‘Relationships matter’. This is the slogan of LinkedIn.com, one of the countless social and professional networks circulating on the internet at present. LinkedIn connects professionals via concentric circles expanding the participants’ network of connections. This particular network site consists of over ‘20 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 150 industries.’53 In the early days of the new millennium social and professional networks like LinkedIn have sprouted all over the internet. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Ning are all variations on the same networking theme. The success of these networks makes the point that the
‘native’ behaviour of the internet is social and the social behaviour of internet connectivity is spread virally through invitations and personal and professional connections (Mayo and Newcomb 2008). To a certain extent theorising journalistic practice means theorising networked information flows. I focus on the journalist-subject position and journalist-subjectivity and the role of the self-other relation, which will bring me to the concept of cosmopolitanism as a ‘global’ human relationship. But before I delve into the theories of cosmopolitanism in connection to the journalist-subject I want to contextualise the ‘globalised’ networked relation of journalistic practices and other information flows on the internet. These flourishing online networks contain and share information, personal as well as political. They helped Senator Barack Obama gather unprecedented online support for his presidential campaign 2008. As he and his campaign managers embraced his Facebook friend number 1 million some time ago, other supporting networks emerged and independently developed rallies and financial support for the Senator’s campaign.
These events can be seen as a ‘democratisation of politics’ (MacAskill 2008). The Obama campaign built a network of supporters online who contributed through volunteer work, financially, and through creativeness and imagination to experiment.
The campaign ‘allowed such supporters to create a community’ (MacAskill 2008).
‘The Internet encourages a new cultural practice of resignification, something possible in the small agricultural communities of the past, but then limited to the immediate members of the group’, believes Mark Poster (Poster 2006: 78-9). In community building, relationships matter online just as in ‘real’ life relations. The Obama
53 http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=company_info&trk=hb_ft_abtli
supporters are physically located all over the planet – from the United States, France, the UK, Denmark, Nigeria, Kenya, Venezuela, Italy etc.54, but online they constitute a community connected in their support for Senator Obama’s campaign and in their democratic beliefs. In Poster’s words, the internet deterritorialises exchanges (Poster 2006) in ways that the ‘old’ media55 could not do. The internet is both worldwide and anchored in the concept of the nation-state, he argues, and this double spatial interaction affords a new political positioning, that of the netizen. A netizen is an online citizen who interacts politically and personally via blogs, networks, chat-rooms or other online information output. S/he can be a civic journalist, an online journalist or not a journalist at all – s/he is a citizen who functions personally and politically partly on the internet.
3.1.1 The embodied netizen
However, netizenship is only possible if the nation-state does not attempt to regulate the access and the information on the internet. Freedom of expression is pivotal to netizenship because of its democratic ideals. Poster (2006) believes national regulations of the internet to be difficult if not impossible (Poster 2006: 78).
Nevertheless, this has never stopped, for instance, the Chinese government from limiting access and imposing censorship online (Li 2008).56 Blogging and networking is not always a benign interaction of gathering voters for the US presidential election, but may pose physical danger to the civic journalists posting critique of national governments (Li 2008, Loewenstein 2008). Chinese bloggers may post a critical text on their blog and leave it there only for a short period of time in order not to be found out and closed down by the Chinese government. This creates a window of opportunity for readers to copy the text and send it virally throughout the internet – through personal and political networks – and in this way make many people aware of
54http://www.facebook.com/barackobama?ref=s (accessed 2 July 2008).
55 By ‘old’ media is meant TV, radio and newspapers in which the editing power belonged in the news room, and by ‘new’ media is meant internet and blogs etc. This distinction is problematic for several reasons, especially in light of my argument in this dissertation: That journalistic subjectivity is a networked and rhizomatic multiple relation and as such ‘old’ and ‘new’ media (ex)change each other continually. However, in order to maintain clarity I have used the distinction.
56 ‘Western’ democracies such as Australia and the Scandinavian countries have also proposed regulation of the internet, for instance, banning access to sites containing child pornography
(Loewenstein 2008). Though it may seem reasonable to limit online access to child pornography, the reasoning behind these regulations is based on paternalistic assumptions that the governments in Australia or the Scandinavian countries know what is (morally) best for their populations and that they need to be controlled, argues journalist and blogger Antony Loewenstein (2008, 2008a).
the critique levelled at the national powers (Li 2008). That is, the internet does not extract the netizen from bodily locations, as Poster suggests (Poster 2006). On the contrary, the body and its connection to geographical and political spaces is very real to many bloggers in countries such as Iran, Cuba and China (Li 2008; Loewenstein 2008), as well as to the Obama supporters who congregate physically too in order to work for a ‘real’-life better North America. According to Deleuze and Guattari, our selves are relevant only through our affects and affective connections to others.
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming theorises the action of relating to others to an extent which leaves neither self nor other unchanged by the relation. It is a metamorphosis with and a becoming other. This means that a community online is comparable to that of a ‘real’ life community, because the relation is affective and networked.57 ‘Real’-life communities such as the nation-state may be as imagined and abstract as a ‘virtual’ online community (Anderson 1991, Appiah 2005), but this does not mean that embodied experience of the interaction with the other(s) online disappears. We all consist of both online and physical relations and intensities vacillating and (ex)changing all the time and therefore a strict distinction between the two is futile. What is important, in my view, is to realise the geographical as well as quantitative extent of the possible network as well as the qualitative synergy it generates. Human interaction may be forever changed in the online connection due to the technological interface, as Poster argues. Poster develops the concept of the humachine to deal with this always already technologically-morphed subject.
Consequently, I will argue with Deleuze, Guattari and Braidotti, as I did in chapter 1, that the ethical relation needs to be theorised on an embodied and embedded subject-based level. However, humachine or not, the subject is still a subject constituted through his or her ever-changing and exchanging affects and relation online and offline. In my view, what the internet brings to relation is a much wider span of relation than imagined in previous technological times and a new potential of becoming-other in this new ‘global’ space.
However, this ethics of relation through which relations can be created and developed reaching across vast spaces by help of the internet does not mean that the internet
57 I will not deny that a personal relationship to family members, spouses or lovers is the same as the relationship to a politically rooted community, but the arguments and discussions about the
particularities goes beyond the scope of this dissertation. For a defence of ‘some form of particularity’
and the ethics of cosmopolitan singular relations can be found in Appiah (2005).
equals a ‘global’ cosmopolitanism. ‘Global’ community formations in which racist, extreme-right, oppressive views are put forth are also available online. These groups are not excluded from the internet or from building communities in which they continue their hateful politics (Downing and Husband 2005). Though Chinese critics of governmental violations of the human rights may help bring the situation in Tibet to the attention of the rest of the world, many Chinese bloggers also write in favour of the Chinese rule of Tibet, as well as post videos with messages such as, ‘Tibet WAS, IS and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China’58 and ‘Chinese Special Armed Police Force (SPC)’,59 in which the ‘west’ is challenged by pictures of the Chinese military and the text: ‘Come and get some’ on YouTube online. The internet is not inherently morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or communist or capitalist – it is what the users make of it. It is not a Habermasian process of inevitable rational consensus nor can it be thought of in terms of over-arching cosmopolitan morality.60 That is, it is formulated and continually (re)constructed through the embodied subjects of relation.
3.1.2 The ‘global’ subject-position
As mentioned in chapter 2, academic research on journalism and globalisation has tended to focus on the technology which enables (civic) journalism to reach beyond national and cultural borders and which posits journalism as the (universal) Fourth Estate and a direct political power (Anderson and Ward 2007, Durham and Kellner 2001, Berry 2005). However, the technological developments have also forced journalistic theorists and practitioners alike to rethink the power positions within the practice. Editing power is now dispersed into a billion mobile phone users, bloggers and webmasters, and has left the dual space of private and public realms merged and intermingled. Nevertheless it is sometimes argued that the role of the media in the globalised world is overrated and that it is even a myth, though a necessary one (Hafez 2007). The national ‘old’ media still sit heavily on the administration and flows of newsfeeds and media consumers still prefer to watch television to finding their news online, argues Kai Hafez (2007). In effect, ‘[m]edia production and use are proving conservative cultural forces in many parts of the world. They are generating a reality which the “globalization” approach struggles to cope with’ (Hafez 2007: 2).
58 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9QNKB34cJo. (Accessed 1. Nov. 2008)
59 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khDrho-1A6M. (Accessed 1. Nov. 2008)
60 I will discuss Habermas’ idea of the global public sphere later on in this chapter.
Indeed, in chapters 1 and 2 I argued that journalist-subjects reproduce social imaginaries through reiterations of cultural memories excluding minority groups and glossing over unrecognised multiculturalism. In this chapter I argue that globalised ethical journalism of relation should be seen as a potential for creative affirmation and excess of relation and that the concept of ‘the media’ therefore is unhelpful. Rather I argue for a return to the journalist-subject as I have theorised the position in this dissertation and thus to the inter-subjective ethical relation of power experienced through journalistic practice.
The act of building networked communities through technological developments is based in social but singular interactions and so I repeat my argument in chapter 2 for the privileged position of journalist-subjects. My point in this dissertation so far has been to reconnect ethical accountability to the journalist-subject and practice of doing journalism. This ethical relation points in a different direction from that of the theories discussing the impact of the blogosphere or CNN’s iReport and use of YouTube images. I am expanding my argument to encompass a ‘global’ setting into which I transpose the ethical self-other relation. And thus I emphasise the capacity for community building and networking in connection to the journalist-subject, journalistic subjectivity and the self-other relation discussed in the two previous chapters, not as new identity-based group formations. Journalism is always already relation – not-one. In the preceding chapters I have theorised relation as embodied and embedded experience. Embodied in way of sensory and sensuous affects and creativity, and embedded in the sense that journalistic cultural memories produce and are produced by and within the social imaginary – and inescapably so. I have argued that these relations need to be acknowledged if not completely understood by journalist-subjects if the project of developing another journalistic subjectivity is going to be successful. Moreover, the journalist-subject as not-one is networked through technology as well as through affective relations and situations into a multiple relation and position.
3.1.3 Becoming journalist-subject
This chapter picks up where chapter 2 left off. I will be drawing on the categories presented and discussed in chapter 2 of the professional and the personal journalist-subject in order to connect journalist relation to theories of ‘global’ mediation and
cosmopolitanism. I will also be following up on Muhlmann’s concepts of the decentring and the unifying function of journalism in the social imaginary and in the construction of journalistic cultural memories. The categories of the personal and the professional journalist show an acknowledgement of the journalistic power position;
Morris’ contention that ‘as a journalist you have the power to destroy’ and Hanlon’s ideal of caring about the same things in the community due to common experience (‘We all use the same roads and get annoyed about the same pot-holes!’) are arguable ideas of recognition of own hegemonic power and subjugated knowledges, respectively. Both contentions, then, operate with a kind of questioning and acknowledgement of the journalistic power position. By transposing the self-other relation of the journalist-subject as not-one into the debates on cosmopolitanism I want to pursue the argument that the Deleuzian concept of becoming-minoritarian reworked through the work of poststructuralist feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti can help develop a kind of ethical cosmopolitan relation within journalistic practice and theory. The journalists in the USVI draw on a multiple system of identification because of the immense diversity of the islands’ population and history. However, the journalists practise their writing ‘in dominance’ (Hall 2001). Even though Braidotti states that in order for the (white) master position to engage in the becoming-minoritarian s/he has to undo her or his own position – thus leading us back to the notion of resistance – it is nevertheless a concept, which moves in rhizomatic formations and therefore escapes the binary positions of hegemony and resistance.
That is, the concept of becoming-minoritarian avoids the identity-politics and deterministic tendencies in the Marxist-inspired readings of power relations by staying in a process of embodied deterritorialisation and of becoming-other or minoritarian. As will become apparent on the next pages, I take up the path from chapter 1 through phenomenology and poststructuralist philosophers’ theorising about the power of the social imaginary and resistance to it and in relation to ethical connections to the other. My point is that with the concept of becoming-other or minoritarian I am allowed a reworking of political and social activism embedded in the hegemonic position of the social imaginary as well as informed by other poststructuralist philosophers than Deleuze, Guattari and Braidotti. In this chapter I therefore hope to show that theorising journalism through becoming-minoritarian enables a journalistic practice and theory in a cosmopolitan and deterritorialised
scope, while taking into account the role of power as multilayered. I will return to this in more explicit forms later in this chapter.