Devaluing The News: How People Appropriate Journalistic Content

Dr. Pablo J. Boczkowski (Northwestern University) // April 11th, 2019 // 12:00pm-1:30pm // Jesse H. Jones Communication Center (CMA) 5.136

The Center for Media Engagement Speaker Series promotes discussion about critical issues in journalism, social technology, and other communication media. We feature renowned scholars, experts, and professionals to share their research and perspectives on these topics.

How have our technology and media practices evolved to deal with a world in which we spend 7% of our time awake on social media,
rotate computer screens every 12 seconds — and cellphone screens considerably faster — watch the new season of our favorite thriller in four days, and encounter news stories everywhere and all the time, even when we want to get away from them? Dr. Boczkowski will be highlighting these answers in his discussion about “Abundance,” a book manuscript-in-progress. The book offers an account of the lived experience of an exponential increase in the volume and availability of information that has taken place over the past couple of decades. This project draws from 158 interviews conducted between March 2016 and December 2017 in four cities in Argentina, and a survey of 700 adults administered in Buenos Aires and its suburbs in October 2016. The analysis highlights the enduring yet transformed role played by constellations of meaning and everyday routines; the growing attachment to devices, relationships, and content that marks our evolving subjectivity and sociability; and the fundamental instability of a society for which age has become a preeminent organizer of technology and media life.

Pablo J. Boczkowski is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, co-director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, and senior research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Germany. From 2014 to 2017 he served as the inaugural MSLCE faculty director. He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2001, and was on the faculty at MIT from 2001 until he joined Northwestern in 2005. His research program examines the dynamics of digital culture from a comparative perspective. He is the author of three books, three edited volumes, over thirty journal articles, twenty book chapters, and eighty conference presentations. He is currently the coordinator of Project NET, a study of the consumption of news, entertainment, and technology in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States.