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A journalistic approach to IDN when the user is the message: The JUC model for content strategy
Jose Manuel Noguera-Vivo
To cite this version:
Jose Manuel Noguera-Vivo. A journalistic approach to IDN when the user is the message: The JUC model for content strategy. 2021. �hal-03226230�
Working Paper
Presented at the first meeting of Task Force 3: Collecting Models and Mechanisms of IDS&N for Complexity,
Part of COST Action INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations).
26 May 2021, Dubrovnik
A journalistic approach to IDN when the user is the message: The JUC model for content strategy
José Manuel Noguera-Vivo UCAM, Spain jmnoguera@ucam.edu
Regarding the triad among environmental hypercomplexity, complex interactive narrative representations and complex audiences, underlined by Noam Knoller,1 this approach is related to the last element -audiences- and it is focused on the emergent trends around the called Creator Economy (Schram, 2020), which it is happening because previously we had –and we are having right now in an increasing way- a Creator Communication Media Landscape (CCML). We develop here a model of content strategy for Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) to deal with the growing complexity of the media audiences, by showing how professional content can coexist within digital ecosystems of mainly amateur content.
By rephrasing the well-known McLuhan´s paradigm (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967) where the medium is the message (and the massage), we apply it to the online media landscape in this last decade, where “the user is the message” (Cardoso, 2008;
Scolari, 2008: 98; García-Avilés, 2015) but, what does it means? Traditional communication models (Lasswell, Gerbner, Shannon & Weaver, Schramm…) were created mainly by describing the effects of technology and content. Now it is different.
Nowadays we have not just “prosumers revisited” (Kotler, 2010) or proactive audiences, but also a huge variety of user-led content creation (Bruns, 2009) which modifies in so many ways the original term of “prosumer” coined by Toffler (1980) decades before of the arise of the social media. He had a futuristic glimpse about the horizontal digital scenarios where amateur and professional content would coexist at the same level.
Models created by digital networks are different than the previous ones to the internet. By one side, as Castells (2010) said, social networks are the contemporary social way of organization. By the other side, a network should be considered in a holistic way: any kind of network –especially digital ones- is much more than the simple aggregation of its individual members. Firstly, this holistic view is caused by internal factors (algorithms); secondly, the community component is a phenomenon developed by the social filtering (see Twitter, for instance). In this Network Society, journalism cannot be considered as a product anymore, but a service. Finally, we could add a third factor: the editorial filtering –no one like to read points of view against his/her “confirmation bias” (Klayman, 1995)-.
1 Personal communication, e-mail, April 19, 2021.
Media are not the final destiny for the users, now media are just a member of the network (Hermida, 2010), (almost) just like the users. They both are not members of the news stock industry anymore, but members of the communication flows industry, where social platforms are leading the dissemination of news and “incidental news consumption” is one of the first consequences in this media landscape (Boczkowski, Mitchelstein & Matassi, 2018). This phenomenon shows us how the activity of looking for news is being replaced by the fact of finding news I was not looking for, so it is a challenge for any kind of professional digital content strategy.
The rise of social platforms such Twitch, Tik Tok or Instagram Stories, as well as the new measures adopted by other one like Twitter for improving the experience of the “content creators” within the network (newsletters, tip button…) and relevance of youtubers for some audiences, are just some of the factors that helped to create the CCML mentioned before, which it is mainly an interactive digital narrative (IDN).
When the user is the message, the journalism industry -as professional storytellers- must find its place inside this user-centered model, to solve some issues related mainly to authorship, revenues, content strategies and personal branding for journalists. A way to find this place is by considering any journalistic narrative as a potential IDN. In this context, the great disruption is not the interactivity journalist-user –which we had many years ago already-, but the inter-action among users, who are re-interpreting the content and the message in a daily basis (see the internet memes, for instances) and even contributing to the complexity growth instead of its reduction.
For this reason, a professional filtering or edition is needed. With a new content strategy made in cooperation with community users, we can solve issues such cognitive reduction of complexity –see all the problems caused by misinformation and disinformation around COVID issues-.
In order to play a key role in this user-centered online market made by the Creator Economy, media can face this reality by using the tool we call here as JUC model (the triad of Journalists, Users and Community): just those narratives made from the horizontal perspective suggested by the JUC model –horizontal in terms of collaboration of different online actors without hierarchical borders: media, journalists, users…- can play at the same level. In other words, success comes when the Journalistic narrative is perceived by the Users as something made within the Community of each medium. Some key questions will be developed to clarify the role of each one of these spheres during the narrative process (journalist, user and community).
To sum up –but as starting point for further debates-, we claim here the JUC model as a content strategy for co-creations with the journalistic audiences, by considering also the so many different stages of the journalistic process: observation, selection, filtering, production, edition and dissemination. The co-creation can happens in any of these stages or in some of them at the same time. It depends how the JUC model helps to design the digital narrative in each particular case.
References
Boczkowski, P. J., Mitchelstein, E., & Matassi, M. (2018). “News comes across when I’m in a moment of leisure”: Understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media. New media & society, 20(10), 3523-3539.
Bruns, A. (2009). From prosumer to produser: Understanding user-led content creation. Transforming Audiences 2009.
Cardoso, G. (2008). Los medios de comunicación en la Sociedad Red: filtros, escaparates y noticias. Barcelona: UOC.
Castells, M. (2010). The Rise of the Network Society. USA: Wiley-Blackwell.
García-Avilés, J.A. (2015). Comunicar en la Sociedad Red. Teorías, modelos y prácticas. Barcelona: Editorial UOC.
Hermida, A. (2010). Twittering the news: The emergence of ambient journalism. Journalism practice, 4(3), 297-308.
Klayman, J. (1995). Varieties of confirmation bias. Psychology of learning and motivation, 32, 385-418.
Kotler, P. (2010). The prosumer movement. In Prosumer Revisited (pp. 51-60). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the message. New York, 123, 126- 128.
Schram, Ryan (2020). The state of the creator economy, Journal of Brand Strategy, 9(2), 152-162.
Scolari, C.A. (2008). Hipermediaciones. Elementos para una Teoría de la Comunicación Digital Interactiva. Barcelona: Gedisa.
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