没有历史的技术:民族志、物质性与新闻业的变迁

Technology without History:Ethnography,Materiality,and Journalistic Change

本文通过梳理两条不同的学术脉络来探讨技术、历史、新闻和民族志之间的关系。本文首先讨论了"组织化的时间旅行"(organizational time travel)这一概念的内涵,及其在《做新闻》(Making News)、《什么在决定新闻》(Deciding What’s News)和《新闻的数字化》(Digitizing the News)这三部重要的新闻民族志研究著作中被运用的方式。本文认为,民族志方法为了更顺畅地融入历史学和社会学理论,采取既将自身"置于某一特定时刻",又尝试"脱离具体情境"的策略。此外,本文还分析了哈罗德·英尼斯(Harold Innis)、艾瑞克·亥乌络克(Eric Havelock)、沃尔特·翁(Walter Ong)和詹姆斯·凯瑞(James Carey)等人的"媒体生态学"(media ecology)研究,认为细化的、针对特定地点的新闻田野工作能够丰富更广泛的、全方位的文化史并为其开拓新的研究领域。最后,本文认为,我们应当至少部分地将新闻室民族志看作人文学术的一种实践,并将其与社会科学等而视之。

This article examines the relationship between technology,history,journalism,and ethnography by engaging with two distinct bodies of academic literature.First,it discusses the concept of"organizational time travel,"and how this notion manifests itself in three major ethnographies of news:Making News,Deciding What’s News,and Digitizing the News.The degree to which ethnographic research acknowledges itself as simultaneously situated within and moving away from a particular moment in time,I will argue,the more amenable it is to incorporating durable historical and sociological insights.From a second direction,the paper analyzes an older,largely forgotten body of quasi-historical work-the"media ecology"studies of Innis(1950),Havelock(1982),Ong(1982)and Carey(1989)with the goal of demonstrating how granular,site-specific journalistic fieldwork can add an important layer of complexity and problematization to these more sweeping,all-encompassing cultural histories.In the end,the paper argues that newsroom ethnography needs to be seen and understood,at least in part,as an exercise in humanities scholarship alongside its usual placement in the social science.