This chapter draws on three research projects on journalism, audience practices and newsroom cultures and uses them to illustrate the changing nature of the communicative relationship between journalists and audiences operating in a media environment characterized by digital technologies. This development in communicative practices is already yielding changes in traditional newsroom routines and could lead to a shift in the communicative orientation of journalism that puts an emphasis on dialogue, moderation and curation, instead of the unidirectional dissemination of news, a kind of dissemination that might not suffice any longer as a unique characteristic for journalism in the pluralistic information ecosphere of the digital realm. However, this chapter highlights that this transition follows neither a linear nor a simultaneous process for all segments of journalism, for all journalists or all audience members. In sum, this chapter confronts expectations about innovative journalistic practices and highlights how communicative forms and media ensembles, which were not available in the predigital era, establish new modes of dialogue with audiences. The conclusion discusses how this transformation of communicative figurations among journalists and media users affects their self-conception with regards to their roles and core functions in their given community and in society as a whole.

Data power is a highly ambivalent phenomenon and it is precisely these ambivalences that open up important perspectives for the burgeoning field of critical data studies: First, the ambivalences between global infrastructures and local invisibilities. These challenge the grand narrative of the ephemeral nature of a global data infrastructure and instead make visible the local working and living conditions, and resources and arrangements required to operate and run them. Second is the ambivalences between the state and data justice. These consider data justice in relation to state surveillance and data capitalism and reflect the ambivalences between an “entrepreneurial state” and a “welfare state”. Third is the ambivalences of everyday practices and collective action, in which civil society groups, communities, and movements try to position the interests of people against the “big players” in the tech industry. With this introduction, we want to make the argument that seeing data power and its irreducible ambivalences in a pointed way will provide an orientation to the chapters of this book. To this end, we first give a brief outline of the development of critical data studies. In part, we also want to situate the data power conferences, the most recent of which this volume is based on. This will then serve as a basis for taking a closer look at three facets of the ambivalence of data power.

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