Networked Journalism
My primary research right now is on the changes that have taken place in journalism culture since the mid-nineties. I am writing a book, Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition, which traces the transformation over the past decade from mass-media journalism to a new journalism made possible by digital communication networks—a networked journalism more diverse, diffuse, personal, unwieldy and raw than mass-media journalism, a new information product, in fact, that underlines the outdated quality of the longstanding genre classifications of communication we have come to take for granted, classifications like "personal" and "professional," like "news" and "entertainment" and "advertising" and so on.
DIY Media
At ACC I am working with Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold to explore emerging forms of participatory or do-it-yourself media. Last year I wrote with the ACC fellows a "wiki" essay on networked culture that's being published as part of a book on networked culture by MIT press. This year we're hosting a monthly speaker series, an online forum, and two workshops as a prelude to a Fall 2007 DIY Video Media Festival, which I'm co-chairing with Mimi. We've invited key innovators as well as major industry representatives—including of course the Google guys. The goal of the festival is to showcase experiments in viral, amateur, and peer-to-peer work and to build new alliances that might influence the future of DIY media.
PR 2.0
My research on journalism and on networked culture has led me to consider the ways networked communication strategies are, on the one hand, being applied in the field of public relations and how PR strategies, on the other, are being applied more broadly in network communication. Corporations and politicians are increasingly adopting digital grassroots PR tactics. And individuals are developing elaborate PR campaigns in self-promotion through the use of new networked tools. PR, I think, is becoming one of the most pervasive, powerful, and yet under-explored social forces in contemporary society. In 2007 taught a course at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication that emphasized emerging tools and practices and explored the issues and debates related to winning and maintaining public confidence in the networked era.
Read an excerpt from "Public Relations and Digital Communication Networks, a talk I gave at USC’s Annenberg School on November 2, 2006.
International Activist Blogging
My research in online activism has led me to explore the development of blog culture in international contexts. It is clear that news blogs in the U.S. and France, the two specific contexts my work has examined thus far, are increasingly interacting with the content and agenda of mainstream news. For all the usual reasons, including early development and access to resources, successful western (mostly American) blogging models are being exported around the world, in the form of their norms and practices but also on the level of code—that is, in their styles of interface and mode of operation. I have just finished editing a book with longtime friend and media scholar Nabil Echchaibi on the ways U.S. blogging norms and practices function once they're exported around the world. In examining media activist tools and practices in different local and national contexts, we aim to address network-era questions on media hegemony or control—even when it appears in the form of tools of resistance—and on the uniquely universal-particular and global-local qualities of contemporary network society.
The 2005 French Riots, Pierre Bourdieu and New Media
The Fall 2005 riots in France and the controversies surrounding the way they were reported underlined the transnational and trans-media nature of the contemporary news landscape, highlighting some of the debates surrounding emerging journalism practices and products. The events provided material through which to pose some basic questions about the way the digital communication environment is evolving. A good place to start, I thought, was with French sociologist and media theorist Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about the journalistic field. With the ghost of Bourdieu at my side, I recently completed a case study that offers a snapshot of new-media news activity centered around the riots and the ways that new-media activity may be challenging traditional journalism, altering it slightly now, perhaps, but pointing to a major contemporary shift and dramatic potential change in the future. The study underlines the relevance of Bourdieu’s writings to analysis of new media as well as suggesting ways to usefully update his conception of the journalistic field.
“The French Democracy”—New Media and Global Public Address
I am completing an article with Jayson Harsin of the American University of Paris on the machinma film “The French Democracy.” The film is an example of how opportunities for amateur cultural production and distribution created by emerging forms of digital media are expanding the voices and points of view that constitute global publics or the transnational public sphere.
The Zapatista Online Network
My doctoral research centered on the Zapatista movement, perhaps the first major sustained example of a networked-era "wired" social movement, the first example of how—with the rise of many-to-many distribution in the form, for example, of mailing lists and collective blogs and of peer-to-peer social networking and collective authoring tools—the threshold for publishing and disseminating knowledge and culture to a general public was and continues to be reduced, increasing the speed and dimensions of DIY media and altering the character of longstanding communication genres. Articles based on my dissertation research have been published in scholarly journals, including New Media and Society, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, Gazette - International Journal of Communication Studies, and Peace Review.
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