Securitizing Communication: On the Indeterminacy of Participant Roles in Online Journalism

Description

This article takes Judith T. Irvine’s insights about the indeterminacy of participant roles and interpretive frameworks to explore how the increased use of social media in journalism leads to new quandaries for political actors. The dialogics of distributing or amalgamating participant roles provide for a particularly tricky domain of maneuver for journalists in India and Israel, where rightwing leaders seek to control news that disseminates rapidly on the currents of social media. Journalists have long sought to avoid becoming the story themselves, as part of claiming liberal positions that distinguish the reported events from their representation. It considers the current attempt to clamp-down on social media use by journalists as a securitization of communication, where the very journalistic utterance is used by ruling politicians to make the journalist, or potentially the news media more generally, into a threat to public security. However, even such policing can be too slow. This article thus also considers how outraged publics become an important aspect of policing social media.

Authors

Francis Cody is Associate Professor in Anthropology and in the Asian Institute, both at the University of Toronto.

Alejandro I. Paz is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.