Eric Klinenberg

Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age

A paradox of contemporary sociology is that the discipline has largely abandoned the empirical study of journalistic organizations and news institutions at the moment when the media has gained visibility in political, economic, and cultural spheres; when other academic fields have embraced the study of media and society; and when leading sociological theorists have broken from the disciplinary cannon to argue that the media are key actors in modern life. This article examines the point of journalistic production in one major news organization and shows how reportersand editors manage constraints of time, space, and market pressure under regimes of convergence news making. It considers the implications of these conditions for the particular forms of intellectual and cultural labor that journalists produce, drawing connections between the political economy of the journalistic field, the organizational structure of multimedia firms, new communications technologies, and the qualities of content created by media workers.

Bodies That Don’t Matter: Death and Dereliction in Chicago

Through a case study of the scientific, political and journalistic treatment of dead bodies in the 1995 Chicago heat wave, this article questions what kinds of truths are written on or contained within the body and what happens to the study of society once the body is not simply brought in, but made a core object of analysis. I focus on the kinds of social information bodies convey and conceal when they are made to stand in for the social in scientific and journalistic inquiries. During the heat wave, the dead bodies served as a double distraction from the sociological issues that the disaster might have made visible: first as commodified spectacles, in the media representation of the crisis; second, as scientifically defined objects, in the narrowly medical attribution of the deaths. In Chicago, the dead bodies were so visible that almost no one could see what had happened to them. This suggests that bodies can either lose their capacity to substantiate truth claims or turn into evidence for false claims when they turn into the subjects of spectacle or fetish.

Cultural Production in a Digital Age

Preface: Cultural Production in a Digital Age - Eric Klinenberg and Claudio Benzecry Global Networks and the Effects on Culture - Alexander R. Galloway Multiple Media, Convergent Processes, and Divergent Products: Organizational Innovation in Digital Media Production at a European Firm - Pablo J. Boczkowski Boczkowski and Jose A. Ferris Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age - Eric Klinenberg Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design - Natasha Dow Schull Mobilizing Fun in the Production and Consumption of Childrens Software - Mizuko Ito Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age - Joseph Turow Remote Control: The Rise of Electronic Cultural Policy - Siva Vaidhyanathan The Changing Place of Cultural Production: The Location of Social Networks in a Digital Media Industry - Gina Neff Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy - Philip N. Howard Organizing Technologies: Genre Forms of Online Civic Association in Eastern Europe - Balazs Vedres, Laszlo Bruszt, and David Stark The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements - Jeffrey S. Juris Book Review Essay A Digital Revolution? A Reassessment of New Media and Cultural Production in the Digital Age - David Grazian

SYMBOLIC POLITICS IN THE INFORMATION AGE: THE 1996 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS IN CYBERSPACE

This paper traces the use of the World Wide Web as a medium of political communication during the 1996 American presidential campaigns. Beginning with the Republican campaigns’ use of the medium during the primary election season, a typology of uses of the web is outlined. While all campaigns felt it necessary to participate in the World Wide Web, different candidates used the medium differently. Furthermore, no campaign made full use of the much-publicized interactive capacity of the web; they used it more as a new means of transmitting traditional mass-media literature (video, graphics, etc.) and as a way of providing access to large volumes of campaign information (voting records, speeches, position papers, etc.).

Blaming the Victims: Hearsay, Labeling, and the Hazards of Quick-Hit Disaster Ethnography

behavioral characteristics. These myths were harmful, because they helped perpetuate the official and journalistic opinion that people died because their families and neighbors did not care about or take care of them, or because they neglected themselves. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research in two neighborhoods, including interviews and observations of street-level conditions, HW issues the following claim:

Climate Change: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Critical Infrastructures

On October 22, 2012, an African easterly wave formed in the Caribbean Sea and quickly grew into a tropical storm with frightening potential. It was the hottest year in recorded human history (though that record has subsequently been shattered), and the seawater was unusually warm. Strong winds whipped the wet Caribbean air into a frenzy as the storm moved north and west, and by October 24 the system had become a hurricane. Meteorologists named it Sandy and predicted it would sweep through the Caribbean islands and make landfall somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Sandy turned out to be more dangerous than anyone initially anticipated. The “superstorm” intensified and grew as it moved across the Caribbean, ultimately covering an area more than one thousand miles in diameter, making it one of the largest hurricanes in American history. Its winds were punishingly severe, yet the weather system was painfully slow, and the steady, relentless storm seemed to pause so that it could inflict extra damage on nearly everything in its path. Sandy hit the Atlantic coast on October 29 — the worst possible moment. Not only was there a full moon with high tides, but there was also an early winter storm with arctic air moving into the northeastern region from the other direction, and the two systems collided to form what journalists called a hybrid “Frankenstorm.” As the primary target of the attacks on September 11, 2001, New York City had spent billions of dollars over the course of the following decade shoring up its security systems and preparing for a catastrophe. Terrorism was not its only con-

Quick Read Synopsis: Cultural Production in a Digital Age

At the core of networked computing is the concept of protocols. • The protocols that govern much of the Internet are contained in what are called RFC (Request for Comments) documents. • The RFCs are published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and are used predominantly by engineers who wish to build hardware or software that meet common specifications. • The IETF is affiliated with the Internet Society, an altruistic, technocratic organization that wishes to ensure the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people. • Many of the Web’s protocols are governed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). • Protocols refer specifically to standards governing the implementation of specific technologies. • Computer protocols establish points necessary to enact an agreed-upon standard of action. • Computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed to, adopted, implemented, and ultimately used by people around the world. NOTE: These regulations always operate at the level of coding—they encode packets of information so they may be transported, documents so they may be effectively parsed, and communications so local devices may effectively communicate with foreign devices.

A Review Of: “A Certain Kind of Death”

Donald Wright died alone in a Los Angeles motel. He was 61, a “migrant-type” with

How Many Americas? the Culture Wars in u.s. Politics

290 in his wallet, nothing valuable in his estate, and no known next of kin. After discovering Wright’s body, the motel manager called the police to report his death. The police alerted the County Coroner’s Office, which handles disposal of a decedent’s personal effects and remains when no one claims them. The disposal team handed Wright’s file to the Coroner’s Investigation Office, which spent months searching for relatives while the county kept the body bagged in a refrigerated bay. After 90 days, the office staff discarded Wright’s property. After 5 months, they transferred his corpse to the county for cremation. Eventually his ashes—and those of roughly 1,600 other unclaimed LA decedents from that year, 1997—were boxed and buried together in a small trench. No media reported on the event. Perhaps one reason that the mass burial received no coverage is that it was not news. During the 1990s, more Americans lived and died alone than at any point in the nation’s history, and cities like Los Angeles regularly interred their unclaimed dead while journalistic organizations and political officials looked away. Today, the emerging population of people who are old, frail, and on their own represents a major social and demographic change in both the US and Europe. We hear about them, albeit briefly, when disasters strike. In 2003, for example, over 35,000 Europeans, many of them alone, died during an unusually severe heat wave that lasted 3 weeks. And in 1995, over 700 Chicago residents perished in a heat wave that lasted only 3 days. These deaths, of course, were caused by social conditions as well as the weather. But even dramatic catastrophes fail to generate close and sustained attention to what one investigator in Chicago called “the secret society” of solitary citizens, some of whom have withdrawn or abandoned societies that have largely abandoned them, or to the methods governments use to put those who die alone out of sight. In A Certain Kind of Death, filmmakers Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock document the bureaucratic process of managing the deaths of people with no next of kin. Hadaegh and Babcock fix their camera where few others look: on dead, decomposed bodies that have rotted for days before anyone discovered them; on the personal effects—letters, photographs, diaries, and the like—of solitary decedents; on the SROs and seedy, bug-

New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society, and Culture: A Comparative View.Edited by David Halle. University of Chicago Press, 2003. 558 pp. Paper,

In February, Contexts kicked off a series of public discussions with a forum including University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street; Thomas Frank, author of Whats the Matter with Kansas?; and Nation columnist and Columbia Law School professor Patricia Williams. NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg moderated the discussion before a capacity crowd at New York University. The conversation touched upon issues of class, race, market culture, free speech, and party politics. Here are excerpts from the event.