54 - Data Journalism and Digital Liberalism

Summary

Abstract

How the rise of data journalism intersects with political liberalism.

Keywords: liberalism, sedentary journalism, screenwork, lateral messaging, autological individuality, data journalism

The past 30 years have witnessed a massive transformation of the journalistic profession and the organizational culture of news-making. The causes and effects of that transformation are too complex to detail here. Suffice it to say that the model of print and terrestrial broadcasting that still seemed quite robust as late as the 1990s has been almost fully replaced by a digital-first model of news media created by the rise of the Internet, search engines and social media as dominant communication and information systems, and by the widespread financialization and privatization of news media driven by the economic philosophy of “neoliberalism.” As this volume argues, proliferating digital data streams and tokens are now the default condition of journalistic practice. All journalism is now, to some extent, “data journalism.” In my 2013 book The Life Informatic I described this process as “the lateral revolution,” suggesting that we have witnessed an ecological shift from the dominance of radial (e.g., largely monodirectional, hub-tospoke) infrastructures of news media to lateral (e.g., largely pluridirectional, point-to-point) infrastructures (Boyer, 2013). As Raymond Williams (1974) observed in his brilliant historical study of the rise of television, electronic media have exhibited both radial and lateral potentialities since the 18th century. Where these potentialities have been unlocked and institutionalized has always been guided by social and political circumstances beyond the technologies themselves. There was a prototype fax machine over a century before there was an obvious social need for such a technology and so its formal “invention” was delayed accordingly. Broadcasting systems ranging from radio to television first became socially necessary, Williams (1974) argues, once what he terms the “mobile privatization” of Western society had advanced to the point that it was difficult for government and industry to locate and communicate with citizen-consumers other than by “blanket” radial messaging over a whole terrain. The lesson for our contemporary situation is simply that we should not assume that the recent data revolution in news journalism is solely or even primarily driven by new technologies and infrastructures like the Internet. We should rather be attentive to how news media have evolved (and continue to evolve) within a more complex ecology of social forces.