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Accepted Paper:

The Whitespace Press: Designing Meaningful Absences into Networked News  
Mike Ananny

Paper short abstract:

An analysis of how the contemporary press could create meaningful absences by creating networked whitespaces that help guarantee a public right to hear.

Paper long abstract:

Dryzek (2002) wrote that the "most effective and insidious way to silence others in politics is a refusal to listen." (p. 149) But listening often fails to register as full-fledged participation, neglected among democratic institutions focused on helping people speak, publishing stories, adding to the marketplace of ideas. The press is one such institution. With its increasing dependence upon networked, technological infrastructures, an opportunity exists to reimagine the networked press as a listening institution - to create infrastructures that not only create speech but also opportunities to listen. In this paper, I show how and why the networked press might re-imagine its democratic mission by reconfiguring its material infrastructures in ways that engender and encourage listening. In this paper, I describe the conceptual underpinnings of a democratic theory of listening, focused on affirmative theory of speech freedom; review how domains other than journalism—from graphic design to musicology—use whitespace to create meaningful, material absences; trace traditional meanings of absence through historical studies on news institutions; and present a typology of contemporary, networked absences in today's journalistic infrastructures. I argue that the contemporary press could create meaningful absences by creating networked whitespaces that help guarantee a public right to hear.

Dryzek, John S. (2002). Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, contestations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Panel T154
Remaking News: Technology and the Futures of Journalism Scholarship
  Session 1 Saturday 3 September, 2016, -