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CATALAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW, 8: 11-24 (2018) Secció de Filosofia i Ciències Socials, IEC, Barcelona ISSN: 2014-6035 DOI: 10.2436/20.3000.02.39 http://revistes.iec.cat/index/CSSr Journalism and history in a change of era Jaume Guillamet* Universitat Pompeu Fabra Original source: Comunicació. Revista de Recerca i d’Anàlisi, 30(1): 9-23 (2013) (http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/TC/index) Translated from Catalan by Mary Black Abstract The effects of the digital technologies and the Internet on the social media system offer a change of perspective on the history of journalism, which is now at the end of an evolutionary era. After four centuries, the press and journalism have been replaced in their role as drivers of the media industry by the increasingly dominant audiovisual media, websites and social networks. Consequently, researchers are faced with a new dimension of historical time that affects our most recent past. This study suggests several factors to be considered in connection with the crisis in journalism, the nature of the media and the specific era of Catalan journalism today. Key words: journalism, history, change of era, crisis, nature of the media, Catalan journalism. 1. Introduction Rarely do we historians have the extraordinary opportunity to witness a change of era on the issues that are the target of our attention, research and analysis, a time when history is marching towards drawing a demarcation line before the most recent experience, in which the living past suddenly becomes a subject worth studying. Teaching often requires the researcher to use different criteria to delimit the historical subject matter. When students request it, the time period that should be used for a given research exercise on the immediate past occasionally forces the professor into an exercise in flexibility. The time perspective of facts varies with age and experience. Given a group of Bachelor’s or post-graduate students born in around 1990, there are many personal memories that the professor simply cannot share. For example, the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, such a vivid recollection for their parents and grandparents, is pure past to the students. For this reason, one response that I use in such cases is that history begins where memory ends. * Contact address: Jaume Guillamet. Departament de Comunicació, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Roc Boronat, 138. 08018 Barcelona, EU. E-mail: [email protected]. 12 CSSR, 8 (2018) Jaume Guillamet -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- However, at times historical matter which is being examined may penetrate into the researcher’s living memory. The notes in this article pose several factors on the repercussions of this fact on research in the history of journalism. 2. The crisis in journalism The major changes in the information and communication technologies in recent years and their effects on journalism have sparked an unforeseen acceleration in the consideration of historical time. Within this context, when we speak about the possibility of printed newspapers disappearing in the short term, given the unquashable competition from the Internet, and when there are warnings of the consequent irreversible crisis in journalism as a form of news intermediation, suddenly an abyss opens up in the forms of communication and culture which have matured over the course of four centuries. The unease created by the breakneck, unbridled development of the digital network is coupled with consternation over the effects of a financial crisis which is seriously aggravating the capacity of the means of social communication, particularly journalism, to survive. It highlights what could seem like an intrinsic weakness in what has been the major phenomenon in social communication in the contemporary age. The use of the Internet by the traditional media tends to be dated from the years 1994-1995, the time when the first digital newspapers and news portals appeared, but the impact of their novelty on journalism was not immediately perceptible. In 2002, in the first history of the media that takes this juncture as a boundary comparable to the original milestone of the invention of the printing press, the British Asa Briggs (2002: 347•348) did not yet consider the traumatic effects that the Internet could have on journalism. This should come as no surprise, even though just a few years later those effects became visible and irreversible, with the inestimable magnification by the decline in advertising due to the financial crisis that detonated in 2008. Not even twenty years have elapsed since the advent of the Internet, and its effects have spread far and wide with extraordinary speed, to such an extent that it has even modified many aspects of our forms of social life.1 Barely 24 years have gone by since the British Tim Berners•Lee dreamt up the worldwide web (www) at the CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) particle accelerator under the Swiss Alps in 1989. In Time Magazine, Briggs compared the open-access, free, global web which he conceived and defended – which would have been impossible without the previous contributions by the Americans Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf for the TCP/IP protocols and Lawrence G. Roberts for server localisation and routing techniques in data networks – with Gutenberg. The spread of the printing press dreamt up by that coin-minting German artisan (in around 1450) took place in a fairly brief period in post-mediaeval Europe, but a full century and a half elapsed until the advent of the first weekly 1 The magazine Le Temps des Médias has published a dossier on “Histoire de l’Internet. L’Internet dans l’histoire”, coordinated by Jérôme Bourdon and Valérie Schafer, in its issue 18, spring 2012. Journalism and history in a change of era CSSR, 8 (2018) 13 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- newspapers (in around 1605). The acceleration of historical processes brought about by the Industrial Revolution could already be clearly seen in the late 19th century. Barely a quarter of a century passed from the wireless telegraph invented by the Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1897) to the broadcast of the American Lee de Forest (1906) and the first radio stations (1920). The first television stations, the first mechanical television by the British John Baird (1926) and later the first electronic television by the Russian Vladimir Zworykin (1936) quickly ensued as logical next steps. Comparative studies of these three major processes in printed communication, via Hertzian waves and via the digital network, are of immense interest to researchers. To journalism, the advent of the Internet signalled the end of a third major historical period, the period of 20th-century industrial or contemporary journalism, which itself was the culmination of the process that had gotten underway with artisan or old journalism from the 17th and 18th centuries and the liberal or modern journalism of the 19th century. The concepts of eras and cycles are theoretical constructs used to study and understand historical processes by considering technological, political, social and professional factors. This model of the three major epochs,2 which correspond respectively to the successive prominence of the circulation of news, the initiative of journalists and the hegemony of the media, has inevitably exhausted itself in the early years of the 21st century. At all the previous times of change, both those perceived at the time by contemporaries and those established after the fact by historians, there was always the sense of a step forward, an evolution based on improving the ways of publishing, printing, distributing, issuing, commercialising and financing. It was the outlook of the process of unveiling new possibilities which fostered and multiplied the ones that already existed. The defensive reactions of newspapers and theatres, concert halls and cinemas to the new developments of the radio and television, and even radio’s defensive reaction to television, nonetheless reflected reasonable concerns over the immediate effects of an adjustment and division of the business. Today the outlook is different, especially for newspapers and journalism, whose very survival is threatened. In a climate of defeat for the large journalism industry, it is not certain that the disappearance of print newspapers in the United States, augured for 2043 (Meyer, 2004)3 on the cover of The Economist on the 24th of August 2004 with the question: “Who killed the newspaper?”, will actually occur. Yet even if it does not happen and the press retains its own niches in the market thanks to the survival of minority audiences who are 2 I presented this model in Guillamet, 2002, and in Guillamet, 2003b. I also used it when writing Guillamet, 2003a. Regarding the impact of the Internet, in this work, pp. 211-212, I limit myself to pointing out the uncertainty regarding the profound change that the very concept of journalism is facing. 3 Beyond the misleading title, The Vanishing Newspaper, Meyer’s title is actually a bid for editors to reinforce the quality and social influence as newspapers’ way forward. The reference to the year 2043, on pp. 15-16, corresponds to the calculation of the time when readership of newspapers will drop to zero in the United States in