Pausing Public Attention: News Technologies and Journalistic Silences

• In Event: Attention! - III: Pauses and Punctuations of Experience

Abstract

When and why does networked journalism fall silent? As news work increasingly intersects with technology companies and software infrastructures (e.g., social media platforms and analytics dashboards), it encounters non-journalistic materials and practices that set publishing rhythms, orient audiences in time, and organize their attention. Nightly newscasts and evening newspapers—with their power to regularly convene audiences and set news beats—have been replaced by the “timeless time” (Castells, 2009) of largely hidden and poorly understood sociotechnical infrastructures extending far beyond traditional newsrooms.

Sometimes, infrastructures punctuate timeless time with pauses: absences and silences that reveal the rhythms, breaks, rests, and attention that publishers think publics need. The sociotechnical forces creating such pauses often run counter to marketplace models of speech that dominate journalism and social media—more speech is always better, individuals can manage their online attention, and self-governance needs fast, continuous, wide-spread speech.

We can learn how networked journalism understands public attention by tracing its infrastructural pauses. Scholars, journalists, and technologists alike are increasingly questioning everything from algorithmically metered publishing and social media synchronization to “slow journalism” and earned trust during breaking news. Based on a discourse analysis of trade press discourse and close readings of digital news infrastructures, I survey sociotechnical forces driving news pauses, identify patterns in their construction, and use journalism’s infrastructural pauses as opportunities to reflect upon the kind of time that publics need.

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Castells, Manuel. (2009). Communication power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Mike Ananny, University of Southern California Annenberg