Florida State University Libraries

Florida State University Libraries 2015 The Shifting Sands of Authority in the Age of Digital Convergence Leah Frieda Cassorla Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE SHIFTING SANDS OF AUTHORITY IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CONVERGENCE By LEAH FRIEDA CASSORLA A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 © Leah Frieda Cassorla Leah Frieda Cassorla defended this dissertation on October 26, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were: Kristie S. Fleckenstein Professor Directing Dissertation Davis W. Houck University Representative Ned Stuckey-French Committee Member Kathleen Blake Yancey Committee Member Michael Neal Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii Dedicated to Granny Bling, and Stephen Sasha Normand who know why. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It would be impossible to thank all the people—friends, family, and colleagues—who have made this dissertation possible. I would, however, like to thank especially; Kristie Fleckenstein, who said, “No;” Beth Hewett, who said “Yes;” my husband, Maestro Jaime Manuel Garcia Bolao, for loving me through a process that was difficult (and made me difficult); David Levenson, and the Religion Department, for needing a Hebrew teacher and for being crazy enough to think I might do another of these; Adam Goldstein, for doing everything he could when he realized my spark had gone; my family, genetic and extended, for poking, prodding, joking, not-so-joking, and loving me; my mentors, Donna Sewell and Pat Miller, who listened and counseled years after I got my BA; and finally, my fellow travelers, Kendra and Martha, who reminded me regularly that it’s a passertation! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ viii 1. THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY AND DIGITAL CONVERGENCE .................................1 2. DEFINING THE MEDIA: HOW THE PRESS AS TECHNOLOGY AND THE LONG TAIL OF POWER LAW MAKE PROTO-AUTHORIZATION NECESSARY ....................................40 3. INTERBLOGGING SHIFTS AUTHORITY ON THE NETWORK: REUTERSGATE VS RATHERGATE AND THE TOOLS OF THE 20 PERCENT ......................................................73 4. AUTHORIZING THE THIRD SPACE: HOW WIKILEAKS SHAPE-SHIFTS TO MEDIATE BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH ESTATES .................................................................100 5. WHEN AUTHORITY AND AUCTORITAS COLLIDE ......................................................143 APPENDICES .............................................................................................................................160 A. THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNALISTS’ PLEDGE ........................................................160 B. CFAPA MEMBER TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF USE .................................................162 C. CODING FOR CHAPTER 4 TABLES ..................................................................................170 References ....................................................................................................................................191 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................197 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1. The New York Times Perspective from Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy ..............................................................................................................................112 Table 2. The Guardian Perspective from WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrets ....................................................................................................................................113 Table 3. WikiLeaks’s Perspective from Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website .........................................................................................114 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.The Long Tail (in yellow) of The Power Law. (Kranen) ................................................31 Figure 2. “The Bowtie Structure of the Web” (Benkler 250) ........................................................36 Figure 3. Original cutline and credit line: “Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj” ....................................................................75 Figure 4. The original photo (before Hajj made changes) was released by Reuters. ....................77 vii ABSTRACT Authority is a much contested concept and practice, often connected to notions of violence and control, and it emanates variably from class, institution, and now—as I argue—from digital convergence, which is the availability and shareability of information across multiple digital platforms at all times. This dissertation considers how digital convergence is responsible for taking what would otherwise be a difference of degree (simply more people sharing more information) and turning it into a difference of kind (people turning information sharing into knowledge making, previously the domain of institutions). Through the tools made available both online and on multiple technological platforms, individual users of the digitally converged network (though primarily users of the Internet) are building their own auctoritas. In the particular case of journalism, this threat primarily stems from individuals and groups of individuals sharing information online that both acts as news and critiques the mainstream media (MSM). Institutions are currently facing such a foundational threat through the platform-wide information availability and shareability of digital convergence and specifically through the topology and design of the network created by it (and which it simultaneously creates). This threat of digital convergence leads to a situation in which individuals and groups of individuals are empowered to create and maintain auctoritas outside the institutional structures that Western culture traditionally leans on for authority and knowledge creation. The individual auctoritas uniquely enabled through digital convergence acts as a valid challenge to the institution’s structure, causing it to respond with proto-authorization and other tactics designed to limit individual auctoritas and maintain institution per se. The Fifth Estate, considered and defined in this dissertation, is a porous border across which the needs of American journalism consumers are met both by journalists and by consumer subjects moving into the journalism role just-in- time. Porousness of the border between production and consumption of cultural knowledge is a threat to an institution whose job traditionally has been considered to be cultural knowledge creation. In many ways, this movement across the porous border between news consumer and producer is neither a new concept nor a new practice. The difference is one of technology and performances. It is through the affordances of a globalized social structure and a global technological connection, as well as ubiquitous access to multiple platforms, that a Fifth Estate viii can become influential enough to need defining—that is, influential enough to bring American journalism back to its roots in citizen auctoritas. I use three sub-case studies to look at ways the Fifth Estate makes use of tools of digital convergence to cross this porous border and challenge the institutional authority of the Fourth Estate. ix CHAPTER 1 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY AND DIGITAL CONVERGENCE Authority Authority is a much contested concept and practice, often connected to notions of violence and control, and it emanates variably from class, institution, and now—as I argue— from digital convergence, which can be defined as the availability and shareability of information across multiple digital platforms at all times (Jenkins 2). In simple terms and from a mid-twentieth-century perspective, Hannah Arendt explains that due to a loss of understanding of authority, in the twentieth century, “authority is whatever makes people obey” (416); for the most part, Arendt appears to be referring to institutional authority, wronged or missing in her time. She sees a lack of true authority, and accuses ideological institutions of mislabeling violence as authority because it achieves the same outcome, namely obedience. As she points out in the beginning of the same paragraph, however, obedience stems not merely from violence or the threat thereof from a governmental control stance although each certainly can inspire people to obey what is required or asked of them. Rather, the very fact that people confuse violence for the fulfillment of the role of authority (i.e., making people obey) has led to totalitarian regimes being mistaken for authoritarian regimes. Arendt’s argument—that, while violence

Load more