<p>"Boyer analyzes the nuances of screen-oriented news-work in truly exemplary fashion; indeedmany journalism studies scholars and budding newsroom ethnographers could learn a great deal from this practicing anthropologist about how to so newsroom fieldwork well... we must take the arguments of <i>The Life Informatic</i> seriously. It certainly stands as a remarkably important piece of ethnographic and anthropological scholarship." —C.W. AndersonCollege of Staten Island (CUNY)</p>

Anthropological Quarterly

<p>Dominic Boyer's thoughtful exploration of news production in Germany is a standout among recent newsroom studies based on ethnography, observation, or participant observation....Boyer writes that he envisioned <i>The Life Informatic</i> as 'short, accessible, and above all teachable,' and it is all those things. Any of the ethnographic chapters could be used in a graduate or advanced undergraduate course without the instructor feeling that he or she needed to assign the entire book.</p>

- Susan Keith, Journalism

<p>In his intriguing new study <i>The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era</i>, anthropologist Dominic Boyer.. brings a rich ethnographic focus on daily labor practices rather than on industry—or organization—scale relationships....[this] deep ethnographic study reveals in sharp detail one aspect of the 'life informatic' when it comes to the competitive environment of global, digital, and often entertainment-focused journalism.</p>

- Greg Downey, Technology and Culture

Se alle

<p>In<i> The Life Informatic</i>, Dominic Boyer examines the changing news industry by observing journalists at work, in the hope that mapping the flow of information between and within newsrooms will help us understand how news is made in today's post-broadcast era. Boyer is ultimately successful in presenting a contemporary account of the converged newsroom and adding to a body of evidence-based thought about how to build a sustainable industry in the future.</p>

- Scott Bridges, Inside Story

<p>This book offers much that will interest advanced students of journalism and anthropology.</p>

Choice

News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? In The Life Informatic, Dominic Boyer offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is a fascinating account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information.Boyer conducted his fieldwork inside three news organizations in Germany (a world leader in digital journalism) supplemented by extensive interviews in the United States. His findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based "screenwork" (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon Boyer puts forth the notion of "digital liberalism"—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. Finally, Boyer offers some scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.
Les mer
A fascinating account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information.
Les mer
PrologueIntroduction: News Journalism Today1. The Craft of Slotting: Screenwork, Attentional Practices, and News Value at an International News Agency2. Click and Spin: Time, Feedback, and Expertise at an Online News Portal3. Countdown: Professionalism, Publicity, and Po liti cal Culture in 24/7 News Radio4. The News Informatic: Five Refl ections on Journalism in the Era of Digital LiberalismEpilogue: Informatic Unconscious: On the Evolution of Digital Reason in AnthropologyNotes Bibliography
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The Life Informatic is an original and engaging consideration of, at an ethnographic level, news production and, at a conceptual level, the predicament of critical social inquiry in a digitally mediated world. The juxtaposition of case studies in Dominic Boyer's eloquently provocative book illuminates competing journalistic ideologies, and Boyer's bold readiness to speculate on future developments is to be applauded. Let The Life Informatic reboot your thinking.
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A series edited by Dominic Boyer
Expertise isdedicated to publishing innovative scholarship situated at the vibrant juncture of the anthropology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and new media studies. The proliferation of new technologies across the world today is generating new forms of knowledge and techniques of knowing that are in turn transforming existing practices and institutions. Understanding these emerging cultures of expertise ranks among the most challenging and rewarding horizons of the human sciences. Expertise seeks to extend this horizon and to create new opportunities for conversation and collaboration. We seek theoretically sophisticated, historically attuned works of ethnography from anthropologists and other scholars. The following is an illustrative but not exhaustive list of areas of research and scholarship that interest us: •Professions, professionalism, and cultures of expertise •Technocracy, bureaucratic practices, and institutions •Expertise and authority in scientific, technical, and medical communities •The diversification of digital media and information technologies and their cultural and political effects •New media and information practices in contemporary political and social movements •The intersection of religious and spiritual knowledge with scientific and secular knowledge •Late liberal and neosocialist forms of political expertise, administration, and management •Contemporary efforts to commodify knowledge and capitalist knowledge industries and economies •Globalization, transnational ecologies of expertise, and circulating forms of knowledge and information The series editor for Expertise is Dominic Boyer, Department of Anthropology Rice University (dcb2@rice.edu). Praise for Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge "In Dominic Boyer's series, the long deferred and exotic anthropology of elites finally becomes, most productively, the ethnography of experts, on which so many lively topical openings in contemporary anthropological research depend. Experts are subjects, partners, sponsors, and audiences—all of which shape the spaces and questions that anthropologists distinctively create in their research. It is so important to have a series defined in this way, and it is exciting to watch as each new volume appears." —George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine "Dominic Boyer's aptly named Expertise series tackles issues that are of pressing interest globally and that will likewise define anthropology’s future: the effects of new media and technology, the contemporary threat of disease, the spread of capitalist management techniques, and more. Boyer has assembled exceptional scholars who adroitly analyze these emerging conditions and the knowledge practices they call into being. The Expertise series is an important venue for exciting, innovative, and urgent work." —Caitlin Zaloom, New York University “Imaginative, sophisticated, and, yes, displaying extraordinary expertise, this series brings together remarkable studies of the social life of contemporary knowledges—and of the actors and institutions central to their transformation. Individually fascinating and grounded in the textures of emergent practice, these volumes together constitute a rich and generative conversation of real consequence.” —Donald L. Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz “For the last decade or so interest in the nature of expertise and the operation of cultures of expertise has moved from the margins to the center of anthropological research. The Expertise series published by Cornell University Press not only fully anticipated this trend but also has been in the forefront of defining its intellectual interests and its ethnographic ambitions. The series demonstrates how a bold new synthesis of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) agendas is gaining articulation, a synthesis that demands serious attention to how theory and data themselves operate within cultures of expertise. Encompassing many of the most important and challenging areas of global knowledge production--media, religion, politics, medicine, science, and technology--the books in the series reveal the creative role of expertise in defining the institutional imperatives and the managerial practices of our time.” —Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University “In a more or less tacit sense, anthropology has always involved the study of expert knowledge and expert practice. But this indispensable new series from Cornell University Press invites us to confront the problem of expertise as a conceptual object in itself, one that is at once grounded in particular institutional settings and constantly in a state of translation across domains of media, science, politics, and entrepreneurship.” —William Mazzarella, University of Chicago
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780801451881
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Cornell University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
24 mm
Aldersnivå
01, UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Dominic Boyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He is the author of Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy and Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture.