry serve as an example of what Zelizer calls the ‘interpretive community’. Usher writes:

Discourse about the changes in the news industry creates a discursive community of journalists. This, then, shapes shared meanings about the trials and tribulations journalists face and takes on the collective memory of ‘professional journalism’ in a pre-web, pre-blog, pre-newspaper slump era. (915)

Usher’s analysis is structured around four main areas of journalists’s discourse functioning as an ‘interpretive community’: 1) ‘Journalism as an ideal’ (916-9), 2) ‘New Media Economics’ (919-21), 3) confusion around what is being challenged or changed, mostly in terms of technology (921-2), and 4) a failure to be ‘forward thinking’ (923-5).

The basic tenets of journalism as an ideal are that journalism works in the public interest, it remains impartial, serves the voiceless and provides a crucial link in democracy (916). The ideal of journalism is to serve as ‘public service journalism’. Mark Deuze defines public service journalism as:

Journalists share a sense of ‘doing it for the public’, of working as some kind of representative watchdog of the status quo in the name of people, who ‘vote with their wallets’ for their services (by buying a newspaper, watching or listening to a newscast, visiting and returning to a news site). (447)

Deuze (2005: 448) notes that journalists can learn to have more responsive attitude to their ‘publics’ and therefore use this “age-old ideological value” as a wau to maintain the power relations of the status quo while learbing how to adapt to changing conditions. As Usher describes it, in the context of ‘prestige papers’ (such as the LA Times or New York Times), “these individuals want to reassert their claims to defining the public interest and determining what public service journalism is, rather than creating a more open conversation with a newly engaged audience of news producers and consumers” (917).

In the context of smaller, local newspapers this public service ideal is described in terms of a newspaper being a (more paternalistic than patronizing) ‘caretaker’ helping a public “interpret difficult ideas” and also sustaining local community by reproducing existing routines of newspaper communication and correlative power relations. Usher’s point is that this does not take into account those on- and off-line practices that reproduce ‘community’ that do not have the newspaper at the centre (918). Newspaper in general are seen to be arbiters of democracy in the idealized practice of highlighting the power relations that underpin existing governmental and market-based power relations. There was a general lament, Usher notes, that transformations to journalism are understood in terms of catering to the ‘market’ rather than ‘democracy’. ‘New media economics’ (and ‘new media technologies’) therefore become a threat to the democratic role of public service journalism. Political writer Michele Jacklin’s final column captures a sense of this when she writes, “As a substitute for hard news and insightful analysis, readers are served up a steady diet of splashy graphics, celebrity gossip and stories with the heft of cotton candy.”

In the Australian context, this tension between hard news and insightful analysis versus forms of content designed to increase website visitors and ‘hits’ is represented from the other side of the conflict by NineMSN.com’s online news editor Hal Crawford in his commentary about the Australian Federal Government’s Independent Media Inquiry posted to mUmbrella.com.

Real time data tell you exactly how popular a story is, and to maximise your audience size you need to weed out stories that no one wants to read. This kind of brutal treatment can be hard for an old school journalist to take.
Initially you may get upset that no one is reading the ‘important’ stories, but that arrogance fades quickly. Truly important stories rate. If some piece of news is going to change lives or become socially necessary or is just plain interesting, it gets traffic.

The NineMSN submission to the inquiry similarly seeks to problematise ‘quality journalism’:

The traditional view is that a key role for the news media is to be an independent monitor of government power and therefore quality journalism requires truth, accuracy and independence. We think it’s also important to acknowledge that that news media serves diverse roles. [...]
For ninemsn the most important indicator of quality content is that it is trusted. Trust is the key concern for our news team because trust equates to brand reputation which drives of audience. [...]
The traditional media are no longer small elite who serve as the gatekeepers of the news. Value in the digital news media is increasingly generated by interactions with users including the use of social media to provide commentary, share stories and drive traffic. News produced for digital platforms has to be a quality product if we want people to engage with our stories, to contribute their own insights and to participate in their dissemination.

The discourse surrounding ‘new media economics’ in Usher’s analysis is less important to my Online News unit this semester, but will be central to the second semester unit organised around ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurial journalism’. The second semester unit is designed to prepare students for a more market-oriented, audience-driven form of journalism at the level of producing individual stories through to the level of creating standalone ‘online media enterprises’. Usher’s analysis notes that individual journalists generally take structural shifts personally, and see their respective departures as a failure of ‘owners’ or ‘Wall St’ to recognise talent. This is important in an educational context because ‘talent’ is still recognised, of course; it is more a question of the character of the ‘talent’ and of the mechanisms of ‘recognition’.

Jacklin’s comments are also interesting in the context of the socio-technical practices and technologies that Usher suggests will assist journalism. She lists a number of “recommendations as the possible salvation for traditional journalism’s problems: increased social networking, conections with the audience, more multimedia platforms, crowd-sourcing, better forums, flash-graphics, newspaper-hosted community blogs and hyperlocal reporting, to name a few” (922).

Lastly, Usher notes that the article odes not mean to say that other journalists are not reconsidering with the public and “are deeply engaged in trying to understand what such things as user-generated content, blogging, comment boards, data-mining, crowd sourcing and the like might mean for their newsrooms” (924-5). She ends with a provocative question: “to what extent are non-traditional journalists concerned with the discourse about traditional news values and the idea of what it means to be a journalist?” My response, shared with other educators, is to work on developing units that hope to empower students when they hit the job market.

I think OOO and onticology specifically addresses this problem better: what must the world be like for us to relate and have knowledge about it? Indeterminate, non-specified clumps of matter and energy just don’t work. But neither do we simply know things are they are, either, as knowledge is simply a subset of a larger, more significant distinction drawn by onticology: relation. Otherwise you risk making humanity an essential ingredient in being itself—that doesn’t make sense, either. There is something between pure materiality without form or structure and transcendental idealism. Namely, the partially translatable individual entity.

Joseph C Goodson replies to my comments about withdrawal and OOO. Making sense, indeed.

Let me flip Joseph’s warning regarding humanity as an essential ingredient in being itself. Is there a dimension of Reality that only humans have access to? What is this dimension of Reality? Meillassoux has carried out a fine service for so-called correlationists. Of course we relate to nothing other than matter and energy, while at the same time it is not as simple (or complex) as a relation directly with matter and energy, as this is unintelligible to us. Sure, scientistics can produce elaborate experiments to reduce the number of variables so as to work at relating directly to matter and energy. Do they apprehend matter and energy? No, they attempt to come up with a description that ‘fits’ the particular singularities at play in a particular composition of matter and energy as isolated in their experiments.
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze describes ‘sense’ as the contraction of singularities that renders bodies and mixtures of bodies sensible and therefore intelligible to humans. A ‘description’ is a particular series of singularities. In his Discourse on Language, Foucault described his ‘archeological project’ in terms of examining a series of these descriptions for particular epistemes — what he called discourse events — and critically analysing the composition of singularities on the side of human intelligibility. The distribution of singularities, and series of singularities as they are never (ironically) ‘single’, he described as a distribution of statements. Bruno Latour’s project has been, in part, to expand this critical analysis to examine the practical, social and institutional, that is, extra-discursive, distribution of singularities that exist in great chains of relations and which are essential for the reproduction and production of such descriptions. An ‘incorporeal transformation’ (from A Thousand Plateaus) is to use a different description (sense + knowledge + sociality) for a given series of singularities that combines it with another series of singularities, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s example, renders a person as a convict. You get the jist? As if Reality is only objects and thoughts about them (the so-called ‘correlationist’ position), and not a baroque distribution of singularities across every fold of the cosmos…
On the non-human side of this composition are singularities that belong to the cosmos, and exist for humans as they exist for any subject whatsoever; Whitehead called these singularities ‘eternal objects’. I’ve described the singular point that humans describe as a ‘boiling point’ here, as part of an explanatory post on the concept of the virtual; this is the relevant section:

Think of the boiling point of water. Humans have measured the boiling point and have figured out that it is 100C. The boiling point is real; you can actually witness water boiling, but on the other hand, depending on the energy introduced into the water-boiling system only small amounts of pure water at sea level will boil instantly and turn into steam. (If there is a large amount of energy released into a system, such as a nuclear weapon, then larger bodies of water will boil and evaporate instantly. Instantly still not being ‘instantly’, it still takes some time for this to happen, relative to our human frame of reference, it is an ‘instant’.)

In all other situations, the boiling point is virtual because it is actualised in different ways according to the variable constraints that move the water-boiling system from the ideal model (small amount of pure water at sea level pressures). Super heated water, for example, is water that has had extra energy added to it (heated) beyond the boiling point, but kept under extreme pressures. The boiling point remains virtual, it is not actualised, but the variable constraint of pressure (nominally at sea level) has not been fulfilled.

‘To boil’ is an event. Depending on the conditions, it is repeated in different ways. It would be impossible to exhaust the number of ways to boil water. That is, for example, we could never run the infinite number of experiments required to capture the infinite multiplicity of differentially repeated events of boiling water (or the critical point of a phase state at which water vaporises into steam). This is not the inifinity of extension, but the infinity between one and zero. It is the intensive multiplicity of Bergson’s duration. The reduction of this multiplicity, and that which renders the boiling point intelligible to humans, are counter-intuitively extra singularities of sense (Deleuze), knowledge (Foucault) and sociality (Latour). Others have expanded on this.

For example, Massumi bypasses this series of proper name philosophers to draw on others and has explicated the singularities of experience, which, to continue the example, are those singular points of qualities that belong to the event ‘to boil’ that are differentially repeated. My singular ‘experience’ of boiling water occurs, for example, everytime I boil the kettle for my morning (and mid-morning and mid-afternoon) coffee. I experience particular qualities of sound and vision, and if I am unlucky heat. These specific actualisation of singularities (mostly vision and sound, less so heat) require my specifically human perceptual apparatus for this specific event of experience. They experience of the fly in my kitchen, for example, has a better sense of the air currents produced by the steam expanding and heating air.

Latour’s work to connect human and non-human sociality has rightly indicated that I also include the virtual singularities actualised by the kettle itself (and kitchen and power supply and so on) of sufficient electrical contact between the plug and the mains socket and again in the kettle’s switch, of sufficient integrity belong to the kettle, and so on, that combine in certain ways to give the kettle agency in the event (it, literally, does ‘work’ in every sense of the word).

Tim Morton has described water boiling from an OOO perspective here. He writes:

Think of a kettle boiling. What is happening? Electrons are quantum jumping from lower to higher orbits. This behavior, a phase transition, emerges as boiling for an observer like me, waiting for my afternoon tea. [...]
It would be wrong to say that the water has virtual properties of boiling that somehow “come out” at the right point. It’s less mysterious to say that when the heating element on my stove interacts with the water, it boils. Its emergence-as-boiling is a sensual object, produced in an interaction between kettle and stove.

And from a previous post:

The tendency is to see it as some kind of underlying causal mechanism by which smaller components start to function as a larger, super component.
If true, this would seriously upset the OO applecart. Why? Because objects are ontologically primary entities, not some process such as emergence. In an OO reality, emergence must be a property of objects, not the other way around. Thus it seems likely that in OOO emergence would be a sensual feature of objects. In other words, emergence is always emergence-for or emergence-as.
In other words, emergence implies 1+n objects interacting in what Graham Harman call the sensual ether. This ether is the causal machinery, not some underlying wires and pulleys.

So my simple response is: Is water boiling a quality of electrons “quantum jumping from lower to higher orbits” and therefore a ‘critical point’ is a quality of electrons? Or is the “ontologically primary entity” or ‘object’ of water and not the electrons? Or should we describe it as a ‘phase state’ proper (thus including all attendent and involved ‘objects’)? (Ether! What?!) This could be extended further to analyse the singularities involved in ‘waiting for tea’, which introduces another series of singularities contracted into habit and memory that ‘possibilises’ relations of futurity as protension.

Here is the crux of the issue: There is no withdrawal, there is only ever an addition of singularities, and because there is only ever the addition of singularities, objects are not ontologically primary entities. The reality is not of a withdrawn object, but the reality of the object is a reality that always exceeds the object (and and and).

What if there are only ‘occurent qualities’? I don’t mean the obvious primary/secondary qualities distinction, but that the composition of matter and energy are entirely compositional and contingent. As energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, then this or that composition of matter and energy is continually being transformed (ie entropy) since the beginning of the universe. The given composition of anything would therefore be a particular contingent composition of matter and energy. Isn’t this what meillassoux is getting at with his hyper-chaos (or, as I have always understood it, Guattari’s chaosmos)?

I’d argue this is a far harder task for any OOP: rather than simply ‘withdrawing’, when observed, the composition of the matter and energy change, always! Or is OOP is describing an anthropomorphic consistency in the composition of matter and energy as ‘objects’? Unless one wants to argue for an absolute non-relationism, and therefore avoid a recomposition of matter and energy, etc. I can’t really see how this can be avoided.

Above is another comment to Levi’s post about the notion of objects withdrawing. An easy way it can be avoided is following Deleuze’s argument in Difference and Repetition regarding differentiation, does the recomposition catalysed by observation of any composition of matter and energy beyond the sub/atomic scale make a lick difference? No… Well at least not to human perception and our perception of a (correlationist) difference.

I think I’ll call this the thermodynamic critique.

“From salesman to client, from client to salesman, from consumer to consumer and from producer to producer, whether competing or not, there is a continuous and invisible transmission of feelings — an exchange of persuasions and excitement, through conversations, through newspaper for example — which precedes commercial exchanges, often making them possible, and which always help to set their conditions.” (Gabriel Tarde in Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay “The Science of Passionate Interests”, 39)

My ‘festive season’ reading has largely consisted of Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay’s “The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology”. It makes for fascinating reading. The extent of my Tarde reading consists of his Laws of Imitation and the special 2007 issue of the journal Economics and Society on his work. (Oh, plus Tarde’s post-apocalyptic science-fiction novella!)

In The Science of Passionate Interests, Latour and Lepinay have produced a diagrammatic reading of Tarde’s masterwork Psychologie Economique (1902). They set up Tarde’s core problematic in terms of developing an adequate critical theory (or ‘science’) of economies that does not fall into the same mistakes as ‘economics’. Here are my notes to part one (1-32). The science part of it is a development of the notion that everything can be measured according to measures appropriate for their terms.

Latour and Lepinay begin with Tarde’s theory of value, and demonstrate its relation to subjectivity. For Tarde subjectivity refers to the “contagious nature of desires and beliefs, jumping from one individual to the next without ever [...] going through a social context or structure” (9). Value extends to all desires and beliefs; it is made up of all the continual assessments we make. Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital is also another way of critically engaging with non-economic economies of social and cultural value. The difference between the two is that Bourdieu’s focus is squarely the deployment of cultural competence and social esteem within structurated fields. Tarde and Bourdieu have different takes on the aquisition of value, for Bourdieu it is learnt as a product of imbrication in a field, for Tarde (immanent social) value is produced through the special interference effect of congruent practices of ‘imitation’, what he calls ‘invention’. Tarde’s value is a mmeasure of talent, Bourdieu’s is a measure of competence.

Tarde argues that economists did not make use of all the possible ways value can be quantified and they instead relied on, firstly, reducing all human behaviour to an ‘objective’ realm and, secondly, extending this reduction to all domains of human activity. Latour and Lepinay argue that economists format social relations. They do this by confusing two orders of measuring. The actual measured measurement that “captures the real state” (15) and the measuring measurement that formats the social world. Latour and Lepinay quote Tarde’s example of how the value of ‘belief’ is (re)produced by monks:

Priests and the religious have studied the factors involved in the production (meaning here reproduction) of beliefs, of ‘truths’, with no less care than the economists have studied the reproduction of wealth. They could give us lessons on the practices best suited to sowing the faith (retreats, forced meditation, preaching) and on the reading, the conversations and types of conduct that weaken it. (Tarde in L&L 15)

For Tarde it is a question of the laborious work of seeking out the specific values of any activity. Latour and Lepinay introduce the term valuemeter to refer to all devices whose specific function is to make visible and readable all the value judgements of what Tarde calls economics (16). The result is a metrology produced by chains of valuemeters. They provide the sociology of science as an example, where a metrology of learned literature “made visible and readable by the very extension of the quasi-currency we call credibility where, better than anywhere else, the very production of the finely differentiated degrees of belief plays out” (19).
The flaw in the approach of economists is to imagine they had to pursue a line of inquiry characterized by a “progress of detachment, objectivity and distance” (20). Latour and Lepinay provide money as an example of a ‘measuring measure’. What money measures, as a process of simplified registering for the purposes of capture (money as an ‘apparatus of capture’?), has kind of link to what is indicated by the numbers (21).

It would be a mistake to imagine, Latour and Lepinay warn, that as the number of metrological chains of valuemeters increases, there is a danger of shifting from passions to reasons, from the inter-subjective of Tarde’s social economy to the anemic economics of neoliberal markets, etc. Nor is it about finally recovering economic reason, but about how the economic rational is always thoroughly irrational. The solution to ward off the epistemological problem of false distance, built on a scaffold of irrationalities, is to properly appreciate value “from up close, in small numbers, and from the inside” (28). Latour and Lepinay are clear on this:

If there is, for Tarde, a mistake to be avoided, it is to take social facts “as things,” whereas, in other sciences, if we take things “as things,” it is for lack of a better alternative! How could sociologists abd, more surprisingly, economists, have had the crazy idea of wanting to imitate physicists and biologists through an entirely artificial effort at distancing, while the very thinkers they tried to imiate would give their right hands to find themselves at last close to particles, cells, frogs, bodies with whom they try top come into intimate association with the help of their instruments? (29)

The central problem has been to mistake the discipline of economics for the economy (31-32).

Over the weekend I led a session as part of a workshop camp training youth media advocates for ReachOut.com. ReachOut.com is an advocacy group that seeks to raise awareness about issues relating to youth mental health and suicide, and is part of Inspire.org.au. I was very happy to donate my Saturday morning and the couple of days it took to put together my session. Like most people, I’ve had some personal experience with a loved one struggling to overcome the ‘black dog’. It has been good to see depression and mental health issues receive proper media attention over the last few years as struggles with mental health issues transcend social and cultural boundaries.

In my session I introduced the youth advocates to the concept of a ‘complex media environment’. It builds on well established concepts within media studies from key figures such as Marshall “The medium is the message” McLuhan (see this video of McLuhan in Australia from ABC Open) and Neil “Media Ecology” Postman. The key outcome from my session was to get the advocates to realise that as media advocates they are no longer simply ‘consumers’ of media content, but nor are they properly ‘producers’ within the media industry. Instead, they are somewhere in between, what I described as being ‘operators’.

ReachOut.com’s own media advocacy kit for the workshop was put together (EDIT: 13/12/11) under the direction of co-manager Nathalie Swainston by Phoebe Netto and it is a brilliant practical guide for working with journalists and other content producers within the media industry. For example, it presents the well known values of news worthiness (timeliness, proximity, impact, etc) in an inverted form so media advocates know how to position their message so as to be useful for journalists working on producing a story.

I built on the media advocacy kit by reaching out to the youth media advocates’ existing mode of engagement with the media — as mostly ‘crticial consumers’ — to point out ways this could be extended and intensified so as to spot and plan for ‘opportunities’ for their message. I focused on two methods for doing this. The first involves working within the constraints of the journalistic ‘news cycle’ and also tracking the rhythm of the media activities of other social institutions, such as governmental authorities or the NGO sector publishing relevant reports.

The second involves appreciating the strucutral dimensions of the media industry. The commercial media industry basically operates as an ‘apparatus of capture’: it produces content so as to ‘capturre’ an audience, and then sell this audience to advertisers (or others). The questions the media advocates need to work through are, what sort of audience can I help produce and who would want the traffic/metrics/listeners/viewers/readership that my message can help deliver? The session after mine was delivered by the lovely and talented Pheobe Netto (who also took the phone camera snap above during my presentation!) and it was about the practical skills of crafting one’s media message. The ‘complex’ bit of the ‘complex media environment’ comes from the structural changes that the Australian media industry has undergone over the last decade or so. There are increased opportunities for engagement for those with the necessary skills to turn out good copy for many media outlets.

One of the qualities of this complex media enviroment that I discussed in my session was the way media stories can cascade across multiple channels and platforms. Most people are familiar with the concept of an ‘echo chamber’, but a more general example of a similar phenomenon is the way various media outlets will pay attention to what other media outlets are reporting on. This doesn’t only happen amongst competitors (or ‘co-opetitors’) but also sub-jacently related channels, such as local radio stories picked up by larger ‘talkback’ radio, picked up by print journalist, picked up by TV journalists, etc.

I think it was a very good day and the feedback I’ve received from participants is that they found my session to be very productive.