RE Media And The Digital Wormhole
Remediation theory (Bolter and Grusin,1999) postulates that new media forms [present] themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media. In order to scrutinise whether this is true of SNES such as Buzzfeed, Bolter and Grusin's idea of double logic of immediacy is a useful entry point.
The holy grail of any medium is, as outlined in the double logic, is that of immediacy. Whilst true immediacy - the complete and unadulterated immersion in a particular media form or content, to the exclusion of any other external influence - is virtually impossible to achieve, media, particularly digital media, it could be argued, strive to create the illusion of the media form as an extension of the user themselves and to create seamless connections between them.
In the world of the SNES, the illusion of immediacy is facilitated by the capacity of social media. Buzzfeed, for example, as a site on its own, only gets a third of its traffic direct to the site, the other two thirds are drawn down through social media. This digital wormhole is the perfect environment for what Jodi Dean (2010) describes as communicative capitalism. She takes the position that
Contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. (p4, 2010)
The operative word here is capture. Immediacy, or at least the illusion of it, thrives on the undivided plugged-in attention of its audience. Consequently, there are a number of elements that can perhaps be identified that enable social news and entertainment sites to act as communicative capitalists, thus helping to perpetuate this illusion. Firstly, the idea set out earlier, that of the user's values being embedded in the content itself, underlines an important way in which social content mirrors, and thus draws in, its audience. Social media feeds are littered with an array of Buzzfeed's quizzes, ranging from Which Philosopher Are You? (1st March 2014) to Which Adele Song Should You Sob To Tonight? (15th November 2015), and the listicle format, popularised by Buzzfeed, covers anything and everything from 22 Tweets About Procrastination Which Will Make You Laugh Out Loud (17th November 2015), 33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed In You (12th April 2010) to 11 photos of US Weapons Used By ISIS (8th September 2014). Both serve to simultaneously reflect the user's values and ideologies as well to engage them further by interacting with the content. To illustrate how the psychology of this works, Dean goes on to acknowledge
“I know that quizzes on Facebook are ingenious ways of collecting information from me and my friends, but I take them anyway. The psychoanalytic notion of fetishism provides a convenient shorthand: “I know, but nevertheless. . . .” (p5, 2010)
The same principle could perhaps be equally applied to the second way in which sites like Buzzfeed suck their audiences further through the digital wormhole of social media, that of clickbait journalism. Clickbait is a relatively new term in media, although it clearly has its roots in history as the modern day descendant of yellow journalism. As early as 1913, headlines such as those below appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's paper The World (home of the 'Yellow Kid' cartoon which gave rise to the name yellow journalism)
King Victor Shielded By His Queen From Assassin's Bullets
"Oldest Crook" To End Days in the Prison He Loves
Crowd Tries to Kill Would-Be Murderer
Coffyn Carries Passenger in Air Trip About the Bay
Over a hundred years later, current headlines in social news and entertainment media look very similar.
Refugees arriving in Scotland will get this greeting Upworthy 17th November 2015
What will our life look like after the robots steal all our jobs? Vice, 17th November 2015
Isis says it used this soda to take down Russian passenger jet Gawker, 17th November 2015
The term clickbait perjoratively describes content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page (Oxford English Dictionary) or as Josh Benton, of Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab, defines it on Twitter Noun: things I don't like on the Internet. Although the concept will be discussed in more detail later, it is important to point out, that in terms of remediation, Buzzfeed has been central to the discourse surrounding clickbait journalism, and its role in the public consciousness. Buzzfeed itself decries that it employs this type of journalism and states
“You can trick someone to click, but you can’t trick someone to share” (2014)
Whether or not Buzzfeed believes it has been a proponent of clickbait or not, what is key is to understand is that digital journalism relies on the click through rate of its content. Clicking on a story is, more often than not, the semi-arbitrary result of wanting to bridge the curiosity gap (Loewenstein, 1994), sharing a story, however, is perhaps, for many journalists, the true litmus test of whether the audience emotionally invests in it and aligns with its values.
In light of this, SNES would perhaps prefer to modify the term clickbait to clickworthy - content is always going to need a snappy headline, but, as can be evidenced by the general ennui that audiences seem regularly express about clicking on an appealing headline, only to be disappointed with the content not living up to expectations, sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and The Huffington Post rapidly would inevitably lose the trust of their audiences if this were to become the overarching perception. These sites need to ensure their content has a much greater impact than the simple click-transaction - and that's where the compulsion or drive to share comes in to play.
Shareability is also the crux of where immediacy (or the illusion of it) crosses into the other half of Bolter and Grusin's double logic, that of the notion of hypermediacy. Hypermediacy operates where, instead of trying to hide the presence of the media form itself, which is the underlying principle of immediacy, the audience is actively reminded of its presence. As Bolter and Grusin state
“New digital media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between
transparency and opacity.”
This oscillation is embedded within the DNA of the medium. On one hand, social content aims to draw us in through the immediacy of endless 'windowed' content, through the Droste-like effect of passively clicking on link after link, in an attempt to subconsciously fulfil our cognitive thirst for information. On the other hand, it also plays on our affective needs, and our hypermediated awareness of, and the desire to connect with others through, sharing, commenting and creating. Jodi Dean, however, offers that this communicative capitalism does not thrive because of unceasing or insatiable desires but as the repetitive intensity of drive (p6, 2010)
The very idea of hypermediacy implies awareness, and with awareness usually comes greater control and choice. However, what could be argued is that we, as the audience, might be aware there might be the appearance of choice, but ultimately, what the wormhole does is play to our desires, or drives, as Dean calls it (p6, 2010). The journey of social media distribution, for the audience, has no designated beginning - the audience usually arrives casually at the article or link through their social media feed, not through direct choice- and it has no end - the article or link may be shared, it may be commented on, it may be 'liked', it may be blogged about, or it may be ignored. The life or narrative that the audience creates for social news and entertainment content is summed up by what William J Mitchell (1994), said when he described the hypermediacy of the internet,
“[It] privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy and heterogeneity and... emphasises process or performance rather than the finished art object” (p31, 1999)
One perspective of this is that there is the appearance of control and choice to the audience but, in reality, social media carefully curate links, and what the audience's choice is usually comprised of is the product of social folksonomy, structured journalism and sponsored content. Deuze (2005) states that
“The manifold scrambled, edited and converged ways in which we produce and consume information worldwide are gradually changing the way people interact, are interconnected, and give meaning to their lives.” (p8, 2005)
Gunther Kress explored this idea further in his theory of multimodality (2010). He believed that media forms contain their own rhetoric of communication through the interplay of visual and textual content. When applied to New Media and Web 2.0, Kress again puts forward the idea, like Mitchell, of the social world becoming fragmented and individualized. When this occurs, there is a sense of disruption and tension when new forms of communication, created by new media, demand that
“Social and ‘political’ relations, tastes, needs and desires be newly assessed.” (2010)
The corollary of this is that a new rhetoric is created. Buzzfeed has responded to this by its style of coagulating pathos, human interest and hard news into easily digestible, highly shareable items. Kress extends his theory further by postulating that in this tension, created by increased fragmentation and individuation, there is a period of searching for new conventions and norms to create a sense of stability or as Kress says, a strong frame. One could argue that Buzzfeed has led the way in creating this ‘strong frame’ and this also lends credence to how it is shaping the industry as a result.
Buzzfeed, and sites like it, rely on the 'binding technique' of social media, and the drive of the audience is accelerated by the combined effect of the cognitive and affective pull of clickbait/clickworthy content. However, this drive is no longer just measured through quantitative viewing or readership figures, as in the past for traditional media, it can be now be measured by cutting edge analytics, as in the case of Buzzfeed's proprietary POUND (Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion) analytics software. Not only can Buzzfeed tell what the audience is clicking on and where they are getting it from, they now have the capability to know what the audience does with the content once they get it. And that is the - very powerful - difference.
This power lies not just in the content SNES create, nor simply the recognition of the cognitive or affective needs of the audience but also the understanding and acting upon the drives or desires in its distribution and the monetizing of these within the double-bind tension of social media which is both hyper-individualist and collectivist at the same time. This is what Perelman recognizes in loose terms, as referenced earlier, and if we wrap up the idea further, in Lacanian terms, the pleasure or jouissance experienced by filling the lack or void in the audiences' world created by a fragmented, hyper-individualised digital culture, and the resulting drive for them to connect, is what SNES capitalise on.
To refer back to the concept of remediation again, in the way Bolter and Grusin define it, to simply explain it as a refashioning of older media forms doesn't feel robust enough to encompass all the different ways the nuances of new media have shaped the journalism industry. The efficiency of the term, in this context, becomes greater when combined with the acknowledgement of it as part of a continuum in defining change.
Deuze (2005) packages up remediation alongside the concepts of participation and bricolage, and this goes some way further to mapping out the complexity of the relationship between new media and the journalism industry. However, when something so fundamental changes in the media landscape, it seems that to couch it in terms which imply it is straightforwardly the repackaging of something old, negates the whole idea of the new in new media. It would seem naïve to say television was just cinema remediated because, although both forms are based in moving image, the medium and the context each occupies it entirely differently.
Similarly, journalism, like moving image, can be present in multiple entirely different media or platforms. Indeed, Buzzfeed, and its SNES companions, magpie from every area of media. If, therefore, something new is created, even with recognisable elements of older forms, the concepts of remediation and even bricolage seem to fall short of adequately defining the current fabric of today's journalism.
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