The emergence of ChatGPT has attracted the attention of the entire academic community, and the intelligent era of communication has slowly begun. Intelligent media are not only channels and intermediaries, but also become the main body of communication, which means that the way of thinking in communication research will usher in a new change.
In fact, the last change in the way of thinking in the journalism and communication academic community has not completely receded.
The communication knowledge system was formed in the era of mass communication. It either emphasizes the information transmission function of the media, with a strong color of information theory and cybernetics, or emphasizes the cultural ritual function of text and meaning, with a critical color. Since the 21st century, digital and network technologies have challenged the traditional research paradigm that focuses on content and its impact. Researchers have begun to pay attention to the meaning and impact of the media itself. Media materiality, media archeology, media infrastructure, geographical media, urban media, etc. that have been introduced in the previous volumes of "Analysis of Chinese Journalism and Communication" all represent the introduction of this new paradigm in China.
However, in radical media theory, even in Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT), the agency of the media is still basically a metaphorical concept. According to the German philosopher Kramer, the media is just a messenger, heteronomous, and must obey others. At the same time, it does not intervene in the content itself, but only transforms the content into perceivable experience. Therefore, media research mainly focuses on the intermediary, organizational and transformational issues of media. On this basis, the "medium is existence" proposed is a more poetic interpretation. However, no matter how important they emphasize the importance of media, researchers basically still view media from an anthropocentric perspective. The most typical one is Stiegler's view that technology is the externalization of human organs.
The advent of the artificial intelligence era is likely to change the original communication pattern and assumptions. Literally new actors will join the ranks of communicators. They will no longer be passive and heteronomous messengers, but will actively intervene in content production as subjects. In the interpersonal relationships mediated by computers, the dimension of human-machine relationship may also be added. Of course, this does not mean that artificial intelligence will completely replace humans as new communicators. There are many transition zones in the middle. Artificial intelligence may cooperate with humans to reconstruct communication content, communication methods and relationships. This will rewrite the default assumptions of a series of previous studies.
Since the era of intelligent communication has just begun, there are not many studies in this volume that directly focus on artificial intelligence. Most of them summarize the changes in the previous research paradigm, and many studies are rethinking the issue of media. The so-called mediality, as Huang Dan said in the article "Understanding the Power of Media," is not a characteristic of a specific medium, but a characteristic of an abstract ordinary medium, such as the intermediary, heteronomy, transformation, perceptibility, transparency, asymmetry (the medium will not eliminate the differences between the two parties) mentioned by Kramer. Hu Yiqing and Yao Wenyuan summarized it more clearly: media is the trinity of interface, content and material. The interface embodies the intermediary and transformational nature of the medium, converting the content that the transmitter wants to convey into an experience that the recipient can perceive. However, whether the content mentioned in it can be classified as the characteristics of the medium can be further discussed. The medium proposed by Debray is the "organization of content" and "organized content", of which the latter as a semiotic system still emphasizes the form or format of the content rather than the pure content itself.
In addition to philosophical discussions on mediality, most of the discussions on media included in this volume involve specific media, such as infrastructure, bodies, platforms, and navigation media. Each study is also unique, and readers can appreciate that through the media perspective and the use of media as a method We can see everything about the world, especially the two articles "Networked Body" and "Agency and Limitations of Space Production of Digital Platform Workers". The articles provide a more in-depth analysis of the alienation and manipulation of people by technology, showing the complex symbiotic relationship between platforms and people. Although technology may not be the direct cause of enslaving people, and the real reason is the institutional arrangements and power relations behind it, media technology at least serves as a cultural form and structural factor, putting specific groups at a greater disadvantage. Technology plays the role of "medicine" as Plato and Derrida said. On the one hand, it brings benefits to human beings and relieves the pain caused by desire, but on the other hand, "it is three parts of medicine and poison" and it can put people into new difficulties.
In recent years, with the difficulties of the journalism industry, journalism research has been in the process of exploring paradigm transformation. In the past two years, many researchers have begun to re-understand news from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, which coincides with the approach of using the concept of knowledge to criticize the concept of information in communication research. This is a homage or return to Parker's classic studies. Parker's article "Journalism as Knowledge: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge" is the foundation of American journalism research, but this tradition happens to be absent from China's past journalism research. There have been philosophical journalism studies and communication sociology journalism studies before, which either regarded news as a tool of political struggle or regarded news as a product of the media industry, but rarely thought deeply about the uniqueness of news from an ontological sense. Parker's classic work links news with the construction of reality from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. Although his explanation is not systematic or in-depth due to the time and knowledge structure, this perspective builds a bridge connecting journalism research with the broader social environment and academic resources.
The dimension of knowledge gives us a new perspective on issues such as news, post-truth, and Internet journalism in the platform era, and we get rid of the problem of only focusing on news and ignoring the connection between news and broader platform technology and social relations. The articles by Hu Yiqing, Wang Bin and others in this volume are good examples.
Classic news production research (or traditional media sociology) focuses on studying the impact of intricate relationships in the media on media content from the perspective of organizational sociology. In recent years, more and more studies have begun to consider technology as an important factor in production. Empirical studies conducted by Wu Jingwei, Zhou Ruiming, Wang Min, etc. have revealed that technology has become an important part of the logic of media production, shaping and constraining the methods and processes of media production.
From the above brief introduction, it is easy to see that the journalism and communication research included in this volume all take the social effects of media technology as the core issue, which not only reflects the current focus of academic research, but also reflects the editor's tendency.
At this point, it is necessary to repeat the selection principles of this book. Because occasionally we are asked why some authors' articles are often selected for inclusion while others are never. First of all, it should be emphasized that this book is not a comprehensive record of Chinese journalism and communication research, nor does it have the ambition of a monthly review. It only represents the editor's limited vision and narrow understanding of the current focus and trends of journalism and communication research, or it is purely a personal interest.
In fact, starting from the first editor-in-chief of this series, Professor Chen Lidan, "Analysis of Chinese Journalism and Communication" has a very strong personal style. Compared with the "heavy" styles of other yearbooks and blue books, this style can be described as "light", experimental and exploratory. As for whether this style has value, it is ultimately up to the readers to judge.
Due to the epidemic, the 2022 volume of "Analysis of Chinese Journalism and Communication" is temporarily unavailable. The volume in your hands brings together two years of reviews and important literature. This has both advantages and disadvantages. The good side is that there is more accumulation, but the bad side is that there are more regrets. Starting with this volume, there is a slight change in the title. In previous years, each volume was marked with the year of publication. Although it is easy to identify, it also gives people the illusion that the book is only valid for one year. In fact, the better the research, the longer its shelf life. I believe that the articles included in this volume should not be perishable research, but will have an impact in the next few years. This year we have set the subtitle as “Reunderstanding Media” to highlight the common orientation of the articles included in this volume.
Zhai Jianghong, chief editor of the Humanities Branch of Renmin University of China Press, has continued to support the publication of "Analysis of Chinese Journalism and Communication: Reunderstanding the Media". Without her persistence, this volume would not have been successfully published. Thanks also to the authors for their generous permissions. At the same time, Shu Kairong undertook a lot of editing and organizational work, and doctoral students Sun Tongxin, Ding Yiran, Zhang Shichao, Liu Jie, Chen Yuheng, and Hui Yiheng undertook the re-editing work of each article. We would like to express our gratitude!
