Digital expertise in online journalism (and anthropology).

Digital expertise in online journalism (and anthropology). "Lineal thinking will always generate either the teleologicalfallacy (that end determines process) or the myth of some supernaturalcontrolling agency." --Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity Introduction: Cybernetics and Anthropological Knowledge in theDigital Age The core of this article is an ethnographic exploration of thesignificance digital media practices and digital (self-)understandingsin contemporary western news journalism. For those of us followingcurrent trends in news production and circulation, this theme has acertain obviousness to it. Talk of an internet "revolution" innews is commonplace, and even those journalists who voice concerns aboutthe short- and long-term effects of digital media upon the news industryseem resigned to the transformational power of those media. Likewise,digital culture seems an unavoidable destination for anthropologicalresearch and reflection today (e.g., Boellstorff 2008, Coleman and Golub2008, Coombe and Hartman 2004, Kelty 2004, Mazzarella 2006, Reed 2005)just as digital media have become increasingly important instruments andenvironments of anthropological knowledge-making and communication(Kelty 2008). Beyond the ethnography of digital expertise in news journalism, mysecondary goal in this article is to suggest how we can connectanthropological research on digital knowledge to the status of digitalknowledge within anthropology itself. No one would likely dispute someconnection between our environments and practices of digital mediationand our interest here in exploring knowledge in the digital age. Butwhat exactly is that connection? Can we go a step farther and thinkthrough the specific contribution of digital mediation toanthropological methods of theory and analysis? To answer thesequestions, we need to adjust for what I describe below as a certainGramscian organic intellectual faith in the radical newness andtransformational power of digital media. This is an ideologicalorientation that binds anthropologists of digital culture with otherdigital media practitioners (like online news journalists). And, forthis very reason, it is important to trace anthropology's ownhistory of engagement with digital modes of understanding. I begin witha deeper (pre-internet) history of anthropology's investment indigital methods and analytics and move laterally from there into acomparison with how digital expertise is currently being formed inonline news journalism. Anthropology's engagement with the digital age surely began nolater than Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead's (and to a muchlesser extent Clyde Kluckhohn's) active participation in thelegendary Macy Foundation Conferences from 1946 to 1953. The MacyConferences were an exercise in what Donna Haraway would much later term"cyborg theory" (Haraway 1991). Organized as a somewhatexperimental venture into interdisciplinary communication between thesciences and social sciences, these ten meetings focused on thestructures and operation of human and machine intelligence while nevertaking a human/machine distinction for granted. Here, in the primarycrucible and amplifier of what came to be named, halfway through, as"cybernetics," long-standing anthropological interests inlanguage and epistemology brushed shoulders with mathematics,engineering, Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, ethics, neuroscience,cellular biology, and an emerging "information theory." Allthe participants sensed a paradigm shift in the making, and they worked,albeit only with partial success, to solidify an analyticalmeta-language for their shared intuition that the sciences of mind,knowledge, and understanding were about to be radically transformed(Helms 1993, Dupuy 2000). The central themes of the Macy Conferences were feedback, control,and circularity in the communication and behavior of "complexsystems" both mechanic and biotic (see, e.g., Wiener 1948, 1950). Adiscussion over whether intelligence was primarily digital (discrete) oranalogical (continuous) in nature was also pivotal. As Bateson recalledlater, "In the early days of cybernetics, we used to argue aboutwhether the brain is, on the whole, an analogic or digital mechanism.That argument has since disappeared with the realization that thedescription of the brain has to start from the all-or-nothingcharacteristic of the neuron. At least in a vast majority of instances,the neuron either fires or does not fire; and if this were the end ofthe story, the system would be purely digital and binary. But it ispossible to make systems out of digital neurons that will have theappearance of being analogic systems" (2002:103). As Bateson'scomment reveals, despite their varying disciplinary backgrounds,research interests, and frequent conceptual disagreements, the Macyparticipants tended to agree about a fundamental systematicity of theirobjects of reflection and about the role that recursive informaticoperations played in shaping behavior. As co-convener Norbert Wiener explained in computational andthermodynamic idioms, cybernetics was interested in how organizationalorder was produced through recursive systemic feedback--feedback whichcountered an overall environmental tendency toward entropy or noise:"Thus the nervous system and the automatic machine arefundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on thebasis of decisions they have made in the past ... The synapse in theliving organism corresponds to the switching device in the machine ...The machine, like the living organism, is ... a device which locally andtemporarily seems to resist the general tendency toward entropy. By itsability to make decisions, it can produce around it a zone oforganization in a world whose general tendency is to run down"(Wiener 1950:33-4). In Wiener's cybernetics, human neural andmuscular organization--and even, although admittedly with greateruncertainty, social organization--became comparable to mechanicalautomata by likening both to the switching devices and systemiccircuitry of electronic computation. This conceptual emphasis, shared bymany of the Macy participants, on a recursive computational system asthe model for intelligence and action is the essence of what I refer tobelow as a "cybernetic-computational" epistemology. The analogy of the operation of living organisms and machines was,of course, nothing new in itself and echoed western philosophicalcompressions of humanity and its operational artifacts dating back toEnlightenment materialists like La Mettrie (1748). However, thecybernetic-computational epistemology that was articulated and refinedat the Macy Conferences was also historically specific in its connectionto the experiments in computational design and electrical engineeringthat generated the first prototype electronic computers in the late1930s. These experiments were accelerated through major governmentalinvestments and military applications during the second World War, andWiener himself said that he had come to the general principles ofcybernetics through wartime research on the possibility of using radarfeedback to improve antiaircraft weaponry. Both the realities andfantasies of "machine intelligence" were matters ofsignificant cross-disciplinary scientific attention and concern by thelate 1940s. The military and civilian applications for electroniccomputation expanded rapidly (not least through the mathematical anddesign work of Macy participants and guests like Wiener, John yonNeumann, Claude Shannon, and J.R. Licklider) and became increasingly amatter of public fascination, aspiration, and anxiety in the early 1950s(see Time 1950, for example). In this respect, cybernetics can beinterpreted as a kind of transposition of the epistemic models andresearch problems of electronic computation into other fields ofscientific and human-scientific inquiry (Galison 1994, Latour 1987,Pickering 2002). Cybernetics did not invent the centering of electricschemata--including idioms of circuitry, charges, recursive functions,and feedback--in models of human rational process and behavior (SigmundFreud's Interpretation of Dreams is a wonderful early example;1900). But cybernetics did expand and, I would argue, cement thesignificance of these schemata. Its networks of practitioners andspokespersons elevated informational and communicational systematicityinto a mystery worthy of further scientific and public attention (Heims1993). In short, cybernetics transposed the nascent industrialization ofelectronic computation into a new ontology: one that invited new scienceto elaborate, refine, and specify it epistemologically (see Boyer 2005for a parallel discussion of dialectical ontologies and epistemologies). Across the 1960s and beyond, cybernetic insights, attentions, andpostulates merged into new conceptual experiments and movements within avariety of fields in the human sciences, for example, Luhmannian systemstheory in sociology or post-human, cyborg and informationalist trends inliterary and cultural studies (Haraway 1991, Hayles 1999, Kittler 1990).Even outside the conceptual avant-garde, the importance of"communication" and "information" as objects ofinterest, research, and reflection in the human sciences swelled afterthe 1950s. In anthropology, one sees this perhaps most clearly not onlyin the maverick cyberneticism of Bateson himself (1987, 2002), but alsoin the rise and disciplinary dominance of symbolic, structuralist, andinterpretive anthropologies. Despite their legendary arguments with eachother, all of these anthropologies focused their analytical imaginationon communicational and informational problems (at least in the sense ofsemiosis writ large) and in cases like Levi-Strauss'sstructuralism, the presence of informationalist insight (for example inhis theory of "hot" and "cold" societies, 1966) ismore directly recognizable. The signature problem of postwaranthropology through the 1980s--culture--was often apprehended incryptocybernetic terms. The Sahlinsian model of culture is exemplary forits rigorous systems of binary (or "digital" in Bateson'ssense) oppositions (1976), and even the more stubbornly"analogical" culture models, such as Geertz's, exhibitinformationalist flirtations (e.g., 2000:49-52). Even with the turn awayfrom culture in the 1980s, the rising influence of Frenchpoststructuralist (particularly Foucaultian) theory assured cyberneticattentions a prominent place in anthropology. Two of the things thatdistinguished poststructuralism's analytical method were itsconcern with language and power (i.e., "discourse") as systemsof co-constituting elements and its exploration of networks, nodes,linkages, lateral effects, and recursive operations within modern socialformations (Foucault 1979). The influence of cybernetic andcomputational (now, "informational") epistemology upon postwaranthropology and the postwar human sciences is thus, in my view, deepand largely undisclosed. It is not so much the case thatcybernetic-informational epistemology taught anthropology to beconcerned with language and semiosis; rather, its saturation of thepostwar human sciences "informed" the elevation of languageand semiosis into signature concerns of postwar anthropology, and, moredistinctively, it encouraged anthropologists to think about variousaspects of semiosocial order (for example, "culture") insystemic, recursive, and informationalist ways (see, e.g., Collier 1975or Rappaport 1971). This silent shaping of knowledge has led me to writeelsewhere of a cybernetic and digital "unconscious" withinpostwar anthropological theory and practice (Boyer n.d.). Yet, clearly this article is too short to explore this unconsciousin the detail it deserves. My point has simply been to demonstrate thatthe intellectual roots of our contemporary digital attentions andanalytics are historically much deeper than the explosive innovation andwidespread implementation of "digital" (here in thecontemporary sense of electrically-enhanced mediation)information andCommunication technologies (ICTs) in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, wecould even go farther. Although the cybernetics movement of the 1940sand 1950s was a fantastically important conceptual watershed inscientific and human-scientific analytic paradigms, its own epistemicroots can be traced back into the electrical science and social scienceof the 19th century. But, rather than pursue the problem of knowledge in the digital erain this direction, that is, into greater historical depth, I would liketo now expand the discussion laterally through ethnography by examininghow another kind of professional intellectual, online journalists,discuss the particular modes of expertise they have acquired throughworking in a multimedial digital ecology. This ethnography is based uponmy research with German news journalists since the mid 1990s as well asupon a more recent project investigating online news departments and theimpact of digital information technologies in Germany and the UnitedStates. Through a comparison between online journalists' sense oftheir digital expertise and our (anthropological) own, I hope tohighlight the importance of cybernetic-informational epistemology incontemporary intellectual and public culture. My ethnography focusesespecially on two dimensions of how online journalists conceive thespecial nature of their expertise within journalism and public culture:(1) non-linear or networked thinking contrasted with organizationallinearity and (2) a sense of being able to better manipulate andoptimize informational "content" to suit communicational"medium." Online News and Online Journalists: Organic Intellectualism in aDigital Register News journalism is experiencing what sociologist Eric Klinenbergdescribes as a "revolutionary period" in the transition todigital communication and information technology (2005). Over the pastfive years, the internet has become a central feature of virtually everynews organization's strategy for short- and long-term survival.This trend began in fits and starts in the mid 1990s but was derailed ordelayed, according to online news executives and journalists I haveinterviewed, by what are described as professional resistance, byinstitutional inertia, and by the collapse of technology markets in 2001(see Boczkowski 2004, Paterson and Domingo 2008). Yet by 2004 and 2005,a renewed surge in internet advertising revenue and pressure from aninstitutional investment culture skeptical of old media (especiallyprint media) viability, combined with a demonstrable migration ofaudience (especially younger audiences) toward online and other newmedia platforms, persuaded even the most resistant news organizations toinvest more robustly in online initiatives. Online news investment inthe United States and the United Kingdom has outpaced the rest of theworld, but there is general agreement within western journalisticcommunities and across western journalistic generations that new digitalinformation systems and platforms have profoundly reshaped theinstitutions and practices of newsmaking, whether for good or for ill?In an era in which most western news organizations are shedding staff tomeet investors' demands for profitability in the face of fallingadvertising revenues, online news departments are experiencing growth.Online investments tend to be justified by predictions of future revenuegrowth since, for the most part, online initiatives have not yetdeveloped sustainable revenue streams of their own and thus often dependon old media newscenters and revenue for their continued operation. Asone department head confessed to me, "We don't have a viablebusiness model. Yet." In tandem with this process of technical transformation,journalists working in and with digital media, especially in Europe andNorth America, have increasingly come to establish specializedprofessional networks and institutions for themselves. For example,there is a vibrant blogosphere now devoted to online journalism, citizenjournalism, news blogging, the future of journalism, and so on. And, anannual North American online news conference began in the late 1990s,which gradually evolved into the Online News Association(http://www.journalists.org), a professional organization that claimedover 1,600 professional and associated members in 2009. Oneinternational database of online news resources contained the names ofover 19,000 online news organizations in 2006 (Deuze 2008:199).Journalists invested in digital media have meanwhile worked to refineand publicize a new (sub)professional identity for "onlinejournalism" complete with a rich field of indexical distinctionsbetween online journalism and "traditional journalism." Ofcourse, this project of identity-formation is typically selective andcontingent, its apparently substantive and stable distinctions of"us" and "them" undermined by the fact that manyjournalists who would not willingly identify themselves as"onliners" have become, both by necessity and by inclination,skilled in the use of a wide variety of digital media platforms andtechnologies. Likewise, digital ICTs have been industrially standard inall western news production centers for over a generation. Nonetheless,self-identifying onliners tend to present themselves publicly as thefuture guarantors of the news industry, as the cutting edge of theirprofession who will broker the reinvention of news for the digital era.In their mission statement, the Online News Association announces,"We believe that the Internet is the most powerful communicationsmedium to arise since the dawn of television. As digital deliverysystems become the primary source of news for a growing segment of theworld's population, it presents complex challenges andopportunities for journalists as well as the news audience." The common thread within narratives of online journalism is a kindof Gramscian organic intellectual certainty in the inevitability oftechnologically-driven revolution in media production, circulation, andreception--a revolution that is nevertheless susceptible to humanknowledge and intentionality if managed by experts in new media (foracademic analogues see Bell 1973, Balkhausen 1978, Poster 2000, amongmany others). George S., (2) the internet strategy director of a USpublic radio broadcaster, startled me with his bluntness when he said,"Really, I don't give a shit about the radio anymore. But Ican't say that around the station. Already I get a lot of pushbackfrom the reporters, who think of the website as a waste of time, soinstead of creating content themselves, they hand it off to the interns.But what they don't realize is that they're becoming dinosaursand that in five years, the interns will have their jobs." HermannL., who occupies a position parallel to George's at a regionalpublic broadcaster in Germany, laughed broadly as he paraphrasedinvestor Warren Buffett on the necessary collapse of print news,"Imagine that printing had never been invented and that we only hadthe internet today. And, I came to you and said, 'I have a greatbusiness idea: we gather together all the news of the day, single themost important stories out, print them on giant, expensive printingpresses, on paper, and then drive them with an unbelievably expensivefleet of trucks across the country, hand them out, and for all that, youcan read today's news tomorrow morning.' Would you give me anymoney? [laughs] The newspaper is moving away from the news business andtoward background stories with specific profiles; weekly papers willprobably give up news altogether.... [And] this pull toward online isgoing to eventually affect television and radio as well. The internetwill be the center, and the other media--the other media will besatellites." In Gramsci's model of organic intellectualism as the epistemiclabor that accompanies and organizes new forces in social production(1971:5), one finds a helpful, if schematic, way of understanding how anew mode of professional consciousness could crystallize in tandem withthe expansion of social practices of digital mediation. Gramsci wouldlikely have anticipated something like George's and Hermann'smillenarian narratives of new media given their practical andintellectual investment in the productive potentials of new mediatechnology. Gramsci might also have expected their disdain for olderproductive techniques and technologies they saw their expertise asdisplacing. In this respect, Gramsci's category is analyticallymore helpful than the distinction of universal and specificintellectuals favored by Foucault (1980). Online journalists, like otherprofessional intellectuals, may well be "specific" in theiridentification with certain technologies, domains of expertise, andtechnical practices. But what really distinguishes them intellectually,I would argue, is the particular cybernetic and informationalistepistemology in which they define their expertise. I turn now toethnographic examples drawn from my research with online journalists inGermany and the United States that allow us to explore thisepistemologyin-action in more detail. "Das Sein pragt ja das Bewusstsein" On a warm bright summer day in May 2008, I sat with Helga S., thehead of the online department of a German public broadcaster, in heroffice in a small western German city. Germany's publicbroadcasting system is federalized with the Bundeslander (federalstates) possessing their own public broadcasters or sharing themregionally (Humphreys 1994, Meyn 1994). And yet, public broadcastingpolicy in Germany is also coordinated at the federal level, with theminister presidents of the federal states meeting occasionally tonegotiate a federal Rundfunkstaatsvertrag ("RStV,"broadcasting agreement) that governs broadcasting across the country.Helga and I were involved in a deep discussion of the major issueaffecting the online departments of all the German public broadcastersin the Spring of 2008: the upcoming negotiations over the right ofpublic broadcasters to create unique online material. Up until now, theRStV has only authorized online departments to offer Programmbegleitung(program accompaniment) for already broadcast radio and televisualmaterial. Thus, for example, the text of a radio interview or atelevision clip could be placed on the public broadcaster'swebsite. But the online department could not research and develop itsown "unique content" and then broadcast it. It was alsomandated that the public broadcasters could spend no more than .75% oftheir entire budget upon online initiatives. The online departments thatI researched were quietly lobbying for the relaxation of these Fetteln(shackles) in the upcoming RStV negotiations. Journalists argued to methat the old law missed the evolving nature of digital communications.An artificial separation between radio, television, and internetplatforms, my interviewees said, made little sense in the era of digitalradio, YouTube, and podcasting. But the leaders of Germany'sprivate broadcasting industry have argued vigorously that any moreaggressive move by public broadcasters to generate unique online contentwould allow publicly financed media to ruin commercial media markets.One online director, although himself a proponent of relaxing therestrictions on content generation and especially the budgetary limits,admitted that with the brand loyalty and financial strength of theGerman public broadcasting system (2nd in the world only to the BBC interms of funding), they could rather easily dominate the German languageinternet news market were that their intention (although he alsoemphasized that market dominance was never an organizational priorityfor German public broadcasting). (3) It was in this context that Helga described to me herorganizational rationale for maintaining and strengthening independentonline departments that worked with both radio and televisiondepartments rather than subdividing online expertise and placing itunder the control of radio and television. At stake, she explained, werethe public broadcasters' future organizational ability to manageplatform convergence and new media. Online departments, Helga said,brought digital consciousness to broadcasting organizations. HS:...There are ever more themes that are falling between thedomains [of radio and television]...And as there are more of thesethemes that transcend the old structures, the more it becomes clear thatthe normal old linear organization doesn't work any longer. Andthat is the phase that we're in right now. DB: Are you talking about convergence? That different media aregrowing together, perhaps into one medium with different platforms? HS:...[breaking in] But that won't solve the problem. Thefundamental idea that somehow everything belongs together won'tsolve your organizational problem. If you are a large media organizationand are convinced that somehow things are going to grow together thensomehow you need to be able to form unities. And this is where we cometo a very important point. I believe that Onliners have specialnon-linear knowledge [nichtlineares Wissen], which others do notshare--the others have linear knowledge. "Das Sein pragt ja dasBewubtsein," being imprints consciousness: this old Marxistprinciple is right in that respect. Organizations need this knowledge ofnon-linearity and this knowledge of the complexity of informationpackets--that they need to be logically structured in a non-linearspace, or otherwise they cannot be found. And this knowledge can'tbe splintered into radio and television. Because if, in the name oforganizational unity, we dissolve this department, then there are onlytwo possibilities. The competence will flow into other departments, orthe competence will be dissolved in the process of flow or become mired,evaporating like drops on a hot stone, since the minority in anyorganizational culture often find it hard to hold their own against themany. DB: This is a very interesting point. How does one learn this kindof non-linear thinking? Does it have something to do with the work, withthe connection to the internet? HS: Yes, yes, it's just as we learned linearity before. Basedon my own professional experience, for example, I can tell you that thetimeline exerts an enormous linear ordering effect over ourorganizational structures. The effect is constantly underestimated. Thetimeline reflects the programming sequence, and the departments thentend to think this way as well. And there is a truth to it. But when youare working in the internet or in another dialogical medium, then yousimply can't think this way, in terms of a timeline (Zeitstrahl).(4) And I also think that what's really really important is thatthere are too few decision makers here that have practical experiencewith IT (information technology) projects--that is, with how complex ITprojects are, that one basically has to conceptualize all the workprocedures in advance, with how difficult it is to manage such projectsin an iterative process. I have to explain to these decision makers whyI began a project two years ago and then in the middle realized that Icouldn't do what I thought I could do--because I always have toadapt myself to the project, and then I always have to justify why Ideviated from the plan. But I have to deviate; I can't simply stayput. Yes, I find this paucity of experience in thinking in the terms ofIT to be a great organizational problem [pauses]...because innon-linearity it somehow always comes back to an IT project somewhere.The basis is always IT. This extensive exchange is exemplary of the autoanalysis of onlinejournalism in several respects. The exchange suggests that the futureviability of news organizations is dependent upon the specialintellectual and organizational capacities of online journalists. Italso conveys the contrast that online journalists frequently assertbetween their minoritarian digital consciousness and expertise and thoseof the organizational cultures that they inhabit. Onliners oftencontrast the "iterative" networked nature of their expertiseto the hierarchical, isolating, and inflexible institutions of broadcastmedia. This contrast makes sense, they say, because of how thejust-in-time, decentered, interactive character of new media like theinternet challenge the center-periphery organization and structuredtemporality of traditional news broadcasting. Echoing Wiener'sconcerns with feedback and organismal learning, for example, Helgaaddresses the need of her own organization "for knowledge of thecomplexity of information packets" in order to make betteroperating decisions. Helga's final reflections upon non-linearityare particularly interesting in this regard. She closes a distinctionbetween distributed networks of information technology ("IT")and non-linear thinking, drawing upon Marx to support her understandingthat lived experience of work practice and technical environments shapesmodes of consciousness and expertise. Non-linear thinking in this casesignals a capacity to think at the level of a network of dynamic,mutually constituting elements and relations. Like Bateson, Helgarejects the ambition of linear thinking to correctly understand thetechnical and social ecologies of digital media in terms of stablechains of cause and effect. Helga's conclusion, "The basis isalways IT," may not be intended as a radical collapse of thecontingent mediations between technology and consciousness, but it doesdemonstrate the extent to which many online journalists understand theradically differential character of their expert knowledge when comparedto that of traditional (broadcast) journalism. Onliners feel that theyunderstand problems of informational architecture and circulation betterthan other journalists because they live the complexity of informationin their digital media practices. IT is their basis, the practicalknowledge which anchors their special identity and social importance,especially in an era in which news media organizations are becomingincreasingly multimedial and real-time in their productivity. "It's not about radio. It's about content." Online journalists' feeling of release from the spatiotemporal"linearity" of broadcasting into more networked, dynamic, andinteractive modes of understanding and action is accompanied by a sensethat they possess a special expertise in reconfiguring and mobilizingrelations between information signals and the channels that carry them.As with Helga's identification with non-linear thinking, acybernetic language and social imagination is often prominent. I onceasked Rosie R., a US newspaper journalist who was, by her own account, a"convert" to online journalism, whether she felt there wasanything that distinguished online journalism as a practice. Shereplied, "The core of what we do is delivering the contentbest-suited to the medium...If we were to say we were experts inanything, it would be in adapting the content to the medium.""Information" and "content" are, unsurprisingly,core informationalist categories that frequently serve as tropesdenoting the objects and products of journalistic labor (tropes that, toa certain extent, have replaced older tropes like "news" and"stories"). "Mediums" meanwhile are appreciated fortheir multiplicity and dynamism but most often treated as passiveconduits for information content. An epistemic capacity to separate"content" from "medium," as well as a practicalcapacity to optimize "content" across "medium," isconceived as a great professional advantage by online journalists andone often hears traditional journalists generically criticized orironized for their inability to understand, to paraphrase NicholasNegroponte's critique (1995) of Marshall McLuhan, that contentrather than medium is the message of the digital age. The non-onliner isregarded as someone whose expertise is imprisoned within a singleconfiguration of medium and content, whereas the very essence of onlineexpertise seems to be the ability to emancipate content from such mediumdependency and instead to reimagine and repurpose content across avariety of different "platforms." As George S. explained,"It's not about radio, it's about content. If we canreconceptualize our newsroom as a mini-wireservice (5) feeding out todifferent platforms then, we're going to be much better off in thelong run." Nevertheless, the complex ecology of content and media in thedigital era is widely recognized to be exceedingly challenging. Onlinejournalists are keenly aware of the abundance of messaging in thedigital era and frequently discuss, much in the spirit of the MacyConferences, the problem of maintaining a clear signal amidst anentropic ocean of informational "noise." As Rosie put it,"The challenge is that as people become over-saturated with news,as there are more and more sources of news, from the big branded newsproducers to the independent blogger, citizen journalists, whatever youwant to call them, we have to figure out how we can cut through theclutter and provide some clarity to people as to what'simportant." The image of providing clarity, of a special capacityto identify significance within informational clutter, takes thepractices of thematic selection and message filtering that have longbeen aspects of news journalism and elevates them to new jurisdictionalimportance at the core of the identity of online journalism. Hermann L.noted likewise how the digital ecology of information shifted thevocational profile of the journalist, "the amount of information onthe same topics is growing explosively. And that brings the journalistinto a role that he perhaps did not have before, namely...to tell mewhat of this information is really important, what is believable, andwhat is trustworthy. Before it was more the role of the journalist topublish something that without his research would not have existed, buttoday the role is increasingly to evaluate the material that others aregenerating. And to organize it. For, the end consumer is still the wayhe always was, with limited time and with limited competence."Recognizing the necessary transformation of journalism is itself, asnoted above, an essential element within narratives of online practice.It marks digital expertise as a departure from past practice and norms,as a mode of knowledge better adapted to the new informational andcommunicational ecology. Moreover, digital expertise makes"content" susceptible to journalistic agency, and this,together with the relatively inert quality of "mediums,"enables online journalism to operate creatively and effectively despitethe operational challenges of messaging in the digital age. As one might imagine, the generalized opposition we have justencountered between "digital" (online) expertise and"traditional" (broadcast) expertise weakens when it ishistoricized. Both sides of the opposition, after all, reference modesof electronic mediation. As Raymond Williams noted in his prescient bookon television (1974), the first large-scale installations of electronicmedia appeared in the 19th century and then to enable lateral networkedcommunications within a specific institutional field: the military. Itwas not until much later that electronic media were reorganized into thedominant radial modes familiar to us from terrestrial radio andtelevision broadcasting. That lateral modalities of electroniccommunication have risen again with the expansion of the internet shouldperhaps be seen less as a world-historical rupture (although it oftenseems that way to contemporary media professionals and audiences) thanas a rebalancing of proportions between the lateral and radialpotentials of electronic mediation. (6) For, even in the heart ofcontemporary digital information technology, for example at Google, onecan witness powerful tendencies toward informational centralization andradiality, even given the astounding lateral and dialogical potentialsthat appear to inhere in internet-based communication. But historicization is not an analytic move that often appears inselfrepresentations of online journalistic knowledge and practice. Theorganic revolutionary sensibility of online journalism guarantees thatthe cybernetic and informationalist idioms and dispositions of onlinejournalism are relentlessly presentist and future-oriented. For thisreason perhaps, they merge rather seamlessly into market and commerciallanguage as well. There is, for example, persistent discussion ofconceptual and technical "innovation" and organizational"optimization" in online journalism. At the 2007 Online NewsAssociation meetings in Toronto, the plenary panel focused on how bestto adapt news journalism to recent digital media like news aggregators(e.g., Google News), blogging, and social networking software (e.g.,Facebook, MySpaces) and debated how best to foster a spirit ofinnovation in news journalism. One panelist, a blogging specialist,observed, "Journalism is the culture of infallibility. If you getsomething wrong in a story, then why do you exist? So, if you getsomething wrong with the platform that supports the story, it feelsterrifying. And I think that's the hardest thing to workagainst." The executive editor of the Los Angeles Times onlineedition then explained the challenges in getting her group to"think more like a startup," and a representative of googlenews exhorted his colleagues to a more nimble, experimental approach tooperational change, "the pursuit of perfection can really derailinnovation...You need to make changes on a real-time basis...Rather thantrying to plan in advance for every contingency, you just need to go outand do it." Yet, interestingly, later in the debate, all of the panelistsuniformly condemned another dominant trend in online journalism towardrepublishing news agency feeds in lieu of producing original"unique content." The blogging specialist contrasted aninnovative and productive strategy of content management withinformational automation when he declared, "If a site is justtaking the wire content and reprinting it, they don't deserve anytraffic because that's lame. That's not journalism.You're just having your robot machine repurpose it." Hiscolleagues applauded and then echoed his point with their own critiquesof algorithmic selectivity, arguing that good news journalismnecessitated some artisanal or simply human investment in processes ofselection, filtering, and republicization. Both the blogging specialistand his colleagues emphasized a praxiological understanding of thecommunicational and informational value of online news, yet it was anunderstanding that, unlike, for example, Marxian praxiology, did notseem overly concerned about the draining away of productive energiesinto spectral forms of mediation (see Boyer 2007). Where Marx drove awedge between production and circulation in his critique of capital, thesocial ontology intuited within online journalism typically sees nocontradiction. True to its cybernetic imagination, production is alwaysalready situated within the dynamic exchanges of a circulatory"system." In Niklas Luhmann's terms (2000), media areenvisioned as "autopoetic," self-generating at the level of asystem of elements, forces, linkages, and operations. Conclusion: Digital Expertise as Ideology In closing, I would like to return to the question of how to tiethe anthropology of digital knowledge to the presence of digitalknowledge in anthropology. The key to this connection comes in learninghow to understand the formation of digital expertise in onlinejournalism and anthropology as "ideological" in a veryspecific sense of that term. Contrary to much later wisdom, withIdeologie Marx meant not just the deformations of false and classconsciousness and not just the "taken for granted" assumptionsstructuring knowledge (cf. Lukacs on "reification" [1971] andBourdieu on "doxa" [1990]). "Ideology" representedalso, at a very basic level, a shielding of knowledge to its relational,social contingencies in order to create the stable ontic field of forcesand forms requisite for all further action (and thought). Marx wasinterested, for example, in how Adam Smith was able to generate hislabor theory of value at the precise moment that he did, and Marxreasoned that this great revolution in political economic theory hadeverything to do with the fact that institutions of industrial wagelabor were leveling out the practical distinctions between differentkinds of productive activity in Smith's lifeworld (Marx and Engels1978:240). As modes of labor became more interchangeable with oneanother and more monetarized, it became possible for Smith to intuit thehomogenization of labor and to articulate universal theoreticalcategories of Labor and Value that took little heed of qualitativedistinctions between different modes of productive activity. Theoreticaltruth (the labor theory of value) reflected an emergent social truth(the industrial interchangeability and monetary interconvertibility ofwage labor). Of course, Smith did not himself perceive this ideologicalmediation of his theoretical work. He didn't recognize theenvironmental, historical transformation of productive activity thatallowed him to think labor as Labor. Good bourgeois imperial presentistthat he was, Smith felt Labor was a transhistorical, universalfact-as-it-was. Yet, this was no personal failure of "falseconsciousness" on Smith's part for the reason that, inMarx's concept, all knowledge (including expert knowledge)incorporates an invisible phoropter, a series of differentiallyrefractive ideological lenses, the curvature of each ground by differentaspects of productive activity, that aligned together guarantee asubjective experience of factual clarity and truthfulness. Although somemight think themselves capable of recognizing the existence of thephoropter, none of us, according to Marx anyway, would be able to fullycomprehend or experience our specific lens configuration sinceideology's principal operation is to mark the domain of "thereal" that exists beyond mediation. Put another way, there is noknowledge without ideology since who thinks or acts outside of someintuition of "the real"? Marx's analysis suggests thatideas emerge at the level of material relations and very much defined byspecific social and historical configurations of productive activity,but these ideas are then transformed, through the camera obscura ofideological refraction, from contingent relational judgments intoabsolute universalist judgments. Practical intuition becomes truththrough ideology. I have suggested already that the cybernetic insights of both 20thcentury anthropology and of 21st century online journalism share acommon environmental, historical legacy in the industrialization ofelectronic computation in the mid 20th century. They share furtherhistorical contingencies to be sure, not least postwar postimperialnationalism, which, in alliance with Keynesian statecraft, furtherprojected a sense of national boundedness and systematicity within whichindividual citizens were mobile, circulating, productive elements. But these contingencies, while undoubtedly highly significant, arealso remote in many respects from the day-to-day practices andsituations of professional and institutional life. To argue for a directcausal relationship between industries of computation or politics ofnationalism and cybernetic epistemology would be to miss, as Marxhimself often did, many vital processes of epistemic mediation along theway. I would argue that with professional intellectuals like onlinejournalists and anthropologists, we must also look for the ideologicaldimension of their digital expertise in their mundane productiveengagements of instruments, artifacts, and discourses of digitalinformation. As professional actors who work constantly andcollaboratively with digital ICTs, perhaps it should not surprise usthat online journalists understand their non-linear networkedsubjectivity at a very intuitive level ("the basis is alwaysIT"), even though they retain confidence in their ability toflexibly manipulate content and media to "cut through" thedynamics and density of digital information enveloping their practice.Their experiential familiarity with digital ICTs, their productivereliance upon them, translates online journalists' practicalintuitions of networked subjectivity and content/medium management intothe definitions and discourses--and, ultimately, into the truth--ofdigital expertise and digital power that we have just explored. It is quite possible that parallel modes of experientialfamiliarity and practical intuition contributed to the cyberneticunconscious of the postwar human sciences as well. But this is aquestion whose answer lies beyond the scope of this article. Therefore,a next logical step in the analysis of anthropological knowledge in thedigital age would be a deeper historical, ethnographic, and theoreticalengagement of the role of digital ICTs in academic life (e.g., Kelty2009), a conversation that has already begun to take shape in fieldslike communications and library science (see Gradmann and Meister 2008).We might link, for example, the rising intuitiveness of cybernetic andinformationalist social theory to the more highly networked, fast-timemodalities of academic labor with which we have become all-too-familiarsince the 1970s. We might also consider the much-contested legacy ofFrench poststructuralism in anthropology as a symptom of the limits ofthis intuitiveness, expressing the tension between our obvious existenceas messaging, publicizing media professionals and our relative lack ofprofessional investment with the full instrumentarium and circuitry ofnew media. Of course, this "lack" is changing even as I writethis. Anthropology, and, more importantly, anthropologists, areincreasingly accessing and exploring digital culture whether throughethnography of virtual environments (Boellstorff 2008, Malaby 2009),blogging (Reed 2005, 2008), hacking practices and politics (Coleman andGolub 2008), and open source movements (Coombe and Herman 2004; Kelty2004, 2005; Kelty et al. 2008), or through new digital modalities ofanthropological conversation (via social networking sites like Facebookand blog communities like http://savageminds.org) and publication(http://www.culanth.org). What I hope that I have successfullydemonstrated here through my case study of digital expertise in onlinejournalism is that it is not only possible but necessary to link thetruth regimes of expert knowledge to the experiential and materialconditions of expert knowledge practices. Analyzing this connection willhelp us to understand in a more nuanced way why various schemata ofexpert knowledge take the specific forms and contents that they do. And,of course, this goes for dominant paradigms within anthropologicaltheory as well. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the Alexander yon Humboldt Foundation inBonn, Germany, which funded much of the research upon which this essayis based. I would also like to give special thanks to my colleagues atthe Institut for Kulturanthropologie und Europaische Ethnologie at theGoethe-Universitat Frankfurt, especially to Prof. Dr. Gisela Welz, fortheir constant support and inspiration throughout my research. Some ofthe ethnographic material was presented at the 2007 AAA conference, andI thank Patrick Eisenlohr, Webb Keane, and William Mazzarella forexcellent comments in that context. 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For example, the release of a PewResearch Center report in December 2008 (Pew 2008) showing that for thefirst time more US residents (40%) surveyed reported getting most oftheir national and international news from the internet than fromnewspapers (35%) kindled fierce debates in news professional circlesover the inevitable decline and perhaps even death of the newspaper.Yet, these debates paid little heed to the fact that newspapercirculation and advertising revenues are still generally rising acrossAsia, Latin America, and the Middle East (see http://www.wan-press.org).In general, western news journalists assume the trajectory of globalnews is following their own, and so they speak of universal conditionsof transformation. (2) All interviewee names are pseudonyms. (3) As of the publication of this article, it appears that thelimits on unique online content production in German public broadcastingwill be upheld for the foreseeable future. The twelfth RStV (which wentinto effect on May 1, 2009) upheld the current restrictions on onlinecontent production to "sendungsbezogene" (broadcast-related)material. (4) Helga is talking here both about the organization of workprocess into narrowly defined functional tasks and about the temporalorganization of broadcasting via programmed timeslots. (5) George is taking as his model news agency organizations("wires") like the Associated Press, which typically producedifferent versions of the same news stories configured for the temporaland textual needs of different news platforms (e.g., short, fastbulletins for news television and longer texts with image bundles fornewspapers). (6) By the "radial" potentiality within electronicmediation, I mean a typically unidirectional hub-spokes pattern ofmessaging from a broadcast locus to a field of receivers. I amcontrasting this to the "lateral" potentiality, which refersto electronic mediation's parallel capacity for bidirectional ormultidirectional messaging within a network of producer-receivers.Terrestrial radio and television broadcasting is a classic example ofradial communication and telephony a classic example of lateralcommunication. However, one finds these potentialities recreated in newdigital ICTs as well, if often with greater flexibility andhybridity--podcasting, for example, is a radial mode of communicationand SMS (text messaging) a lateral mode, with more recent hybrids likeTwitter balancing the two potentialities in interesting ways.