Despite claims of continuity, contemporary data journalism is quite different from the earlier tradition of computer-assisted reporting. Although it echoes earlier claims about being scientific and democratic, these qualities are understood as resulting from better data access rather than as being something achieved by the journalist. In the context of Big Data in particular, human subjectivity tends to be downgraded in importance, even understood as getting in the way if it means hubristically theorising about causation rather than working with correlation and allowing the data to speak. Increasing ‘datafication’ is not what is driving changes in the profession, however. Rather, the impact of Big Data tends to be understood in ways that are consonant with pre-existing expectations, which are shaped by the broader contemporary post-humanist political context. The same is true in academic analysis, where actor–network theory seems to be emerging as the dominant paradigm for understanding data journalism, but in largely uncritical ways.

No abstract

Among the many reactions to the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, one of the most unexpected and striking was a public discussion of postmodernism. In his 22 September New York Times column, for example, Edward Rothstein interpreted the World Trade Center attacks as a 'challenge' to postmodernists, arguing that 'This destruction seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective.' 1 On 24 September, Time magazine proclaimed 'the end of the age of irony', with Roger Rosenblatt asking combatively: 'Are you looking for something to take seriously? Begin with evil.' Despite the devastation, Rosenblatt suggested, 'one good thing' would come out of 9/11: postmodernists would no longer be able to say that 'nothing was real'. 2 Similar views were expressed in academia. Conservative academic Andrew Busch argued that 'postmodernism has run smack dab into original sin, and original sin has won'; while Kenneth Westhues recalled telling his sociology undergraduates after 9/11: 'Hey, students, there is a real world. It's not all social construction….It's not a matter of point of view. It's a fact.' 3 Finally, said these commentators, here was an event so undeniably real and shockingly immoral that it would make a disengaged, ironic attitude untenable, and would instead prompt people to reaffirm traditional notions of right and wrong.Of course, the declaration of the end of the age of irony was premature. Before the month was out, US News and World Report editor John Leo was complaining that the reaction to 9/11 on university campuses was characterised by 'radical cultural relativism, non-judgmentalism, and a post-modern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending -all knowledge and morality are constructions built -2 -by the powerful.' 4 A November 2001 report compiled by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni on responses to 9/11 in US universities claimed to have found evidence that 'professors across the country sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America' (Martin and Neal 2001: 1). By the first anniversary of the attacks, Charles Kesler conceded in the conservative National Review: 'September 11 was a deathblow to postmodernism, we are often told. I wish this were true.' 5 Indeed, some observers argued that far from signalling the end of postmodernity 9/11 epitomised it. Christine Nicholls, for example, offered 'a reading of September 11 2001 as the first world crisis expressing postmodernity'. Noting that the attacks were evocative of 'the most spectacular of the Hollywood disaster movies', she suggested that: the main external referent for September 11 2001, at least as visual spectacle, seemed not to be 'the real' or 'reality' but the movies, specifically Hollywood movies. In a bizarre inversion of what is supposed to be the norm, simulacra of reality, at least in some respects, became the major referent for the real in this case. (Nicholls 2004) Rather than marking a return to the real, the spectacular d...

No abstract

No abstract