The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  Nonlinearity is an important principle here. According to some scholars of comparative politics, the paths to a hybrid regime are several and depend in part upon the characteristics of preceding arrangements. Simple authoritarian regimes may gradually grant minor concessions as a result of internal pressures, crises or international stimuli, as has been the case in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. New electoral regimes may emerge rapidly out of the old authoritarian settlement but may also have strong vestiges of the past, such as over-mighty executives, as is the case with Russia and several other post-communist systems. And democracies may sometimes “regress” toward authoritarianism, by retaining democratic elements like elections while executive power is gradually extended, as is the case in some Latin American countries.

  Approaches in which regimes are the unit of analysis have been accompanied by new directions in a cognate field: the social science of governance and regulation. Scholars in this field emphasize complexity, diversity, and the simultaneous coevolution of seemingly contradictory social, cultural, economic, and political practices. Ash Amin, an economic geographer, has written of new “micro worlds” of regulation, in which informational flows and networks constitute “an unfolding regime of heterarchical order that is topological, hybrid, decentered, and coalitional in its workings” (Amin, 2004: 217; see also Bulkeley, 2005). Henry Farrell, an international relations scholar, traces the emergence of “ ‘hybrid’ forms of governance … in which states seek—individually or in concord—to set general rules or principles under which transnational private actors implement policy and adjudicate disputes” (Farrell, 2003: 278). Karin Bäckstrand argues that there has been a general shift toward “hybrid, bifurcated, pluri-lateral, multi-level, and complex modes” of governance based on multistakeholder dialogues and partnership agreements (Bäckstrand, 2006: 468; see also Risse, 2004). Marc Allen Eisner portrays U.S. environmental governance as a “hybrid of traditional command-and-control regulation, government-supervised self-regulation, and corporate voluntarism, reinforced by the market and procurement” (Eisner, 2004: 161; see also Lockwood & Davidson, 2010). Meanwhile, political theorist Terry McDonald sketches out a model of democratic regulatory governance that derives its legitimacy from a hybrid blend of principles associated with state and non-state institutions, the assumption being that neither sector has the capacity to provide an integrated system (see also P. S. Berman, 2007; Macdonald, 2008). Finally, the work of Nobel-prize winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom suggests a hybrid approach to the governance of scarce common-pool resources, one that blends centralized enforcement of community rules and privatized competition. Ostrom’s work thus highlights the complexities of contextually specific, hybrid incentive structures in shaping power relations among actors (Ostrom, 1990; Sandler, 2010).

  Hybridity has also proved influential in an area that overlaps with governance and regulation: the study of organizations. This encompasses interpretations of the shifting nature of life inside organizations but also the increasingly fluid interactions between organizations. This is an interdisciplinary trend, as scholars from fields as diverse as management, sociology, political science, information science, and communication have become increasingly preoccupied with explaining the dialectical co-presence or the integration of a huge range of variables, such as: hierarchical and networked modes of coordination (Fimreite & Lægreid, 2009); elite control and individual autonomy (Clegg & Courpasson, 2004; Courpasson & Dany, 2003; Hodgson, 2004); centralization and decentralization (Ashcraft, 2001); technological artifacts and organizational norms and routines (Bloomfield & Hayes, 2009); voluntarism and directive planning (Langlois & Garzarelli, 2008; Shah, 2006); bureaucratic and market-based interorganizational and intraorganizational relationships (Foss, 2003); formal and informal divisions of labor (Ashcraft, 2006); expertise and lay knowledge (Bjørkan & Qvenild, 2010; D. Scott & Barnett, 2009); rationality and affect (Ashcraft, 2001); online and offline mobilization repertoires (Chadwick, 2007; Goss & Heaney, 2010); “entrepreneurial” and “institutional” modes of engagement (Bimber, et al., 2009); “protest” and “civic” forms of collective action (Sampson, et al., 2005); “alternative” and commercial models of news production (Kim & Hamilton, 2006); advertising-funded and state-regulated broadcasting (Born, 2003); institutional isomorphism and individuation (Pedersen & Dobbin, 2006); and “Americanized” election campaigning styles and nationally specific approaches (de la Torre & Conaghan, 2009; Nord, 2006; Plasser & Plasser, 2002). This diverse and impressive body of research is informed by hybrid thinking.

  Media and cultural shifts have of course played important roles in the constitution of these new hybrid domains, creating new relations of complex interdependence in the local-translocal and national-transnational spheres. It should therefore come as no surprise that the field of cultural studies has been inscribed with conceptual disputes about hybridity. Central concerns have included the production, transmission, and contested reception of media texts (Gilroy, 1993), and, more recently, digital technologies of transnational communication. Hybridity has emerged in postcolonial studies as a critical response to the dominance of “cultural imperialism” (Holton, 1998: 161–185). While cultural imperialism suggests the relatively effortless exporting of western cultural values to non-western contexts, hybridity scholars argue that the reality is in fact messier (Kraidy, 2005). Central to this usage of hybridity is cultural resistance through ironic subversion—the idea that historically “subaltern” cultural movements have selectively engaged in the integration and adaptation of aspects of dominant cultural genres in order to blunt the latter’s potential hegemony (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1994). Some scholars have explored the construction of racial and ethnic identities through mediated communication in postcolonial settings such as diaspora communities (Arnold & Schneider, 2007; Gillespie, 1995; Shome, 2006) and there is now a growing body of work examining hybrid media genres such as world music, the Latin American telenovela, the Bollywood film industry, and the subtle but significant changes that are made to “localized” television format shows that now form an important sector of the global entertainment industry, such as The X-Factor and Who Wants to be a Millionaire, to name just two.

  These cultural treatments of hybridity have often drawn attention to fundamental questions of ideology and power. The construction of hybridity is often portrayed as a heavily politicized and competitive process of interaction at critical historical junctures, as groups engage in struggle to assert their power and autonomy. Studies of cultural hybridity also reveal that the flow of cultural power is rarely unidirectional (Glynn & Tyson, 2007; Shim, 2006; Wang & Yeh, 2005). Some processes of hybridization are best seen as constructing “strategic inauthenticity,” whereby cultural creators deliberately incorporate non-indigenous genres as a means of challenging dominant or stereotypical expectations in their respective cultural fields (Luvaas, 2009; Taylor, 1997: 125–146). More broadly, the turn toward hybridity in cultural studies presents a challenge to analyses based on the oppositional interaction of static social phenomena. My aim here is not to argue for the importance of these specific examples, nor for the particular importance of cultural explanation per se, but rather to establish a general orientation toward power and change in the underlying dynamics of a system. It strikes me that these insights on power, appropriation, and counter-appropriation offer some useful conceptual resources for studying a system of political communication in which there are ongoing struggles between older and newer media logics.

  Linked in part to this literature on hybridity in cultural change is a broader concern with the ever-evolving nature of media genres. For example, attention is now shifting to the increasingly porous boundaries between “hard” news and “entertainment” genres in political communication (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011). Emblematic of this shift is of course the popularity of political comedy talk shows like The Daily Show in the United States (Baym, 2005: 262). Talk shows, especially those featuring audience participation, have
always hybridized and integrated news and entertainment genres (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994; see also Wadensjö, 2008). But The Daily Show takes this to extremes, combining humor with serious discussion of politics, media bias, and political hypocrisy, all through a highly entertaining satirical lens. As Geoffrey Baym writes, “Discourses of news, politics, entertainment, and marketing have grown deeply inseparable; the languages and practices of each have lost their distinctiveness and are being melded into previously unimagined combinations” (2005: 262; see also D. G. Young, 2011). Documentary, long considered a “serious” media form for politics, has undergone a transformation over the last decade, with the rise of hybrid genres such as fictional or semi-fictional “mockumentaries,” “docu-soaps,” “game-docs,” and “biopics” (Kilborn, 2003; Mast, 2009). Very recent political events are now routinely adapted by television dramatists, a good example being the BBC show On Expenses, which aired in 2010, within less than a year of the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, one of the biggest crises in the history of the British parliament. At the same time, fictional shows, like HBO’s Veep and the BBC’s The Thick of It increasingly integrate highly detailed plot lines and contextual information from real or half-real contemporary political events, in what Kay Richardson, Katy Parry, and John Corner term “secondary performance” of the political (Richardson, et al., 2012: 19). Meanwhile, genres such as cookery shows are putting the “info” back into infotainment, as public health campaigns and political mobilization occur in the older-media-meets-newer-media networked spaces facilitated, but by no means dominated by, high-profile “celebrity chefs” like Jamie Oliver.

  The internet and digital media are, of course, especially powerful in these processes. The internet and digital media hybridize and integrate a wide range of “ancestral” (C. R. Miller & Shepherd, 2004) genres in the process of creating new genres (Chadwick, 2006: 4–9; Crowston & Williams, 2000). They also encourage users and audiences to engage in what Clay Spinuzzi terms “subversive interactions”: the injection of familiar genres and routines into new and unfamiliar information environments (2003: 3). Journalists now routinely appropriate the genres of social media sites and hybridize these with their preexisting routinized, professional practice. But newer media are not uniquely powerful here. Older media have been steadily reinventing themselves. Television is now a prolific hybridizer of genres, especially since the emergence of so-called “reality” formats in the 1990s (Wood, 2004). And televisual style is now shot through with digital style. Various concepts have been proposed to capture these trends, from the “multimodality” approach that first emerged in the field of sociolinguistics (Kress, 2010) and which has been taken in new and fruitful directions by Manuel Castells with his concept of “mass self-communication” (Castells, 2009), to “remediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), “interdiscursivity” (Fairclough, 1992), “interpractice” (Erjavec, 2004), and “convergence culture” (Jenkins, 2006).

  Finally, the sociology of science and technology has given rise to what is probably the most radical understanding of hybridity: actor–network theory. Most often associated with the philosopher Bruno Latour, actor–network theory’s central claim is that modernity has been based upon a seemingly “natural” but actually artificial ontology that distinguishes between “nature” and “society,” or between the human and “nonhuman” domains. Actor–network theory posits that the world is based upon “hybrid networks” of human and nonhuman hybrid subject-objects. In this perspective, nonhuman “actants” have a form of agency that emerges, not from the intrinsic capacity of nonhuman “things” to act alone, but rather from these things’ interdependent interactions with other resources—both technological and human—in a given sociotechnical system. These hybrid networks must be analyzed holistically in order to understand the interplay of technologies and social actants (Latour, 1993: 10–11; see also Latour, 2005).

  Actor–network theory is heavily dependent upon the idea of hybridity. By freeing us from modes of either/or thinking, and by creating a generalized principle of “symmetry” between people and “things,” it enables us to identify sociotechnical systems whose functioning depends upon the intermingled agencies of the social and the technological. Indeed, Latour’s assumption is that the very terms “social” and “technological” are merely labels of convenience that do not hold any substantive meaning. As he vividly puts it “ … when we find ourselves invaded by frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers, and so on, when our daily newspapers display all these monsters on page after page, and when none of these chimera can be properly on the object side or on the subject side, or even in between, something has to be done” (Latour, 1993: 49–50).

  Actor–network theory’s relational theory of agency and power is controversial primarily due to this understanding of hybridity, but the approach has radiated out from its origins in the sociology of science and is now starting to influence many different fields of inquiry, including anthropology, political theory, the sociology of organizations, social psychology, communication, and cultural studies (Saldhana, 2003). Its influence has been particularly strong in human geography (Lulka, 2009; Thompson & Cupples, 2008; Whatmore, 2002) and is now growing in information systems research (Heeks & Stanforth, 2007; Ranerup, 2007). More recently, some scholars have integrated some of the themes of actor–network theory with broader philosophical ideas in poststructuralism and empirical developments in political communication. Most important here is the idea of the assemblage, which I discuss in chapter 4. Originally introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004), the idea of the assemblage has recently been stripped down to its essentials and used as a means of capturing the heterogeneous social and technological aspects of collective action in news making and political campaigning (Chadwick, 2011a, 2011b; Kreiss, 2012; R. K. Nielsen, 2012). Situating power and agency in the context of integrated but still conflict-ridden systems comprising people and technologies offers a creative orientation for the study of media and politics.

  Hybridity’s Analytical Challenges

  Despite offering these rich theoretical resources, an ontology of hybridity also presents challenges. To what extent can hybrids be understood as something analytically unique “in themselves,” and as something new? Is the whole notion of hybridity logically dependent upon prior and coherent fixed categories? Does it always entail the ultimate resolution of contradictions? One way of addressing these problems is to distinguish between two basic modes of hybridity. In one sense, hybrids may be seen as “diluted” versions of their antecedents. A more suggestive approach, however, is “particulate” hybridity, which sees antecedents’ characteristics as always in the process of being selectively recombined in new ways (Wade, 2005: 609). Particulate hybrids are recognizable from their lineages but they are also genuinely new. Newness derives from the particulate recombination of prior elements. Though I did not use the terms diluted and particulate, I have previously argued for the importance of both of these forms of hybridity as outcomes of the influence of the internet on political organizations. Older organizational forms—political parties and interest groups—now blend together their own preexisting campaigning styles with mobilization repertoires typically associated with social movement organizations. Particulate hybrid organizations, such as MoveOn, the American political movement, selectively recombine mobilization repertoires typically associated with political parties, interest groups, and social movements (Chadwick, 2007).

  This particulate idea of hybridity is similar to cultural theorist Edward Said’s notion of the “contrapuntal,” which he borrowed from musicology. As Said put it, “in the counterpoint of western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives f
rom the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work” (Said, 1994: 59–60). Counterpoint is an intriguing musical technique, found most vividly perhaps in Bach’s well-known work, The Goldberg Variations. It relies not upon strict harmony—compatible notes played simultaneously—but the weaving together of quite distinct melodic lines that may occasionally intersect at certain points to create a harmony that is substantial but often only temporary. As Marwan Kraidy has convincingly argued, this contrapuntal thinking is “well suited for understanding the relational aspects of hybridity because it stresses the formative role of exchanges between participating entities” (Kraidy, 2005: 13).

  Hybridization is therefore a process of simultaneous integration and fragmentation. Competing and contradictory elements may constitute a meaningful whole, but their meaning is never reducible to, nor ever fully resolved by, the whole. Particulate hybridity is the outcome of power struggles and competition for preeminence during periods of unusual transition, contingency, and negotiability. Over time, these hybrid practices start to fix and freeze; they become sedimentary, and what was once considered unusual and transitional comes to be seen as part of a new settlement, but that new settlement is never entirely fixed.