The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  It is also the case that the U.S. blogosphere has changed in important ways since the first waves of excitement during the mid-2000s. While blogging continues to be very popular, a great deal of online content production that in the mid-2000s would have found expression in blogging now appears on social networking sites, particularly Facebook, which at the time of writing in mid-2012 is used by more than 155 million Americans, or 50 percent of the entire U.S. population (Socialbakers, 2012).

  At the same time, some of the successful U.S. bloggers have become semi-professionalized. They act as consultants to campaigns, interest groups, government agencies, and traditional media. The blog and other interactive internet genres are no longer the radical departure they once were; they have been appropriated by all elite sectors of public communication in the United States, from politicians and agency officials to professional journalists to television and radio presenters. Moving in the direction of something like a model of a professional news organization, there are group blogs like the Huffington Post. Founded in 2005 by Arianna Huffington, a former columnist, California gubernatorial candidate, and wife of a U.S. Congressman, the Post soon attracted venture capital funding and evolved into a hybrid of group blog and professional news organization (for Huffington’s vision see Huffington, 2007). It combined articles from well-known public figures with commentary pieces by academics and even investigative pieces. It enjoyed the low overheads that derive from online-only publication, not to mention an army of several hundred unpaid volunteer writers. By the time it was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million, the Post, with more monthly visitors than the New York Times website (Economist, 2012), was a world away from the cliché of the plucky independent blog running on a shoestring budget.

  New digital network repertoires of collective action have also now proliferated across the American political landscape. The Wisconsin labor protests and Occupy sit-ins of 2011 and 2012 were the latest important manifestations of the networked activism that began in earnest during the late 1990s (Bennett, 2003; Bimber, 2003; Castells, 2004; Chadwick, 2006: 114–143; 2007). Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg have shown how the Occupy movement scaled from local to national and then to transnational with great speed via the sharing of collective action memes (2012). However, Occupy also sought to reconfigure the power of mediation by professional media. Borrowing from the repertoires of the early 2011 Egyptian pro-democracy rebellion centered on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Occupy activists hybridized real-space physical presence with their own instantaneous social media resources and publishing channels—flows of information that they knew would be monitored and reassembled by professional journalists eager to create authentic representations of their protest camps.

  It is also important to note that these digital network repertoires are no longer the preserve of movement activism. They have now also been seized upon by television figures in order to raise profiles and promote both conservative and liberal agendas. This is an area where there are some important differences between the U.S. and Britain, because in Britain the public service broadcasting model constrains editorializing in broadcast news. In America, where the constraints are weaker, there have been some interesting recent interactions between broadcasting and the internet in this field. In August 2010 controversial conservative radio and Fox News host Glenn Beck organized a one-hundred-thousand-person “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall in Washington DC. Beck was able to tap into the horizontal online networks established by the libertarian Republican Tea Party movement, whose supporters turned out in large numbers, but the event also revolved around Beck’s reputation as a radio and television presenter. A few months later, in response to a suggestion by Joe Laughlin, an ordinary user of the news aggregator site Reddit, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert mobilized an estimated two hundred thousand people from among networks of liberal activists to participate in what they jokily termed a “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” again on the National Mall. The idea of using the rally to raise donations for DonorsChoose, a educational charity website, also came from Joe Laughlin and his Reddit comrades (Adams, 2010). Although largely satirical in its approach, Jon Stewart stated in public on several occasions that his aim was to draw attention to the lack of reasoned debate in the American news media and the influence of partisan extremism on public discourse (Agence France-Press, 2010).

  Hybrid Mediality

  These processes of hybridization in Britain and the United States stretch beyond the simple availability of greater numbers of devices and media channels. Professional media producers can now more easily manipulate media resources, but citizen “produsers,” to use Axel Bruns’ formulation (2008), increasingly play their part. And the range of media resources has expanded as political actors and newspaper and broadcast journalists have also adopted media practices associated with the internet. As the internet diffused in the 1990s, its modalities, genres, and interfaces influenced other media. This process was particularly evident in the field of television news, which has come to rely on sophisticated visual techniques that are employed by editors in order to leaven “hard” news for a general audience, such as digital animation, montage, overlay, and data visualization. The broadcasting of all live events now rests upon a whole host of practices that seek to deliberately (and some would say artificially) construct a sense of the real-time (Auslander, 2008: 15–22). These include ever-changing news tickers, split screens with simultaneous film footage and commentary, and the use of live studio audiences, not to mention simultaneous Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. These techniques are themselves symbolic of the immediacy of television and its power in integrating and representing dispersed real-time events (Bolter & Grusin, 1999: 188) but these older affordances are now increasingly amplified by digital newer media. Customization, searching, filtering, copying, and pasting have become the norm in newsrooms and in political activism and campaigning. At the same time, the internet has been an important part of the transition away from the idea of computers as office machines and the growth of computing devices of many kinds, from notebooks to smartphones to tablet devices, as technologies for consuming and producing all forms of media.

  During the 1996 elections in the United States, CNN presented all of the results on their website as they rolled in. This was the first time that broadcasting’s immediacy—its status as a real-time medium for informing the American public about their political fate—was contested. CNN’s site crashed on several occasions due to the demand, but it was a hint that some form of integration of the television screen and the computer screen might become the experience for future election nights. Fast forward to 2012, when 11 percent of Americans dual-screened the first live televised presidential debate. In other words, they watched the debate live on television but simultaneously followed along and in many cases produced real-time social media commentary about the debate (Pew Research Center, 2012).

  In its use of computer-style interfaces, television has often provided viewers with little more than an illusory sense of interactivity. But television interactivity has recently evolved a great deal in response to the internet. Television news now frequently displays viewer commentary that has been supplied via e-mail, text message, Twitter, or webcam, as part of a digital montage approach to representation. Television news shows like Al Jazeera’s The Stream stretch this approach still further, by emulating the interfaces of online communication in a hybrid mix of Skype video calls, Facebook posts, Twitter updates, and traditional broadcast news anchors. So in an important sense, subject still to the influence of editorial gatekeeping, audiences can sometimes mobilize the logics of newer media to exert greater power over the flows of real-time television news, as it happens. Television streamed over the web grants viewers an even more literal sense of control. We may choose to stop the stream, browse to other sites, place our web chat, Facebook, or Twitter feeds alongside the streaming video, and watch these competing but also complementary representations unfold in real time.
By contributing commentary online we are both the subject and the object of this hybrid system. If digital new media hybridize media of representation, communication, and monitoring, the contemporary experience of watching a television show while participating in online discussion about the show on Twitter further recombines these associations, encouraging us to make rapid shifts backwards and forwards along a continuum from passive consumption to active production.

  Television program makers now seek to create content that will spark such connections across media, with the central aim of fostering online communities and networks that will generate and recirculate resources signifying loyalty and enthusiasm. Even if program makers do not consciously do this, a vast range of amateur online content that connects in one way or another with what happens on television is often only a Google search away. Some entertainment media have pushed this approach beyond branding tie-ins and toward what Henry Jenkins has termed “transmedia storytelling.” The Matrix trilogy of Hollywood films is Jenkins’ classic early example, with its blend of professionally produced and consciously integrated transmedia narratives distributed across the film, the Blu-ray extras, the web downloads, and the computer games that have all coevolved with online communities’ discussions of the film’s meaning and appeal. This process transcends earlier approaches which saw the simple duplication of a “base” product like a film character (2006: 95–96).

  But does the term “convergence” adequately capture these processes? First popularized during the 1970s as a way of describing the integration of computers, broadcasting, and telecommunications systems as the carriers of images, sound, and text, forty years on the idea of convergence continues to exercise its grip on the media industries and scholars alike, even though the reality has always been much messier than envisaged. The central problem with convergence has been its underlying assumption of a single delivery platform to which all media will inevitably be drawn. In practice, as Jenkins himself has admitted, there have been partial and shifting alliances between different media, as well as competition and resistance to change among older media in response to the new. Turf wars among those involved in the production and distribution of media and information have always diluted convergence. Where it does occur, convergence has been partial and contingent and based in discrete sectors of the media; it has not happened in the holistic sense originally predicted by influential scholars such as Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983b). The democratization of media production that is occurring through the proliferation and distribution of digital technologies requires us to move beyond convergence theory’s preoccupation with the production and dissemination of content through a single hierarchically organized delivery channel.

  One problem with the “convergence culture” approach is its equation of “online” with “grassroots” activism. The rise of online media elites, the increasing use of the logics of online media by those working in older media together with the ongoing intervention by non-elites in the construction of political news and information brings this dualism into question. When such large numbers of bloggers are now integrated into professionalized or semi-professionalized news production, when citizen activists are integrated into news-making assemblages through their participation as bloggers or Twitter and Facebook users, and when the vast majority of older media organizations have moved into the online environment, it is not always accurate to counterpose an online participatory culture against a centralized, top-down, broadcast media culture.

  In addition, transmediality continues to evolve, as new genres associated with the hybridization of television with newer online social media are increasingly brought into play. Nick Anstead and Ben O’Loughlin’s pioneering analysis of real-time tweeting during the BBC’s famous political discussion show Question Time in 2009 reveals the same logic but extends the analysis beyond genre. Anstead and O’Loughlin identify the emergence of politically engaged audiences who “use online publishing platforms and social tools to interpret, publicly comment on, and debate a television broadcast while they are watching it,” creating “centripetal dynamics that pull disparate and often-distanced individuals into a mainstream political event” (Anstead & O’Loughlin, 2011: 441, 457). As we shall see at many points throughout this book, these are emerging as important facets of campaign communication and the construction of news. Jenkins argued that the rise of online fan communities means that the main dynamic in television is the “shift from real-time interaction toward asynchronous participation” (Jenkins, 2006: 59), but in fact the reverse seems to be occurring, as ad hoc online communities now routinely form on Twitter and Facebook in response to television shows as they are aired. Little of this was in evidence during the early period of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s. But when the real-time communication affordances of social media suddenly emerged in the mid-2000s, this pushed things in a different direction, and in ways that simultaneously enhance the popularity and legitimacy of both online and broadcast media forms.

  Finally, transmediality is now also structured by users in ways that have nothing to do with professional media’s attempts to generate “buzz.” Take, for example, the group of individuals who use Twitter to assume the identities of the fictional cast of the television political drama, The West Wing. Though they have no connection with the show, their linguistic styles are eerily similar to those of the original characters. But their expression goes beyond mere mimicry, as they playfully construct a hybrid political space somewhere between fictional television entertainment and online political activism. In theirs and the worlds of their thousands of followers, the current president of the United States is not Barack Obama, but Matthew Santos, while “former president” Jed Bartlet tweets from a position of highly informed and highly engaged semi-retirement. The key point here is that the commentary of the Twitter West Wing cast is almost entirely aimed at current political events. “Bartlet” spends a great deal of time baiting real-life Republicans as well as commenting, often in considerable detail, on the daily machinations of Washington politics (Bartlet, 2011). As the anonymous author behind the account says, “I’d rather they see Jed Bartlet when they read the tweets, and not me.” His approach, he says, is to read “a few political pages bookmarked on Twitter … every morning to sort of get a bearing on what I’m going to tweet about that day and what President Bartlet would have to say about that” (Pappas, 2010). The facade of pure role play occasionally drops when the characters interact with other fans who enthuse about their recent viewings of reruns of the “real” television show. During such fleeting moments, this transmedia remediation of the original show is exposed, before normal business is resumed.

  Conclusion

  To revisit the phrase I used in the opening to chapter 2, all older media were once newer and all newer media eventually get older. Media and media systems are always in the process of becoming. The power relations within and between media—where media are understood as confluences of technologies, social practices, and publics—change over time, and with important results. But the older and the newer adapt, interact, and coevolve. This is a process characterized by immense flux, competition, and power. Media practices intermingle and compete, but sometimes aspects of media practice may become sealed off from outside influence, following processes of boundary-drawing and the delineation of reserved domains.

  As this chapter has shown, the media systems that are the focus of this book—those of Britain and the United States—are now hybrid, contradictory, mixtures of older, newer, and what Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin have termed “renewed” media (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010). Older media, primarily television, radio, and newspapers are still, given the size of their audiences and their centrality to public life, rightly referred to as “mainstream,” but the very nature of the mainstream is itself changing. While older media organizations are adapting, evolving, and renewing their channels of delivery, working practices and audiences, newer media are achieving popularity and becoming part of a new mainstream.
Television retains its primacy in the mediation of politics, though it is now accompanied by a panoply of online media activity, some of it facilitated by broadcasters themselves. Politicians, journalists, and publics are creating these new complexities—and adapting to them. Political communication is in transition. While broadcasting still remains at the heart of public life, the nature of mediated politics is evolving rapidly and is being pushed and pulled in multiple directions by multiple actors. Some of these forces are contradictory, some are integrative; all are generative of systemic hybridity.

  The way political elites, media elites, and publics produce and consume political information is changing. As use of the internet and mobile technologies has grown, so these media have become an important space for those creating and consuming political news. Audiences have never had access to so much political information through such a variety of news media. Digital technologies provide new opportunities for audiences to engage in political activities, express their opinions, and contribute public information in historically unprecedented ways. In some respects, the internet is contributing greater fluidity and openness to what social movement scholars would term the political opportunity structure: the constellation of political institutions that enable and constrain collective action and mobilization (Kitschelt, 1986). Increasingly, publics are able to exert influence and hold politicians and media to account through the use of newer media logics. All of the evidence suggests that growth in the numbers taking advantage of these newer media logics is likely to continue, but this growth will occur in the context of the evolution of older media’s power and older media logics.