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Chapter 9 (part 1)

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Comments and Discussion:

 

Oriana:

Society of Newspaper Design was founded by a group of authoritative graphic designers in Washington. It was 1978.

 

Their first meeting "became legend in the trade, marking the beginning of the so-called revolution in newspaper design that led the way into electronic forms" (Burnhurst).

 

Designers, who founded the society, used to organize lectures all around the world and in particular where "American visual culture" (Burnhurst) was perceived important.

 

The organization developed in different countries and geographical areas such as Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand but also Asia, India, United Arab Emirates.

The newspaper design changed continually during the 19th century.

 

The word "revolution" marked the rhythm of the 19th century and various dates are part of the newspaper history.

Moreover, "modern" and "revolution" went together from the Renaissance period and they meant "to fight" against medieval prospective in the short past.

The most important principle for the newspaper visual art was to give the simple and well-explained news of the world to people.

 

So, during the nineteenth century looking at the sentence cited by Bacon ("Knowledge is power"), journalists put in the center of the attention the __indivdual __and its power of knowledge. They wanted to be objective and to succeed in their goal, they transformed "elite knowledge" into more "naturalizing and humanizing knowledge" (Burnhurst) using proper instruments.

 

But in the twentieth century, journalists followed a different path because their attention focused more on "__general knowledge__" using the new technological tools. In this moment of the history, power is not in the people's control anymore but in favour of journalists.

 

Reading the news by people means understand and give their own interpretation. There exist two different kind of readers:

 

  • material: news forms is the connection "between readers and other social actors" (Burnhurst) such as public associations, governements, economic organizations, local offices etc.

 

  • represented: readers are seen as receiver, part of the public opinion. Journalists, organizations etc. refer to them.

 

In every news this two faces are hidden inside the form and the nature of this structure comes from the objectivity started in the century before.

 

 

Fabrizio

 

The Chapter 8 talks about the role plaid by the form with respect to the relationship between “readers and events” and deals with the “material and the represented level”.

A particular example of form which “casts the readers” is the periodical dialogue between the editor or a well famous journalist and the readers which takes place on the main newspapers.

In Italy, there is a was very famous case: “La Stanza”, managed by Indro Montanelli for many years on the Il Corriere della Sera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indro_Montanelli), where this legendary journalist used to answer a letter a day.

The name itself of the page on the newspaper (La Stanza, as already said) suggests the idea of a form which organizes the multivocality of the society expressed by readers; however, it represents an effort of mapping this complexity, almost as a process of furnishing the room.

The readers are authorized to enter the “room”, but they have to accept the related rule: only after this “movement”, they can communicate their point of views.

Each “house” has its convention and good manners basically require to acknowledge them. For instance, each letter was very polite and moderate.

On the other hands, the permanence of the contact between the journalist (the consistent presence of the “house” with its “room”) and his audience set in a predictable way the relationship.

In short, this example shows how the represented level works, by building the rules which (a part of) public opinion should respect for performing its role: a similarity with the Searle pattern might be seen (http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/), even because he elaborate the Chinese room argument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPECTATORS & THEIR SPECTACLES

Forms of Knowledge, Forms of Power

In 1978, a small group of graphic designers met at an American Press Institute seminar in Washington, D.C., and from their initial discussions grew the Society of Newspaper Design (SND). The organization spread slowly through the United States and Canada, moving eventually into Europe and Latin America and then on to other countries, including Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and in Asia, India, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Twenty years later, with more than two thousand members in forty-seven countries, the group portentously had changed its name to The Society for News Design.

 

The story of that first meeting became legend in the trade, marking the beginnings of the so-called revolution in newspaper design that led the way into electronic forms. Through traveling workshops, the founders, who hold a revered place among the membership, spread the gospel of modern (or what we would call Late Modern) design. The organization's conferences and publications claimed an international reach, including a competition that named The World's Best Designed Newspapers. Although tiny in a global setting, the members represented experts in news typography, layout, information graphics, illustrations, and so forth - a highly specialized group with considerable influence at newspapers, where staffers jokingly called them design czars. The membership clustered in countries most receptive to American visual culture, and the society's new name not only hinted at proselytizing aims but also reflected a trajectory away from traditional news on paper.

 

During the modern newspaper formation in U.S. history, such revolutions have been endemic. One chronicler identifies four in the twentieth century, in the 1910s, 1930s, 1960s, and 1970s, all before the founding of SND or USA Today (Hutt, 1973). To make much of the uprisings would yield a story with too many climaxes, full of exclamation points but finally pointless. The term modern has flown over a long string of revolutions since the Renaissance, when scholars rediscovering the classics first lifted the banner to declare battle on all things mediæval. Constant revolution is a defining trait of the modern. Each rebellion invariably takes aim at a worn-out and irrational authority, beginning with that of the church in the early modern era but later extending to the divine right of kings and many other widely and firmly held beliefs. The modern invariably asserts itself by relegating the immediate past (the distant past is another matter) to the zone of superstition.

 

The newspaper design revolution typifies all the others. It began by asserting the accessibility of genuine knowledge and attacking the accretions of accidents and confusions that stood between knowledge and the people. Modern journalism proposed to reveal the external world and array it with clarity. The proposal, which as always aligned itself with science, aimed not at contemplation for its own sake but at the exercise of power, following Bacon's claim, “Knowledge is power.” But power for whom? Compared with the Age of Reason, when the new epistemology accompanied, justified, and took credit for the discovery of the New World and the Protestant Reformation, the stakes for the modernist newspaper worker might seem paltry indeed. The design revolution would amount to little more than office politics if the particular office involved did not direct the house that the Enlightenment built for citizens to consummate the social contract. Newspapers gave physical form to the public sphere, and designers did battle over that legacy, however dissipated.

 

By moving the center of power from established practices accreted through long collective experience, modern journalists (like Enlightenment philosophers) centered power in the individual. Extracting an objective knowledge of the social world required an operator, a privileged observer. Relying on human subjects to produce objective knowledge introduced a key contradiction into the modern project. Naturalizing and humanizing knowledge made the world more egalitarian but required proper (that is, expert) methods. In all fields of knowledge in the nineteenth century, practitioners developed protocols of observation that increasingly separated them from a lay public. The twentieth-century rise of modern news design and news professionalism extended this revolution from specialized to general knowledge. Modernists at newspapers, following a well-beaten path, invariably called into service a variety of machinery and procedures - the Web, most recently - to safeguard the truth, to make it reliable and predictable. In the process, power flowed to journalists themselves.

 

Although we discount the revolutionary rhetoric employed in the rise of newspaper modernism, we take its claims to power seriously. Over the long course of the modern and of U.S. history, the recent rhetoric among news workers does contain a nugget of truth: something is afoot, and it has to do with power and its spectators.

a sea of change, or, who needs a weatherman?

 

When a tsunami, or tidal wave, originates at sea, it does not always manifest itself on the surface. Moving at high speed as a subsurface pulse or shock wave, it may altogether escape the notice of sailors up above. Or they may feel a brief shudder. Their first real awareness that a tsunami has passed under them will come moments later, when dead fish, crushed by the immense pressure, float to the surface. In American political culture, a lot of dead fish have floated to the surface lately - say, O. J. Simpson or Monica Lewinsky. We suspect that a tidal wave passed underneath some time ago.

 

Although stories of revolution overstate the case, changes in news forms, which the public receives and then uses in governing itself, did contribute to the tsunami. The forms of the news hail readers into a particular relationship with the events and personages of the day. As we have suggested, news forms recast readers on two levels, which for want of better terms we characterize as material and represented. Materially, news forms set up relationships between readers and other social actors, such as the New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Congress, and the National Basketball Association. The existing forms of the legislative report, for example, materially configure the reader as a spectator and politics as a sporting event. The stock tables and the daily sports standings each cast the reader into a material relationship with an institution, and, in the process, such forms foreclose or eliminate other relationships.

 

A similar although not often consonant process occurs on the represented level. In the example of legislative reporting, the forms cast the reader as a voter/citizen, a member of the chorus that performs a role called public opinion, which legislators and reporters refer to as the ultimate moving force of politics. The disjuncture between the material and representational work of each news form comes embedded in its very structure. That is, when a reporter as expert/insider, adopting an attitude of objectivity, condenses a complex legislative process into a story or series of contained stories operating according to news values - prominence, conflict, timeliness, proximity, and so forth - and publishes it in a mainstream daily newspaper or nightly network news program, the very form makes the reader/viewer into a spectator. Yet at the same time that form, in constructing in advance the narrative of the report as a prelude to an election, represents the reader/viewer as a member of the active, judgmental citizenry of public opinion.

 

The example suggests that not every form of news produces disjunctures of equal severity. Take an alternative form of legislative reporting, the transcript of debate. The form flourished in the early through mid- nineteenth century, when quasi-official newspapers such as the National Intelligencer acted as news services, and the nation's press duly copied large chunks of digested and sometimes verbatim speeches. That form of news disappeared from the mainstream press when daily newspapers yielded the function of record-keeping to official government printers; it now survives in the Congressional Record and on the cable channels C-Span and C-Span 2. The transcript form also incorporated a disjuncture between material and representational relationships. On a material level, it cast the reader as a spectator in the halls of legislation viewing a dramaturgically constructed spectacle of decision-making. On a representational level, however, it cast the reader as jury member, making an actual judgment during a real-time contest of argument. The falsity of the representational level lies in the fact that the very form of public-ness always drives decision-making away from the readers' gaze; even a casual C-Span watcher knows that no one ever makes up one's mind during or even on the basis of the televised debate. The very form of the news embeds a disjuncture between the material and the represented citizen.

 

Nevertheless, we consider the disjuncture more benign in the transcript than in the legislative report. Legislative reports perform a double trick, purporting to unveil the hidden decision-making process, but at the same time pulling a veil over the spectatorship of the reader and the constructedness of the report. Ultimately, the form empties the stage, leaving no politics for anyone to pretend to participate in, even as audience. The transcript, on the other hand, stoically refuses to unveil the decision-making process and stubbornly insists that the debate is the point, which affirms politics, albeit naively. By leading readers to believe that argument matters, the transcript form encourages them to remain politically active, helping bring about a situation in which argument does matter. Not by mere coincidence did the period when the transcript flourished coincide with the period when U.S. citizens most often voted, organized, volunteered, and asserted themselves in politics. Americans went to war over slavery and used politics to address fundamental questions of economic organization and social fairness. U.S. histories recall much of the political silliness of the period, such as the campaign spectacles of the Jacksonian era (Schudson, 1998), but neglect how seriously the represented debates were conducted and observed. That seriousness waged war against and eventually lost out to the veiled agendas of political operators, right to the brink where politics tumbled into war. Politics in that age was finally tragic, not triumphant, but it was serious. Can anyone make the same claim for the Age of Lewinsky?

 

One example of a shift in news forms can reveal only so much. Each element of form is just that - one among many, existing within an overall environment of forms in relation to everything else. The form of news by itself could not revolutionize the political landscape. The decline of popular politics required many other actors and processes, such as the mobilization of upper-class reformers and the privatization of government tasks into specialized and de-politicized agencies (McGerr, 1986). The forms of news do not constitute the Archimedean point from which to move the world. Forms do, however, have deep and far-reaching meanings and consequences. It is silly to believe that improving the content of the news could revolutionize public life in the absence of formal change, as many media critics, particularly journalists, seem to assume. Better reporting from the campaign trail, for instance, is still reporting from the campaign trail. If reporters did better in 1996 than in 1992 or 1988, they still did nothing to reform the architecture of public life. We doubt that meaningful change will come from improved performance in occupational routines.

 

Change in news forms throughout U.S. history occurred dialectically, as we have argued. Each of the major news formations presented a synthesis. The printerly newspaper synthesized an idealized public sphere with a craft-based type of manufacture, for example, but that synthesis generated contradictions between its economic and political aims. The partisan newspaper resolved the conflict by embracing the marketplace model, and a new synthesis emerged, employing the competitive ideal for not only the business of newspapers but also for their political arguments. The partisan newspaper in turn generated contradictions between its editorial posture and its various other news and business departments that led to a new synthesis in the Victorian newspaper. Similar dialectics constituted not only subsequent formations but also the phases of advertising design, which in turn supplied the impulse toward changes in the news.

 

Another way to understand the interaction of forms and publics is through the concept of voice. We have noted repeatedly how news is voiced in different formations. The printerly newspaper suppressed the printer's voice and at the same time gave voice to gentlemen-readers. The partisan newspaper spoke in the editor's voice. The publisher's newspaper produced a de facto multi-vocality, with the editor's voice chanting alongside the staccato melodies of the marketplace - advertisers occupying newly fenced off suburbs on paper, and various external actors, including wire services and stock markets, voicing national and everyday news. The industrial newspaper continued this multi-vocality, and the jumbled, intense vernacular of Victorian sensibility nurtured the urgent racket of the marketplace and the department store.

 

The professional newspaper challenged multi-vocality. The reporter's soothing monotone overrode every other voice in the news, reducing all other speakers to sound bites and focusing attention on the unvoiced landscape behind everything else. Where voices could not be reduced they were dumped into ghettoes: the sports page, for instance, or the editorial page, where they supplied mere amusement or opinion. On the front page, the modern forms of news remained essentially mono-vocal, as the typographic unity of Classicist and High Modern designs attest.

 

The mono-vocality of modern news forms justifies itself as democratic. The modernist newspaper proclaimed its mission to give a complete and accurate account of the day's news in a context that gives it meaning. The newspaper would be the intelligence agent (Lippmann, 1922), providing information that ordinary people need to orient themselves as responsible citizens in a complicated and ever-changing world. That common sense packs in the raft of assumptions we began with, about knowledge, power, and the individual's relationship to the social real. The modernist newspaper, and much of the twentieth century culture of the press, followed the Baconian understanding of knowledge and power, presuming that the function of democratic media is to present knowledge to a citizenry composed of rational individuals. Simple rationality itself, however, cannot guarantee readers' ability to decode the news properly. They must first share a pool of taken-for-granted knowledge, a consensus on the larger features of an overall mapping of society. A prime instance is the boundary that readily separated the personal from the political. If empowerment came from acquiring information, journalism aimed to supply the information, preferably mapped according to the gross features that, common sense said, corresponded to the essential structure of society. Such mythical background knowledge expressed itself in one voice - hence the mono-vocality of modernist news.

 

We have emphasized one aspect of modern news repeatedly, the byline, because the fact that stories acquired bylines returns to the fundamental contradiction of modernism, in which objectivity presumes subjectivity. The byline tells readers that, although a subjectivity (a specific person) wrote a story, the set of procedures followed precisely can still warrant the story's objectivity. The writer implicitly certifies that any other reporter could replicate the report. Naming the writer, ironically, underscores the mono-vocality of news. The byline stipulates the irrelevancy of voice or persona.

 

In the late-modern or neo-Victorian moment, the weaknesses of the Baconian model have become manifest: a public of rational individuals is no longer a believable fiction. Instead the great public has bifurcated into passive (readers and viewers) and active (newsmakers and opinion-leaders) parts. Reporters, more aligned with newsmakers than with audiences, often become celebrities who speak from a position of race, gender, or other difference, as the notion of a universal observer crumbled. Knowledge can no longer be viewed as socially neutral. Instead, the news media and their forms exhibit power effects that are better explained by Foucault's inversion of the power-knowledge relationship. The forms of the newspaper encode power in ways that a literate reader can decode, but the knowledge they engender does not claim to empower the public by making it more intelligent. Having lost the fiction of the Baconian public, late modern news organizations, in an ironic echo of a conceit of colonial printers, satisfy themselves by believing that they themselves are the public. The collapse of the categories of journalist and citizen into one marks neither an end to mono-vocality nor a return to multi-vocality. As journalists become more fond of talking to each other, they cannot wholly abandon the repressed monotone of the neutral expert. Instead they produce a pseudo-vocality that uses personal-sounding effects to speak from nowhere and everywhere.

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