The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge)

New
Hardcover
2013
$177.71

News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? In The Life Informatic, Dominic Boyer offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is a fascinating account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information.

Boyer conducted his fieldwork inside three news organizations in Germany (a world leader in digital journalism) supplemented by extensive interviews in the United States. His findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based screenwork (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon Boyer puts forth the notion of digital liberalism -a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. Finally, Boyer offers some scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.

Synopsis

News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? In The Life Informatic, Dominic Boyer offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is a fascinating account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information.

Boyer conducted his fieldwork inside three news organizations in Germany (a world leader in digital journalism) supplemented by extensive interviews in the United States. His findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based screenwork (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon Boyer puts forth the notion of digital liberalism -a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. Finally, Boyer offers some scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.

$177.71

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 18 Apr 2013
ISBN 10: 0801451884
ISBN 13: 9780801451881

Media Reviews

This book offers much that will interest advanced students of journalism and anthropology. -Choice

In The Life Informatic, Dominic Boyer examines the changing news industry by observing journalists at work, in the hope that mapping the flow of information between and within newsrooms will help us understand how news is made in today's post-broadcast era. Boyer is ultimately successful in presenting a contemporary account of the converged newsroom and adding to a body of evidence-based thought about how to build a sustainable industry in the future. -Scott Bridges, Inside Story (9/13/13)

Boyer analyzes the nuances of screen-oriented news-work in truly exemplary fashion; indeed, many journalism studies scholars and budding newsroom ethnographers could learn a great deal from this practicing anthropologist about how to so newsroom fieldwork well . . . we must take the arguments of The Life Informatic seriously. It certainly stands as a remarkably important piece of ethnographic and anthropological scholarship. -C.W. Anderson, College of Staten Island (CUNY), Anthropological Quarterly

Dominic Boyer's thoughtful exploration of news production in Germany is a standout among recent newsroom studies based on ethnography, observation, or participant observation. . . .Boyer writes that he envisioned The Life Informatic as 'short, accessible, and above all teachable,' and it is all those things. Any of the ethnographic chapters could be used in a graduate or advanced undergraduate course without the instructor feeling that he or she needed to assign the entire book. -Susan Keith,Journalism(May 2015)

In his intriguing new study The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era, anthropologist Dominic Boyer. . .brings a rich ethnographic focus on daily labor practices rather than on industry-or organization-scale relationships. . . .[this] deep ethnographic study reveals in sharp detail one aspect of the 'life informatic' when it comes to the competitive environment of global, digital, and often entertainment-focused journalism. -Greg Downey,Technology and Culture(January 2015)

Wow! Dominic Boyer has morphed a quite exceptional ethnographic study of the transformation of news journalism (based on European research) by digital media into an astute meditation on the parallel predicaments of scholarly writers like himself and us. While ingeniously designing the 'shape' of the book medium in which he writes according to his insights about the changing habits of readers and thinkers living the life informatic, he delivers the most usable assessment yet of the conditions of social inquiry in digital immersion. . . . Clever, profound, edgy. -George E. Marcus, Director of the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine, and coauthor of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

The Life Informatic is an original and engaging consideration of, at an ethnographic level, news production and, at a conceptual level, the predicament of critical social inquiry in a digitally mediated world. The juxtaposition of case studies in Dominic Boyer's eloquently provocative book illuminates competing journalistic ideologies, and Boyer's bold readiness to speculate on future developments is to be applauded. Let The Life Informatic reboot your thinking. -William T. S. Mazzarella, University of Chicago, author of Censorium

In The Life Informatic, Dominic Boyer provides an ethnography of news journalism in a time of technological transformation and contributes to a broader intellectual discussion on the cultural consequences of media practices. Boyer's argument is very well crafted and the ethnography is convincing. The book is of high analytical sophistication and will become a key contribution to the anthropology and sociology of media as well as journalism studies. -Patrick Eisenlohr, Utrecht University and University of Goettingen, author of Little India

Dominic Boyer blends textured empirical accounts with sophisticated theoretical meditations in this superb inquiry of journalistic practice and experience caught in the whirlwind of the life informatic. The outcome is an exquisite and powerful interrogation of the contemporary knowledge condition. -Pablo J. Boczkowski, Northwestern University, author of Digitizing the News and News at Work

Author Bio

Dominic Boyer is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University. He is the author of The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era, from Cornell; Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture; and Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy. He is coeditor of, also from Cornell.