Abstract
This book examines the immense economic and cultural influence of the ‘big five’ technology companies Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, and provides a critical analysis of their impact on journalism and the public sphere. The four empirical chapters deal with the importance of distribution, the emergence of alternative media, the promise of automated journalism and the influence of right-wing initiatives in citizen journalism, which was previously more liberal and left-wing. Whittaker’s perspective is limited to the Anglo-American cultural sphere, and abounds with factual information about earnings and losses, growths and declines for legacy media as well as the big five. The book is well-resourced, densely written and contains a large number of footnotes for further reading. It is not an easy read but it is rewarding when you get into it.
Whittaker adopts two critical approaches. He argues that digital distribution, online advertising, alternative media and most recently automation have led to a ‘dramatic loss in confidence in mainstream media’ (p. 5) and made the public sphere ‘unstable’ (p. 5) and ‘severely weakened’ (p. 65). He is particularly concerned with explaining how alternative media and fake news emerged over a long period.
Whittaker also criticizes what he considers to be an unfounded technological determinism in the public image about digital technology and the big five tech companies. This mentality reduces complex social developments to a story of inevitable progress, and furthermore has an idealized understanding of community. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders are typically presented as idealistic heroes struggling to make the world better. Whittaker discusses recent developments in terms of ‘digital ecosystems’ and ‘media ecology’ and tries hard to avoid simplistic teleological narratives. He is good at showing how social conflict and tensions about new technology influence developments, and how these forces are under-communicated in dominant narratives about digital media. For example, he reminds us that Google Glass failed miserably despite its advanced functionalities, because people found its presence in ordinary live situations threatening and intrusive.
While he has a sharp critical eye, Whittaker sometimes cannot avoid sounding like a technological determinist himself. He rightly points out that popularity is easily quantifiable, while veracity is not. This has allowed for search tools, click-based ratings and automation that moved away from more creative journalistic production that only humans can conduct. To me this sounds like a bias that is less social than it is technical.
Interestingly, Whittaker has an optimistic view of automated news writing with AI. It can lead to more objective journalism, he argues, and it can relieve journalists of some of the mechanistic aspects of news writing. ‘In the face of an explosion of data that was unimaginable when Gutenberg first invented his printing press, it is not surprising at all that automation has risen to take the place once occupied by human editors and gatekeepers’ (p. 165). To suggest that a level of automation is simply unavoidable in our time also sounds more like a technical than social bias.
While Whittaker has difficulty upholding a consistent social constructivism position throughout, he has nevertheless written a highly informative and thought-provoking book.