The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era by Dominic Boyer (review)

Abstract

Dominic Boyer, The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in Digital Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. 240 pp.Dominic Boyer's signal achievement in The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in Digital Era is to utterly evacuate concept of reporting from world of journalism. Instead, Boyer argues, dominant mode of jour- nalistic labor in digital era is screenwork, a set of almost entirely seden- tary processes in which newsworkers [navigate] complex ecology of information already 'out there' as much as they seek and reveal unknown truths (3). This navigation process, which Boyer understands as a specific aspect of a more general process of mediological subjectivity, takes place largely in front of screens. To focus so resolutely on digital information man- agement-slotting, clicking, spinning, and timing-in part by bracketing practices of reporting is a genuine breakthrough. While aspects of this dynamic have been touched on in Boczkowski's (2010) explora- tion of newsroom imitation, in Ryfe's (2012) ethnography of small American newsrooms, and in my own analysis of aggregation practices inside and outside traditional journalism organizations (Anderson 2013), no other author has zeroed in on screenwork as a core component of newsmaking process in quite this way. And while I think sedentary dy- namic Boyer points to is, perhaps, overdrawn (a point I will return to in conclusion to this review), focus on screen-oriented aspects of journalistic production is a welcome corrective to cluster of five- decade-old newsroom ethnographies that have, by now, achieved largely hagiographic status in journalism studies.The focus on screens and mediological labor aside, The Life Informatic falls rather squarely within newsroom ethnography tradition (although interestingly enough, vast majority of those ethnographies have been produced not by anthropologists, but by sociologists and more recently by scholars in science and technology studies tradition). Bracketed by opening and closing chapters focused on a comparison between medio- logical practices in journalism and anthropology, remaining chapters of book hew fairly closely to three site visit paradigm that is so com- mon in newsroom ethnographic research (though, yet again, perhaps not as much so in anthropology). The first site is Associated Press office in Frankfurt (AP Deutscher Dienst, or AP-DD); second is Darmstadt campus of T-Online, a portal subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG; and third is newsroom of MDR INFO, a 24/7 public radio broad- caster making transition to digital forms of journalistic production. At each of these sites, Boyer analyzes nuances of screen-oriented news- work in truly exemplary fashion; indeed, many journalism studies scholars and budding newsroom ethnographers could learn a great deal from this practicing anthropologist about how to do newsroom fieldwork well. We might summarize four driving dynamics in these chapters as 1) a focus on praxiological aspects of mediological screenwork, 2) relationship of journalists to the public sphere (or more accurately, to realm of Offentlichkeit), 3) shifting phenomenology of news time in digital age, and 4) literal and figurative spaces of journalistic work.I will turn to an examination of each of these four concepts momentarily, but I do want to briefly point out an additional, highly intriguing aspect of The Life Informatic-namely, setting of its field sites in Germany. There is no doubt that one of dominant trends in journalism studies over past decade and a half has been growing internationalization of subfield, a welcome development to be sure. And while Boyer does spend a few pages discussing ramifications of his choice of Germany as a field site, by and large he chooses not to dwell on comparative aspect of his book. …