Robert Gutsche Jr is Senior Lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice at Lancaster University (UK). Gutsche studies cultural meanings of news, particularly related to issues of power and propaganda, digital innovation, and the role of myth and narrative in News storytelling. He is the author of several books, including Media Control: News as an Institution of Power and Social Control (Bloomsbury, 2017), Geographies of Journalism: The Imaginative Power of Place in Making Digital News (Routledge, forthcoming) and is editor of The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy (Routledge, 2018). His book, Trumpled: The Making of Trump and the Demonization of the Press (Bloomsbury) is due to publishers in 2018, as is Reinventing Journalism, Education, and Training: Addressing News as Power and Propaganda (Bloomsbury). Gutsche is Associate Editor of Journalism Practice.
DJRG Fellow, October 2018
Title and abstract
Journalism(s) of the Future: Understanding Today and Tomorrow
Through Intersections of Futurology and Digital Journalism Studies What are the futures of digital journalism? This question is posed with specific scenes in mind: Imagine journalists working within a Blade Runner environment of dead farmland and neon cityscapes. It is a dystopic setting of the world’s future, information blasting through adverts, control and order issued through policing and visuals of the “real” and “artificial.” Now, picture roving robot reporters navigating technological bastions of advanced societies within Black Panther’s Wakanda. Commentary on power of racialized landscapes and connections of technology, and globalization, these spaces also hold forms of communicating nationalism, traditionalism, and identities of the “outside world.” How do journalists work in these visions of tomorrow – or in the technologically advanced present of the Marvel universe? We don’t need fiction to imagine the future in which journalism will (or may?) exist. Today’s journalism is already molded and delivered through wearable technologies. Time compression through social media and data collection have altered means and measures of journalistic interpretation and creation. Increased surveillance by governments and corporations shape what and how journalists interrogate everyday life, approved behaviors, and social undesirables. Scenes from today’s films that position us in possible futures are simply starting Points for how we question what our futures might look like.
We don’t need fiction to imagine the future in which journalism will (or may?) exist. Today’s journalism is already molded and delivered through wearable technologies. Time compression through social media and data collection have altered means and measures of journalistic interpretation and creation. Increased surveillance by governments and corporations shape what and how journalists interrogate everyday life, approved behaviors, and social undesirables. Scenes from today’s films that position us in possible futures are simply starting points for how we question what our futures might look like. Futures Studies, particularly in Sociology, live alongside motilities research and science and technology studies (STS), as well as social theories of time. Together, these voices of the future (and of the past future) operate to position solutions of and for challenges of today within a realm of future outcomes of today’s Choices and investments in tomorrow (Urry, 2016). Such scholarship does not seek to determine what “actually will be” but addresses what might result from overt planning of today for tomorrow by governments, collectives, and individuals. In journalism, questions emerge from the use of problematic social media platforms, pushing and pulling user information, economic models, and uses of VR and AI technologies. Specifically, then, this project addresses how we prepare for our futures of journalism by asking:
- What will journalism look like in post-human futures beyond Our lifetimes?”
- What will trust look like in relationships between audiences and journalists in an age of AI and crafted scenes of immersive storytelling via VR and AR?
- What ethics are involved in new technologies that could be shared or controlled on global scales and by which journalists collect and distribute information?
- How can we even predict journalistic futures, and why should we?
Selected publications - Gutsche, Jr., R. E. & Hess, K. (2019). Geographies of journalism: The imaginative power of place in making digital news. New York & London: Routledge.
- Gutsche, Jr., R. E. (Ed.). (2018). The Trump presidency, journalism, and democracy. New York & Oxen, UK: Routledge.
- Gutsche, Jr., R. E. (2017). Media control: News as an institution of power and social control. New York & London: Bloomsbury.
- Gutsche, Jr., R. E. (2015). Boosterism as banishment: Identifying the power function of local, business news and coverage of city spaces. Journalism Studies, 16 (4), 497-512.
- Gutsche, Jr., R. E. (2014). News place-making: Applying ‘mental mapping’ to explore the journalistic interpretive community.Visual Communication, 13 (4), 487-510.