"News media are suffering a Schumpeterian "creative destruction" (Schumpeter, 1949): this has been the received wisdom among scholars and media watchers evaluating the impact of digital technology on journalism today. However, is "creative destruction" an appropriate term in this case? The use of it to explain this recent period of upheaval in journalism usually involves reductive techno-economic paradigms that overlook critical cultural and ethical dimensions. This collective volume aims to understand technological ...
Read More
"News media are suffering a Schumpeterian "creative destruction" (Schumpeter, 1949): this has been the received wisdom among scholars and media watchers evaluating the impact of digital technology on journalism today. However, is "creative destruction" an appropriate term in this case? The use of it to explain this recent period of upheaval in journalism usually involves reductive techno-economic paradigms that overlook critical cultural and ethical dimensions. This collective volume aims to understand technological innovation as "creative reconstruction" (Alexander, 2016). The idea of "creative reconstruction" was coined by cultural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander around 2014, after he and a group of cultural sociologists and journalism scholars expressed frustration at how academics and pundits were narrowly theorizing in purely technological and economic terms the current "crisis of journalism" and the consequent changes and innovations in news. This perspective was crystalized in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered (Alexander, Breese, and Luengo, 2016), a book that shows how crisis and change in journalism are equally caused by cultural and ethical factors. The empirical investigations in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered demonstrate that intense alarm over digital change implies the strength of both journalistic ethics and democratic values (Carlson, 2016; Luengo, 2016). The book argues that the compulsion to defend these ethical and civil commitments actually energizes a search for new organizational and technological forms"--
Read Less
