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Book Review: The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Finally, what about Boczkowski’s ambition to take technology seriously while rejecting technological determinism? Responding to Michael Schudson’s challenge to offer evidence of how new technology ‘affects the news’ (p. 80), at one level, his answer is: ‘Not much’. Citizen forums, offering the potential for greater journalist and audience interaction, have failed largely in that ambition due to lack of interest among both parties, according to the evidence from interviews and content analysis of forums that Boczkowski provides (pp. 93–5). Similarly, despite the potentially ‘limitless newshole’ of the internet, CyberTimes articles were slightly shorter on average than those in the print Times (pp. 83–4). Yet new technological capabilities, as well as old print-based habits, actually may have been behind this surprising result. Boczkowski suggests that the use of hyperlinks to previous stories or websites of sources reduced the ‘space devoted to background information’ within many articles (p. 82). One other technology that seems to have made a difference is email. Since online journalists tend to list their email addresses more often than their offline peers, perhaps this has facilitated increased two-way communication (p. 93). Technologies were appropriated in more transformative ways in Houston and New Jersey, but we need more and different kinds of research to assess these experiments’ effects on the journalistic field as a whole. This review only scratches the surface of Boczkowski’s empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated and highly readable study. Nearly four decades have passed since Herbert Gans, Gaye Tuchman, Edward Epstein and others wrote their classic newsroom ethnographies. It is high time, to say the least, for both an empirical updating and a theoretical rejuvenating of this tradition. Recipient of the International Communication Association’s 2004 Outstanding Book Award, Digitizing the News is surely a worthy successor to these earlier studies, as well as an exemplar for the next generation of newsroom research.