Abstract
The whole wired world appears, at first glance, to be our personalized digital oyster. As Joshua Braun, assistant professor of journalism studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, addresses in his book, it is imperative that we look inside the “black box” of online media distribution to fully appreciate the inner working and efforts of contemporary media organizations. The connected individual has become a focal point for developing technologies that address fundamental shifts in content creators’ relationship with, and engagement of, online media consumers. Braun shares that “we appear to have entered a phase in which much of news work revolves around a somewhat different concern: How do journalists get non-journalists to distribute their messages?” (p. 5). This deceptively simple observation is at the very core of a new “Conversation Economy” that requires the leveraging of online content consumers and their social networks. For good reason, Braun calls for a paradigm shift in research that is more inclusive of the roles and implications of distribution, noting that past scholarship has skewed more heavily toward production efforts and consumer effects. As the foundation for his research, Braun utilizes a case study methodology with three primary field sites and numerous interviews set in the larger MSNBC constellation of independent units, cable TV shows, and management, as it was structured in 2010.
Central to the importance of this inquiry is the veil of instantaneous access to peruse and procure online media that obfuscates the highly orchestrated and negotiated journey that content travels. This path often includes an incredible degree of curation, often automated, taking place to ensure that content gets on the right websites and devices for the right consumers. Braun hints that the final distribution routes hidden inside this black box may come at costs we have yet to understand, stating that “decisions about distribution, whether made by media executives or file sharers, are—in the barest terms—attempts to control who has access to information and culture, and under what conditions” (pp. 7-8). To render these socio-technical systems visible, Braun chooses to rely heavily on science and technology studies perspectives on infrastructure. In the first chapters of the book, Braun builds upon the study of seafaring Portuguese merchant ships charting trade routes, or “Voltas,” amid natural phenomena and human interests to allegorically depict the journey of online media content to the consumer. The comparison is an apt one, and Braun steers clear of over-applying it, returning to the metaphor to tie the concepts of the first section of the book together cohesively.
Braun approaches some technological artifacts, like the MSNBC video player, through an “anti-art” lens, seeking an elevated discussion of whether “the object in itself has politics or is making a statement” (p. 55). While the discussion of factors leading up to the development of the player and its functionality is impressive, I found greater value in Braun’s use of it to introduce the emergence of business-to-business companies “in the media ecosystem that remain largely, and often entirely, invisible to end consumers, and have until now remained equally unstudied by researchers and media critics” (p. 10). These actants fill in the various technological gaps for media organizations that help to make online media distribution profitable, automated, and tuned to the user experience in ways that may push the boundaries of user privacy.
Throughout the book, Braun applies a socio-technical lens of heterogeneous engineering, successfully fueled by many of its common elements with actor–network theory. A socio-technical lens allows Braun to equally examine human, organizational, and technological actants achieving various temporary states of equilibrium amid often-conflicting needs and priorities and available technologies. Through the case study, Braun shows how a media organization like MSNBC expands its reach and technologies by acquiring or contracting with existing teams. What Braun adeptly demonstrates is that these teams “never entirely give up their shape” (p. 40) despite becoming entangled with MSNBC, and they continue to carry forward some of their own interests and technologies.
Braun extracts a core theme of “recalcitrance” from these entanglements where “the introduction of a gadget to the emerging solution creates a new problem” (p. 40) in need of its own solution. These new problems often require the addition of new organizational or technological actants to the network. Braun’s switching from the vantage point of one actant to that of another highlights this recalcitrance throughout the case study as it reoccurs with the addition of each new actant or technology and the network seeks a new equilibrium that Braun calls isometric pressure.
Throughout the book, Braun pulls back the curtain on MSNBC’s growth to help the reader see the continual and recalcitrant process of equalizing these isometric pressure systems. What arise from these new equilibria are shifted trajectories for organizational initiatives, as well as both seamless and unwieldy user experiences. Braun uses interview data to illustrate how MSNBCs processes became recalcitrant, artfully pairing quotes with actant vantage points. Ultimately, Braun succeeds in shedding light on the path that online content traces from producers to consumers. In the end, I found myself with a profound feeling that in new ways the line is blurring between the role of online users as content consumers, and evolving roles as extensions of both distribution and the production process.