Abstract

"WikiLeaks' series of exposés is causing a very different news and informational landscape to emerge. Whilst acknowledging the structural leakiness of networked organisations, Felix Stalder finds deeper reasons for the crisis of information security and the new distribution of investigative journalism.

WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the Internet, which means by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear. First is a change in the materiality of communication. Communication becomes more extensive, more recorded, and the records become more mobile. Second is a crisis of institutions, particularly in western democracies, where moralistic rhetoric and the ugliness of daily practice are diverging ever more at the very moment when institutional personnel are being encouraged to think more for themselves. Third is the rise of new actors, "super-empowered" individuals, capable of intervening into historical developments at a systemic level. Finally, fourth is a structural transformation of the public sphere (through media consolidation at one pole, and the explosion of non-institutional publishers at the other), to an extent that rivals the one described by Habermas with the rise of mass media at the turn of the twentieth century." (http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-11-29-stalder-en.html)

Wikileaks and the Networked News Ecology

Abstract

Navigation menu