Wednesday 5 December 2007

Did Somebody Say Interactivity?

The title of this post is a paraphrase of Slavoj Žižek’s book Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? in which he argues that totalitarianism “is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into historical reality it describes, it revelas us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking.” (Žižek, 2001: 3) In Rob Crover’s (2006) article, in which he demystifies interactivity as an exclusive and natural characteristic of “new media”, interactivity can be regarded as a kind of a stopgap. This can especially be attributed when Crover (2006: 145) debates the author-text-audience relationship in the context of “mainstream” online media (CNN.com) and “alternative” online media (indymedia.com). Crover (ibid.) characterizes this “dichotomy” as a struggle between corporate media industries and consumer-users, between author and audience.
Crover (ibid.) universalizes connotative message of CNN.com’s advertisment “We say, you need only three keys – CNN” on all “mass news media”: “The implication of CNN’s reduction to needing only three keys is that news and information creation is, and should be, in the hands of a media industry and its authors, journalists or content-creators” (ibid.) However, contemporary research indicates that journalism is in the process of rethinking and reinventing itself online. Journalists are drawn into new “permitted” forms of interactive practices (i. e. “normalization” of blogging in “mainstream” journalism) that are gaining legitimacy and thereby altering some traditional notions how journalism should be done (i. e. reshaping their gatekeeping role) (Singer, 2006; Robinson, 2006; Deuze, Bruns and Neuberger, 2007).
On the other hand, Crover (2006: 145) stresses that independent internet media or Indymedia “in both structural terms and intent allows content-creation, right for reply and redefinition, debate and discussion to be held by general user – indeed, its moto is “Everyone’s a journalist”. However, contemporary research proves that production process in Indymedia outlines the corporate editorship. “Indymedia editorial teams often face the same problems as the ones faced by corporate news media, the ways of solving such problems by Indymedia activists are based on a radically different interpretation of journalistic ideology.” (Deuze, 2003: 336)
When debating over re-transformations of author-text-audience relationship in journalism the complexity of theoretical underpinnings of interactivity, presented by Cover (2006), should be taken into consideration. The last sentence of Barthes’ (1972/1977: 148) essay The Death of the Author is in this “new” context at least interesting: “[W]e know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the Reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

Igor Vobič, 2007


References
- Barthes, R. (1972/1977). The Death of the Author. Image-Music-Text, 142–148 New York: Hill & Wang.
- Cover, R. (2004). Audience inter/active: Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history. New Media & Society, 8(1): 139–158.
- Deuze, M. (2003). Indymedia Journalism. Journalism, 4 (3): 336–355.
- Deuze, M., Burns, A., Neuberger, C. (2007). Preparing for an Age of Participatory News. Journalism Practice 1 (3): 322–338.
- Robinson, S. (2006). The Mission of the j-blog: Recapturing Journalistic Authority Online. Journalism, 7 (1): 65–83.
- Žižek, S. (2001). Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso.

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