10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17291
Digital infrastructures are increasingly altering the ways in which journalistic content acquires social value. Our key argument here is that processes of digital circulation are merging with the construction of social meaning in new kinds of news flows. Based on recent work in journalism studies, this paper outlines a theoretical perspective on circulation through the concept of “communicative object”. Through this concept we account for the dual technological and cultural constitution of circulation and the processes of meaning-making that it sustains. We argue that the duality of the communicative object as both a digital and an epistemic object allows for a productive conceptualization of journalistic communication as well as for a methodological innovation in journalism studies.
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Christoph Raetzsch
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
digital methods
Journalism and the Circulation of Communicative Objects
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Scenarios
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
129-148
TS
Christoph Raetzsch
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17291
129
Freie Universität Berlin
2038-3460
1
digital methods
en
148
Journalism and the Circulation of Communicative Objects
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17291/16153
7
                                                                             Scenario

Journalism and the Circulation of
Communicative Objects
          Christoph Raetzsch                             Henrik Bødker
           Freie Universität Berlin (DE)                 Aarhus Universitet (DE)




     Abstract Digital infrastructures are increasingly altering the ways in which
     journalistic content acquires social value. Our key argument here is that
     processes of digital circulation are merging with the construction of social
     meaning in new kinds of news flows. Based on recent work in journalism
     studies, this paper outlines a theoretical perspective on circulation through
     the concept of “communicative object”. Through this concept we account
     for the dual technological and cultural constitution of circulation and the
     processes of meaning-making that it sustains. We argue that the duality of
     the communicative object as both a digital and an epistemic object allows
     for a productive conceptualization of journalistic communication as well as
     for a methodological innovation in journalism studies.

     Keywords: circulation; journalism; digital objects; communicative objects;
     digital methods.

     Corresponding author: Christoph Raetzsch, Freie Universität Berlin,
     Institute for Media and Communication, Division of Journalism Studies,
     Garystr. 55, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: christoph.raetzsch@fu-
     berlin.de.



1. Introduction

    Circulation is emerging as a critical concept for analysing online
communication. This is prompted by an increasing awareness among
scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds of the growing embed-
dedness of digital content in forms of online interaction, especially
through social networking sites. Circulation seems to be hard-wired into
the digital systems that structure, aggregate and prioritise communica-
tions at the individual level – for millions of users at the same time. Web
search and social networking sites in particular enhance the circulation of
more information in less time among larger networks of users across dif-
ferent (geographical and cultural) spaces, which, however, does not nec-
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
7 (1) pp. 129-148 - ISSN 2038-3460                2016
www.tecnoscienza.net
130                                                           Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

essarily result in more heterogeneous networks. In light of the emergence
of such sites, increasing circulation could count as a plausible but simpli-
fied rationale of media development in general. It would be fairly easy to
establish a genealogical connection between the now dominant social
networking sites and early efforts of Dutch publishers to enhance the dis-
tribution of stock and goods prices across Europe in what was called co-
rantos in the 16th century – the ancestors of modern day newspapers
(Hart 1970; Steinberg 1959).
    Methodologically, it is easier to retrace circulation to a source of
origin than to understand in what ways and dynamics circulation contrib-
utes to the constitution of social and individual practices of meaning-
making. With digital and networked media gaining central importance in
the maintenance of social relations, we are, however, urged to
acknowledge the need for a methodological reversal, asked to “explore
the intersections of content and materiality in the use of media technolo-
gies” (Siles and Boczkowski 2012, 242). In this article, we bring together
previous arguments on the practice of journalism and its connection to
cultures of circulation (Raetzsch 2015; Bødker 2015) in order to develop
the notion of the circulation of communicative objects as a theoretical
and methodological innovation for the study of journalism.
    Taking circulation seriously as a critical concept in journalism studies
means to shift our attention away from traditional actors (e.g. institutions)
to acknowledge the co-constitution of materiality, users and meaning. Just
as journalists developed specific cultural forms and practices which, over
time, gave shape to the institution of journalism, so have users engaged in
practices of commonplacing in their function as readers and audiences.
Already in the 16th century, users were copying and curating information
to “construct a trail of references, often shared with other people, as a
way of showing off their taste and their circle of friends” (Hoem and
Schwebs 2015). This sharing of information, commentary and content
with others has enhanced under conditions of digital and networked
technologies, becoming a new form of “self-communication” (to borrow
half a phrase from Castells 2007, 248). By circulating references, symbolic
content and relations in social networks, users are “equipping copied in-
formation fragments with tags and with links to the online sources” (Ho-
em and Schwebs 2015). The practice of circulating information is not and
has not been exclusive to the domain of journalism.
    The potential of circulation as an analytical concept lies in the possi-
bility to overcome dichotomies of creators and consumers, of producers
and users, to focus on the social processes that emerge from the enhanced
referentiality of very different types of content in digital media. As audi-
ences come to be regarded as actors in these processes, the domain of
journalism studies needs to critically interrogate its key analytic categories
and models of public communication. In this article, we want to propose
that circulation is akin to processes of “co-creation” (Banks and Deuze
2009), not simply in the sense that audiences and journalists together cre-
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                        131
ate new forms of journalism, but that circulation can help to understand
the negotiation over boundaries, cultural meanings and heterogeneous
group affiliations in digital media. Invoking circulation in relation to
journalism and networked media means foregrounding processes of in-
teraction in which cultural forms develop, are contested and appropriated
– among journalists and their audiences, between users and observers, be-
tween actors and their networks. Circulation implies more than “[bridg-
ing] a source and a destination” but foregrounds a constant “realignment
of forms in relationship to each other” (Straw 2010, 26).
    In this article, we delineate in what ways our understanding of jour-
nalism can be reconfigured through the concept of the circulation of
communicative objects. In the first part, we will retrace the prevalent
concept of circulation in relation to journalism to show how the strong
association with distribution has side-lined processes of meaning-making
that arise from the negotiation over journalistic content and that now be-
come all the more relevant (and apparent) in regard to social media. We
will especially focus on how news in its varied forms contributes to the
creation of social value through circulation. In the second part, we will
develop the concept of the communicative object based on two core ar-
guments. First, we posit that digital circulation is distinguished by a uni-
form layer of referencing (i.e. digital encoding and metadata description),
which creates the condition for the transmutation and remediation of any
kind of content. Second, we argue that this referential layer is not adja-
cent or secondary to content but is now integral to the constitution of
processes of communication. By defining the communicative object in re-
lation to its digital materiality and its epistemic function in social interac-
tion, we propose that the study of journalism needs to methodologically
and theoretically focus on how circulation sustains and creates techno-
social structures rather than just focusing on specific types of content.


2. Journalism and Circulation: from Newspapers to News
Flows

    The concept of circulation has often been associated with objects
moving – either in circles or through networks of different kinds. Jörg
Heiser has retraced the etymology of the term to the “metabolic distribu-
tion and redistribution of fluids and matter, implying qualitative and
quantitative transformation via movement.” From this original meaning,
the term circulation in the 19th century became “linked to urbanization,
the flow of populace and traffic in the city” before being applied to the
circuits of money, labour and news (Heiser 2005, n.p.). Circulation thus
stood for basically two forms of circular movement. In the original sense,
an object or substance was seen to repetitively move through a point of
origin or was propelled by a centrifugal force around a centre. During the
132                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

passage, the circulated object or substance changed, acquired new prop-
erties or transformed into something else. In the latter sense, circulation
came to describe an endless and cyclical transmutation of forms (symbol-
ic, artistic, commodities, labour) while the notion of an actual or assumed
centre of force driving circulation receded gradually to the background.
    In journalism, circulation traditionally refers to the physical distribu-
tion of newspapers, i.e. how many copies are printed and disseminated.
The history of modern journalism is often associated with the gradual in-
crease in the circulation of particular cultural artefacts, especially news-
papers, across geographical space. But most newspapers were at the same
time intimately linked to a specific urban setting and market. Through
their close associations with urban communities, most journalists and edi-
tors were keenly aware that the distribution of newspapers had a social
significance for the exchange and constitution of public opinions. The
movements of the artefact were thus intimately tied to the circulation and
the construction of meaning within the community of which journalists
and editors were both members and outside observers. In many locations,
the newspaper became the main object through which communities and
publics were formed. Traditionally, this “text-based” community of read-
ers and contributors to a newspaper (Warner 2002, 51) was a “kind of
public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circula-
tion” (Warner 2002, 50). In the early twentieth century, the sociologist
Robert E. Park made the obvious but important point that “[a] newspa-
per is not merely printed. It is circulated and read. Otherwise it is not a
newspaper” (Park 1923, 274-275). Forming reading publics through the
regular provision of printed news calls attention to the material object of
the newspaper that is flexible and mobile enough to be inserted into an
unlimited number of social contexts. Through the institutionalisation of
the urban newspaper, Straw points out, the circulation of news gradually
moves away from the “chance encounters” in “the chaotic unpredictabil-
ity of urban life” to take the form of structured deliveries to households
in “repetitive, bureaucratized routines” (Straw forthcoming; see also
Boutros and Straw 2010). In light of more recent technological develop-
ments, the newspaper then appears as a “mobile-interface” for printed in-
formation (Sheller 2015, 13) that establishes certain conventions and cul-
tural forms to distinguish itself from more quotidian practices of dissemi-
nating information and forms of knowledge. Publics begin to form in re-
lation to the modern newspaper that now serves as a document of im-
portant knowledge and official information. As the profession of journal-
ism begins to establish rules and guidelines to turn “less authentic types
of knowledge” into news, information on the printed page becomes
“more or less authenticated by the fact that it has been [published and]
exposed to the critical examination of the public to which it is addressed
and with whose interests it is concerned” (Park 1940, 679). News as a
journalistic and narrative genre codifies both a ‘politics’ on the relevance
of certain pieces of information (Schudson 1995) as much as it creates the
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                        133
reading public in perpetual response to the cyclical provision of identical
copies of printed documents. The circulation of news as a cultural form
and the creation of publics as a social structure thus are written into and
derived from the specific materialities of news journalism itself (de Mae-
yer and Le Cam 2015).
    These established modes of circulation in journalism, and their under-
lying routines of news production continue to exist today. They corre-
spond loosely to what Nerone respectively calls the “commercial public
sphere” and the “expert public sphere” that came with the institutionali-
sation and professionalisation of journalism in the late 19th and early
twentieth century (Nerone 2015, 191). With the emergence of a “net-
worked public” (boyd 2011) or “networked public sphere” (Benkler et al.
2013), we arguably seem to witness a return to more chaotic modes of
circulation, in which ‘chance encounters’ often structure interaction in
diverse social settings. The “new forms of the public sphere” that are
emerging at the intersections of various networks of actors, institutions
and media outlets in many ways “straddle the modern divide between ac-
tive and passive publics” (Nerone 2015, 191), a divide which was consti-
tutive of the professionalisation of journalism in the early 20th century.
Apart from the widely distributed forms of news that journalists continue
to produce, news now also structures interpersonal information, e.g.
through emails, blog posts, feeds, or tweets. News in this wider sense
emerges out of processes that “blur the production, consumption, and
distribution of news into a single [multi-directional] flow of ambient live
updates of an on-going situation” (Sheller 2015, 20). At the intersections
of different technological systems and networks of digital communication,
users are embedding the creation, distribution and curating of news from
a wide range of online sources in quotidian practices of communication.
This shapes what Sheller calls “ambient news flows”, the constant circula-
tions of news that “re-situate how we understand where we are, who we
are connected with, what our ‘present’ moment actually is. The now-ness
of news, in other words, offers a new sense of the present” (Sheller 2015, 24).
    Understandably, journalists are keen to tap into this constant news
flow, using social media as an “awareness system” for upcoming stories
(Hermida 2010) or as a means to access prominent (and less prominent)
sources (Broersma and Graham 2013). Journalists, as a specific profes-
sional ‘culture of circulation’, now need to assume new roles in relation to
their content and the audiences that connect to it (Bødker 2015, 112). But
by integrally embedding content from non-journalistic media (e.g. social
networking sites, syndication services) journalism is also coming to de-
pend on resources that are beyond its own control. As Ananny argues in
relation to networked news “those with power are increasingly technolo-
gists and advertisers—not journalists—whose platforms and commodifi-
cations control how and when news circulates” (2016, 12). The temporal
and spatial circulation of journalistic news comes to be co-determined by
processes outside the institutional settings of journalism itself, e.g.
134                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

through the availability of network bandwidth, the importance of search
algorithms to find content and the pluralisation of outlets for advertising,
which often enough infringes on the exclusivity of certain occupational
roles and their respective fields of expertise (Rodgers 2015). Despite such
developments in digital media and journalism, the “concepts of sender,
channel, message and receiver are still the most common starting points
for much journalism research” argue Sjøvaag and Karlsson (2016, 1) in
the introduction to a recent special issue of Digital Journalism on research
methods. To bypass this established set of analytic categories, we argue
that the circulation of news should not only be restricted to occupational
roles, institutional settings or professional values but also include a focus
on the creation of social value across different networks of actors. Limit-
ing journalism to its products, e.g. news, overlooks that journalists inter-
act on a regular basis with a wide range of actors, many of whom are
nowadays also communicating independently within their own ‘personal
publics’ (Schmidt 2014). Seeking the social value of news only in the
products of journalism (e.g. in the content of an article, in information
about an event) misses out on the opportunity to regard journalism and
its wider spheres of circulation as equal parts of a social structure that is
newly realised in each new interaction (Raetzsch 2015).

2.1. The Circulation of News as Social Value

    The new prominence of ‘less authentic types of knowledge’ now circu-
lating online has created an urge to defend professional ethics and roles
among journalists and journalism scholars alike (McNair 2013; Pavlik
2013; Meyer 2004). Quality and trust in journalism are regarded as im-
portant values both commercially and socially to sustain journalism in a
dispersed environment of communication online. One key issue in this
negotiation over value is the “professional-participatory tension” (Lewis
cited in Carlson 2015, 11) that arises from the growing possibility of non-
journalists to engage with journalism in equally public fashion. Comment
sections of online news sites, now already in decline (Ellis 2015), were an
early setting in which a “constant contestation [over authority]” between
journalists and their audiences took place (Robinson 2015, 161). Follow-
ing Papacharissi these comment sections can be regarded as “[l]iminal
spaces … where journalists and citizens meet, to collectively shape a sto-
ry” (2015, 37). Negotiations over authority and identity may indicate a
“de-differentiation” of occupational and professional roles in journalism
(Loosen 2015). Whether this is the case, is still subject to debate. None-
theless, these negotiations between audiences and journalists signal that
we need to shift away from seeing journalism mainly as an institution to
seeing it as a “performative discourse” that is able to “simultaneously de-
scribe and produce social phenomena” (Broersma 2013, 33). Through
this performativity of journalistic practice, we can highlight that journal-
ism sustained in its varied historical forms and media of communication a
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                      135
social structure between different types of actors – the public in the wider
sense (Jones and Salter 2012).
     The business of news has for a long time been about turning the im-
material or social value of news into monetary value. This model for news
has become a lot harder to sustain with declining numbers of people re-
garding newspapers (even when they are digital) as necessary constituents
of their own conversations. The percentage of people who discover news
through social media first has risen from 2013-15 in all the countries
measured in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report although there are
still significant differences between countries (e.g. 20% in Germany and
48% in Brazil). The proportion of under-35s that discover news through
social media is, in all countries, higher than for the over-35s, and the pro-
portion of women is, again in all countries, higher than the proportion of
men, who use social media to discover news (Newman et al. 2015, 76).
Exposure to news is more and more tied to an immediate social environ-
ment, as a sign of embedding attention to public affairs with interpersonal
communication on a regular basis.
     Elisabeth Bird points out that “news is received and circulated almost
constantly – even more so today with the rise of social media” (2011,
490). User practices of engaging with journalistic and other types of con-
tent become a lot more apparent and transparent, as they are objectified
as comments, links or likes. A lot of meaning-making that had been tak-
ing place outside the media is nowadays increasingly mediated as well:
“Previously most people’s commentary on the media was lost in the ether
– a shout at the television, a scrawl in a book, a remark to a friend. Now
our commentary is automatically archived and made visible online”
(Couldry 2012, 54-55). Digital traces of online interactions feed data-
banks with detailed records of user behaviour, preferences and social
connections. Traces of ‘chance encounters’ are becoming “extractable as
data” (Beer 2013, 17) as more and more “objects ... capture data about
their use” (Beer 2013, 18). Interactions between users become structured
by a “variety of practices that blend news co-creation with social practices
of sharing” where journalistic stories are embedded within other modes
of storytelling in “affective news streams” (Papacharissi 2015, 28).
Whereas the newspaper (print or online) was and is a fairly fixed contain-
er of circulation, personalised news streams fuse the circulation of con-
tent with the creation of social meaning. The combination of “news re-
ports with emotionally filled and opinionated reactions to the news […]
makes it difficult to discern news from conversation about news” (Papa-
charissi 2015, 32). This new hybridity of information, circulation and
commentary makes news streams on social media “affective” in the sense
that they “emerge out of collaboratively generated flows of information”
(35). Social media are used as a “commentary filter”, as a “hybrid be-
tween earlier informal retellings and repetitions […] and published com-
mentary within journalism” Bødker (2013, 213). The distinction between
circulation as the movement of artefacts and circulation as a process of
136                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

constructing meaning is further blurring in such media environments in
that the artefact (e.g. the article) now often circulates with comments at-
tached to it (as meta-text), which is somewhat different from newspapers
circulating and being talked about.
    The new quotidian practices of circulation attract the attention from
media institutions and academics alike. Jenkins, Ford and Green have in-
troduced the term “spreadable media” to develop a “hybrid model of cir-
culation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how
material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory
(and messier) ways” (2013, 2) than was possible in the era of broadcast-
ing. Circulation in the context of digital and networked media means to
understand how meaning is created through the interaction of social net-
works, artefacts and media texts (Jenkins et al. 2013, 35). Sharing and
commenting become intricately linked to a “culture of connectivity” (van
Dijck 2013) and sociability itself (cf. Hermida 2014).
    On the level of digital code, a circulated artefact can be detached from
its original location or context, “converting information that has distinct
spheres of circulation into a homogeneous, commutable format” (Rae-
tzsch 2015, 69). An article or just parts thereof can be remediated and re-
combined endlessly, just as images, database entries, tweets and posts can
be copied and republished instantaneously in various platforms with an
ever growing reference scheme of links keeping taps on the changes oc-
curring every second on a global scale. The link-based economies of digi-
tal circulation trigger new assemblages of objects, meanings and social ac-
tors. What emerges out of these economies, then, are new “cultural
forms”, to use a term employed by Gaonkar and Povinelli (2003). On the
basis of digital encoding, symbolic content, which previously existed only
in a limited, material form and sphere of circulation, can now acquire new
“edges” through metadata, syndication and linking. Following Straw, we
can perceive of these edges as “constitut[ing] the interfaces of cultural ar-
tefacts with human beings and other forms” (Straw 2010, 23). Such edges
are now an integral part of the practice of journalism itself, as likes,
tweets, RSS feeds and news alerts become embedded in the production
and circulation of journalistic content. But through these same technolo-
gies and protocols of digital circulation the previously ancillary practices
of audiences in debating, referencing and circulating content – whether
journalistic or not – sustain a now quotidian “communicative perfor-
mance of endless distribution and flow of media texts and images”
(Sumiala and Tikka 2011, 147; see Aronczyk and Craig 2012). This com-
municative performance of individual actors can include original crea-
tions or the remediation of texts (blogs, photo collage, mash-up, remix,
wiki), where the “distributed texts, images and symbols are a material site
of the exercise of circulation” (Valaskivi and Sumiala 2014, 232-233).
Circulation here designates a process of creating social value that is inti-
mately linked to its modalities of communication, i.e. the digital encoding
of content coupled with the ability to trace, store and reconnect content,
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                            137
actors and resources across different platforms. In the following section,
we want to address these modalities of digital circulation through the
concept of the communicative object in order to foster methodological
innovation for the study of journalism and its publics. We here agree with
Kitchin et al. who argue that “much more research needs to be undertak-
en with regards [sic] the social and spatial processes by which knowledge
circulates and mutates through social media, its intersections with other
fora such as broadcast media, meetings, classrooms, pub talk, and so on,
and how tokens of credibility, authority and reputation are recast and ne-
gotiated” (Kitchin et al. 2013, 100, emphasis added).


3. Communicative Objects as Cultural Forms

    On January 7, 2015, the French graphic designer Joachim Roncin
(@joachimroncin) created an iconic image and posted it to his Twitter
profile. Only an hour after terrorists had attacked the satirical weekly
Charlie Hebdo, Roncin’s image captured the feeling of speechlessness
and solidarity with the victims. Using the typeface of Charlie Hebdo’s
cover page, Roncin put just three words on a black background: Je Suis
Charlie. Seven minutes after Roncin’s image had appeared on his profile,
Thierry Puget (@titi1960) used the image and added the hashtag
#JESUISCHARLIE (Beech 2015). In the two weeks after the tag had oc-
curred, it was used roughly 5 million times on Twitter.1 In the hours after
his image had gone viral Roncin was busy replying to other users and
journalists, asking whether they could re-use his image. He replied “yes
and we have to” (tweet by @joachimroncin, January 7, 2015; 20:54:58).
Roncin’s image appeared first online but in its most notable manifesta-
tions, the image was taken to the streets by people all over the world. The
image was printed and adapted, appearing in different forms in shop
windows and on social media profiles, on cars, as projection on walls and
even in the source code of software.2
    The example of jesuischarlie shows very clearly the dynamics of circu-
lation that we address in this paper. Parallel to the reporting of the events
of January 7 in journalistic media around the world, the image and
hashtag from single users of Twitter created “ad hoc issue publics”
(Bruns and Burgess 2011, 7) for the event. Through their digital circula-
tion, the tag and the image became manifest objects through which an
evolving public discourse and response to the events took shape. Our aim
in this section is to use the example of #jesuischarlie for a theoretical
elaboration of our concept of the communicative object. By using the
term object, we do not mean to “objectify” or simplify the social process-

1
  Estimate created by the app Sifter on Texifter.com for the hashtag #jesuischarlie
    occurring between Jan 7 and Jan 21, 2015.
2
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_suis_Charlie for examples.
138                                                           Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

es in which meaning is created. In contrast, we regard communicative ob-
jects in their duality as both digital objects (e.g. Roncin’s image file, Pu-
get’s tweet, the hashtag #jesuischarlie) and as epistemic objects, as a stage
in the process of circulation, where both form and meaning become tem-
porarily fixed by certain actors to sustain particular aims. We adopt this
dual viewpoint to understand how the materialities of digital communica-
tion are tied up with and are now often constitutive for social processes of
interpretation and meaning making. The concept of communicative ob-
jects emphasises that digital circulation relies on the meta-textual descrip-
tion of digital data (metadata), which creates the edges for particular ob-
jects to be copied, linked or remediated. In turn, circulation creates on
the cultural level a form of epistemic object, an object of knowledge that
emerges from the temporal layering of references and links between ac-
tors, content and platforms.

3.1. Communicative Objects as Digital Objects

    At first sight, digital circulation seems to warrant a distinction from
analogue circulation. In journalism, the number of copies of a newspaper
or the number of viewers of a television program was and is often used as
a key figure to determine circulation. And this remains the case in many
branches of the media industries, which rely on advertisers for a large
share of their profits – whether they are traditional journalistic ventures
or social media platforms. With digital circulation this production of
identical copies of a single artefact has even become much easier, which
makes it difficult to posit a difference between digital and analogue on
the basis of the materialities of media production or distribution. But
what we believe distinguishes digital from analogue circulation is the
prominence of links and metadata – descriptive data about data – which
create a referential layer of information in addition to what is manifest as
content. As Rogers and others argue, links are “natively digital objects”
(Rogers 2013, 19) and were a central innovation in the development of
the first HTML standards for websites (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 2000).
When we encounter ‘text’, ‘image’ or ‘video’ in digital media, these media
forms are universally encoded digitally, but in addition, are endowed with
meta-textual elements such as tags, links and other descriptors.
    Hui argues that digital objects are experienced on the user side in sim-
ilar ways as “natural objects” e.g. objects perceived in space. Despite the
sensory deprivation and privileging of the visual sense in computer-
mediated communication, the construction of digital objects through
code is effectively obliterated by means of graphic and interaction design:
“Digital objects appear to human users as colourful and visible beings. At
the level of programming they are text files; further down the operating
system they are binary codes; finally, at the level of circuit boards they are
nothing but signals generated by the values of voltage and the operation
of logic gates” (Hui 2012, 387). The complexity of the technological lay-
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                        139
ers involved in digital circulation has, however, little importance for as-
sessing how users experience digital objects, because their experience is
structured around a flexible and continuous responsiveness of digital sys-
tems to input: buttons are ‘clicked’, a line is ‘drawn’ and appears on the
screen, a tweet is ‘sent’ and appears in another user’s feed only millisec-
onds later. Hui points out that “one fails to see the whole landscape if one
simply understands the digital as only a 0 and 1 binary code; rather, one
should grasp the digital as a new technique to manage data in comparison
with the analogue.” (ibid. 387, emphasis added). Instead of insisting on a
rupture of the digital with the analogue, Hui regards the digital as an ad-
ditional descriptive layer of our quotidian world, in which new social
practices in conjunction with technological systems become possible. In
comparison to natural objects, digital objects can become more “con-
crete” as more and more descriptive attributes are added through
metadata, creating new possibilities of connecting, circulating and trans-
muting such objects: “When there are more digital objects, there are
more relations, hence the networks either become larger or new networks
are actualized” (390). Endowing objects with enough description to make
them mobile and readable to machines is what Hui calls the “datafication
of objects” (389). What seems trivial from the perspective of user experi-
ence (seeing and finding an image online, reading a tweet) is based on
standardised descriptions of data across different platforms, groups of us-
ers and computer systems. A hashtag found on Twitter like #jesuischarlie
is significant insofar as it functions as a descriptive metatext, which allows
for different tweets to be aggregated from various users, while it is at the
same time also a form of content, which is embedded into the grammar of
the message.
     In journalism, the rNews metadata framework was developed to de-
scribe in a structured fashion types of information and relations between
them that were logically unreadable for machines when presented in the
narrative formats of journalism (Raetzsch, forthcoming). Although a hu-
man user may know that “Omaha” is a CITY and that Barack Obama is a
PRESIDENT of a COUNTRY called “United States of America”, such
categories and relations need to be defined by metadata to enable subse-
quent digital operations. A search query like “PRESIDENT in CITY on
DATE” requires a prior definition of what type of information in a narra-
tive journalistic text will qualify as data for each of the three categories. A
sentence like “The president visited Omaha yesterday” is replete with
contextual information that is not usable for calculation when it is pre-
sented in narrative form. A tweet containing only the hashtag #jesuischar-
lie is not meaningful in itself, unless a lot of contextual information is
available. The same definition of information through metadata – what is
commonly called semantic web technologies – applies to new forms of
communication like tweets, wikis, or blog posts. Researchers in the social
sciences and those employing “digital methods” typically take advantage
of the high level of structuration in web and social media data for auto-
140                                                            Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

mated data retrieval and scraping of online sources. While it is easier to
scrape all posts from Twitter containing a particular term or tag, the chal-
lenge for researchers is to understand in what functions and social rela-
tions a retweet, for example, is used as an endorsement, as a criticism or
in an effort to build social networks.
    To summarise, communicative objects as digital objects are distin-
guished not primarily by their different form of encoding but by the pos-
sibility of assigning metadata, which creates new edges. These structured
ontologies of describing properties of data allow for the calculation, stor-
age, and circulation of content across platforms, types of software and
hardware, and open up new possibilities for social science to use automat-
ically retrieved data as sources for investigations of digital circulation.

3.2. Communicative Objects as Epistemic Objects

    The digital side of communicative objects becomes apparent when we
consider single objects, e.g. a post on a website, a tweet or simply an entry
in a database. Links to this object can proliferate around the web and so-
cial media. Because the description of the object remains stable, e.g.
through a link, we can retrace circulation as the proliferation of links in a
variety of contexts. The link thus functions as an indicator to wider cul-
tures of circulation, to social networks in which a given object is endowed
with particular meanings and can fulfil very different functions. In digital
circulation, however, the objects themselves are also changing and prolif-
erating, being remediated, adapted, and connected by social actors. Ob-
jects appear much more prominently as instances of on-going and con-
stantly evolving processes of communication and negotiation. When an
image like Roncin’s appears in journalistic reports, it simultaneously ex-
ists in other users’ profiles and feeds, is printed and handed out at
demonstrations, thus assuming a variety of material forms that are often
remediated to the digital, e.g. through photographs uploaded to individu-
al profiles on social media. We thus begin to see that communicative ob-
jects do not have fixed identities, but are part of a continuum of on-going
cultural interpretation and production that functions as a permanent con-
testation of what it means to live in the present. Not least because of the
enhanced possibilities to track and trace journalistic reporting over time,
we are beginning to realise that each journalistic object in circulation (an
article, an image, a video clip) is merely an instantiation of meaning-
making processes that take place across a wide domain of actors – in
journalism and society as a whole. The novelty here is not, that these pro-
cesses are taking place, but that our awareness of them is now considera-
bly more pronounced as links and references are made explicit in digital
circulation and subsequent aggregation. We propose to regard communi-
cative objects not only as digital objects but also in their function as “epis-
temic objects”, a term that was originally coined by Karin Knorr-Cetina
to describe practices of knowledge creation among scientists.
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                     141
    In her article Objectual Practice, Knorr-Cetina argued that knowledge
production in science needed a relational approach to practice, in which
the connections of subjects and objects could be captured reflexively. She
underlined that objects of knowledge were always rather markers in a
continuous process of research than fixed entities. Epistemic objects were
defined by a “lack in completeness of being”, functioning more “like
open drawers filled with folders extending indefinitely into the depth of a
dark closet” (2001, 190). In contrast to seeing such objects as internally
defined and externally limited, Knorr-Cetina argued that epistemic ob-
jects are “always in the process of being materially defined [and] continu-
ally acquire new properties and change the ones they have” (ibid.). Epis-
temic objects are stages in a sequence of communicative acts that involve
the transformation of stocks of knowledge, references and shared mean-
ings. Epistemic objects thus have an “unfolding ontology” (ibid. 196) in
time and are “meaning-producing and practice-generating” (ibid. 192).
Knowledge production constantly reintegrates and questions what is al-
ready known, formulating concepts and theories that are instrumental for
a given question but that more importantly serve to generate new ques-
tions. In science, Knorr-Cetina argues, the designation of an epistemic
object like a theorem or a neuron “is not an expression and indicator of
stable thinghood” but rather an attempt “to punctuate the flux” of con-
stantly shifting stocks of knowledge and “to declare them as pointing to
an identity-for-a-particular-purpose” (ibid. 193).
    From this conceptualisation of the communicative object as an epis-
temic object, we can draw important parallels to journalism. Similar to
the creation of knowledge in science, journalists provide to a certain de-
gree – and with less theoretical and methodological rigour – preliminary
interpretations of present events and developments as they unfold. The
objects that journalists circulate have the character of an unfolding ontol-
ogy meaning that journalists struggle to establish meaning about events as
they unfold, while reacting to what is already known and what others are
saying at the same time. In this sense, news as a narrative form “conven-
tionalizes” events and “rewrites history for immediate popular consump-
tion” (Langer 1998, 20-21). One of the core tasks of a journalist is to de-
termine in what ways events or developments are significant for his or her
readers, why they matter and what the consequences may be: “To ask ‘Is
this news’ is ... to ask ‘Does this mean anything?’” (Schudson 1986, 84).
Designating particular events or issues by names and keywords is a cen-
tral journalistic practice to ensure that a ‘story’ is continued and can be
followed by audiences. In digital circulation, the designation by name or
special terms is now a widespread, quotidian practice, which in turn ex-
emplifies how the exclusivity of journalism in determining public rele-
vance is under siege. The hashtag and image of #jesuischarlie became sy-
nonymous with the public response to the terrorist attacks in Paris but
they were not the creations of journalists. With communicative objects as
epistemic objects, we see processes of meaning creation unfold, under-
142                                                            Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

stand how a given meaning emerges in response to particular events by
following the adoption and recirculation of given objects by different ac-
tors.

3.3. Communicative Objects in Digital Circulation

    To theorise digital circulation in relation to journalism, we have pro-
posed the concept of communicative objects. Our main aim was to un-
derstand in what ways the materiality of digital communication can be re-
lated to a reconsideration of the social processes of negotiations over
meaning that occur publicly in web and social media. The particularity of
the communicative object as a digital object consists in its capacity to ac-
cumulate rich descriptions, either through metadata or links from differ-
ent sources. This descriptive layer allows for the emergence of new social
relations, which are often only momentarily stabilised, and which expand
well beyond those established categories of journalists and their audienc-
es. By focusing on objects, rather than discourses or networks, we main-
tain the central theoretical premise of Lee and LiPuma (2002, 192) that
cultures of circulation are “created and animated by the cultural forms
that circulate through them, including – critically – the abstract nature of
the forms that underwrite and propel the process of circulation itself”. In
digital circulation, communicative objects appear as temporarily and ma-
terially defined cultural forms, which sustain the continuous (re-)pro-
duction of social relations on the basis of content shared by actors across
platforms and networks, both inside and outside journalism. Communica-
tive objects as digital objects can be connected, transmuted and re-
activated, creating sequences of communication between different actors
over time. As layer upon layer of objects and references accumulates, a
technologically simple object like #jesuischarlie can assume a history of
meanings across very different sets of actors.
    Far from objectifying social processes, the communicative object in
digital circulation should be seen as a manifestation of the dual technical
and cultural constitution of meaning where primary agency is ascribed
neither to technology nor to users alone. The challenge for researchers in
this environment is to develop methodologies that can capture the un-
folding and potential unpredictability of the emergence of communicative
objects. Not surprisingly, the development of digital methods has proven
that on the basis of user data we can research social processes rather than
treating data as stand-in for such processes (Rogers 2013). But an overt
focus on data itself risks to exaggerate the statistically significant (top ten
users, most active sites, most tweeted messages) in comparison to the less
significant but equally important cohorts in a dataset. Taking circulation
seriously as a critical theoretical and methodological concept will require
an integration of statistical and qualitative methods in order to grasp how
objects emerge constantly at the intersections of social networks and
computational routines (Gillespie 2014). Modelling such temporalities of
Raetzsch and Bødker                                                     143
circulation between different actors, platforms and data formats will be a
central challenge for innovating methods in journalism studies.


4. Conclusions

    This paper has pursued two interrelated goals: I) a description and
discussion of how digital circulation can be understood in relation to
journalism apart from its established association with distribution, and II)
a theorising of digital circulation through the notion of communicative
objects. In the conclusion, we want to outline a few suggestions as to
what these considerations imply for journalism studies.
    A first consideration addresses the increasing complexity of the pro-
cesses through which the publics of journalism are formed. While jour-
nalism never had just one public the various possibilities and practices of
digital circulation create an intricate, fluid and ‘messy’ image of how pub-
lics are formed, interact and confront each other over the definition of
‘now-ness’ (Sheller 2015). The exclusivity of journalism to speak with au-
thority on behalf of a wider public is in many areas of social life waning,
as users prefer to connect directly to sources they deem relevant. A relat-
ed issue here is whether and how journalists connect to their own publics.
Frequent interactions on many levels of intensity mean that journalistic
texts and meta-texts are accumulating as communicative objects in their
own right, texts which can be re-activated and re-contextualised later on.
Such processes of (re-)circulation mean that journalists and their institu-
tions are becoming increasingly aware of the life of their work, as well as
their own role in its creation. Neither the “continuous present” of news
journalism (Schudson 1986, 86) nor the “permanent amnesia” of journal-
ists (Bourdieu 1998, 72) are certain any more, as algorithms define what is
new and relevant and databases store any snippet of exchange for later re-
trieval.
    For journalism studies circulation poses some of the same challenges
as it does for journalism. Scholars and practitioners alike are increasingly
focused on mapping the trajectories of communicative objects and under-
standing the public spheres that they create and sustain. Integrating an
understanding of the processes of digital circulation with the social and
cultural processes of meaning-making urges us to come to terms with the
duality of communicative objects, as both technological and cultural
forms. But developing methods for the study of communicative objects
requires the acquisition of knowledge and skills that neither journalism
scholars nor journalists have traditionally mastered. While the meaning of
news has always been linked to their specific mediation there has been a
tendency in journalism studies to push aside the meaning of form. Given
the increasingly varied mediated forms of digital circulation such a ne-
glect is increasingly difficult to defend.
144                                                              Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)


Acknowledgments
   We would like to thank the two external reviewers for insightful comments
and suggestions.



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