“So does wikileaks represent the end of an age of journalism?”
Andrew Walkingshaw asked me this as about 11pm on Sunday night as we waited for our flight to Newark.
“Or is it the start of a new type of journalistic construct?” was my response.
Without missing a beat, Andrew replied, “Isn’t that the same thing?”
Looking back, it’s hard to think of a conversation that took place at NewsFoo that didn’t eventually get to Wikileaks. People debated every possible aspect of the story, from the responsibility of papers working with Assange to address his political goals as outlined in his manifesto ((I realize that it’s called the Wikileaks Manifesto, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate the site from the individual)), to what is the responsibility of news organizations to monitor and call attention to the lack of transparency in Wikileaks’ processes and operation. Needless to say, while some minds were swayed and some new areas of consideration opened, nothing was settled.
As an outside to journalism looking in (the job of the anthropologist), the Wikileaks discussion is about a fundamental change in journalism from an institutional model to an “assemblage” model. By that I mean that instead of news being mediated by a single large institution (say the New York Times of old), the assemblage model is one in which a network of actors, including media institutions and new players such as Wikileaks, collaborate in releasing stories.
Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. (Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, pg 12)
This is exactly the sort of thing that I think McLuhan was getting at in the above quote. The constant discussion of Wikileaks, and the resulting cognitive friction is caused by, can be read as, a moment in which journalism is breaking through a barrier, transitioning from a moment of individual institutions to assemblages,
A range of social scientists and philosophers have argued that there are fundamental differences between the two forms. The institution is (somewhat) fixed, centralized, and lasting, while the assemblage is more fluid, distributed, and ephemeral.
So, for example, the assemblage blurs the line between sources and journalists, not allowing the two to be easily separated. Typically, in the institutional case, the source is hidden, or is at most treated as a somewhat neutral party in the production of the report. They give the reporter their information and then step away. In the assemblage case, the source ((admittedly, one could argue that Wikileaks isn’t a source but a mediator for the as-of-yet unknown individuals who leaked the encrypted documents…. This argument in itself notes the blurring of roles)) publicly stands beside the news organization(s) in the report. From this perspective, the also share in the cultural power & prestige that comes from the final product.
As suggested in the opening exchange, we don’t know if we’re leaving or arriving, and perhaps we’re doing both. Either way, it’s unclear what the future of journalism will look like and whatever it will be will be worked out in part through experiments and debates such as this one.