Distributed Communication Architectures and News

The architectures of information technologies reflect the societal power relationships they embody. This observation is most poignant at moments of convergence, when old social systems struggle to maintain their integrity within the context of the architecture defined by the new technology (McLuhan, 1964/1994). Journalism, we contend, now finds itself at such a juncture, as it reflects back on a set of mature norms and canons established during the reign of mass circulation newspapers, and as it looks ahead to computer-based information network technologies.

Newspaper and television production can be imagined as having an hour-glass shape: Large amounts of information flow in linear fashion from many sources through a narrow, journalistic "neck" and on to a mass of readers or viewers. The ability to control this linear flow rests almost exclusively about the journalist. The result is an asymmetry in social power, with the scales clearly tipped toward the journalist. Indeed, this inequality of power helps define the way society regards newswork

and gives rise to public and professional concerns with such concepts such as credibility and objectivity. Thus, for example, one key component of objectivity, balance in news content, becomes an issue for journalism because of the perceived imbalance in power between journalists and their clients. 1 Some news sources may have the ability to co-opt this agenda setting role by strategically positioning themselves at a point where the hour glass has already narrowed, but still prior to the journalist in the news flow. Of course, journalists are taught to be on guard against this possibility, but frequently succumb to it under daily deadline pressure. Indeed, this observation applies equally to journalist and public relations agents since both are subject to the same architectural constraints on their ability to control content.

The convergence of linear mass media technologies with nonlinear computer technologies, depicted in Figure 1, raises the issue of what the social relationships between information providers and receivers will look like in any hybrid technology.

Across the millennia, civilization arguably has advanced, but the information processing problem (that is, understanding novel events in a complex environment with limited time and resources) has remained remarkably constant. If anything, the problem has become more complex because our information needs have far exceeded the range of direct sensory observation. Information processing technologies thus perform the critical task of locating survival-specific events at distant locations, collecting raw data about them, and packaging them into messages called news. True, sometimes novel information not directly related to survival is created by those mediating technologies. A story about a frog with two heads, for example, might make the newspaper, but it is not, in the sense used here, strictly defined as news.

If news can be thought of a survival-relevant information about novel events, then the process of newswork becomes an important phenomenon for study. In what follows, we will offer some preliminary thoughts about the relationship of news to the technologies that are used in its creation.

In thinking about technology, we are less interested in its physical implementation and more concerned, to borrow a phrase from computer science, with its system architecture. Specifically, technology is process, with its architecture manifested in any number of physical implementations (Beniger, 1986). War drums and newspapers are both manifestations of a technology where message senders encode information into abstract symbols whose meaning is understood by their receivers. In one case the technology, language, is implemented by using hollow logs, and in the other, printing presses are used. It is important to understand that while the messages sent by drum might contain novel survival-relevant information, they are not news unless the they are the product of a mass medium system. This is illustrated by the fact that while information about novel events seems to have been valued very early in human history, the word "news" did not come into usage until the European invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century (Simpson, & Weiner, 1989). 2 Prior to the invention of movable type, current events were called tidings (Emery & Emery, 1988).

While unquestionably a critical advance in human communication, neither the printing press nor movable type enabled a true mass medium. Movable type had more to do with regularity and uniformity than it did scope or, to use today's jargon, penetration (Bolter, 1991). Neither did it foment the formation of a class of information professionals. Notice that the people who created newspapers at this point were called printers, reflecting the relationship between artisans and their press. Moreover, printers stood as peers with the merchants of the emerging middle class. As the merchants were go-betweens in the world of trade and commerce, so the printers became go-betweens in the world of information. These two observations are important, because they imply there was considerable consensus between information provider and client about content.

The word "journalism" did not come into usage until 1833 (Simpson, & Weiner, 1989). That almost exactly coincides with the emergence of mass circulation newspapers in the eastern United States, a feat made possible by high speed rotary steam presses (Emery and Emery, 1988). Those presses were able to take one message and very rapidly produce enormous numbers of exact replicas at extremely low cost. This added the important characteristic of scope to newspapers, and represents the implementation of a truly mass medium.

The production and consumption of a mass circulation newspaper might be likened to that of a Hershey bar. The first step in the production of the taste treat is to collect and to dry large qualities of chocolate beans at some remote tropical location, then ship them to a central production facility. At this point the raw material is concentrated into a powerful extract or essence. Only a small amount of that extract is then added to a vat of other ingredients, from which huge numbers of perfectly identical candy bars are produced and distributed.

Similarly, in newswork, vast amounts of data are gathered from around the world and collected at some central production facility. 3For an earlier use of this industrial metaphor to model local television news production, see Bantz, McCorkle & Baade, 1980. A similar process of concentration or compression then takes place, where data are reduced to a potent extract or essence called stories, and then combined to create huge numbers of replicas called newspapers.

Mass media architectures are sufficiently complex as to require a great deal of specialization and differentiation. The collectors have power in the process to the degree they control raw material. Their title, "reporter," suggests a relationship between them and the events they cover. 4We are fully aware of the research literature which stresses the subjective nature of news creation and the negotiated reading/viewing of news texts by audiences. However, we would still contend that the power of journalists lies in their role as initial definers of newsworthiness. Editors, by contrast, derive a great deal of power based largely on their position in the message concentration process. Notice that their title (editor) refers to their relationship to the product (data/news), not to the replication technology, as was the case with the printer. Editors reside in the production facility, the newsroom, at exactly the narrowest point of information flow, where compression or condensation of the raw data takes place. Editors work at the task of data compression, creating uniform story units that enable the printing or broadcasting technology to infinitely replicate them. This power is manifested in all their editorial functions. For instance, the role of assignment editor constitutes a form of filtering Beniger (1986) calls preprocessing. This filtering role is most evident at the moment of story selection, and has been conceptualized as gate keeping and agenda setting. Copy editors too exert an enormous amount of power based on their ability to look within stories and actually manipulate the raw data provided by the reporters, giving it meaning by imposing structure. Given the amount of real power they have in the creation of "meaning" in the news, it's ironic that the copy editing function is depicted as one of the most tedious and least glamorous of all jobs in journalism.

Regardless of their specific function, editorial power derives from the fact that very small expenditures of energy are amplified to have enormous reach into the mass population of message receivers.

In turn, the reader receives only a diluted "dose" of the concentrated data in the form of their exact replica copy. This is important to understand because, unlike earlier days of printing, in the era of mass media, message producers, particularly for the elite media, are no longer the peers of the message receivers (Harwood, 1995). Editors now control content; it is precisely their job to embed meaning or structure in the raw data (Hall, 1980). This is stated in the agenda setting dictum, that editors do not tell their readers what to think, but they do tell them what to think about (McCombs and Shaw, 1971).

The obvious need for professionalization at this stage of development can be seen by imagining what happens when a batch of chocolate extract goes bad at the candy plant. Of course, the gravity of mistake is amplified by the process of concentration, and the market ends up being flooded by bitter tasting candy bars. To avoid that catastrophe the concentration process must become highly standardized, and controlled by skilled technicians. 5In a similar discussion of the need for standardization in complex technologies, Beniger (1986) discusses how time zones were created to help prevent railroad train wrecks.

Likewise, with the advent of mass circulation newspapers, the standard production of news became the job of a professional elite largely due to a concern with quality control. For instance, if journalists wrote each story out by hand, a factual error might be confined to just one copy of the newspaper. However, when a journalist commits an error within the architecture of a mass replication information system such as a newspaper, it will be faithfully reproduced thousands, or even millions of times. (This line of reasoning can be extended to television news production because, while it differs from newspapers in important ways, broadcast journalism is obviously still a mass media system.)

Thus, standardization and canonization help motivate the generation of "good" information. The discussion of what "good" means within the normative language of the professional revolves around the central theme of truth. The practice of techniques to insure accuracy, balance, and fairness are all deemed important to the degree they help achieve truth. 6These processes of standardization and canonization might also be useful in achieving the individual goals of professional autonomy and organizational goals of prestige- and revenue-enhancement (See McQuail (1994), especially Chapter 7).

While those norms lay out a practical proscriptive agenda on how to achieve the goal of objective truth, they do not really say why that goal is important. It is at this point that conceptualizing news as novel survival-dependent information becomes valuable. Evolution has endowed the species with a set of psychological heuristics to help insure the organism attends to and processes "good" information from the proximate environment. The visual system, for instance, is designed to attend to rapid or novel motion (Gibson, 1979). Humans employ sophisticated heuristics in the assessment of risk, with outcome probabilities overweighted to emphasis events taking place nearby (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Stocking and Gross (1989) discuss the role these cognitive processes play in journalistic reporting.

However, humans living in complex societies have come to need information well beyond the range of their senses. Journalistic norms, then, take on the job of the psychological heuristics in generating "good" information, only at a societal level. That means an account of an event is "good" to the degree that such an account will help in making important decisions about it.The relationship between "good" information and "making important decisions" can be considered not only in a evolutionary biological framework, but also from a liberal normative perspective. So-called "free press" theory would suggest, for example, that unbiased, objective information, delivered via an unfettered journalistic mass media is necessary to create informed citizens and to insure the most fundamental decision-making processes of a democratic polity. This can really be seen as a leap across levels of analysis, where the idea of "true" at a social level, corresponds to "real" at a psychological level. Norms such as accuracy and balance are, then, heuristic responses specific to mass media. They are intended to insure that the media system generates messages that are "true" accounts about events to the degree that they can be processed by readers or viewers as if it were directly experienced and "real." The question now has to do with the kinds of psychological and social heuristics appropriate to the next generation of information systems.

While it is true that the Internet may represent as significant an innovation as movable type, it is equally true that the idea of a "multi-media" personal computer system has come to be accepted with only limited understanding of its true meaning or potential long-term impact as a way to communicate. Touting "multi-media" as a feature might sell computers, but it also overlooks the important defining character of the computer as a communication technology; that is, its distributed architecture. Even within communication research, the topic has come to be identified as "computer mediated communication," which describes the technology's physical implementation, and not its architecture (for example, see Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994; Biocca & Levy, 1995). Similarly, if newspapers were typified by the physical implementation of the technology rather than their system architecture, we would study them as "printing press mediated communication," rather than mass media.

However, the true power of the Internet resides in the way it is hooked up, that is, in its architecture. The flow of information through a network is nonlinear, and distributed across a vast number of sender-receiver nodes. Because message production can take place at any node in the network, information distribution is a diffuse, parallel process, unlike the compressed, serial process of mass media. This can be seen in the transmission of the simplest e-mail message. A message may become fragmented during transmission due to the packet switching protocol employed by the TCP/IP standard employed by the Internet. Thus, different parts of the message may take an entirely different route across the Net before reuniting at their destination.

McLuhan (1964/1994) argued that technologies are extensions of human processes, and the information technologies are extensions of the central nervous system. That logic makes the idea of a computer network based on a parallel distributed- processing architecture compelling. Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) describe the architecture of human learning and memory in precisely those terms. Since their seminal work appeared, the body of evidence supporting the idea that the brain is wired into such networks has grown steadily (see Hinton, & Anderson, 1989). Computer designers have even come to borrow from this psychophysiological model, constructing "neural net" programs that have the capacity to learn, and link super-computers together in "massively parallel, distributed" architectures. Neither is the similarity between the architecture of the brain and the Net lost on the so-called cyberpunk genre of science fiction, where computer hackers "jack in" to make a seamless connection between their nervous system and the Net (see Gibson, 1984).

The Durability of Journalistic Practice on the Internet

Data concentration is unnatural in distributed network architectures that facilitate dispersed message production. Thus, the application of canons or standards produced to deal with mass media systems may be unnatural, unrealistic, and practically impossible to apply in a setting where any participant is equally likely to be a message producer as a message receiver. Members of such a system are more likely to be true peers, further eroding social codes borne out of the need to protect against the amplification of error fostered by power imbalances. First, the reportorial act of data collection is dispersed, with data collection potentially taking place at any node on the Net. Second, and most importantly, editors may lose control of the agenda.

Movable type brought standardization and regularity to symbolic human communication. The rotary steam press added scope. Networked computers now add resolution to information technology, manifested in the inherent interactivity of the architecture. Now, journalists have to examine what their role will be in the context of such parallel distributed communication architectures. An initial investigation might begin by re-examining some of the essential functions performed by journalists in a mass media system.

Data Collection and Verification

Collecting information and certifying its facticity is central to journalism. Thinking back to the role of news as the presentation of survival-specific information, the demand for factual accuracy is obvious. The importance journalism places on verification can be seen in the practice of double checking sources or getting more than one source for a "story." Verification gives journalistic communication credibility and believability, characteristics critical if information is to be useful in survival-dependent decision making.

In practice, editors may play a part in creating story facticity, but this is usually only in a backstop or quality control mode and is facilitated by their position at the narrowest part of the hourglass architecture, where vast amounts of data are reduced for transmission as a single message to a mass audience.

By contrast, it is difficult to imagine how this verification function might work in a distributed architecture and, in its absence, the burden of verification may thus shift back to the audience. Interactive information searches will call on the users to employ a set of highly effortful cognitive skills they may not now posses.

Newspaper journalism is elegant in its ability to provide guide posts for readers. The newspaper's nameplate, a story's location in the newspaper, and the elemental writing style all aid readers in their information assessment task. Those signposts, however, will largely be absent on the Net. Judgments about credibility will have to be even more contextual and site specific. 8Of course, mass media audiences have always made judgments about the credibility of news sources. For example, some readers may put more faith in a report in The New York Times than in the National Enquirer. But the reading public has had a long history of making such evaluations about newspapers, a history which is just beginning with online sources of data and information. For instance, the user of a computer discussion group focusing on Italian cars might judge it to be a highly credible site for information about rebuilding an Alfa Romeo engine, but not think much of it as a source of information about race relations.

The natural response to the absence of the finely tuned societal level heuristics offered by mass media is to revert to the primitive psychological heuristics. That course, however, is fraught with danger. For instance, a key reason television consistently scores higher than newspapers as a credible source for news has to do with the idea that seeing is believing (see Newhagen, & Nass, 1989). However, postmodern media critics such as Baudrillard (1983) detail how advanced media technology simulates events in such a way as to make them "hyper-real," that is, better than real. The idea of virtual reality suggests stimuli that may be "real," or plausible, from the point of view of the user's perceptual systems, but have no foundation in the physical world. The computer generated images of human forms "morphing" into insects is but one example.

In short, what may be needed in the age of distributed communication architectures is an even more ambitious effort at teaching "news literacy." While humans require no training in the use of the visual cortex, they may, however, need a new set of skills to evaluate the images and text available on a computer network. Notice that making the computer "user friendly" has mainly to do with making the interface more psychologically intuitive, and does not generally address issues of information evaluation or assessment. Furthermore, journalism is simply not up to instructing the mass audience in how to read the paper or watch TV news. To do so would require the application of journalistic norms to each and every information package. The analog of such a process in a mass media system would be to have an editor hand deliver individual copies of the newspaper to subscribers' doorsteps, and then to sit down over coffee with them as they go over the morning's news.

Data Compression

Controlling the amount and content of news on the Information Superhighway (a.k.a. data compression) is a current hot button for journalists, and the function to which editors cling with the most tenacity. Journalists increasingly reassure themselves that even cyber-journalism on the Net will still need editors to tell "audiences" what is important (Javers, 1995).

However, information compression is not particularly well- suited as a data reduction technique in a distributed architecture such as the Net. Computer science and engineering are focusing on more efficient forms of filtering than compression for this architecture. That implies complex and potentially egalitarian power relationships between information managers and end users. This might be manifest in the role of a pathfinder rather than agenda setter, with this later function falling back to the user, whether editors like it or not. Editors derive their power from being able to say, "because of my position in the architecture you have to pass through me to find out what's important." On the Net the pathfinder might tell the user, "tell me what you need and I will guide you through this complex environment."

How this editor-pathfinder role might develop is, of course, unpredictable. What professional and ethical norms might be associated with this emergent role? Will pathfinders be more like social workers or more like insurance brokers? Whose interests will be served by the pathfinders' work - - the pathfinders themselves, their corporate or public service governors, the established economic formation?

Moreover, some part of pathfinding, perhaps even a very substantial share, may exist one day as a "job" for a computer program and not for a human editor at all. This development would represent an embodiment of the Turing test and would raise metaphysically profound questions about human agency and computers. 9See Bolter (1974) for a discussion of computer agency and the Turing test. For instance, the concept of "newsworthiness" can be represented as a mathematical algorithm (Oard, 1994). Figure 2 shows how newsworthiness can be modeled as an n-dimensional oval. The computer program, based on records of the user's previous information seeking behavior, searches the Net, and preselects, or filters information for presentation. This interactive data resolution process does not exist in a mass media architecture. Such search engines raise obvious questions, including: who is doing the programming, will citizens loose the opportunity for shared cultural experiences, and who will have access to details about the users' interest and behaviors. 10 This suggests interesting scenarios in which non-human "intelligent agents" might decide what a "human interest" story is.

The Net probably will not kill mass media, but it will most certainly reshape them. It is, therefore, professionally dangerous and more than a little short-sighted for newsworkers to deny this broad-gauge certainty. It is also equally imprudent for communication scholars, policy makers, and the public to ignore these trends. Who knows? One day soon perhaps the term "information specialist" will sound every bit as romantic and every byte as nourishing as the title "foreign correspondent" did a century ago.

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