"Mapping" Media Spaces: Smoothness, Striation, and the Expropriation of Desire in American Journalism from Postindustrial to Datafied Capitalism. Issue 4 (1st October 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fitzgerald, Andrew Arthur
• Is Part Of: Communication theory. Volume 29:Issue 4(2019)
• Page Start: 401
• Page End: 420
• Publication Date: 2018-10-01
• Subjects: New Media Theory and History -- Political Economy -- Critical Theory -- Media Sociology -- Labor Force -- Journalism; Communication -- Periodicals; Information theory -- Periodicals; 302.205
• DOI: 10.1093/ct/qtz001
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1050-3293

Abstract

Abstract: The future of journalism in the digital age is a major topic of both vocational and academic debate—as is the question of whether anything is "new" with the rise of the digital more broadly. This article argues for a redeployment of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of "smooth" and "striated" space. Conducting a synthesis of a new wave of scholarship on digital journalism with the body of "sociology of news" literature from the late 1970s and 1980s, it maps continuities and intensifications of processes in the interplay between journalistic desire and the constraints of liberal capitalism, while also noting a key shift in the relationship between journalism and dominant economic classes, concomitant with a new form of "datafied capitalism."