Although journalism is often associated with human beings, non-human entities also play an important role in shaping and even doing journalism—especially today. We can refer to the material, non-human technologies that make a difference to how news is produced and disseminated as technological actants within the space of journalism.
While that definition may seem quite abstract, at its heart is a simple truth: nearly all of today’s journalistic work is shaped in some part by technology.
This isn’t a recent development, though. Technological actants have played a major role in the historical development of journalism. The development of the printing press made the mass distribution of journalism theoretically possible, even as it restricted the formats it could take on for many years due to the technology’s limitations. Another technology, the telegraph, enabled newswire services like the Associated Press to develop and allowed reporters to relatively quickly relay their reports from afar. Conversely, the proliferation of the telephone allowed more reporting to be done from within the newsroom as reporters could just call their sources instead of having to meet them in person.
In those examples, technological actants shaped the behaviors of human actors by creating new possibilities and restricting others.
As a more detailed example, consider the following scenario: A news organization uses a content management system to facilitate its workflow, and all reporters at that organization must submit their stories through that system. When a reporter sees that a star athlete announced via a video on Instagram that they’re signing a new contract, the reporter quickly writes a news brief for the website and hopes to embed the Instagram post so readers may see the athlete’s elation. However, it turns out that the particular system used by the news organization does not have the technical capacity to embed social media posts in a story. Thus, the reporter must either describe the video through the text in the story or send the reader away from the story through a link to the post.
In that example, the technological actant shaped a particular human choice by making it impossible for the reporter to pursue their preferred course of action, which was to embed the post with the video. Instead, it provided the reporter with a limited set of alternative courses of action that the system could accommodate. However, over time, that system may discourage the use of social media in reporting—such as embedding posts that illustrate a point made by the reporter or posts with reactions from others—and thus impact the way the reporters working for that organization relate with their sources and audiences.
It is crucial to note, though, that just because a technological actant is designed to promote a particular way of doing things does not mean that its users will use them in that way—or use that actant at all. Many innovations in journalism are not actually adopted by journalists, and, when they are, are often adopted in ways that allow journalists to continue doing the things they are used to doing, and in the ways they are used to. In that sense, technological actants can take on the logics and biases of their users when they are put to particular uses.
The relationship between technological actants and human actors is not a one-way street, though. That is, human actors also shape technological actants.
It is easy to think of technological actants as neutral tools due to their mechanical nature. However, they are created and refined by human actors, and thus take on certain cultural norms, politics, and ideological values. These may be intentionally inscribed by humans in order to advance certain commercial, technical, or journalistic objectives as well as unintentionally due to the human creator’s biases and own preferences.
To illustrate this, consider a scenario wherein a programmer is contracted to create a web tool that helps journalists at a news organization quickly produce interactive data visualizations. The programmer intuits that most journalists at that organization are not tech-savvy, and thus chooses to limit the range of customization options so as to not overwhelm the user. The programmer similarly intuits that many of the journalists lack a design background, and thus implements a feature that will quickly look at the data and recommend the chart form that best illustrates the data. Finally, the programmer is told by the news organization, as part of the contract to create the tool, to develop for a mobile-first experience, and thus further restricts the customization options to ensure that the journalist can only create things that look good on smartphones.
In that scenario, the programmer—a social actor—has shaped the tool—a technological actant—in different ways. First, their biases and perceptions lead them to promote a restrictive logic of simplicity within the tool. Second, the programmer’s background shapes the tool’s suggestion for which kind of chart to use, which may be more oriented to scientific visualizations than journalistic ones if the programmer’s background tilts toward the former. Third, the economic logic of the news organization instructs the programmer, who in turn instructs the tool accordingly.
Thus, not only do technological actants take on the logics and biases of their users when they are put to use but they are also infused with the logics and biases of their creators as they are built.
By acting upon one another, technological actants are constantly shaping human actors and human actors are constantly shaping technological actants. This is called mutual shaping and it operates in an iterative manner.
Returning to our data visualization tool scenario, the programmer’s instruction to have the software recommend pie charts when presented with data about proportions may result in that format becoming the norm in such data visualizations created by that organization. However, one of the journalists may find that they want the doughnut chart alternative to be an option, and eventually convince the programmer to include it. Over time, the journalist’s peers may try that option and come to prefer it. They thus convince the programmer to set the doughnut chart to become the default recommendation, which in turn socializes future hires in the organization to consider the doughnut chart first, even as they continue to stay within that general aesthetic initially proposed by the non-journalist programmer.
As the scenario now shows, a human actor shaped a technological actant, which shaped the behaviors of other human actors, who in turn used the actant in particular ways and got the programmer to reshape the actant, which had subsequent impacts on yet more human actors. As such, they were influencing one another over time, with the technological actant taking on the ideas, biases, and logics of different people—even as it influenced those very same people.
Given that technological actants act and are acted upon human actors (as well as other technological actants), it is unsurprising that those dynamics introduce fluid power relationships. Those relationships are oftentimes asymmetric, meaning that a technological actant may ultimately have more power over the human actor—and vice versa.
For example, Google’s search algorithms may play a major role in determining how many clicks a reporter’s story gets, and the reporter may thus try to optimize the language in their story to get more attention from Google. However, Google’s algorithms are hardly influenced by that individual journalist, and perhaps even the journalism industry as a whole. Thus, that algorithm has more power over the reporter than the reporter has over the algorithm.
Such power relationships are particularly important to examine as particular technologies become more and less central to the profession and to everyday life, and as certain kinds of human actors become more and less central to journalism.
Technological actants refer to material, non-human technologies that make a difference to how journalism is produced and disseminated.
Technological actants shape human actors by structuring their behaviors, both in terms of making it easier to do some things and impossible to do others.
Technological actants are not neutral, though. They are developed by humans and become socially constructed as they are employed within newsrooms to suit commercial, technical, and journalistic imperatives.
The mutual shaping of human actors and technological actants creates power relationships that are fluid and dynamic.