6 Conclusion
My aim has been to show a new way of thinking about press freedom—one that moves us beyond the image of heroic, individual journalists defining what they think the public is, and claiming that their unfettered right to speak sustains it. I have argued that, for the press to legitimately earn and normatively defend its freedom as an institution of democratic self-governance, it needs to show how its separations and dependencies ensure not only individual rights to speak but collective rights to hear. Especially in eras of extreme social and technological flux, press freedom can be more than a tired or anachronistic trope that rests upon the myth of journalists’ separation from nonjournalists.
Instead, it can be a powerful concept to think with and ask questions: What image of the public is assumed in the press’s separations and dependencies? Do these relationships give us the publics we need? Who has the power to imagine and sustain the press’s relationships to states, markets, technologies, audiences, or advertisers? What other publics are possible or necessary, and what kinds of press freedom would they require? Rather than revisit the same old debates about who is a journalist or which government officials are harming the traditional press, we might see this moment of sociotechnical, economic, and normative upheavals as an opportunity to reimagine, recreate, and redefend the press. But if we are to do so, we have to know where this press is, how its autonomy emerges, and why exactly we want to defend one version of it versus another.
My contribution to these debates starts by arguing that democratic autonomy and self-governance mean more than individuals being free from unreasonable constraints. To realize ourselves more fully, we need not only the right to access information, share opinions, and choose associations. We also need to see ourselves as publics—and question whether our publics have capacities to hear people and ideas that we would not choose to encounter.
Such publics and capacities are products of history, and depend on more than just journalistic definitions of public interest, or media technologies that engineer serendipity, calculate relevance, or manipulate attention. They require communication systems that help people discover and manage their shared social and material conditions—that show them how thriving requires more than personalized information, self-selected communities, and freedom from unwanted influences.
Because the press is a key institution of public communication, its autonomy cannot be seen simply as freedom from those who prevent it from pursuing whatever it thinks the public is. Rather, the press and its autonomy—as they always have been—are separations and dependencies that work together to help publics form. The press must not be defended blindly; it has no monopoly on defining the public interest and its autonomy should only be protected insofar as it helps to create and sustain defensible publics. A robust and self-aware press speaks the language of publics, appreciates its public-making role, and eloquently articulates why it works to create some publics over others. This kind of press is one of democracy’s most powerful and essential institutions. Its freedom is worth defending.
And because today’s press is inextricably embedded within sociotechnical contexts where both people and machines have power, the networked press’s freedom—and therefore its power to realize networked publics—depends on how humans and nonhumans join and split through a variety of sociotechnical dynamics. The power to imagine and realize contemporary, networked press freedom is the power to create and influence these dynamics.
Accepting this argument requires seeing two kinds of freedom—individual and institutional—as relational achievements that entail balancing two other kinds of freedom—negative freedom from and affirmative capacity to. It is nonsensical to pretend that individuals can achieve autonomy without institutions (and vice versa) or that negative or positive freedom can exist without each other. Add to this framework the observation that today’s institutional press is not only a social, legal, economic, or cultural achievement but also products of technological arrangements we struggle to understand and private actors who eschew public accountability, and the model of networked press freedom becomes one in which autonomy must be traced across multiple sites with varied sensitivities.
My goal has been to suggest a different way of thinking about press freedom that might speak to this historical moment and the days ahead. But beyond the argument that the sociotechnical press creates sociotechnical publics, why might this way of thinking about press freedom matter?
The press is an ideal that is made and remade in each historical moment. But this ideal needs to be interrogated and critiqued (Downey, Titley, & Toynbee, 2014), not just described, if we are to understand why we have the press we have. These interrogations and critiques require a new skill that the press and its critics are only just starting to develop—the ability to read sociotechnical relationships for their power to create the conditions under which people become publics. Research on media accountability and journalistic ethics requires seeing how normativity is inseparable from technological infrastructures. Since networked technologies are not broadcast technologies, we need a language of press freedom that speaks to today’s sociotechnical landscape.
The concern is urgent. We currently are debating which parts of the press can or should be automated; whether social media is just a publishing channel or beat or an integral part of the press; why news organizations should invest in making their own technologies versus adopting those of Silicon Valley; what obligations social media platforms have to democratic processes; and what power news organizations have to resist the metrics and advertising regimes of social media platforms with narrow, opaque, and unaccountable visions of the public. The power to design the networked press is currently unevenly distributed among journalists, publishers, technology companies, and audiences. Too many decisions about how publics are made live in private organizations and proprietary technologies with thin, transactional, or nonexistent theories of autonomy and self-governance. In many ways, news organizations are still playing catch-up and still dealing with the shock of early internet incursions into what was a stable and conservative business of elite gatekeeping and mass broadcasting. Scholars and journalists alike have often seen new technologies as professional threats, distribution channels, or economic competitors, but rarely have they been seen as ubiquitous infrastructures with existential power to change the conditions under which the press imagines itself and realizes publics. As companies like Facebook and Google increasingly capture and monopolize revenue and attention, they consolidate the power to make publics within inscrutable and unaccountable sociotechnical systems, seeing public outcries as public relations problems to be ameliorated or endured. Such companies are not simply threats to the journalistic freedom, but to the very idea of autonomous, self-governing publics.
There is a flip side to the press’s crisis: technology companies are generally not as adept as the news industry is at talking about publics and democracy. Technologists are often shy about using such language. They talk about communities, groups, users, sharing, content, and individual choice—but beyond platitudes about the “democratization of computation” or the “power of connection,” they seem largely incapable of grappling with hard questions about self-government, democracy, and publics. As the history of press freedom has shown, journalists have a long if uneven past thinking about how their work relates to democracy. Often unconsciously, they created separations and dependencies designed to realize an image of the public. They may not have said so explicitly, or they may have fallen back on tropes of their own, but embedded in the profession of journalism and the missions of many publishers were ideas about how they thought they were helping democracies, what they defined as the public interest, how they knew they needed to act if they were to be anything other than just another business. As we saw, such commitments ebbed and flowed over time, took on varied forms, suffered from problematic relationships, and often were not as well developed as critics would have liked, but the very best and most self-reflective journalists do not shy away from seeing their work as part of democratic culture and respond maturely to critical and constructive critiques. As technology companies and social media platforms try to decide what exactly they are and who their constituents are, they often only awkwardly and shallowly invoke democracy and self-governance, preferring instead the safer terrain of users, customers, communities, personalization, and optimization.
There is an opportunity, then, for a new kind of press and a new defense of press freedom. Thoughtful journalists who understand both the history of their profession and the potential of sociotechnical systems could lead technologists to richer, more subtle, and defensibly ethical relationships with publics. Journalists, technologists, and audiences could create new sociotechnical contracts and contact languages that let them talk about what the networked press is, could be, and should be at any given moment.1 As this book tries to do, they could look deeply and honestly at the networked press’s separations and dependencies and ask if they are creating the publics people need. Instead of being enamored with every new technology Silicon Valley offers—such as augmented reality, virtual reality, drones, big data, and machine learning—or narrowly framing their work as storytelling, journalists could instead ask questions: how are these technologies actually sociotechnical relationships, what are their separations and dependencies, what kind of autonomy do they make possible, and does it help to create normatively defensible publics? This is a big ask. Although U.S. news organizations struggle for financial revenue and public trust, journalistic practitioners, scholars, and activists could band together and use their collective cultural power to resist the thin democratic thinking of Silicon Valley. The press could redefine and reassert its moral authority and demand new sociotechnical relationships for new kinds of publics. If journalists simply see their relationship to technology in terms of storytelling innovation, audience distribution, and content monetization, they cede the high ground of democratic debate to technology companies that cannot or will not prioritize publics.
As strange as it may sound, machines need to be part of this conversation. Data, algorithms, machine learning models, and artificial intelligences of all stripes need to be seen not as precursors, channels, or products of news but as powerful and often invisible agents creating the conditions under which journalists work, news emerges, audiences convene, and publics form. The networked press is made up of humans with different traditions and affiliations, but it also is populated by nonhumans with considerable and largely unaccountable power—proprietary algorithms that resist auditing, data sets with embedded and invisible biases, and surveillance and personalization technologies that watch and influence human actions. These are not just tools that the press might decide to use; they are infrastructures the press is already embedded within and often has little knowledge of or control over them. Without seeing itself as infrastructure, how will the networked press be able to see all the ways it might be being censored, all the relationships that are not being created, all the stories that are not being heard, and all the publics that are not forming?
The infrastructural view of the press and its autonomy calls for science and technology studies (STS) to be at the core of journalism scholarship that integrates democratic theory, media ethics, and sociotechnical epistemology. It does not mean applying STS to journalism as if STS were just a methodology or analytical perspective. A sociotechnical view of the press fundamentally sees journalism’s people and machines as intertwined and inseparable. It calls for categories of inquiry that rise above lists of influences or isolated meetings of humans and nonhumans. Scholars of the networked press interested in creating alternative models of journalistic autonomy would do well to revisit the work of feminist writers like Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Sandra Harding and feminist STS scholars like Adele Clark, Donna Haraway, Susan Leigh Star, Lucy Suchman, and Judy Wajcman. Such a focus on alternative forms of power might help develop an explicitly feminist theory of networked press freedom that values listening and situated knowledge, and that challenges the dominance of voice and objectivist epistemologies. More critical, cultural, feminist scholarship is required to understand the “deep structures” (Hall, 1997) of the networked press that make some publics more possible than others.
This way of seeing press freedom is meant as a constructive challenge to rethink what the press could be, in three directions. First, designers may think about what publics could be—what kind of publics they want the press to convene—and assemble human and nonhuman actors to achieve it (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Deliberative, agonistic, enclave, decentered, affective, recursive, participatory, and counter publics all require different types of presses—and therefore different types of sociotechnical separations and dependencies. How might the twelve dimensions of networked press autonomy be combined and remixed to realize different types of publics? These dimensions are the exclusive domain of neither journalist nor technologists. They cut across questions of design, optimization, ethics, publics, and democracy. I am not saying that journalists and technologists simply need to collaborate to create new storytelling tools or turn editorial decisions into algorithms. I am arguing for an entirely new ethic of production focused on understanding, making, and defending sociotechnical publics. Editorial judgments and technology design decisions will become increasingly intertwined, and my fear is that a focus on publics will suffer irrevocably—at the hands of dominant concepts like audiences, users, customers, and communities—if networked press designers, scholars, and policymakers do not foreground and prioritize them.
Second, this way of rethinking what the press can be is not just a mode of design but a publics-driven mode for critique. If publics are failing to produce normatively acceptable outcomes—for example, if people are systematically excluded or oppressed, ideas are routinely marginalized, dissent is squashed, resources are mismanaged, or elections are stolen—then we might look at the sociotechnical conditions under which people are convened or served by the press. If the networked press is seen as a system of relationships among humans and nonhumans, with different degrees of freedom and control, then its breakdowns might be diagnosed as failures that can be ameliorated with a different set of separations or dependencies. The shortcomings of social media platforms could be seen not as failures to live up to the traditions of journalism—they do not want to be news organizations anyway—but as shortcomings in the “system of freedom of expression” (Emerson, 1970) that highlight how the power to create the conditions under which people can hear is unevenly distributed. More simply, how could Facebook be held accountable as a listening platform? How does Twitter help or harm a public right to hear? What new types of power would news organizations need with such companies if they were to use their expertise as creators of sociotechnical publics to change social media?
These questions might help journalism see itself not as a profession fighting for cultural legitimacy or economic viability but as sociotechnical makers and defenders of networked publics (Creech & Mendelson, 2015; Kunelius & Ruusunoksa, 2008). Social media companies may have greater power to create networked technologies, and regulators may have greater power to force normative change—but journalists could become the essential hybrid professionals of networked publics. They might understand not only how technologies work but also how sociotechnical systems behave as communication institutions with normative power. This shifts conversations about journalism education beyond narrow questions of whether students should be taught to code or hack or what kind of storytelling is possible with digital technologies. It pushes students to learn their professional freedom as the right and obligation to help create publics by configuring relationships among humans and nonhumans. Their autonomy could be taught as the creation and defense of the sociotechnical systems that make publics. And if someone asks “Is she a journalist?,” “Is that journalism?,” or “Does she need independence?,” the answers might be yes to all three questions if she and her actions help to create a public right to hear.
Third, foregrounding the networked press’s capacity to realize a public right to hear might help journalists and technologists look anew at questions of information overload or communication fatigue (Ananny, 2017). Instead of seeing their profession as the production of information—faster, more immersive, more shocking—journalists might see themselves as creators of listening environments. It would be a long-term project and one that would be challenging to mount in the face of the constant pressure to produce, but journalists could say that because their professional autonomy partly depends on enabling a public right to hear, they are sometimes ethically obligated not to add to the surfeit of online information and must instead create sociotechnical environments that help publics hear. Such courage might be supported by editors, technology companies, professional organizations, and sociotechnically literate audiences that understand the value and necessity of periodic silence.
The press’s job is not to listen to us or for us but to help us hear ourselves well enough to understand how we are inextricably linked. It achieves only part of its mission—and deserves only limited autonomy—if it simply speaks to us in ways it assumes we need. If instead it is an infrastructure for both speaking and hearing—for individual and collective autonomy and for positive and negative freedom—then it is perhaps our most critically important institution and needs ongoing and robust protection.
The U.S. press currently seems to be in an “infrastructural drift” (Ciborra & Hanseth, 2001, p. 4). The current president has publicly denounced the idea of the free press, suggested the need for new libel laws, fed panic about fake news and leaks, and spread misinformation at White House press conferences while barring their broadcast. Social media bots and platforms, many of which are controlled or influenced by foreign adversaries with explicitly anti-democratic aims, swamp Western democracies with disinformation designed to sway elections and discredit results. Twitter has announced its intention to let users flag tweets as fake news, and Facebook and Google have created complex international partnerships to outsource truth judgments to proprietary, algorithmically driven infrastructures and hand-picked news and fact-checking organizations. Surveys of U.S. news audiences find that they are concerned about fake news and have little trust in traditional institutions, but they also admit to sharing stories they know to be untrue and acknowledge that they are largely held captive by unaccountable social media platforms. The press’s current existential crisis is far more fundamental than concerns over declining revenues or definitions of a journalist. In the United States, at least, many are asking whether democracy can survive if we are unable to learn about, convene with, and trust each other through digital media.
There has rarely been a better and more urgent time to figure out exactly what the press is and how its freedom can and should be defended. Just as the U.S. press in colonial times was not the same as the press of the muckraking, McCarthy, and Watergate eras—press freedom meant different things then—the contemporary press faces unique challenges. I have tried to argue that in the midst of technological hype and uncertainty, today’s networked press would do well to define itself as a public institution concerned with how publics are made and sustained—to ask hard questions of itself and its relationships. This demands that journalists quickly and confidently reinvent themselves as sociotechnically savvy, reflective practitioners who are concerned not only about their individual right to speak but also about a public’s right to hear. This moment offers journalism an opportunity. Instead of being held captive by a mythology of autonomy that strives only for freedom from or being overtaken by thin technological rhetoric, the networked press—made of humans and nonhumans—might thoughtfully, playfully, skillfully, and powerfully reimagine itself as an institution that deftly uses separations and dependencies to make and defend entirely new publics.
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