epistemic interoperability (early draft of a dissertation chapter)

8/8/2019 Epistemic Interoperability (Early Draft of a Dissertation Chapter)

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Running head: EPISTEMIC INTEROPERABILITY

Sharing the News:

Toward a Construct of

Epistemic Interoperability

Josh Braun

Cornell Dept. of Communication

Authors Note: This is an early draft of a dissertation chapter laying out a theoretical

framework for understanding changes in the practice of publishing news stories, as

news distribution has moved in the digital age from push to pull. It looks at how, in

an environment where news organizations rely on sharing and search for visibility,

news products may be designed to spread particularly well among specific, desirable

audiences. It will eventually be paired with a chapter on architectural

interoperability, that outlines the manner in which the technological infrastructures

of online publishing are designed to open channels to desirable platforms for sharing

and search, while effectively frustrating the spread of content in spaces that are less

desirable to the publishers for economic or branding reasons. Drafts of both chapters

will be presented at conferences this yearask me for details.

Epistemic Interoperability 1


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Introduction/Abstract

In 1978, Gaye Tuchman encouraged sociologists and media scholars to consider

journalism as a system of knowledge. In this paper, I take up her challenge with an eye

toward online news. I begin by arguing that much of the classic sociological research in

communication that examines journalistic practices, coming as it does from decades

when the influence of mass media was at its height, has tended to focus on the manner

in which journalists serve as gatekeepers, limiting public access to information. I assert

that today, in the digital age, journalists are much more explicitly embedded inand

reliant onan online information ecosystem in which many other systems of knowledge

coexist and circulate information alongside the news media. I argue that media

researchers would therefore do well to implement insights from science and technology

studies, where sociologists and historians have developed tools for examining how

systems of knowledge are constructed and how they interact. Borrowing from the

sociology of scientific knowledge on the one hand and Tuchmans (1978) work on the

other, I flesh out what it would mean to think of news and other centers of cultural

production online as epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina, 1999) centered around distinct

systems of knowledge. Subsequently, I review several existing lenses within

communication and science studies that examine how different systems of knowledge

interact and trade with one another. And finally, I conclude by attempting to tie

together the various literatures discussed throughout the paper into a theoretical lens

for examining how the interaction of various systems of knowledge online might be

considered in relation to news production, as well as the production practices of other

epistemic cultures.



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The Logic of Gates

Since the 1950s, both scholars and practitioners examining the gatekeeper

function of the news media have sought to explain why some issues and events become

newsworthy while others remain obscure. Answers have been offered up in the form of

classic newsroom ethnographies like The Gate-keeper (White, 1950),Making News

(Tuchman, 1978) andDeciding Whats News (Gans, 1979); critical studies of news

content such as Stuart Halls (1973) The Determination of News Photographs; and

innumerable lists of news values in the tradition of Galtung and Ruges (1965) The

Structure of Foreign News. This body of research ultimately dispensed with what Gans

(1979) called mirror theory, the nave assumptionif it ever existedthat news

products represent complete, veridical accounts of reality.

And no sooner had it been established that the content of the news media is

neither unequivocally, the way it is, nor all the news thats fit to print, than the

attention of sociologists began quickly to encompass the implications of these findings

for social movements and societal change. At first, this project largely demonstrated the

manner in which social movements had been marginalized. Tuchman (1978), for

instance, documented the various ways in which the womens movement was ignored,

then subsequently maligned and ridiculed by the press before ultimately managing to

establish itself as a legitimate voice in the mainstream media. In his own take on the

news medias framing practices, Todd Gitlin (1980) famously implicated the mass media

as a factor in the eventual dissolution of the 1960s student movement, detailing the

ways in which Students for a Democratic Society ultimately lost control over their image

to the news media. But as Tuchman (1978) and Gitlin (1980) both pointed out, despite



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the potential pitfalls that come with coverage, favorable attention from the news media

greatly benefits social movements, and many sociological accounts have focused on how

media-savvy interest groups adopt dramaturgical styles of activism (Epstein, 1996, p.

220), carefully packaging their claims in ways that are likely to receive (favorable) media

attention (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989; Best, 1990; Ryan, 1991). As Hilgartner and Bosk

(1988) put it,

[Interest groups] are familiar with the selection principles of public arenas and

they deliberately adapt their social problems claims to fit their target

environments by packaging their claims in a form that is dramatic, succinct, and

employs novel symbols or classical theatrical tropes, or by framing their claims in

acceptable rhetoric.

In short, in the sixty years since Lewin (1951) and White (1950) first deemed the news

media to be gatekeepers, media sociologists and other scholars of communication have

developed a sophisticated language for discussing the various ways in which news

organizations form a bottleneck in the public discourse, selectively controlling

audiences access to information, while interest groups tailor their messages to the mass

medias whims and game its various selection mechanisms all in an attempt to bring

their concerns to public. Without questioning the validity or extraordinary depth of

scholarship that has gone into developing this lens on the news media, I now wish to

argue that some of the most interesting questions surrounding todays news media lie

outside its center of balance.



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The Conversation Economy

In his 2005 book, The Search, John Battellea founding editor ofWiredand

former CEO of the defunct Silicon Valley trade journal, TheIndustry Standardoffered

up a concept that has since become known amongst the technorati as the conversation

economy. More and more, he noted, Web users seemed to be accessing news stories

not by clicking through the homepages of news outlets, but by way of search engines and

their associated news portals, or by following links shared by friends and acquaintances

in various forms of online conversation. He argued that such trends put publications

like The Wall Street Journaland The Economistat a disadvantage. These sites, which

were built on a subscription model, put their stories behind paywalls, which in turn

restricted the ability of search engines to index them, and of friends to share content

with non-subscribers. Moreover, the two methodssearch and sharingtend to work

synergistically to direct traffic online. The more often the link to a story is shared in

blogs, discussion forums, and on social networks, the higher it will rise in the results of

search engines that rank pages partly by counting backlinks (Introna & Nissenbaum,

2000), and the more easily it will be found and shared in the future. Battelle predicted

that as search and sharing continued to become more prominent methods of access to

news, the influenceand subsequently the readership and revenueof paywalled

publications would begin declining apace, while their relatively open counterparts

reaped the benefits.

While the conversation economy is far from an academic construct, and the

paywall experiment isnt over yet for many news sites, some aspects of Battelles

predictions have proved prescient. In particular, it appears that a great deal of traffic to



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news sites today is directed by sharing and search. In March of this year, the Pew

Internet and American Life Project (Purcell et al., 2010) reported that

75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or

posts on social networking sites and 52% say they share links to news with others

via those means. 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are also

online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people

they follow. Another 23% of this cohort follow news organizations or individual

journalists on social networking sites. (p. 4)

Similarly, in 2009 Facebook surpassed Google News in the number of users it directed

to news media Websites, and was generating over twice as many clickthroughs to news

sites by February 2010 (Hopkins, 2010).1 There is anecdotal evidence to the effect that

online journalists have begun to select story topics partially on the basis of whether an

article is likely to generate page views through sharing and search (Foremski, 2010).

And companies like Demand Media, estimated by some to be the most lucrative

technology startup since Google (Kerner, 2010), have begun commissioning journalists

to write stories on subjects suggested by algorithms that comb through search engine

queries in search of trending topics likely to generate the most page views.

In short, while media sociologists have long focused on the ongoing issue of how

non-journalists package their stories for propagation by the news media, increasingly

the news media must also package its stories for propagation by non-journalists. The

new task, then, is to develop a theoretical lens for looking at how journalistic accounts

are made to circulate in this new and extended information ecosystem. There are no


1 While Facebook leads GoogleNews in the amount of news traffic it directs, its worth noting that it stilllags far behind general interest search engines like Google and Yahoo! (Hopkins, 2010)


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magic bullets for journalists, of course. Communication research has proven nothing if

not that the producers of messages can seldom guarantee their impact or popularity

(Bauer, 1971). In the words of sociologists of another tradition, online news circulates

within an agonistic field (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). But, as the Latour and Woolgar

reference suggests, there are certainly theoretical lenses that can help us understand

how journalistic practices are adapting to the digital environment.

Systems of Knowledge

In writing about the various challenges presented to traditional theories of media

by digital communication technologies, Chaffee and Metzger (2001) note that, a

fundamental assumption of agenda-setting theory is that people get their news from a

finite number of news sources or outlets...selected by professional gatekeepers who

operate under similar news values (p. 374). But, as they acknowledge, producers of

content online range from professionals based in industries that long predate the

internet (e.g., journalism) to concerned citizens to comic book fans to children.

Likewise, the internet and new media are full of both distinct and overlapping

discourses that mimic, monitor, borrow from, remix, address, react against, selectively

ignore, and sometimes outright steal from one another. In this environment, its hard to

put a fine point on what should be considered news and what shouldntand attempting

to lay down such hard categories inevitably invites questions of value and motivation.

But the challenges new media assert to our traditional categories of producers and

audiences, news and not news constitute a tremendous opportunity to develop

new alternative and interdisciplinary lenses on intermedia influence. In doing so, I



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argue that it is productive to de-privilege professional journalism as a subject of inquiry

and to think of it as one among many intersectingsystems of knowledge produced by

diverse groups on the Internetto take an ecological approach (Star & Griesemer, 1989)

to the way information travels and meaning is constructed online.

News as a System of Knowledge (Among Many)

Gaye Tuchmans 1978 newsroom ethnography,Making News has become a

landmark text in journalism studies and media sociology more generally. One of its

great contributions is to re-envision the study of journalism as an exercise in the

sociology of knowledge. She flags journalism as just one among numerous

organizationally and professionally produced systems of knowledge, including science

and sociology, as well as creative industries like film production and the television

business (Tuchman, 1978, p. 217). Moreover, since Tuchmans initial writing, the

number of creative industries has exploded, with many traditional sectors of the

economy refashioning themselves as producers of cultural products and intellectual

property (Deuze, 2007). Correspondingly, authors like Knorr Cetina (1997, 1999, 2001)

argue that we are gradually becoming a knowledge society, replete with an expanding

number ofepistemic cultures and intersecting systems of knowledge that are no longer

entirely bounded by organizational cultures, but have become a part of everyday life.

Knorr Cetina (1997) takes this discharge of knowledge relations into society as one of

the new key concerns for contemporary social theory (p. 8).

In this vein, many scholars point out that a great deal of contemporary creative

work online, from open source software to blogs to fan fiction to encyclopedias, is



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produced, not by professionals or creative industries, but through commons-based peer

production undertaken by loosely confederated groups of individuals collaborating for

free (Lessig, 2004; von Hippel, 2005; Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008). Bruns refers to the

networks of collaborators that grow up around these projects as produsage

communities, and they bear a great deal of resemblance to what Knorr Cetina (1997;

2001) deems epistemic cultures, or groups whose sociality is organized around common

systems of knowledge, which in turn are generally grounded in common objects of

inquiry or production. Moreover, while some peer production may require a great deal

of cooperation aimed at building a common artifact, such as a software release or an

encyclopedia article, many communally produced resources result from far less

coordinated and task oriented user activity, such as when users individually tag photos

on Flickr resulting in a searchable image archive, or improve search results when their

linking activity is aggregated by a search engine (Shirky, 2008; Bruns, 2008). In

Bruns (2008) interpretation, an online community can even be its own object of

communal production, with users evaluating and assigning merit based on one

anothers contributions to the ongoing discussion, irrespective of any intent to create

any artifact beyond the forum itself.

In light of all these observations, we can begin to consider different online

communities2 as epistemic cultures in Knorr Cetinas (1997, 2001) sense, each


2 I am aware of the extant debate over the validity of the term online community as a scholarlyconstruct. Some scholars, like Wellman and Gulia (1999), have argued that the term at least makes sense,as online communities frequently possess many of the properties of offline communities, such as socialcapital and reciprocity. At the same time, other researchers (for example, Haythornthwaite, 2007) havesuggested that the notion of communities be abandoned in favor of that of social networks, theargument being that social networks are a more precise, quantifiable, and therefore operationalizableconstruct. I do not wish to enter into this fray at the moment, but will clarify my stance on the issue laterin the paper.


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constructing and/or examining its own common objects, whether such objects include

evolving pieces of peer-produced software or the evolving sense of community itself.

This shift makes different online discourses, including but not limited to professional

journalism, amenable to study as systems of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge,

and particularly the sociology of scientific knowledge, has grown enormously since

Tuchman first suggested we consider journalism a system of knowledge akin to scientific

inquiry. This greatly expanded field provides many of the theoretical tools needed to

develop a lens that examines professional journalism, not only as a particular epistemic

culture, but one that must engage in exchange with many others to survive.

On Epistemic Cultures

Before moving on to a discussion of how different systems of knowledge interact,

its worth taking a moment to flesh out what I mean by epistemic cultures, which is a

term Ive only partially defined up til now. The phrase belongs to Knorr Cetina (1999)

and to her comparative study of two scientific fieldshigh-energy physics and molecular

biology. Knorr Cetinas study revolves not around the social construction of knowledge

itself, but in her words, the construction of the machineries of knowledge

construction (p. 3): the social and technical arrangements, arising from affinity,

necessity, and historical coincidence (p. 1) that surround different communities of

investigators and give rise to scientific knowledge. In short, she coins the term in an

effort to describe how different scientific disciplines, and even different laboratories

within a discipline, are not simply pursuing different lines of inquiry, but constitute

different cultures of inquiry, whose objects of study become the focus of an object-



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centered sociality, giving rise to distinct practices, social structures, and shared

ontologies, all of which in turn discursively shape the knowledge they produce.

Moreover, as I say above, Knorr Cetina (1997, 2001) ultimately proposes that, as we

become a knowledge society, we must ultimately consider the notion of epistemic

cultures as one that extends beyond the sciences to other institutions, as well as

informal systems of knowledge production and ultimately into our everyday

experiences.

And in fact, returning the discussion to journalism, Gaye Tuchmans (1978)

explication of the news frame might well in principle be considered an example of an

epistemic culture in Knorr Cetinas (1999, 2001) sense. Framing, of course, is a word

that gets thrown around quite frequently in many contexts (Scheufele, 2000), so its

worth noting that Tuchmans (1978) use of the term is rather distinctive. She describes

how, in an attempt to make economical use of limited resources, news organizations

deploy their reporting staff strategically, both geographically and temporally. She calls

this pattern of resource deployment the news netand describes how it generates

selection effects, systematically capturing particular types of events and issues, while

seldom or never netting others. On the one hand, Tuchmans metaphor of the news net

is intended to evoke the image of a wide-meshed fishing net lifting only items of a

certain size and shape out of the watermuch like the now classic thought experiment

on anthropic bias (Bostrom, 2002). But the woven strands of Tuchmans news net are

also a metaphor for another kind of neta network extending through time and space,

along which information travels from far-flung bureaus and distant wire reporters back

to the newsroom itself. Information on events that makes it back to the newsroom is



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then typifiedassigned to rough categories based on journalists and editors prior

experience covering similar events. These categoriessoft news, spot news, and so

onsubsequently allow editors to plan their coverage, which in turn leads to a refining

of the organizations strategic distribution of resources, further structuring the news net.

A final (for our present purposes) concept introduced by Tuchman is that of theweb of

facticitythe collection of mutually supporting facts and sources assembled by

reporters and written into a story. Taken individually, any fact or source in a news story

might appear suspect, but together they all serve to back one another up, ultimately

giving off the appearance of a credible article.3

Just what constitutes an adequate web of

facticity is a matter that is reflected in individual stories, but larger than any particular

articlethe sorts of sources that are credible, what counts as a fact, and so on, all reflect

and are reflected in the structure of the news net and the professional culture of

journalism that surrounds it.

These elementsthe news net, typification, and the web of facticityare all part

of Tuchmans (1978) news frame. Her use offraming, inspired by Goffman (1959), is

not about the framing of individual news stories, but about the larger machinery of

knowledge construction in Knorr Cetinas (1999) sensethe patterned arrangement of

resources that results in journalists particular and selective conception of the world.

Tuchmans (1978) injunction that we examine the frames employed by other creators of

knowledge is in a sense, then, carried forward in Knorr Cetinas concept of the the

epistemic culture. At the same time, Tuchmans concepts and their attendant


3 The general observation that authors are strategic in their use of sources and the juxtaposition of facts tobolster the credibility or their work risks being a lesson in the obvious, but nuanced accounts of how thisis done are an essential part of accounts that attempt to bring out the constructed nature of factual

writings. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in science studiesfor example, see Collins, 1981; Latour,1986; and Hilgartner, 2000.


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methodology give us a language for talking about the makeup of epistemic cultures that

is more finely attuned to media work.

From Correspondence to Coherence

A final necessary step before launching into a discussion of how systems of

knowledge interact is to consider what we mean by knowledge. If, as Knorr Cetina

(1999) suggests, to talk of epistemic cultures is not to discuss knowledge construction,

per se, but the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction (p. 3), then

our discussion thus far has remained one step removed from this final, essential

construct. Particularly if were thinking of various epistemic cultures that examine

current eventsas many, not just the journalistic ones, frequently doits tempting to

begin with a basic assumption that happenings in the world will have a powerful

influence on a wide variety of knowledge systems. If our various sources of information,

from news to dinner table conversation are all forms of mediated access to reality, then

reality would seem to play as big or even a bigger role in constraining our discourse

than media. Or, as media sociologist Schudson (2003) puts it in discussing news

content,

To hold news organizations accountable for news is something like holding

parents accountable for the actions of their childrenit is convenient to locate

responsibility somewhere, and it reminds news organizations (or parents) that

they have a serious job to do for which they will be judged. Still, they sometimes

have to work with unyielding materials. (p. 14)



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Outside journalism studies, in the world of science studies, the notion that journalists

(or scientists, or any other producers of knowledge) work with unyielding materials is

known as material agency. Simply put, material agency concerns the boundaries of

social constructionit reminds us that there are limits to the sorts of frames and

categories we can force onto the chaos of our world as we attempt to make sense of it.

At the very least, it tells us that such attempts will be met with resistance from the

people or things were trying to wedge into our Procrustean beds (Callon, 1999). And as

Schudson (2003) indicates, any discussion of the news mediaor any other non-

fictional media for that matteras constructors of reality should start with an

acknowledgement of the fact that the material for the news begins with, or at the very

least is in dialogue with, events and issues over which authors (and their institutions)

may have relatively little control. As Richard Dyer (1993) reminds us,

[T]here is no such thing as unmediated access to reality. But because one can see

reality only through representation, it does not follow that one does not see

reality at all. Partialselective, incomplete, from a point of viewvision of

something is not no vision of it whatsoever. (p. 3)

Its important to steer clear, however, of the notion that any medium simply

reflects reality veridically. As I relate above, Gans (1979) called this fallacy mirror

theorythe suspect notion that the content of a medium is simply an objective

reflection of the world. Mirror theory implies what philosophers sometimes call a

correspondence standard of truthan expectation that reliable documents should be an

accurate reflection of the external world (McInerny, 1992). But, as McInerny has

pointed out, there are other additional and alternative standards of reliable knowledge.



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One thats seen been analyzed far more frequently in sociology and other fields of social

science is an epistemological strategy he calls coherence (McInerny, 1992). This is the

idea that a document is reliable insofar as it is consonant with all our other sources of

informationwith everything else we know about the subject at hand. Coherence, as

it turns out, is fast becoming a useful concept in journalism studies. Again, Schudson is

useful here. Take the following extended passage from his 2003 book,The Sociology of

News in which he describes what he calls interinstitutional news coherence:

News institutions pay more attention to other news institutions than ever before.

The stories one reads in one publication are likely to bear a stronger resemblance

to the stories in the next publication than they would have in the past. A century

ago, competing newspapers in the same city featured front-page stories that their

rivals did not even carry in the back pages. There was little urgency in journalism

about coming up with the picture of that day's reality. Now news institutions

monitor one another all the time. ... [J]ournalists not only know what is going

on in other media outlets butthis is the CNN effectthey assume their

audiences do, too. ... The consequence of that assumption is that reporters push

even more insistently toward writing news with greater punch, more attitude,

and more evident interpretation, since they tend to assume that their audience

already knows the basics of the story from TV. Literary or film critics have talked

of intertextuality for a long time. Now news intertextuality is reality, not an

accidental outcome of wars that draw reporters to the same hotel, or of power

centers that draw them to the same bars in a capital city.News is a widely

distributed, seamless intertext. (pp. 109-110; italics mine)



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Boczkoski has expanded in recent years on this phenomenon in several articles and

presentations with names like Technology, monitoring and imitation in contemporary

news work (2009), When more media equals less news (2007), and Imitation in an

Age of Information Abundance (2008).

But as I insinuate above, while journalism studies certainly appreciates coherence

as a phenomenon, elsewhere it has been teased out further as an epistemological

strategya way of knowing about the world. And its here that I wish to cast some

additional attention in the hope that some of what has been said in fields like science

studies and the sociology of knowledge will in turn benefit the way we view not just

journalism, but many forms of online discourse. For this exercise, I take Latours work

as my starting point, as he introduces several constructs that have since been adopted or

adapted by scholars like Galison and Star, who will soon figure into our discussion on

the interaction of knowledge systems.

Latours take on coherence, stemming from the sociology of scientific knowledge,

has been developed across numerous works, including the booksLaboratory Life

(Latour & Woolgar, 1986) andScience in Action (1987), as well as the scholarly essays,

Drawing Things Together (1988) and The Pdofil of Boa Vista (1995). It relies on

numerous constructs, but for the purposes of my present discussion I wish to focus on

three: deflation, inscription, and optical consistency.

Latour (with Woolgar, 1986) notes that scientists (and members other

professions as well) make progress in their work by reducing the external world to

manipulable representations. In a classic example, from Drawing Things

Together (Latour, 1988) a geographer reduces a rocky coastline to a two-dimensional



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map. This might be viewed as simplification, or simply the discarding of all but those

characteristics of the coastline that are most salient to the tasks the map is intended to

facilitate. Such reductions often happen in successive stages. For instance, a biologist

might begin her work by removing the phenomenon under study from the external

world and placing it in a controlled laboratory setup. Next she might use instruments to

record particular data from her experiment, preserving the columns of numbers and

discarding the physical experimental setup at the end of the day. Subsequently the long

columns of numbers might be filed away in favor of a representative graph derived from

themand so on and so forth. This process whereby the external world is successively

reduced to increasingly compact representations is known as deflation, and the end

products of the processmaps, tables, graphs, and so onare inscriptions (Latour &

Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 1987, 1988, 1995).

Also important for Latour (1988) is the notion ofoptical consistency, which is in

many ways simply another way of getting at the notion of coherence. Latour suggests

that the inscriptions desired by scientists are not just concise representations of the real

worldi.e., researchers are not simply after a correspondence notion of truth. Rather,

what are desired are comparable representations of the worldmaps of different

prospective navigation routes with the same scale and legend, graphs of different

laboratory trials represented in the same units, engineering schematics of the same

machine shown from different angles. For Latour, the power and influence of modern

science derive from its ability to make comparisons, to see similarities and

discrepancies, and thereby to create internally consistenttheories of various

phenomena on which to act. In short, scientists seek coherence. And, according to



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Latour (1988), inscriptions are the tool that make this possible. Citing Eisenstein

(1979), he goes so far as to suggest that the ability to compare in short order discrepant

representations of different cosmologies was in part responsible for kicking off modern

astronomy:

The Copernican revolution...is an idealist rendering of a very simple mechanism:

if we cannot go to the earth, let the earth come to us, or, more accurately, let us

all go to many places on the earth, and come back with the same but different

homogenous pictures, that can be gathered, compared, superimposed, and

redrawn in a few places, together with the carefully labelled specimens of rocks

and fossils. (Latour, 1988, p. 37)

Latour (1988) sees deflation, inscription, and optical consistency at work, not just in

science, however, but across all our modern institutions. The functioning of markets

and whole economies, for instance, rely greatly on the deflation of myriad costs, sales,

payments, and other transactional data into inscriptions like the Dow Jones Industrial

Average or the Gross Domestic Product. Indeed, reducing the whole economy to a tiny

set of numeric indicators comparable across decades or nations represents a

tremendous process of deflation and a powerful drive toward optical consistency.

Moreover, as I have argued above, systems of knowledge are no longer limited to the

institutional settings Latour initially envisioned. If the Dow is a remarkable exercise in

deflation and inscription, so are the myriad Google Maps mashups produced by Internet

users in their spare time.

Latours work demonstrates at least two things presently of interest to us. First,

coherence is a powerful resourcewhen maintained, it allows humans to do everything



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from navigate coastlines to set market prices. Second, coherence doesnt simply happen

coherence is hard work that involves constant monitoring and interpretation of new

information. Moreover, many social scientists, from communication researchers like

Brenda Dervin (1989) and Karl Weick (1995) to anthropologists like Gay Becker (1999)

have suggested that people seek coherence in their everyday livesit isnt merely the

preserve of biologists and cartographers.

I would like to argue that, as with Schudsons (2003) observation of journalistic

practices, every distinct epistemic culture strives for internal consistency, for coherence.

Moreover, while focusing above on the work of a single researcher within science studies

provides a clear narrative, observations about the importance of coherence in knowledge

production arent unique to Latour, but are evident throughout the sociology of

scientific knowledge.4 Moreover, in line with Boczkowskis (2009) observations,

maintaining such coherence often involves careful monitoring of ones information

environment. When a journalist writes a news story, it must be make sense within the

context of all the other news stories on the same subject, with regard to the journalists

prior knowledge of the subject, the information provided by her sources, and whatever

knowledge the authors audience might be assumed to possess (Tuchman, 1978; Gans,


4 To give just a few examples, Collins (1981) argues that researchers often attempt to deflect attentionfrom contingency and situatedness in their research reports, so as to provide more compelling, internallyconsistent accounts of the phenomena under study. Starr and Griesemer (1989), whose work is attendedto more closely later in the paper, focus on scientists strategies for developing and maintainingcoherence (p. 393) across social worlds. Karl Poppers (2002) notion of falsifiability as the properdemarcation for scientific study relies heavily on the maintenance of the internal consistency ofknowledge. Kuhns (1970) paradigms are marked by their coherence and break down, in part, whenscientists defect or are reared into competing ontological schemes. Galison (1997) notes that Kuhns workis in fact part of a larger tradition within social studies of science that underscores the importance ofresearchers internally consistent conceptual schemes. Moreover, Galisons (1997) own work onsubcultures within microphysics illustrates that individual subcultures within the sciences can be largelyautonomous, with the ability to withstand challenges from without, partly because the strength andexpansiveness of each subcultures internally consistent logic leads scientists to tolerate substantialamounts of disconfirming data before abandoning a theory or experimental regimen.


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1979; Schudson, 2003). A reporter, thenas well as everyone else who touches a news

story on its way to publication (Hetherington, 1985)must monitor all these things in

the environment to maintain coherence. Part of the act of publishing is the work of

making a text coherent with the environment into which it is deployed. And again, not

to privilege journalism, this is presumably true not only for professional reporters and

editors, but also for bloggers, discussion forum participants, Wikipedians, YouTubers,

and other online content producers.

Interacting Systems of Knowledge

At this point, its worth taking a moment to summarizeand perhaps clarify

what Ive attempted to accomplish thus far. Ive argued that traditional media sociology

predominantly portrays the mass media as a bottleneck in the dissemination of

information, which interest groups attempt to access by carefully packaging their claims

to suit selection criteria. While this is a reasonable view, which captures much about

how journalistic institutions filter information and construct a particular view of reality,

it is no longer sufficient to explain how information is produced for consumption in a

networked information environment where the spread of stories is explicitly mediated

by sharing and search, and visibly embedded in a wide variety of conversations

effectively making journalists claims-makers of a sort themselves.5 I have argued that


5 I say explicitly here because, of course, our experience of media has always been mediated by socialsharing. This is the very basis of the two-step flow model of communication (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 2006).Newspapers and nightly news certainly had a broader reach in the mid-Twentieth Century than they dotoday, but its interesting to consider the extent to which online social media have reshaped the flow ofmass media information versus the extent to which they have merely made it explicit. Before data beganrolling in on clickthroughs, unique visitors, and site stickiness, newspapers were free to assumeormore to the point, encourage advertisers to assumethat every story in the paper was read by everysubscriber. But selectivity about what to read and what to share has undoubtedly been with us since long

before the Web. Even if we grant this, however, we shouldnt underestimate the significance of this newexplicitness for the way legacy media operate in the digital age (Turow, 2005).


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the online communities that consume and discuss news products in the course of their

own forms of cultural production should be viewed as small and large epistemic

cultures, with information gathering resources deployed in particular patterns arising

from affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 1). Each of

their cultural products contains its own inherent logic, its web of facticity and

associated narrative form, and so structures what can and will be reported (Tuchman,

1978, p. 217). These epistemic cultures may be distinctive, but they do not exist in

isolation. Rather, they intersect with many others by virtue of aligned or conflicting

interests and multiple membership. As such, each epistemic cultures maintenance of

coherence takes place as it influences, is influenced by, borrows from, and trades with

others. It is the dynamics of such intersections of knowledge systems to which I now

turn.

Intermedia Influence

Intermedia agenda setting. Traditionally, when communication scholars have

examined the question of how journalists influence and are influenced by other media,

the question has been framed as one of intermedia agenda settinghow different news

outlets influence one anothers selection of topics, or how agendas aired through other

institutionalized media (e.g., political advertising) make their way into the news (for

examples, see Danielian & Reese, 1989 and Roberts & McCombs, 1994). Moreover,

where new forms of social media have been considered in relation to mass media, the

top down focus of traditional agenda setting research has generally been retained,

situating electronic forums as publics to be influenced by mass media (see, for example



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Roberts, Wanta & Dzwo, 2002 and Wallsten, 2007). Only recently have studies begun

to examine the prospect of mutual influence between social media forms like blogs and

mainstream media outlets, and in doing they have run sharply up against the limitations

of methodological and theoretical lenses developed for examining the interaction of

small numbers of neatly bounded mass media organizations (Chaffee & Metzger, 2001;

Wallsten, 2007). As such, in my view it is more promising to shift attention to other

well-developed theories that are specifically built to deal with the interaction of myriad

groups with different characteristics and agendas than to continue modifying and

reassembling traditional theories of intermedia agenda setting to cope with new media

forms.

The public arenas model. Another, alternative model sometimes taken up in

communication research is Hilgartner and Bosks (1988) public arenas model, which

contrasts the fact that a near infinite number of social problems could, in principle,

grace the public agenda with the reality that the public agenda is hosted by media with

finite carrying capacitiesnewspapers with their set number of column inches,

television news with its fixed minutes of airtime. Myriad prospective public problems

compete on the basis of their respective cultural attributes in a vast battle for the limited

number of slots on this public agenda. In principle, what ensues is much like natural

selection, but it is the filtering mechanisms of news institutions and other public arenas

that are brought to bear on the field of potential public problems, withering unpalatable

claims and letting only the must culturally appealing survive in the spotlight, where they

remain for a time, only to be picked off by new claims better adapted to the needs of the

moment. Intermedia influence in the public arenas model occurs when particularly



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successful claims exceed the carrying capacity of a given medium and spill overfrom

one medium to another, such as when a newspaper story is picked up by the evening

news, or televisions movie of the week is ripped from the headlines.

Recently, with the rise of online newspapers and 24-hour cable news, the finite

carrying capacity of news media have become more about the limits of attention and

resources than the constraints of physical media or airtime. But the model still holds in

principle,6 and there are many aspects of it that I want to hold on to as the discussion

moves forward. While Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) generally hold to an institutional

view of public arenas, noting the importance of the selections made by well-positioned

cultural gatekeepers (p. 55), they do not insist on the news media as the only space for

public deliberation. As such, authors like Maratea (2008) have had some success

translating an expanded concept of public arenas to new media environs. Further,

there is nothing in principle that prevents the keepers of public arenas in Hilgartner and

Bosks (1988) model from being claims makers themselves, packaging their cultural

products to play well in other spaces and meet the selection criteria of, and spill over

into, the greatest number of outlets.

Boundary Objects and Trading Zones

In the field of science studies, the intersection of different systems of knowledge

has been a favorite subject of study. Kuhn (1970), for instance, achieved something akin

to academic immortality for examining how scientific paradigms clash and eventually


6 Its worth noting that while the public arenas model has been generally supported, there have been casesin which the model has received only mixed supportsee Hertog, Finnegan, & Kahn, 1994 for one suchexample. It is encouraging, however, that a recent study (Maratea, 2008) applying the model to casestudies of public problems on the Web suggested the theory may hold up well for online media.


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upend one another. Subsequently, Barnes and Bloor (1982), along with other scholars

like Collins (1981a; 1992) and Pinch (with Collins, 1998) pursued an empirical program

of relativism aimed at examining scientific controversiesall of which was intended to

open up competing systems of belief within science from a sociological perspective. In

looking at new media, there are, no doubt lessons to be learned and applied from the

relativistic program. For the present, however, I am far more interested in how different

epistemic cultures coexist generatively than how they ultimately battle to the death. As

such, its appropriate to focus on two theoretical frameworks from science studies that

examine the process of developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting

social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989).

Boundary objects. Star and Griesemer (1989) recognized that knowledge-

building endeavors often require collaboration from diverse groups with only partially

aligned interests and worldviews. In exploring this state of affairs, the authors took as

their example one of Californias early natural history museums and the means by which

it went about building out its collection of data and specimens. Each of the groups of

stakeholders who participatedsome centrally, others peripherallyin the museums

endeavors had very different interests in mind. The donor who funded the University of

Californias Museum of Vertebrate Zoology sought, through her charity and personal

hunting prowess, to preserve specimens of vanishing wildlife, which required the

widespread acquisition of relatively intact furry and feathered corpses. The museum

director sought to make a name for himself in the ecology research community, which

necessitated not only good specimens but accurately collected data about each find,

sufficient for aggregation, comparison, and theory building (think of Latours



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inscriptions here). The university administration cared little about wildlife preservation

or assembling a massive collection of stuffed animals, per se, but sought to legitimate

the young University of California on the national stage, while making it a local cultural

center. The amateur naturalists who occasionally brought in specimens wanted to aid

the museums scientific pursuits, but were also eager to receive official recognition for

their hobbyist naturalism. Trappers could also be persuaded to capture and part with

choice specimens, but were generally only interested in cash, or other exchanges that

benefitted them directly, such as the receipt of other pelts in exchange for those they

contributed or information on promising hunting territories.

Amid this tangled mesh of divergent interests were limited areas of alignment

and overlap, made possible by the existenceand at times the creationofboundary

objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989). Boundary objects may be symbolic or physical objects

like cash, points on a map, or otter peltswhich often mean different things or are

valued for different reasons within the distinctive cultures of various stakeholders. But,

importantly, they are identifiable to everyone at the table, and thus become a means for

translating the interests of one group into the terms of another. In the case of the

museum, each partys use of boundary objects to partially align and further their

individual interests with those of others gave rise to a unique, heterogeneous system for

enlisting, distributing, and managing one anothers labor and capital in a way that

ultimately not only allowed for the museums continued functioning, but distinctly

shaped the knowledge produced by it. Boundary objects are thus an important

construct. They demonstrate how distinct cultures (including epistemic cultures) may

coordinate with one another in a way that furthers their individual interests, without



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foundering on the rocks of their ontological differences. As Star & Griesemer (1989) put

it, the creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing

and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds (p. 393). Moreover, the

construct suggests that the shape that such alliances take impacts the framein

Tuchmans (1978) sensefrom which each culture derives its understanding of the

world.

Trading zones. Like Star and Griesemer (1989), Galison (1997) takes up the

problem of how it is that different cultures can at once be heavily interdependentsuch

as is the case with theoretical and experimental physicistswhile remaining largely

autonomous and distinctive. In answer to the problem, he draws from anthropological

notions of trade, noting that it is possible for different cultures to engage in commerce

while maintaining distinct, and even opposing worldviews. Rather than boundary

objects, he proposes that autonomous subcultures develop languages of trade, or

pidgins, through which to interact with one another. Many of his key examples come

from the collaboration of American physicists and engineers on defense projects during

World War II. To collaborate on the bleeding edge technology of radar, for instance,

theorist Julian Schwinger and his engineering contemporaries developed a pidgin that

served to reduce high theory to the bare essentials needed by engineers and vice versa.

The resulting calculations and schematics were neither physical theory nor engineering

schematics in the classical sense of either. Nor were electrical engineers and theoretical

physicists becoming experts in one anothers domains, which were not even terribly

consistent with one another. Rather, the two subcultures had developed a pidgin that



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allowed both to further knowledge within their own domain without stepping outside of

their unique systems of knowledge.

Galison (1997), through his examples, portrays pidgins as being born out of

pragmatic necessity, though certainly he leaves open the possibility that they may at

times be forged of convenience. But whether they arise in the frenetic heat of the

moment or for simpler reasons, pidgins can often be unstable, resulting from temporary

alliances that disintegrate once everyones needs are met. They may also develop into

sophisticated creolesrich systems of meaning capable of sustaining their own

epistemic cultures.

Trading zones are the areas of partial alignment in intersecting systems of

knowledge that spawn and sustain pidgins and creoles. These may be concepts of

mutual interest or physical objects (e.g., various radar apparatus). They may also be

physical spaces, such as shared laboratories. Galison (1997) points to the initial

architecture of postwar labs like Brookhaven, which simultaneously underscored the

separation between the professional identities of different groups of physicists while

foregrounding opportunities for coordination between them. Such decisions about

architecture will be considered further in my subsequent paper on the design of new

media spaces. For now, its enough to underscore that for Galison (1997), as for Leigh

and Griesemer (1989), the manner in which different epistemic cultures coordinate

whether out of necessity or historical accidentaround their partially aligned interests,

both allows for the generative coexistence of different systems of knowledge, and

influences the sort of knowledge that is ultimately produced within each.



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Interoperable Systems of Knowledge

Again, Id like to view different centers of online cultural productionwhether

online communities (produsage communities in Bruns [2008] phrase), professional

newsrooms, or other organizational sources of contentas individual epistemic cultures

that interact to produce intersecting systems of knowledge.7 It is time, at long last, to

pull together the various elements of my discussion thus far into a single lens for

examining such interactions and studying the manner in which information flows and

meaning is constructed across and between intersecting systems of knowledge on the

Internet.

Circles of Coherence

I have argued that each epistemic culture strives to maintain coherence, to

remain internally consistent, as it deals with new information and spins out the system

of knowledge around which its practices center. And I have also stated that an essential

part of the act of publishing is the work of making a text coherent with the environment

into which it is deployed. Star and Griesemer (1989) hold open the possibility of the

coherence of texts across social worlds, but here Id like to draw a boundary between

local and global coherence. It is likely impossible that any published text would be

consistent with every other. And in fact, this is the persistent worry of scholars like Van

Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (1996), Robert Putnam (2000), Rosen (2004), and Sunstein

(2007, 2009)all of whom have suggested that as discourse online becomes more


7 Note that Id like to draw a distinction here between Websites (or other online forums) and centers ofproduction. It would be a mistake to equate the two, as a single Website may contain many differentcommunities or be maintained by multiple groups of professionals. Similarly, a single epistemic culturemay exist across multiple Websites.


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polarized, mutually agreed upon truths will become harder to come by. In short,

publishers within a given epistemic culture will be far more concerned with making

their texts locally coherent than globally coherent. For example, Adamic & Glance

(2005) have shown that conservative and liberal blogs link far more often to other

politically similar blogs than to their partisan counterparts across the aisle. Along with

Sunstein (2007), I venture to say that a liberal blogger will likely want to publish a text

that is coherent within the context of the liberal blogs and other sources she links to, but

find it less necessary to be consistent with conservative bloggers framings of her

subject. Indeed, if one partisan blogger isnt reading the others work in the first place

as is often the caseits safe to assume that coherence between the two isnt a great

concern. In Galisons (1997) terms, not all cultures are ideologically near enough to

trade (p. 803). Moreover, on those occasions when partisan blogs do reference across

the aisle, additional work is presumably necessary in order to show why the opposing

view is wrong or otherwise make it consistent with the local discourse (Sunstein, 2007).

In this way, we might imagine individual posts or distinctive epistemic cultures

online as existing within limited circles of coherence. A particular post, for instance,

might be consistent with the individual authors existing knowledge of a subject, with

everything else the post links to, with the presumed expectations of the audience, and so

on and so forth. But these are limited requirements for consistency, and outside of them

the post may cease to be coherent with other texts and audiences. The work that

authors do to make their text coherent with particular others is thus selective. Whether,

in a given instance, this has to do with partisan thinking, unique interests, social and

cultural influences, or simply the very real limits of an individuals attention, global



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coherence is impossibleand local coherence constitutes a choice laden with the

authors values and priorities about which sources are worth paying attention to, which

audiences are worth addressing. To put the issue back into Schudsons (2003) language,

intertexts have seams.

Bounding Epistemic Cultures and Circles of Coherence

In developing the theoretical tools laid out here, I do not wish to make the

mistake of conflating Websites with online communities or epistemic cultures. Web

domains and epistemic cultures are not one in the samemany communities may exist

within a Website like Twitter or Daily Kos, while in other instances a single community

may span multiple Websites. I have thus far been discussing epistemic cultures as

though each were monolithic, but the reality of cultural productionand especially the

commons-based peer production that is characteristic of online communitiesis much

more fluid and far less tightly bounded (Deuze, 2007; Bruns, 2008). For Bruns,

individuals may move closer or further from the center of activity in a given community,

but there is no hard outer edge demarcating who is or is not a member, save perhaps for

the exclusion of individuals who have never participated. Moreover, sociologists of

scientific knowledge like Star and Griesemer (1989) and Law (1989) are quick to point

out that a network of texts or collaborations, and no doubt an epistemic culture, looks

very different depending on the initial point at which you start to trace it out. This is a

point echoed by Haythornthwaite (2007) and other communication researchers who

have called for an upending of the notion of online communities in favor of the study

of online social networks. From a network perspective, who is and who is not part of a



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given community is greatly dependent on how one defines links between individuals

and whether this accords with social reality (Haythornthwaite, 2007).

But if the network is at times a more nuanced tool for examining relationships

onlinebetween varying combinations of texts, bodies of work, and individualsthere

is undoubtedly still great utility in being able to speak at times of such groupings as

communities or cultures. Bruns (2008) unequivocally accepts the network view of

online collaboration, but still speaks of produsage communities. Similarly Star and

Griesemer (1989) employ a network perspective, while identifying their historical

subjects as distinct communities consisting of trappers, collectors, university

administrators, and so forth. Law (1989) also is able to speak of shipbuilders, sailors,

astronomers, and so on in his analysesnot as clusters in a network, but as distinct

groupswhile acknowledging that each is on some level embedded in a far more

nuanced set of network relations.

For my own part, I wish to retain the shorthand ofepistemic cultures to speak of

groups online who understand themselves to be a community with a corpus of shared

meanings and associations, and who have in common all of the attributes of a

knowledge frame in Tuchmans sense: an identifiable epistemic netfor retrieving

information about the world, a set oftypifications for distributing attention and

resources, and shared standards for what constitutes a sufficient web of facticity for

establishing new knowledge.8 I contend that we can employ the term epistemic

cultures while all the while recognizing that such relations are undergirded by a


8 Down the road, it may be appropriate to further adapt Tuchmans terminology. Already I have taken theliberty of shifting from her phrase news net to epistemic net to encompass non-journalistic cultures.However, the fact remains that her adoption in 1978 of terms like web and net may well proveconfusing for discussing the Internet.


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network structure. Meanwhile, my construct ofcircles of coherence is very much a

network construct, which seeks to draw explicit links between an individual or text and

the sources it draws from on the one hand, the audiences it addresses on the other. My

intent is that the two terms will complement one another to explicate aspects of

interacting knowledge systems that neither could in isolation.

Active Versus Passive Coordination

While there are many lessons to be derived from Star and Griesemer (1989) and

from Galison (1997) as to the manner in which epistemic cultures which are quite

different can persist autonomously while selectively drawing on and benefitting from

one anothers activities, the bulk of examples from both involve active coordination on

the part of groups on either side of a trade or aligned around a particular set of

boundary objects. Trappers and museum curators must agree on the price of a pelt,

physicists and engineers worked closely with one another in their language of trade to

produce radar technologies. Certainly active collaboration between groups happens all

the time online. MSNBC.com has arranged to republish articles from

WashingtonPost.com. IBM hosts conferences for open source developers. Bloggers

assemble at Meetups and put on conventions. None of these things could happen

without engagement and collaboration between the involved parties. But when we look

at how information circulates on a day to day basis onlineespecially through sharing

and searchwere more often looking atpassive coordination. A journalist or a blogger

publishes a piece which includes desirable audiences within its circle of coherence. The

text and page structure may be optimized for the best possible placement by search



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engines. She may publish the story at a time when site traffic is likely to be high in order

to boost its visibility. She may even convince friends to vote up the story on Digg or post

it to Facebook. But generally speaking, the author of a piece cannot by sheer force of

will make the bulk of users online share an article or even pay attention to it. If we view

a piece of content posted in such a fashion as belonging to a boundary object, it is of a

variety Star and Griesemer (1989) termed a repositorya collection of items indexed

such that people from different worlds can use or borrow from the pile for their own

purposes without having directly to negotiate differences in purpose (p. 410). Users

can take (or leave) a blog post or news story by sharing it to their favorite sites without

negotiating with the publisher as to the specific context of its use. Certainly, the original

publisher gets something in return by allowing their content to be sharedattention,

Google juice, page impressions that perhaps lead to ad revenuebut compared to

more engaged forms of transaction, there is very little resembling mutual coordination

between parties in such an exchange. Galison (1997) and Star and Griesemer (2008)

have given us a sophisticated vocabulary for talking about active coordination, and some

vocabulary for discussing passive coordination. Hilgartner and Bosks (1988) claim

makers, packaging messages for uptake by particular, or even multiple arenas come

closer to the desired picture here. However, Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) spend more

time on the selection principles of public arenas than on the strategies adopted by claim

makers. And given how much information online travels through passive coordination

(Shirky, 2008; Bruns, 2008), I argue that we would do well to extend our vocabulary for

discussing such arrangements.



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Epistemic Interoperability

The language of engineering gives us a nice metaphor for thinking about selective

coherence and passive coordination. In the parlance of engineers, we might say that by

deploying their content within a particular circle of coherence, authors in a sense are

constructing their texts to be interoperable with certain other texts, audience

expectations, and discoursesand inoperable with others. Like developers who design a

software application or electrical engineers who build an iPod accessory, producers who

want to address particular audiences must pay attention to the standards that will allow

their text to operate in the desired environment. But this sort of coordination is

ultimately passivelike the engineers building accessories, content providers cannot

ultimately force audiences to use their inventions.9

This principle of interoperability is certainly important when content producers

are attempting to encourage the uptake of their work by other epistemic cultures. But it

is equally essential within the creators own epistemic culture. In Schudsons (2003)

interinstitutional news coherence, every news story has to make sense in the context of

every other on the same subject. A Wikipedia article on the sociology of childhood is

formatted for consistency of content and style with other articles maintained by the

sites Sociology WikiProjecta community of users interested in the field. Users on the

liberal political blog Daily Kos are encouraged to either back up all assertions they make


9 One might argue in response that the use of some engineers inventions are impossible to avoid, pointingout that some technologies, like seatbelts are mandated and some tasks cannot be completed without theuse of specialized machinery. And I would agree. There are similarly situations where the possession ofcertain information or even the adoption of particular conceptual schemes become mandatory for peopleto function in society or complete particular tasks. This is a matter taken up by Law (1989) in his work onheterogeneous engineering, which I will revisit in my subsequent paper.


35/46

in their posts with links to reputable sources or perhaps reconsider writing [at

all] (dKosopedia, 2004). And so on and so forth.

At the same time, there are discursive mechanisms in play to prevent the

interoperation of certain texts. The use of partisan language and esoteric slang abound

online, as do discussions employing mutually exclusive issue frames. And such

inoperability isnt limited to partisan sites or obscure online discussions. In my recent

study of network news blogs, I found that authors sometimes employ discursive styles

that arguably discourage substantive commenting (Braun, 2010).

Conclusion

The benefit of using this languageepistemic cultures, circles of coherence and

epistemic interoperabilityis that it extends the lens of traditional sociological work on

journalism while keeping its insights. We maintain an awareness of how the news frame

produces selection effects that result in a very particular construction of reality. We

continue to understand how issue sponsors package their claims in ways they believe

will make their issues thrive within the news frame. At the same time, our new lens

takes the mass media in general and journalism in particular off their pedestals. Just as

science and technology scholars introduced their empirical program of relativism,

finally making room for satisfying sociological explanations of science by de-privileging

its claims, so we can better understand how journalism functions within the larger

ecology of new media by treating it as just one epistemic culture among many coexisting

and interacting systems of knowledge.



36/46

The lens I have constructed in this essay also gives us a way of thinking about

why the content of particular online media might be similar or different from one

another that is preferable, in my view, to the more traditional lens within

communication of intermedia agenda setting. The commonplace description of agenda

setting research, that the media dont tell audiences what to think, but what to think

about (Kosicki, 1993) continues to see the balance of agencyeven if that agency is

somewhat limitedon the side of publishers at the expense of audiences. In general,

communication research has advanced when it has given more agency to audiences,

taken a relatively limited view of media effects, and treated the exchange of information

as a dialogic, rather than a one-way process (Bauer, 1971; Lowery & De Fleur, 1983;

Lewenstein, 1995). Viewing centers of content production as epistemic cultures

organized around systems of knowledge that interoperate selectively with others is, in

my view, a step toward balancing the accounts of media and consumer agency as we

progress further into a century in which the gatekeeping role of legacy media has begun

to decline (Chaffee & Metzger, 2001), while the role of consumers has begun expanding

to include content production (Bruns, 2008). Under such a lens, two distinct discourses

that draw from the same sources, address themselves to a shared audience, or otherwise

interoperate will necessarily exist within overlapping circles of coherence, and thus we

have a reason to assume that their content will be similar. Likewise, when two

discourses are inoperable together we have a language for talking about that as well.

And when different content producers actively collaborate, not only does the language of

epistemic interoperability still hold, but the rich lexicon of trading zones (Galison,

1997), boundary objects (Leigh & Griesemer, 1989), and public arenas (Hilgartner &



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Bosk, 1988) is opened further up to us as well to provide an ever fuller description of the

interaction of systems of knowledge.

Lastly, there is also a sense in which the language of interoperability applies to

online discourse in a non-metaphorical sense. If what Ive described above isepistemic

interoperability, there is also architecturalinteroperability to be considered, including

among other things, technological affordances provided by publishers for propagating

content (as with social bookmarking tools on the Web) and constraints (like DRM) for

reigning in its spread. As I argue in my subsequent paper, in the digital media

environment, not only is architectural interoperability equally a way of determining

where your content goes and how it interacts with different audiences and discourses,

both epistemic and architectural interoperability are actively employed together as

instruments in the toolbox of the heterogeneous engineer.



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epistemic interoperability (early draft of a dissertation chapter)

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