Week 8 - Citizen Journalism and New Media Audiences

Traditional hierarchical models seem to focus on resistance within notions of structure and post-structure, the Axel Bruns reading it would seem refers to this as the two-tier model.  Within such a model, resistance by the public is anticipated by corporates, marketers and government in a particular way and as such is built into the model itself. However within a network, resistance seems to behave in a way or at a level that is unanticipated.  Network models seem rather to dispute the very arrangement of the hierarchy model and the very notion of structure as a guiding factor altogether.  In the age of the internet it would seem that both traditional and network models agree (perhaps each for different reasons) that there is a need to incorporate both structure and agency and that structure as a guiding social and theoretical principle has dominated throughout the industrial age.  The dispute of the information age seems to be which model will play an a priori role.  Each model accordingly has its own beliefs, concerns, priorities and associated discourses which try to convince the public that it is the best means to 'the good life'.  Each model talks about different routes to the good life; short term, long term, equality versus overall benefit, competition or cooperation, responsibility or paternalisation (Bruns 2009).

Bruns seems to also outline various positions resistant to the mainstream firstly in relation to the two-tier model.  He discusses resistant positions taken either at edge or alternatively at centre.  The former remains true to authenticity yet can only critique and snipe without suggesting any constructive alternatives.  The latter on the other hand, resisting from centre or cooption, could be deemed as sellout yet is positioned in a way that can affect cultural change within existing structures.  Through the lens of citizen journalism, Bruns discusses a third resistant position to mainstream, that of the information age where nodes are positioned within the flow of the network, effectively structure has moved inside content.  This position resists the very notion of structure as guiding social force at an ontological level.  The model seems to advocate a flattening out, that everyone and everything is equal, that we are each unique and infinitely diverse, that we are not grouped, not stereo-typed and not categorised.  That we are not pitted against each other but will gain more collectively through cooperative effort (Bruns 2009).  Technology and the long tail have revealed an alternative to the dead end critique of post modernism, a means to move forward 'above' modernism (Anderson 2004).

The implications for this seem to be the ongoing existence of metanarrative but it would appear to run, from a Modernist perspective, inverted or reversed and secondary to or enclosed within agency.  It seems at the fission stage of metanarrative that the information age has split not just particular conflated aspects or assumptions of culture within the two-tier system but has split the entire system somehow and is subsequently feeding this model back into metanarrative at the fission stage, in a sense, using the system as its own weapon against itself.  We could see this idea similarly where the internet acts to undermine the scarcity and hence value of 'the copy' for the corporate mainstream model (Shirky 2002).  From a Modernist perspective metanarrative is now running in reverse and we are regressing (Klein 2007, pp3-21).  From the perspective of the information age I guess both of these notions take a back seat anyway because they refer to time and space, both of which are becoming less relevant with digital and global technologies (Sterling 1993).  Was it Einstein who gave us notions of time and space that weren't physical but that which we could only imagine?  So, Newton's three laws of motion presumably still run somewhere deep beneath the information age (Langone et al. 2006, p44 & 57)).  And beneath that Socratic four types of autonomy based on knowledge and awareness, but how have they changed (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2008)?  I can't help but wonder if these four states of autonomy relate to strong and weak force (nuclear power & decay within the two-tier model), electromagnetism and gravity and what the relationship between all these things (Nasa's Imagine the Universe! 1998).  Hydrogen still seems to turn into helium but the hydrogen is somehow different???!!!  Or is the information age about the same idea of the conversion of elements but about helium turning into carbon (The Astrophysics Spectator 2004)?

Alternatively, perhaps a biological comparison may be more apt.  Rather than the idea of humans processing information or relating to the outside world through a centralised brain which can be developed in a hierarchical sense through education and specific academic knowledge, maybe the network model refers to the senses.  The network model seems to focus on knowledge through sense, many senses; sight, sound, touch (Klein 2007, pp25-48).  Perhaps that's what the nodes are, our points of contact with the external world, and then the flow is the data from our senses being interpreted by our brain as a secondary act.  Then is the mind the bridge between sense and brain?  I guess in a sensory and network perspective we are all equal.  Perhaps someone who is blind many have a more keen sense of hearing, but we all have an equal means to utilise our senses and perhaps it is the type of thing that can't really be extended beyond others like there would be no such thing as 'sensory skill' or 'sensory knowledge', when it comes to senses we are all equal or equipped with what we were born with.  The network model, with its uptake and popularity, seems to advocate sense as the primary way that we interpret information, not through the brain.  Quite an interesting idea to get your head around; that information primarily comes into our body through our senses then we interpret it in our brain, not the other way around!  Modernists think this is a dangerous way to think because it gives in to our 'animal' and leads us to act primarily in impulse, thus leading to our regression back to caveman.  Socrates advocated that we as human beings have a tendency to undermine ourselves and he apparently discussed this notion in his dialogues and apparently it is catered for within the democratic model in the form of a 'lock-in' (Hernan Lopez-Garay 2001).  But then how is it in this case that we managed at all to progress past our cave-person days?  Why is it that Socrates, Plato etc. had the apparent ability to see outside our animal when everyone else couldn't and that they could protect us from something that we ourselves couldn't?  And how is it that we worked out how to break/modify/utilise the metanarrative mechanism when this was not apparently ever 'anticipated' or catered for?  If structure makes us, then who made structure?  Is 'the fear of our animal' a discourse that traces way back before the industrial age, a fear that has been instilled in us to keep us regulated through a web of floundering discourse between structure and agency.  Are we finally free of it????  Is this the third kind of freedom, the third culture (Kelly 2008)?  Modernists say that humans are just an animal and that it is important to keep the ideal that we are human, it is imperative.  Does the network say that we are also animals and that we will be more human if we stop trying to forget that we are animals or does the network say that we are not animals because we have the ability to reason our senses and we have only merely been wrongly led to negate our agency?  Why would it matter if we all knew that we were more than a civilised animal?  Actor Network Theory advocates that we are equal though with animals and objects (van Oenen 2011)??  Will have to think about this!

References:

Anderson, C 2004, Wired: The Long Tail, accessed 1/9/2011, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

The Astrophysics Spectator, 2004,Stars, accessed 14/9/2011, http://www.astrophysicsspectator.com/topics/stars/FusionHydrogen.html

Bruns, A 2009, News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism, accessed11/9/2011, http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf

Kelly, K 2008, The Third Culture: Better Than Free, accessed 28/8/2011, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html

Klein, N 2007, The Shock Doctrine, Penguine Books Ltd, London

Langone, J Stutz, B Gionopoulos, A 2006, Theories for Everything, National Geographic Society, Washington

Lopez-Garay, H 2001, Dialogue Among Civilisations: What For?, accessed 14/9/2011, http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/loversofdemocracy/lopez-garay.pdf

Nasa's Imagine the Universe!, 2008, Ask an Astrophysicist, accessed 14/9/2011, http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980127c.html

Shirky, C 2002, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing, accessed 4/9/2011, http://www.shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008, Personal Autonomy, accessed 14/9/2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/

Sterling, B 1993, A Short History of the Internet, accessed 28/7/2011, http://sodacity.net/system/files/Bruce_Sterling_A_Short_History_of_the_Internet.pdf

van Oenen, G 2011, Interpassive Agency: Engaging Actor-Network-Theory's View on the Agency of Objects, accessed 14/9/2011, http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.2.van-oenen.html