From oral chit-chat to web — a brief chronology of news
“Maybe it’s the beginning of a brand new era — there was web, then mobile, apps and now bots. It is an incredibly powerful paradigm shift.”
Surely, announcing the beginning of a new era needs a strong awareness of the past: Because in order to give such a statement, retrospection has to reveal continuities of thought and action that a new appearance seems to break with. But findings like these have to be looked at with caution.
And especially when a paradigm shift — a term by Thomas S. Kuhn that in everyday terms can be defined as “a time when the usual and accepted way of doing or thinking about something changes completely” (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/paradigm-shift; retrieved on 02 August 2016) — has been declared by someone who might be lively interested in placing himself and his projects at the very front of technological development one has to be even more sceptical.
In our case it is David Marcus, chef of the Facebook Messenger, who declares at first with hesitation — „maybe it’s the beginning of a brand new era“ — and later on with absolute diagnostic clarity — „It is an incredibly powerful paradigm shift“ — a turn of time (cf. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/12/facebook-messenger-launches-chat-bot-economy-to-take-on-apps/; retrieved on 28 September 2016).
But do bots in general and journalistic news bots in particular really represent a paradigm shift? Is it legitimate to see conversational bots in the trajectory of the web, mobile and apps?
As one of our blog-projects we would like to engage a rhetoric critically that puts bots in line with turning points in media history and therefore regards them as something wholly new. Therefore, this blog entry will have a look at the history of news in order to reveal the most important steps preceding the news logic of journalistic bots. The next text in this series will adopt a more technical perspective by questioning: Should bots be regarded as a new tree in the landscape of media technologies or do they merely carry forward old logics in a more sophisticated envelope? Finally, with the collected insights in mind, we would like to come to a conclusion of arguments speaking for and against conversational news bots marking a paradigm shift.
But as said before, let’s start with a look at…
A Short History of News
Before giving statements about the history of a particular concept of interest it might be a good idea to agree on how the concept at hand shall be understood in the following. In other words:
What are news?
In his 2007 monography entitled “A History of News” Mitchell Stephens suggests to define news as “new information about a subject of some public interest that is shared with some portion of the public” (p. 4). As indicated in this definition, news have to be seen as a matter of intrasocial exchange or communication and therefore as a part of the sphere of media.
This assumption is supported by the structure underlying Stephens’ book: Starting with spoken news, the author deals with written and printed news as well as newspapers, reporting and electronic news. Against this background, it becomes clear that the history of news is closely related to the history of media, and to be more precise, especially to the history of their technological side.
Word of mouth as a media technology?
But speaking of orality as a media technology might be surprising at first glance. For don’t we think of the hard and artificially produced materiality of gramophone, radio and television when we hear the term “media technology”? The everyday understanding would assume just that. But German media studies scientist Hartmut Winkler (2008) pleads for an expansion of this narrow understanding of technology to a wider conception that embraces oral language and practices such as dance or rituals as well (cf. p. 91).
And as Stephens illustrates, the first news technologies were quite of that kind: People met at central places and exchanged the latest gossip by word of mouth; messengers delivered information from A to B and criers proclaimed newly enacted rules and instructions. And apart from that smoke signals and drums as examples of visual and acoustic delivery of messages should be counted to the news technologies as well.
For Stephens, the technologies mentioned are dated back as far as 10,000 years, the time of agriculture and a growing stability of societies. But as he points out, especially the “oral news system must have arrived early in the development of language, some tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago” (p. 17).
Time, space and news
3,500 B.C. the Chinese used domesticated horses to increase the speed by which news could be delivered (cf. p. XI). This circumstance indicates that the pace of news exchange is a matter of great importance: As Stephens points out, the “requisite of freshness” (p. 4) is central as it separates news from historical data that usually lack it.
The need to transfer news over great geographical distances as fast as possible hints to a classic of media theory: Canadian economist Harold A. Innis (1949) differentiated media by their ability to overcome space (e.g. radio and television) or to withstand the tortures of temporality and thereby overcome time (e.g. stone and clay tablets). Starting from this conception, Hartmut Winkler (2008) suggested to think of the relation between time and space in terms of a coordinate system — with an axis of time and an axis of space — that allows to classify media according to their ability of overcoming these two dimensions. This points to the question as to where news shall be put within Innis’ logic and Winkler’s reconception.
As Stephens explains, via news “groups of people glance at aspects of the world around them” (S. 4). Sensually restricted in the perception of the environment surrounding them, people are in other words released from their isolation by the reception of news which connect them to places, events and people that are lying far beyond their natural reach. Having said that, it is the transfer function of media (a term suggested by classic of media theory Friedrich Kittler (1993) for the overcoming of space) that is dominant with news. (In this context, a bottle post might be a special case of the news logic, as it has probably overcome great geographical distances as well as an extended stretch of time.)
With the development of written language news exchange was no longer a concern of the orality and memory of a messenger but rather of the capacities of transport systems and the handiness of the materials carrying the relevant symbols. Stephens dates “the oldest known writing systems” (p. XI) back to tablets in Uruk and Mesopotamia around 3,100 B.C.. But quite frankly: clay and stone tablets were heavy and bulky and thus inappropriate for carriage over great distances. Instead, these materials were largely reserved for monumental inscriptions that were meant to exist eternally. For the everyday exchange of written information, on the contrary, more portable materials such as papyrus, wood and leather were used (cf. Assmann, 1988, p. 94).
Printed scripture and word of mouth
With the invention of block printing in China (618) and the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450 the technological ground was laid to publish news at an unprecedented scale, with an Italian report on a tournament in 1470 being “the oldest known news publication printed on a letter press” (cf. Stephens, 2007, p. XIII) . But at least after the invention of block printing and the use of moveable bronze types by the Koreans in 1241, in medieval Europe spoken news remained the dominant form of exchanging new information. A phenomenon that puts further stress on the importance of word of mouth in news distribution was the booming of coffeehouses from 1650 to the 18th century in England. Nevertheless, there are borders set to the range of orally conveyed news as Greater London in the 18th century illustrates: For with a population of 670,000 people by the year 1700, it had grown simply too large for spoken news to circulate with ease (cf. pp. XII — XVI).
1650 as the opening year of the first coffeehouse in Oxford was also the birth date of the world’s first daily newspaper: With the permission of his king, Timotheus Ritzsch published the “Einkommende Zeitung” in Leipzig, which appeared six times a week and lasted for two years; but its main successor — the “Leipziger Zeitung” — was able to prevail until the 20th century (cf. http://www.mdr.de/zeitreise/weitere-epochen/neuzeit/artikel125002.html; retrieved on 02 August 2016). The appearance of Ritzsch’s newspaper was framed by the confusions and uncertainties of the years following the 30-year war from 1618 to 1648, which might have been a reason for the people’s thirst for knowledge.
In 1702, the “Daily Courant” as the first successful newspaper printed in English was published and followed by the “Journal de Paris” as the first daily newspaper in France 75 years later. As late as 1783 America’s first daily newspaper appeared on stage (cf. Stephens, 2007, pp. XVI — XVII).
Steam in the news boiler
In 1814 industrialization took hold of the journalistic production routines: By the help of the steam engine, the “Times of London” could increase its sheet production rate from 250 sheets per hour to 1,100 pieces of paper. And besides, news proliferation could profit from the increased use of steam engines yet in another perspective: In April 1838 the “Sirius” and the “Great Western” were the first steamships to cross the Atlantic Ocean — a trip of only 13 days (cf. pp. XIX — XX), that was the beginning of a competition for the fastest Atlantic crossings in favour of intercontinental news exchange.
As fast as light.
With the invention of electronic telegraphy under contribution of Samuel Morse and others in the first half of the 19th century, exchange of information lost its dependency on material carriers that had to be delivered from one place to another. From now on, news could travel through cables at the speed of light. Against this background, the questions of geographical distances and time delay had — apart from their influence on the material construction of the necessary infrastructure — lost their relevance: The electronic telegraph simply denied the existence of space (cf. Winkler, 2008, p. 185) and replaced other means of information delivery as for example the Pony Express that had been installed between Missouri and California in 1860 and was made obsolete by the first telegraph line to San Francisco in 1861 (cf. Stephens, 2007, p. XXI).
But this did not mean that early telegraphy represented the perfection of news delivery; in fact early telegraph lines were quite unreliable urging reporters to put the most important information at the beginning of the message as the later parts could possibly not be transmitted. The “inverted pyramide” writing style that belongs to the journalistic practice up until now and refers to the arrangement of information according to their importance from top (very important) to bottom (negligible) has its offspring here (cf. p. XXI). This may serve as an example of technological problems inscribing themselves into the layer of presentational forms.
Cable conversations
While telegraphy allowed the transmission of electronic signals that could be translated into a human-readable code, the telephone, brought to full functionality by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, supported the translation of electric current into acoustic signals that resembled the speaker’s voices. From now on conversations could be conducted over great distances and in real-time.
Turn the radio on!
Adhering to the logics of real-time transmission of natural language while — as a mass medium — renouncing the reciprocity of real conversations, at the beginning of the 20th century radio became a medium “of wide publicity” as Westinghouse executive Harry P. Davis put it (cf. p. 268). But at first it was not a medium that was able to “gather a crowd” (cf. p. 268). As Stephens illustrates, radio broadcasters of the early days borrowed techniques from newspaper journalism or stemmed from that division themselves. But soon it turned out, that the modes of presentation that worked to bind readers did not fit the reception situation of radio audiences: “Speaking to an audience of news hearers, rather than news readers, required modification of the vocabulary and sentence structure newspapers had employed” (p. 269). “Elevated and circumlocutory sentences” within “long-winded constructions of formal written language” (p. 269) were given up for a more comprehensible and condensed style of both, writing and speaking.
This may serve as another example of media technology and way of reception determining the mode of news conveyance. But as Stephens indicates, the simplification of presentational forms might also have been influenced by the historical context: “When radio arrived, newspaper writers (along with novelists such as Ernest Hemingway) were already beginning to grow impatient with the dense wordings and long-winded constructions of formal written language — a style perhaps better appreciated in contemplative quiet than in the din of the 20th century” (p. 269).
Voices get back faces
When television broadcasting started off in the United States in 1941 it was the beginning of an era of new visual participation and involvement: Audio-visually perceptible anchormen addressing their audiences as in real-life and multi-perspective impressions of weighty events like the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II. in 1953 or the Football World Cup in 1954 belonged to the main attractions of the new medium. Especially television’s capacity to present events or persons both auditorily and visually was an aspect that other media could not catch up with; or as Stephens puts it: “Even with […] primitive equipment, television journalists obviously possessed a power to re-create the sights and sounds of events that went well beyond anything even the most verbally skilled of their predecessors might have achieved, and it was not long before they were more fully exploiting that power” (p. 276).
Media competition, media coexistence and the WWW
As Stephens explicates the decline of newspaper readers between 1946 and 1985 can be traced back to television: “Television newscasts get the news much faster than newspapers, and they deliver them not in gray words but in colorful moving images. Then there are all those networks upon networks full of entertainment programming. The average American spends many hours a day in front of a television set. That time had to be taken away from something” (p. 285). But for Stephens “the arrival of the World Wide Web in the 1990s provided some reason to be cheerful about the future of newspapers” (p. 285) as it represented a means by which information that is gathered by all the reporters of newspapers could be distributed faster. Nevertheless, he identifies news sites and blogs as belonging to “waves of new competitors” (p. 285) brought by the web.
Returning to our question
But to what extent might bots be seen as a part of these newly arising competitors? Or do they simply have to be regarded as tools that are employed by ‘conventional‘ players of the news sector? After focussing the relation between bots and paradigm shifts from a technical perspective in the next blog post belonging to this series, we would like to approach these and other questions. Thereby, we hope to get a better understanding of the role played by bots within the history of news.
Clarification
And of course, the given article has to be regarded as a very rough overview — not to say, as an inadmissible shortening — of the history of news based on the much more detailed presentation by Mitchell Stephens, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University. Nevertheless, the given statements may serve as landmarks that forthcoming explications can build upon.
List of sources
Assmann, J. (1988): Stein und Zeit: Das “monumentale” Gedächtnis der altägyptischen Kultur. In: J. Assmann (Ed.): Kultur und Gedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 87-114.
In Leipzig wurde 1650 die Tageszeitung erfunden, MDR Zeitreise, last update on 01 June 2011, http://www.mdr.de/zeitreise/weitere-epochen/neuzeit/artikel125002.html; retrieved on 02 August 2016.
Innis, H. A. (1949): The Bias of Communication. In: Barck, Karlheinz (1997) (Ed.): Harold A. Innis — Kreuzwege der Kommunikation. Ausgewählte Texte. Wien/ Ny, pp. 69–190.
Kittler, F. (1993): Vorwort. In: Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften. Leipzig, pp. 8–10.
Murgia, M. (13 April 2016): Facebook Messenger’s new bots are a powerful way to target adverts, The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/12/facebook-messenger-launches-chat-bot-economy-to-take-on-apps/; retrieved on 02 August 2016.
Paradigm shift (search term), Cambridge Dictionary, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/paradigm-shift; retrieved on 02 August 2016.
Stephens, M. (2007): A History of News. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winkler, H. (2008): Basiswissen Medien. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag.
