Читать книгу Journalism and Emotion - Stephen Jukes - Страница 23

It is tempting to ascribe the fundamental changes in journalism practice we are witnessing solely to technology. But that is only one element in a host of factors that are shaping today’s news file and leading to an increase in emotive content. These changes have their roots in wider cultural phenomena and the impact of the broader ‘turns’ of the past 50 years. What technology has done is accelerated and exaggerated these influences. Assessing the state of journalism studies, Carlson et al. have identified a new phase in academic research, which they call sociotechnical, focusing on the intersecting social and technological dynamics of journalism’s transformation (2018: 8). In this ‘turn’, which coincides with upheaval in the news industry, many legacy news organisations have been grappling with fragmenting audiences, declining revenues and other challenges stemming from the rise of digital, social and mobile media technologies (2018: 8).

In terms of cultural change, Plummer, for example, argues that in what is a postmodern or late-modern turn we are part of an auto/biographical society where ‘life stories’ are everywhere (2001: 78). There is an expectation that journalists will put more of themselves into stories, sometimes sharing their emotions (just as Graham Satchell did). Research into life stories is personal, emotional and embodied work (2001: 213). Coward contends that today’s media increasingly relies on visual, emotional stories and personal voices (2013). She argues that today’s media-consuming audiences want real-life experience, ‘with all details, especially all the emotions and feelings straight from the protagonists’ mouths’ (2013: 3). That reflects the normative technique in which emotion is outsourced. But at the same time, the journalist’s experiential first-person narrative is becoming ubiquitous and can sometimes be seen as having a veracity that is closer to the ‘truth’. Bogaerts and Carpentier (2012) see an increasingly subjective tone of news reporting, evidenced partly by the wealth of blogs written by mainstream journalists, as an attempt to create a new claim on truth, switching from one based on objectivity to one based on authenticity. This personal way of engaging an audience, also seen as part of the broad evolution of a confessional society, can be interpreted as an attempt to win back an estranged public (2012: 70).

Part of this broader cultural change has also been captured in the so-called ‘turn to affect’ in the 1990s, a phrase generally credited to Patricia Clough, who defined it as ‘a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory’ (Clough & Halley, 2007). Massumi (2002: 27) argues that affect is key to our understanding of our late capitalist culture in which previous narratives and vocabulary are derived from theories of signification. The ‘turn to affect’ suggests a movement away from rationalist traditions of philosophy, which are often characterised as ‘Cartesian’ to signify cognitive or reason-based approaches (La Caze & Lloyd, 2011). That is, however, an oversimplified binary conception and affect scholars contend that affect and cognition are never fully separable (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Wetherell (2012: 20) makes the same point, arguing that it is futile to try to pull apart affect and meaning making. Over the past 20 years, terms loosely associated with affect have steadily gained currency. Concepts such as emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, emotional capital and emotional labour are now well established (Richards & Rees, 2011). Recent academic literature has added to this the emotional public sphere, the affective dimension of the public sphere of policy debate underpinning democratic processes (Richards, 2007); the emergence of body studies since the 1980s has been seen increasingly in the analysis of how films and television ‘work’ affectively, similarly reflecting the view of many scholars that reason and rationality have limits as a way of analysing and understanding communication processes (Blackman, 2012); the affective dimension of Reality TV has become a recent focus of analysis (Gorton, 2009; Kavka, 2008); Richards (2007: 30) tracks the rise of what he calls a broader ‘therapeutic culture’ and a shift from the private to public domain; the sociologist Furedi (2003) has criticised the erosion of the boundaries between the private and the public, with confessional television (e.g., Big Brother) deeply embedded in popular culture.

In addition, a visual turn has been fed by social media images, the ubiquitous ‘selfie’ and, in terms of journalism, the adoption of user-generated content into mainstream news reporting. In what has been called ‘the new visibility’ (Thompson, 2005), emotive unedited footage of violence and grief is finding its way into news outlets via ordinary citizens armed with little more than a mobile phone. According to Susie Linfield, we live in a world of the ‘perpetrator image’ or ‘terrorist selfie’ through which social media images are used to actually celebrate acts of violence (2015):

We live in the age of the fascist image. The cell-phone camera and lightweight video equipment – along with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and all the other wonders of social media – have allowed perpetrators of atrocities to document, and celebrate, every kind of violence, no matter how grotesque.

It is hard to think of today’s news coverage without focusing on the all-pervasive nature of digital images. They become engraved in our mind as readers and viewers of the news, not least – as the author and journalist Will Self observes in his essay ‘Click Away Now – How Bloodshed in the Desert Lost Its Reality’ (2014) – because of the ability to freeze the digital frame or replay scenes on a continual loop. Whether those images are the US military’s ‘surgical strikes’ during the analogue era of the first Gulf War in 1991, sanitised as if part of a video game, or the shocking images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib; whether they are ISIS insurgents pointing a knife at an orange-clad US hostage or the attackers of Fusilier Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of London, they all have one thing in common – these images were not taken by photographers working for professional news organisations.

The ubiquity of the image in our lives, and the new ontology of imagery, is the stage on to which Jihadi John and the other Islamic State murderers have made their swaggering entrance … ours is the culture of the repeat, the freeze frame and the slow motion action sequence.

These images exemplify the ever-present nature of today’s user-generated content dominating the diet of daily news, from Facebook newsfeeds to Twitter – what Beckett and Deuze term the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of media in everyday life (2016: 1).

The other major cultural shift has been the rise of populism and distrust in mainstream news, fuelled by social media and politicians who have been able to take their policies and sometimes extreme views straight to the people, cutting out the gatekeeping of traditional media. The increasingly polarised political and social debate in countries such as the United Kingdom and United States has led to scepticism towards experts and common perceptions, from all political flavours, that the media are biased. The sociologist and political economist William Davies believes there has been a fundamental change in mindset that goes beyond distrust (2019):

The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion.

Davies argues that once public life is infused with doubt, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world works, with the result that facts no longer seem to matter. The explosion of information available to us is simply making it harder to achieve a consensus on what is the truth. On top of this, the polarisation of British society over Brexit and the inflammatory nature of parliamentary debate over the issue has clearly fuelled an emotionalisation and coarsening of public discourse. The former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani captures in her critique of social media culture the paradox between what she calls the breath-taking innovation and entrepreneurship spurred by the Internet and a cascade of misinformation and relativism (2018). She laments how the term ‘truth decay’ has now entered the post-truth lexicon that already includes phrases such as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. Davies adds:

What we are witnessing, is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists & experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself.