Progress of proposal is slow, but steady. I have been promoted to three paragraphs! I am now figuring out what the next few should focus on. One idea is to start with Benkler, outlining how he models modes of production along the lines of the firm, the market, and peer production, distinguishing them in terms of transaction costs. These models are, in Weberian terms, ideal types. What I am interested in, and what Benkler himself does not look at so much, is how these modes of production can be complementary, and dialectical. Can there, for example, be a model where the mode of production is based on peer production, but where the mode of accreditation is not peer produced but based on the hierarchical model of the firm instead? Under what kind of conditions would this model make sense?
Towards a more inclusive global public sphere? institutional changes of journalism in a globalizing world.
I am interested in the institutional transformations of journalism, driven by the internet, in an increasingly globalizing world. I understand journalism as a process of mediated communication that is institutionally and technologically shaped, while also acknowledging that social and cultural factors influence this process. The formal and informal rules, codes and conventions that govern journalism as a process of mediation have changed with the introduction of the internet and its consequent accommodation of the variances of a globalized world. This study uses foreign news as a strategically chosen locus for discerning the changes in the global production of news. In that institutions reflect the resources and power of the actors who inhabit them, and in turn, affect the distribution of resources and power back to society, foreign news can be seen simultaneously as being in sharp decline in its traditional form, exhibiting a loss of resources and signs of a market failure, while harvesting a rise in global citizen media that is shaped more by civil society than the market. The entrance of new mediators and a shift from a market to a civil society as the site of its production make foreign news a fertile locus for examining the institutional changes in journalism.
The arrival of the internet raises questions about the need for journalism to adapt or transform itself as an institution in a differently competitive environment. The question of incorporation of new technologies is not new, as the practice of journalism has always been shaped by its technological context. What is new, however, is the nature of these constraints as afforded by the internet compared to previous technologies. What are these affordances, how are they different and how do they impact the news production process? How are news organizations dealing with the challenges of technological change? Institutional theory suggests that at least two strategies are possible: following a strategy of adaptation where new technologies are used to alter existing production processes or following a strategy of transformation that forces organizations to rethink the underlying principles of their production processes. The difference between adaptation and transformation often turns out to be subtle, but it suggests the importance of the institutional context in understanding how organizations decide to answer the challenges posed by new technologies.
Technological changes do not affect journalism just as an economic process of news production, but also have important ramifications for journalism as a political process of mediation. What links the economic aspects of journalism with the political is the notion of scarcity. The relation between scarcity and a lack of diversity of voices has long been a concern, particularly during the NWICO debate, but it has arisen in a new form in relation to the contemporary global context. Notions of scarcity now suggest that the internet has not only made certain constraints obsolete, but has also introduced new ones and made other constraints more salient. To what degree are these new constraints affecting how certain voices are heard in the global public sphere? Tomlinson emphasizes this need to understand the implications of changing constraints when he argues that “we need to adjust to a reality which is immediate and challenging in its otherness, precisely because it is so accessible. One measure of the accomplishment of globalization, then, is how far the overcoming of physical distance is matched by that of cultural distance.” While a careful analysis of the changes in the global production of news is admittedly not sufficient to give a comprehensive answer to what extent efforts to overcome cultural distance are successful, it is a necessary starting point.
