Abstract
News media scholarship has tried to make sense of the disorienting effects of new media and, in particular, the weakening effect social networks have on the industry by enabling freely available online information. In The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World, Wihbey contemplates our news needs long into the future, arguing that as social media channels and information and communication technologies expand, journalism must change its ways. The theoretical approach grounds the research in a networked concept of news that connects network science and journalism to understand the way society is changing with regard to public knowledge, and how journalism producers must orient their practice toward fostering shared public knowledge. How must a democracy function without commonly agreed upon bodies of fact?
Early chapters explain in detail how information flows through digital networks and how the structure of knowledge is changing to become increasingly contested in a networked and socially mediated world. Based on extensive survey data, these conclusions pose significant challenges for journalists whose attention to facts and information have also been developing through socially mediated channels. These are what Wihbey refers to as Social Facts, “media content accompanied and influenced by information indicating social attention or approval … a kind of fuel for diffusion” (Wihbey 2019, p. xv).
The latter half of the book has something to say about the social epistemology of journalism work, offering insight into how the profession can better prepare for an increasingly data- and knowledge-driven networked future. A broad but useful discussion of research literature on the core issues related to the nature and implications of social facts such as public trust in news, media polarisation and the diminishing capacity news has on democracy is offered in Chapter 9 – before the author offers some ways journalism can move forward in the conclusion.
Where many other studies have positioned newswork, in particular micro-practices of the digital age (Andersson, 2010; Bruns, 2018; Hermida, 2010), Wihbey repositions newswork in a forward-looking manner, into the age of networks, well beyond its industrial-age context. The central argument to Wihbey's thesis draws from Patterson's notion of “knowledge-based journalism” (Patterson, 2013), arguing that “knowledge is the vital fuel and the context for recognition” (p. 38). Wihbey points to the fact that this will lie in how journalists select what to cover and what information will best contextualise stories, organising attention in a knowledge-based fashion. Whibey argues journalists must foster their own ‘networks of recognition‘ by engaging with data, social science and research but must also engage with existing and emergent networks of citizens and their issues, and by “apprehending the key stakes”, create public interest through generative, not just informative, newswork.
Wihbey does see evidence of this taking place: he cites non-profits ProPublica and the Marshall Project as well as the commercially funded Washington Post and New York Times in the US as examples where creating systems of knowledge adds value to the journalism product, as distinct from what internet-based companies can deliver programmatically. The approach of these newsrooms to knowledge and attention makes a difference in terms of issue fragmentation, and thus social fragmentation. While it is acknowledged, the author spends few words discussing the need for stronger economic support of the kind of journalism he advocates for, briefly mentioning a subsidy for news organisations within the broadband- and wireless-based telecommunications system and new tax designations for for-profit news organisations. More on this would have been helpful.
I recommend this book as an excellent extension of either students or scholars interested in connecting network science and journalism. Its contribution is strong because Wihbey is accepting that social polarisation is threatening democracy by the way information flows through social media, steering audiences towards particular content, and creating social facts. But in understanding these flows, the author demonstrates how knowledge-based journalism can be oriented to harness public power and guide audiences through a pathway to, potentially, shared understanding.
