Introduction

Within the text of Bridging Physics and Communications: Experimental Detection and Analysis of Web Site Users’ Paths in an Environment of Free Choice, the thesis I wrote in 2000 for my master of arts degree in journalism, I embedded seven essays that each stand alone, yet work together to present the thoughts underlying the thesis itself. These essays originally served as the content appearing in the test Web site.

This is the seventh essay.

Essay

Professional communicators search for ways to engage community members in multimedia conversations.

The depictions of journalists in various media capture the ways that people have understood the roles of professional communicators and the relations those roles have to the surrounding community. Clark Kent/Superman pursued “truth, justice and the American Way” in an era when his creators, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, thought those qualities faced challenges both from within and beyond the borders of the United States. In a time of deep questions about the the place of authority in our culture, Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein crusaded for the source of the “dirty tricks” played by “All the President’s Men.” For a few years in the mid 1990s, ABC News ran commercials that glamorized its on-air personalities, not the stories they told, ending with a Mt. Rushmore-like frieze of Jennings, Koppel, Donaldson, Brinkley and Sawyer captured in heroic profile. In the age of the Internet, when anyone with a computer and a modem can become a publisher of web content, Matt Drudge dredged up the dry goods on President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

At the same time that popular culture plays seriously with the various roles journalists and other professional communicators can assume within that culture, the research and study within journalism, as an academic discipline, have explored various roles and relations as well.

In the early years of broadcasting, the journalist served as surrogate adventurer, providing an audible sense of presence. Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting from the streets of London during the Blitzkrieg, with the sounds of incoming bombs exploding in the background, exemplified this role. The surrogate adventurer ventured where the average listener could never go. By mixing on-the-spot narrative vocals with ambient sounds, the journalist created a sense of place and activity for the audience. The form of the medium—radio—shaped the function of the journalist within that medium. Because the ear relies upon descriptions, narration, interviews and sounds to create the sense of the place and the event, the successful journalist in this medium needed to be an adept and agile speaker. Looks did not matter.

One of the more traditional roles a journalist could play was the gatekeeper:

For this discussion, “gatekeeping” in mass media is viewed as including all forms of information control that may arise in decisions about message encoding, such as selection, shaping, display, timing, withholding, or repetition of entire messages or message components. (George A. Donahue, Phillip J. Tichenor and Clarice N. Olien, “Gatekeeping: Mass Media Systems and Information Control” in Current Perspectives in Mass Communication Research, Gerald Kline and Philip J. Tichenor, eds., 1972, p. 43.)

The success of this role depends upon the community embracing the premise that there exists an objective standard of truth, propriety and conduct. The journalist works as the gatekeeper, deciding whether items will “make the news.” The standards for newsworthy stories are met when the items serve to increase truth, when they can be told within the bounds of propriety and when they can be obtained within set standards of conduct. An exemplar of this role is Walter Cronkite. The notion of the gatekeeper works in a system where the access to and the quantity of available information is limited. Network news broadcasts in the 1960s fit these criteria.

The Internet’s networked communications challenges these traditional roles on several fronts and drives the development of varying roles responsive to changes in forms of media. When each person with a computer and an Internet connection can publish material to web sites viewable to anyone else anywhere with a similar computer and connectivity, the notion of the gatekeeper loses its power. There can be no gate when everyone is already (potentially) within the walls containing the gate. In addition, the notion of community standards of conduct and truth undergo revision when community is redefined broadly as the whole world and narrowly as anyone who shares an individual’s narrowly crafted niche, like Power On Software’s Up-to-Date and Contact for Macintosh Users’ Group, for example.

Further, the sheer magnitude of the available content creates new challenges and pushes new roles on professional communicators. Because the Internet has grown exponentially rather than linearly, the task of organizing and sorting and making sense, in short, of navigating, has arisen. This may explain the choices behind the naming of browser software. Netscape’s choice of “Navigator” and use of the icon of a sailing ship’s captain’s wheel seems to connote the sense of exploration on the uncharted waters of the high seas. Similarly, Microsoft named its browser “Explorer,” and occasionally used the icon of a globe. This appears to connote a similar sense of adventure. Apple Computer’s ill-fated CyberDog sported a different image, one in which you sent the browser to bring back information to you, as a dog would fetch the daily newspaper.

Whole industries, companies and fortunes have risen and fallen in recent years in the search for a meaningful, useful and profitable way to make sense of the masses of content on the Internet. Search engines, portals, top-100 lists, software for storing and sorting URLs and other methods promote themselves as ways for helping people make sense of the content available to them on the Internet. But hidden behind these flashy on-screen aids is the work of scores of professional communicators. While masked, the communicators are playing an important role in the relations between people and the information they seek on the Internet.

There doesn’t yet appear to be a dominant image emerging to describe the role of the professional communicator in this context. But even so, some characteristics can be teased forth from the discussion above. Sometimes explorers need guides; Lewis and Clark had Sacagawea. Sometimes connoisseurs need experts; home cooks need the Food Network’s Emeril Lagasse and the syndicated Martha Stewart. Sometimes do-it-yourselfers need consultants. Sometimes there exists a need to organize, to provide structure, to customize features to meet a user’s needs or desires. It seems that the breadth and depth of content on the Internet, the velocity with which technological change sweeps across the medium and the diversity of users is leading to a variety of roles for professional communicators.

But despite the variety of images one can sketch out for professional communicators, there remain some common motifs that inform those images. First of all, whether one sees the role of the professional communicator as a guide, an expert, or a consultant, within those roles lies the task of seeking out and encouraging connections among users and between users and content. Linker is a clinker of a job title, but it captures something of that key task of connecting, of encouraging conversation.

If one accepts James Carse’s premise that people can play either finite or infinite games (James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, New York: Ballantine Books, 1986, p. 7.) , and if one buys the notion that good and useful communications lead to further communications, then one can put those two premises together to say that a good conversation is a form of infinite game. Then one can also see a role for the professional communicator as one who encourages the conversation, the give and take that arises among users and between users and the content and computers comprising the Internet.

Professional communicators search for ways to engage community members in multimedia conversations.