Mark Deuze on rethinking the journalist as a DJ when we are all media

Mark Deuze, then associate professor in Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications, opened the Neo-Journalism conference in Brussels in October 2012 by going back much further than the internet. The first function of journalism, he argued, was to warn of danger: early human groups needed individuals who would say when something was coming, and those individuals were killed first, which made the act a noble one. As societies urbanised a second appeared, and with it stories about the elite — telling people who is in charge and who the heroes are, with voting as the modern form of that worship. A third arrived in the twentieth century: setting out the values and rules of a society. Any newspaper, on his reading, is some combination of the three, from a market crash to a report of what people are not supposed to do.

None of that, he said, is owed to journalism as a profession; it is how a society functions. The belief that journalism is special is ancient in one sense and a very twentieth-century artefact in another, sustained by a trade that continually tells itself what it is and who counts as a member — which left academics, he noted, studying a group of people who are not special but have told themselves that they are, and handing each other awards that confirm it. The crisis was therefore a broken narrative rather than a broken craft — “Everybody is a journalist now.” His verdict on the models in journalism studies that put the individual journalist at the centre was one word: “Crap.” A Facebook status update follows the same pattern as a news story, warning of danger, marking who leads and placing the writer in a society; without those updates, he said, people would not know “where we are, who we are and where we belong to.”

Media, in his framing, are three things at once: devices with personalities, generally reliable and occasionally infuriating; activities; and social arrangements that structure a life. As artefacts they are disappearing — a rotary dial telephone was plainly a telephone doing one thing, while a mobile phone is no longer a phone. Media now occupy every waking moment and, through updates arriving in the background, part of the sleeping ones. The Arab Spring, the London riots and Occupy could not have happened without media but were not caused by media, and they behaved like media: rising quickly, nobody in control, no central agenda. Deuze compared them to the conversation in the bar the night before.

The consequence he drew is that there is no audience left to speak of. Content is made everywhere, by users, and the largest share of it is content about content — people telling each other about the stories passed on by people they trust. That is a description of a network rather than of a channel, and it is what the closing image was for.

The last slide was a photograph of the dance DJ Tiësto. A DJ has to know and respect the source material for an audience to respond, and Tiësto answers to no industry: a global brand with a label that draws other artists in, a key node in a network rather than a link in a supply chain. Journalism, Deuze concluded, had reached the point where it could go beyond itself and think of itself that way.