Digitizing the News:
American dailies in the 2nd half of 90s: Repurposed content Increased usefulness of content via links, etc. Created original content uniquely for web
“Newspapers spread risks by moving in many and often counterbalancing directions.” Period of explosive growth
Recombining - going beyond online repurposing by adding value: Customization - “the daily me” 1993 Media Lab, Fishwrap prototype Providing large amounts of content on specific topics (unlimited news hole) Aggregating specific content from various newspapers, adding search, etc.
Personalization:
The conventional opinion - as developed by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim - was that normal people will not have "intimate and exclusive" relationships with machines. Vs. "Monologs will become conversations; the impersonal will become personal; the traditional 'mass media' will essentially disappear," Negroponte proclaimed in The Media Lab
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/media.html
But does personalization lead to isolation or selective ignorance?
Digitizing the News:
Recreating: Content developed primarily if not exclusively for web sites
Online specials and in-depth reports that experimented with combination of other media including audio and video. This slide shows the Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Blackhawk Down”, which examined the 1993 battle in Mogadishu between U.S. and Somalia rebels.
(http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/nov16/default16.asp)
“Actors have attempted to create a “new” entity preserving the “old” one. That is, they have tried to transform a delivery vehicle that has remained unaltered for centuries, and whose permanence has anchored a complex ecology of information symbols, artifacts, and practices, while simultaneously aiming to leave the core of what they do, and are, untouched.”
But what forced newspapers to move beyond simple print-like format was the challenge posed by unique creations of people outside the traditional institutional structure. This is the whole point of the many-to-many Web.
Craig takes $50 million a year from newspapers in the SF Bay Area alone. So newspapers adapt and learn to be hosts as well as publishers, providing public connectivity rather than editorial content. Individual playing cards for every kid on the team, the NYTimes can’t do that! The Lawrence, KA newspaper is profiled in the NYTimes story, “The Newspaper of the Future”
”I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper's parent. "Information is our business and we're trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible."
What is it that the Web does that shapes journalism into something it never was before? Hypertextuality Interactivity Multimediality
The Web and its Journalisms: Website: http://commontimes.org/
“A different mode of addressing the news audience: as active instead of passive media consumers.”
Navigational interactivity - moving around websites Functional interactivity - participating in the production process (forms, mailto, BBS) Adaptive interactivity - every user action has consequences for content
“When news sites add links, interactivity and multimedia, they also opt for changes in editorial organization, story-telling, journalistic norms.”
The Web and its Journalisms:
“Different and overlapping types of online journalism may very well change what one perceives as ‘real’ journalism, as their distinctive features have implications for the way in which media production processes are focused, how news organizations are managed, and how a journalistic culture operates (in relationships with audiences and technologies).”
“orientating journalism” - general public with general orientation “instrumental journalism” - functional specialized information nation to interested audiences
“Authors tend to implicitly assume that the future of journalism is still primarily determined by (a monopoly on) storytelling by journalists for citizens.”
“Potential can be found where journalists offer citizens annotated archives for self-searching purposes, provide people platforms for participatory, connective storytelling in various ways interactive, hyperlinked, and multimedial.”
monitorial and dialogical journalism:
“A more radical and democratic way of locating connectivity and an open culture in journalism would be dialogical journalism, where the contents of a news medium…are fully maintained by journalists interacting with citizens.”
TWAIJ:
“Four distinct online journalisms from pure editorial content to public connectivity:
Mainstream news sites nytimes Index and category sites craigslist Meta and comment sites slashdot Share and discussion sites” the well
“All four types of news sites can be considered to belong to a professional domain of journalism…according to its dominant liberal progressive definition in liberal democracy worldwide, to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.”
Immediacy:
The logic of transparent immediacy (VR, “an immersive medium whose purpose is to disappear” and GUI) Painting, photography, film, TV, sought transparency via linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity. Leon Battista Alberti’s “On Painting” uses the rectangular frame as a perspective window.
“Digital graphics extends the tradition of the Albertian window.”
“Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices…The common feature of all these forms is the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents.”
(Engelbart, Kay, PARC invented GUI and relied on Alberti’s window metaphor)
Remediation: Understanding New Media:
“Hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicty.”
“Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogenous space, in which representation in conceived of not as a window onto the world but rather as ‘windowed’ itself - with windows that open on to other representations or other media.”
“When Braque and Picasso took to pasting scraps of newspaper and wallpaper on their canvases, they created a hypermediated experience.”
Remediation: Understanding New Media:
“In all cases, the artist is defining a space through the disposition and interplay of forms that have been detached from their original context and then recombined.”
Replacement is the essence of hypertext.
Hypermedia replace one medium for another repeatedly, confronting users with multiple possibilities for representation and challenging them “to consider why one medium might offer a more appropriate representation than another. In doing so, they are performing what we characterize as acts of remediation.”
McLuhan on page one of “Understanding”: “the content of any medium is always another medium, the content of writing is speech…of print is the written word…of the telegraph is print”
“Again we call the representation if one medium is in another remediation, and will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media.”
Windowed style favors remediation
Remediation: Understanding New Media:
Hypermediacy is the style of most news and sports programming on TV.
Windowed style “the CNN look” in which crawls, captions and frames make the TV screen look more like a website.
Remediation: Understanding New Media:
“Once again, every medium is a network of economic, social, and cultural, as well as technical elements.”
The Internet remediates the telegraph.
Mosaic browser not only served as GUI for the Net, but became affordance for remediation.
“The Web still refashions the personal letters, the book, and the magazine, but now it also refashions and reforms CD-ROM or DVD multimedia, radio, film, and TV. It rivals all these forms by promising greater immediacy and by recontextualizing them in the encompassing electronic environment of cyberspace.”
“The ultimate ambition of the web designers seems to be to integrate and absorb all other media.” It all comes back to coffee…
Coffee pot was the first webcam, a goldfish cam is the user’s demo of the Net’s monitoring function.
“Webcams are deeply revealing of Web as remediator, taking up the monitoring function”
(http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html)