Information overload is something that humans have dealt with for millennia. During different historical eras, massive increases in what was available to know has motivated the creation of systems for sorting, indexing, and compiling information as well as concerns that the abundance of information might cause cultural anxiety or even drive people to madness. The digital age has renewed concerns about information overload and the detrimental effects it has on our ability to sort through the stream of online data, decide what is most important, or even to train our attention on it long enough to make sense of it. In Abundance, Pablo J. Boczkowski builds upon what we know about the historical and contemporary scholarship to develop a novel framework on the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before, focusing on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, Abundance examines the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of information abundance in the Global South, Boczkowski concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions.

This volume showcases the vibrancy of the study of digital journalism in Latin America. It includes an inquiry into journalists' perceptions of media companies' policies regarding social media use; a survey of investigative reporters; an examination of the interaction between traditional broadcast journalists and online news teams in two television stations in Colombia; research on modes of news consumption on Facebook and WhatsApp in Costa Rica and Chile; and a study of the institutionalization of independent journalism in Brazil. The methods employed by the contributors include surveys, in-depth interviews, eye tracking, and participant observation. These texts reveal differences across and within Latin American media and their audiences. This underscores the importance of abandoning the ethnocentric perspective of most journalism scholarship, which tends to homogenize a supposedly exotic other. In a research field marked by inequality, in which the vast majority of studies, authors, and reviewers are from the Global North, where only 14% of the global population lives, the studies included in this volume illustrate how research about and from the other 86% can increase the representativeness of the scholarly endeavor. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Digital Journalism.

Information overload is something that humans have dealt with for millennia. During different historical eras, massive increases in what was available to know has motivated the creation of systems for sorting, indexing, and compiling information as well as concerns that the abundance of information might cause cultural anxiety or even drive people to madness. The digital age has renewed concerns about information overload and the detrimental effects it has on our ability to sort through the stream of online data, decide what is most important, or even to train our attention on it long enough to make sense of it. In Abundance, Pablo J. Boczkowski builds upon what we know about the historical and contemporary scholarship to develop a novel framework on the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before, focusing on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, Abundance examines the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of information abundance in the Global South, Boczkowski concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions.

Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena. In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. Communication and media scholars have increasingly taken theoretical perspectives originating in science and technology studies (STS), while some STS scholars interested in information technologies have linked their research to media studies inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to advance this view of media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena. The contributors first address the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. The contributors then highlight media technologies as always in motion, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive. Contributors Pablo J. Boczkowski, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory J. Downey, Kirsten A. Foot, Tarleton Gillespie, Steven J. Jackson, Christopher M. Kelty, Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Fred Turner

An analysis of divergent online news preferences of journalists and consumers and what this means for media and democracy in the digital age. The websites of major media organizations-CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others-provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine the divergence in preferences and consider its implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age. Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture, and that it is not affected by innovations in forms of storytelling, such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Drawing upon these findings, they explore the news gap's troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.

The election of Donald Trump and the great disruption in the news and social media. Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States came as something of a surprise-to many analysts, journalists, and voters. The New York Times's The Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the White House even as the returns began to come in. What happened? And what role did the news and social media play in the election? In Trump and the Media, journalism and technology experts grapple with these questions in a series of short, thought-provoking essays. Considering the disruption of the media landscape, the disconnect between many voters and the established news outlets, the emergence of fake news and "alternative facts," and Trump's own use of social media, these essays provide a window onto broader transformations in the relationship between information and politics in the twenty-first century. The contributors find historical roots to current events in Cold War notions of "us" versus "them," trace the genealogy of the assault on facts, and chart the collapse of traditional news gatekeepers. They consider such topics as Trump's tweets (diagnosed by one writer as "Twitterosis") and the constant media exposure given to Trump during the campaign. They propose photojournalists as visual fact checkers ("lessons of the paparazzi") and debate whether Trump's administration is authoritarian or just authoritarian-like. Finally, they consider future strategies for the news and social media to improve the quality of democratic life. Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris W. Anderson, Rodney Benson, Pablo J. Boczkowski, danah boyd, Robyn Caplan, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Josh Cowls, Susan J. Douglas, Keith N. Hampton, Dave Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Seth C. Lewis, Zoey Lichtenheld, Andrew L. Mendelson, Gina Neff, Zizi Papacharissi, Katy E. Pearce, Victor Pickard, Sue Robinson, Adrienne Russell, Ralph Schroeder, Michael Schudson, Julia Sonnevend, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Tina Tucker, Fred Turner, Nikki Usher, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Silvio Waisbord, Barbie Zelizer

Leading scholars chart the future of studies on technology and journalism in the digital age. The use of digital technology has transformed the way news is produced, distributed, and received. Just as media organizations and journalists have realized that technology is a central and indispensable part of their enterprise, scholars of journalism have shifted their focus to the role of technology. In Remaking the News, leading scholars chart the future of studies on technology and journalism in the digital age. These ongoing changes in journalism invite scholars to rethink how they approach this dynamic field of inquiry. The contributors consider theoretical and methodological issues; concepts from the social science canon that can help make sense of journalism; the occupational culture and practice of journalism; and major gaps in current scholarship on the news: analyses of inequality, history, and failure. Contributors Mike Ananny, C. W. Anderson, Rodney Benson, Pablo J. Boczkowski, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Mark Deuze, William H. Dutton, Matthew Hindman, Seth C. Lewis, Eugenia Mitchelstein, W. Russell Neuman, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Zizi Papacharissi, Victor Pickard, Mirjam Prenger, Sue Robinson, Michael Schudson, Jane B. Singer, Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Rodrigo Zamith