Epistemic Interoperability (Early Draft of A Dissertation Chapter)

Epistemic Interoperability 1
Running head: EPISTEMIC INTEROPERABILITY
Sharing the News:
Toward a Construct of
Epistemic Interoperability
Josh Braun
Cornell Dept. of Communication
Author’s Note: This is an early draft of a dissertation chapter laying out a theoretical
framework for understanding changes in the practice of publishing news stories, as
news distribution has moved in the digital age from “push” to “pull.” It looks at how, in
an environment where news organizations rely on sharing and search for visibility,
news products may be designed to spread particularly well among specific, desirable
audiences. It will eventually be paired with a chapter on “architectural
interoperability,” that outlines the manner in which the technological infrastructures
of online publishing are designed to open channels to desirable platforms for sharing
and search, while “effectively frustrating” the spread of content in spaces that are less
desirable to the publishers for economic or branding reasons. Drafts of both chapters
will be presented at conferences this year—ask me for details.

Introduction/Abstract
In 1978, Gaye Tuchman encouraged sociologists and media scholars to consider
journalism as a system of knowledge. In this paper, I take up her challenge with an eye
toward online news. I begin by arguing that much of the classic sociological research in
communication that examines journalistic practices, coming as it does from decades
when the influence of mass media was at its height, has tended to focus on the manner
in which journalists serve as gatekeepers, limiting public access to information. I assert
that today, in the digital age, journalists are much more explicitly embedded in—and
reliant on—an online information ecosystem in which many other systems of knowledge
coexist and circulate information alongside the news media. I argue that media
researchers would therefore do well to implement insights from science and technology
studies, where sociologists and historians have developed tools for examining how
systems of knowledge are constructed and how they interact. Borrowing from the
sociology of scientific knowledge on the one hand and Tuchman’s (1978) work on the
other, I flesh out what it would mean to think of news and other centers of cultural
production online as epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina, 1999) centered around distinct
systems of knowledge. Subsequently, I review several existing lenses within
communication and science studies that examine how different systems of knowledge
interact and trade with one another. And finally, I conclude by attempting to tie
together the various literatures discussed throughout the paper into a theoretical lens
for examining how the interaction of various systems of knowledge online might be
considered in relation to news production, as well as the production practices of other
epistemic cultures.
The Logic of Gates
Since the 1950s, both scholars and practitioners examining the gatekeeper
function of the news media have sought to explain why some issues and events become
newsworthy while others remain obscure. Answers have been offered up in the form of
classic newsroom ethnographies like “The Gate-keeper” (White, 1950), Making News
(Tuchman, 1978) and Deciding What’s News (Gans, 1979); critical studies of news
content such as Stuart Hall’s (1973) “The Determination of News Photographs;” and
innumerable lists of news values in the tradition of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) “The
Structure of Foreign News.” This body of research ultimately dispensed with what Gans
(1979) called “mirror theory,” the naïve assumption—if it ever existed—that news
products represent complete, veridical accounts of reality.
And no sooner had it been established that the content of the news media is
neither unequivocally, “the way it is,” nor “all the news that’s fit to print,” than the
attention of sociologists began quickly to encompass the implications of these findings
for social movements and societal change. At first, this project largely demonstrated the
manner in which social movements had been marginalized. Tuchman (1978), for
instance, documented the various ways in which the women’s movement was ignored,
then subsequently maligned and ridiculed by the press before ultimately managing to
establish itself as a legitimate voice in the mainstream media. In his own take on the
news media’s framing practices, Todd Gitlin (1980) famously implicated the mass media
as a factor in the eventual dissolution of the 1960s student movement, detailing the
ways in which Students for a Democratic Society ultimately lost control over their image
to the news media. But as Tuchman (1978) and Gitlin (1980) both pointed out, despite
the potential pitfalls that come with coverage, favorable attention from the news media
greatly benefits social movements, and many sociological accounts have focused on how
media-savvy interest groups adopt “dramaturgical styles of activism” (Epstein, 1996, p.
220), carefully packaging their claims in ways that are likely to receive (favorable) media
attention (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989; Best, 1990; Ryan, 1991). As Hilgartner and Bosk
(1988) put it,
[Interest groups] are familiar with the selection principles of public arenas and
they deliberately adapt their social problems claims to fit their target
environments by packaging their claims in a form that is dramatic, succinct, and
employs novel symbols or classical theatrical tropes, or by framing their claims in
acceptable rhetoric.
In short, in the sixty years since Lewin (1951) and White (1950) first deemed the news
media to be gatekeepers, media sociologists and other scholars of communication have
developed a sophisticated language for discussing the various ways in which news
organizations form a bottleneck in the public discourse, selectively controlling
audiences’ access to information, while interest groups tailor their messages to the mass
media’s whims and game its various selection mechanisms all in an attempt to bring
their concerns to public. Without questioning the validity or extraordinary depth of
scholarship that has gone into developing this lens on the news media, I now wish to
argue that some of the most interesting questions surrounding today’s news media lie
outside its center of balance.

The Conversation Economy
In his 2005 book, The Search, John Battelle—a founding editor of Wired and
former CEO of the defunct Silicon Valley trade journal, The Industry Standard—offered
up a concept that has since become known amongst the technorati as the “conversation
economy.” More and more, he noted, Web users seemed to be accessing news stories
not by clicking through the homepages of news outlets, but by way of search engines and
their associated news portals, or by following links shared by friends and acquaintances
in various forms of online conversation. He argued that such trends put publications
like The Wall Street Journal and The Economist at a disadvantage. These sites, which
were built on a subscription model, put their stories behind paywalls, which in turn
restricted the ability of search engines to index them, and of friends to share content
with non-subscribers. Moreover, the two methods—search and sharing—tend to work
synergistically to direct traffic online. The more often the link to a story is shared in
blogs, discussion forums, and on social networks, the higher it will rise in the results of
search engines that rank pages partly by counting backlinks (Introna & Nissenbaum,
2000), and the more easily it will be found and shared in the future. Battelle predicted
that as search and sharing continued to become more prominent methods of access to
news, the influence—and subsequently the readership and revenue—of paywalled
publications would begin declining apace, while their relatively open counterparts
reaped the benefits.
While the conversation economy is far from an academic construct, and the
paywall experiment isn’t over yet for many news sites, some aspects of Battelle’s
predictions have proved prescient. In particular, it appears that a great deal of traffic to
news sites today is directed by sharing and search. In March of this year, the Pew
Internet and American Life Project (Purcell et al., 2010) reported that
75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or
posts on social networking sites and 52% say they share links to news with others
via those means. 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are also
online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people
they follow. Another 23% of this cohort follow news organizations or individual
journalists on social networking sites. (p. 4)
Similarly, in 2009 Facebook surpassed Google News in the number of users it directed
to news media Websites, and was generating over twice as many clickthroughs to news
sites by February 2010 (Hopkins, 2010). 1 There is anecdotal evidence to the effect that
online journalists have begun to select story topics partially on the basis of whether an
article is likely to generate page views through sharing and search (Foremski, 2010).
And companies like Demand Media, estimated by some to be the most lucrative
technology startup since Google (Kerner, 2010), have begun commissioning journalists
to write stories on subjects suggested by algorithms that comb through search engine
queries in search of trending topics likely to generate the most page views.
In short, while media sociologists have long focused on the ongoing issue of how
non-journalists package their stories for propagation by the news media, increasingly
the news media must also package its stories for propagation by non-journalists. The
new task, then, is to develop a theoretical lens for looking at how journalistic accounts
are made to circulate in this new and extended information ecosystem. There are no
1While Facebook leads Google News in the amount of news traffic it directs, its worth noting that it still
lags far behind general interest search engines like Google and Yahoo! (Hopkins, 2010)
magic bullets for journalists, of course. Communication research has proven nothing if
not that the producers of messages can seldom guarantee their impact or popularity
(Bauer, 1971). In the words of sociologists of another tradition, online news circulates
within an “agonistic field” (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). But, as the Latour and Woolgar
reference suggests, there are certainly theoretical lenses that can help us understand
how journalistic practices are adapting to the digital environment.
Systems of Knowledge
In writing about the various challenges presented to traditional theories of media
by digital communication technologies, Chaffee and Metzger (2001) note that, “a
fundamental assumption of agenda-setting theory is that people get their news from a
finite number of news sources or outlets...selected by professional gatekeepers who
operate under similar news values” (p. 374). But, as they acknowledge, producers of
“content” online range from professionals based in industries that long predate the
internet (e.g., journalism) to concerned citizens to comic book fans to children.
Likewise, the internet and “new media” are full of both distinct and overlapping
discourses that mimic, monitor, borrow from, remix, address, react against, selectively
ignore, and sometimes outright steal from one another. In this environment, it’s hard to
put a fine point on what should be considered news and what shouldn’t—and attempting
to lay down such hard categories inevitably invites questions of value and motivation.
But the challenges new media assert to our traditional categories of “producers” and
“audiences,” “news” and “not news” constitute a tremendous opportunity to develop
new alternative and interdisciplinary lenses on intermedia influence. In doing so, I

argue that it is productive to de-privilege professional journalism as a subject of inquiry
and to think of it as one among many intersecting systems of knowledge produced by
diverse groups on the Internet—to take an ecological approach (Star & Griesemer, 1989)
to the way information travels and meaning is constructed online.
News as a System of Knowledge (Among Many)
Gaye Tuchman’s 1978 newsroom ethnography, Making News has become a
landmark text in journalism studies and media sociology more generally. One of its
great contributions is to re-envision the study of journalism as an exercise in the
sociology of knowledge. She flags journalism as just one among numerous
“organizationally and professionally produced” systems of knowledge, including science
and sociology, as well as creative industries like film production and the television
business (Tuchman, 1978, p. 217). Moreover, since Tuchman’s initial writing, the
number of creative industries has exploded, with many traditional sectors of the
economy refashioning themselves as producers of cultural products and intellectual
property (Deuze, 2007). Correspondingly, authors like Knorr Cetina (1997, 1999, 2001)
argue that we are gradually becoming a knowledge society, replete with an expanding
number of epistemic cultures and intersecting systems of knowledge that are no longer
entirely bounded by organizational cultures, but have become a part of everyday life.
Knorr Cetina (1997) takes this “discharge of knowledge relations into society” as one of
the new key concerns for contemporary social theory (p. 8).
In this vein, many scholars point out that a great deal of contemporary creative
work online, from open source software to blogs to fan fiction to encyclopedias, is
produced, not by professionals or creative industries, but through commons-based peer
production undertaken by loosely confederated groups of individuals collaborating for
free (Lessig, 2004; von Hippel, 2005; Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008). Bruns refers to the
networks of collaborators that grow up around these projects as “produsage
communities,” and they bear a great deal of resemblance to what Knorr Cetina (1997;
2001) deems epistemic cultures, or groups whose sociality is organized around common
systems of knowledge, which in turn are generally grounded in common objects of
inquiry or production. Moreover, while some peer production may require a great deal
of cooperation aimed at building a common artifact, such as a software release or an
encyclopedia article, many communally produced resources result from far less
coordinated and task oriented user activity, such as when users individually tag photos
on Flickr resulting in a searchable image archive, or improve search results when their
linking activity is aggregated by a search engine (Shirky, 2008; Bruns, 2008). In
Bruns’ (2008) interpretation, an online community can even be its own object of
communal production, with users evaluating and assigning merit based on one
another’s contributions to the ongoing discussion, irrespective of any intent to create
any artifact beyond the forum itself.
In light of all these observations, we can begin to consider different online
communities2 as epistemic cultures in Knorr Cetina’s (1997, 2001) sense, each
2 I am aware of the extant debate over the validity of the term “online community” as a scholarly
construct. Some scholars, like Wellman and Gulia (1999), have argued that the term at least makes sense,
as online communities frequently possess many of the properties of offline communities, such as social
capital and reciprocity. At the same time, other researchers (for example, Haythornthwaite, 2007) have
suggested that the notion of “communities” be abandoned in favor of that of “social networks,” the
argument being that social networks are a more precise, quantifiable, and therefore operationalizable
construct. I do not wish to enter into this fray at the moment, but will clarify my stance on the issue later
in the paper.
constructing and/or examining its own common objects, whether such objects include
evolving pieces of peer-produced software or the evolving sense of “community” itself.
This shift makes different online discourses, including but not limited to professional
journalism, amenable to study as systems of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge,
and particularly the sociology of scientific knowledge, has grown enormously since
Tuchman first suggested we consider journalism a system of knowledge akin to scientific
inquiry. This greatly expanded field provides many of the theoretical tools needed to
develop a lens that examines professional journalism, not only as a particular epistemic
culture, but one that must engage in exchange with many others to survive.
On Epistemic Cultures
Before moving on to a discussion of how different systems of knowledge interact,
it’s worth taking a moment to flesh out what I mean by “epistemic cultures,” which is a
term I’ve only partially defined up ’til now. The phrase belongs to Knorr Cetina (1999)
and to her comparative study of two scientific fields—high-energy physics and molecular
biology. Knorr Cetina’s study revolves not around the social construction of knowledge
itself, but in her words, “the construction of the machineries of knowledge
construction” (p. 3): the social and technical arrangements, arising from “affinity,
necessity, and historical coincidence” (p. 1) that surround different communities of
investigators and give rise to scientific knowledge. In short, she coins the term in an
effort to describe how different scientific disciplines, and even different laboratories
within a discipline, are not simply pursuing different lines of inquiry, but constitute
different cultures of inquiry, whose objects of study become the focus of an “object-
centered sociality,” giving rise to distinct practices, social structures, and shared
ontologies, all of which in turn discursively shape the knowledge they produce.
Moreover, as I say above, Knorr Cetina (1997, 2001) ultimately proposes that, as we
become a knowledge society, we must ultimately consider the notion of epistemic
cultures as one that extends beyond the sciences to other institutions, as well as
informal systems of knowledge production and ultimately into our everyday
experiences.
And in fact, returning the discussion to journalism, Gaye Tuchman’s (1978)
explication of the news frame might well in principle be considered an example of an
epistemic culture in Knorr Cetina’s (1999, 2001) sense. Framing, of course, is a word
that gets thrown around quite frequently in many contexts (Scheufele, 2000), so it’s
worth noting that Tuchman’s (1978) use of the term is rather distinctive. She describes
how, in an attempt to make economical use of limited resources, news organizations
deploy their reporting staff strategically, both geographically and temporally. She calls
this pattern of resource deployment the news net and describes how it generates
selection effects, systematically capturing particular types of events and issues, while
seldom or never netting others. On the one hand, Tuchman’s metaphor of the news net
is intended to evoke the image of a wide-meshed fishing net lifting only items of a
certain size and shape out of the water—much like the now classic thought experiment
on anthropic bias (Bostrom, 2002). But the woven strands of Tuchman’s news net are
also a metaphor for another kind of net—a network extending through time and space,
along which information travels from far-flung bureaus and distant wire reporters back
to the newsroom itself. Information on events that makes it back to the newsroom is
then typified—assigned to rough categories based on journalists’ and editors’ prior
experience covering similar events. These categories—“soft news,” “spot news,” and so
on—subsequently allow editors to plan their coverage, which in turn leads to a refining
of the organization’s strategic distribution of resources, further structuring the news net.
A final (for our present purposes) concept introduced by Tuchman is that of the web of
facticity—the collection of mutually supporting facts and sources assembled by
reporters and written into a story. Taken individually, any fact or source in a news story
might appear suspect, but together they all serve to back one another up, ultimately
giving off the appearance of a credible article. 3 Just what constitutes an adequate web of
facticity is a matter that is reflected in individual stories, but larger than any particular
article—the sorts of sources that are credible, what counts as a fact, and so on, all reflect
and are reflected in the structure of the news net and the professional culture of
journalism that surrounds it.
These elements—the news net, typification, and the web of facticity—are all part
of Tuchman’s (1978) news frame. Her use of “framing,” inspired by Goffman (1959), is
not about the framing of individual news stories, but about the larger “machinery of
knowledge construction” in Knorr Cetina’s (1999) sense—the patterned arrangement of
resources that results in journalists’ particular and selective conception of the world.
Tuchman’s (1978) injunction that we examine the frames employed by other creators of
knowledge is in a sense, then, carried forward in Knorr Cetina’s concept of the the
epistemic culture. At the same time, Tuchman’s concepts and their attendant
3 The general observation that authors are strategic in their use of sources and the juxtaposition of facts to
bolster the credibility or their work risks being a lesson in the obvious, but nuanced accounts of how this
is done are an essential part of accounts that attempt to bring out the constructed nature of factual
writings. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in science studies—for example, see Collins, 1981; Latour,
1986; and Hilgartner, 2000.
methodology give us a language for talking about the makeup of epistemic cultures that
is more finely attuned to media work.
From Correspondence to Coherence
A final necessary step before launching into a discussion of how systems of
knowledge interact is to consider what we mean by knowledge. If, as Knorr Cetina
(1999) suggests, to talk of epistemic cultures is not to discuss knowledge construction,
per se, but “the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction” (p. 3), then
our discussion thus far has remained one step removed from this final, essential
construct. Particularly if we’re thinking of various epistemic cultures that examine
current events—as many, not just the journalistic ones, frequently do—it’s tempting to
begin with a basic assumption that happenings in the world will have a powerful
influence on a wide variety of knowledge systems. If our various sources of information,
from news to dinner table conversation are all forms of mediated access to reality, then
“reality” would seem to play as big or even a bigger role in constraining our discourse
than “media.” Or, as media sociologist Schudson (2003) puts it in discussing news
content,
To hold news organizations accountable for news is something like holding
parents accountable for the actions of their children—it is convenient to locate
responsibility somewhere, and it reminds news organizations (or parents) that
they have a serious job to do for which they will be judged. Still, they sometimes
have to work with unyielding materials. (p. 14)

Outside journalism studies, in the world of science studies, the notion that journalists
(or scientists, or any other producers of knowledge) “work with unyielding materials” is
known as “material agency.” Simply put, material agency concerns the boundaries of
social construction—it reminds us that there are limits to the sorts of frames and
categories we can force onto the chaos of our world as we attempt to make sense of it.
At the very least, it tells us that such attempts will be met with resistance from the
people or things we’re trying to wedge into our Procrustean beds (Callon, 1999). And as
Schudson (2003) indicates, any discussion of the news media—or any other non-
fictional media for that matter—as constructors of reality should start with an
acknowledgement of the fact that the material for the news begins with, or at the very
least is in dialogue with, events and issues over which authors (and their institutions)
may have relatively little control. As Richard Dyer (1993) reminds us,
[T]here is no such thing as unmediated access to reality. But because one can see
reality only through representation, it does not follow that one does not see
reality at all. Partial—selective, incomplete, from a point of view—vision of
something is not no vision of it whatsoever. (p. 3)
It’s important to steer clear, however, of the notion that any medium simply
reflects reality veridically. As I relate above, Gans (1979) called this fallacy “mirror
theory”—the suspect notion that the content of a medium is simply an objective
reflection of the world. Mirror theory implies what philosophers sometimes call a
correspondence standard of truth—an expectation that reliable documents should be an
accurate reflection of the external world (McInerny, 1992). But, as McInerny has
pointed out, there are other additional and alternative standards of reliable knowledge.
One that’s seen been analyzed far more frequently in sociology and other fields of social
science is an epistemological strategy he calls coherence (McInerny, 1992). This is the
idea that a document is reliable insofar as it is consonant with all our other sources of
information—with everything else we “know” about the subject at hand. Coherence, as
it turns out, is fast becoming a useful concept in journalism studies. Again, Schudson is
useful here. Take the following extended passage from his 2003 book, The Sociology of
News in which he describes what he calls “interinstitutional news coherence:”
News institutions pay more attention to other news institutions than ever before.
The stories one reads in one publication are likely to bear a stronger resemblance
to the stories in the next publication than they would have in the past. A century
ago, competing newspapers in the same city featured front-page stories that their
rivals did not even carry in the back pages. There was little urgency in journalism
about coming up with “the” picture of that day's reality. Now news institutions
monitor one another all the time. ... [J]ournalists not only know what is going
on in other media outlets but—this is “the CNN effect”—they assume their
audiences do, too. ... The consequence of that assumption is that reporters push
even more insistently toward writing news with greater punch, more “attitude,”
and more evident interpretation, since they tend to assume that their audience
already knows the basics of the story from TV. Literary or film critics have talked
of intertextuality for a long time. Now news intertextuality is reality, not an
accidental outcome of wars that draw reporters to the same hotel, or of power
centers that draw them to the same bars in a capital city. News is a widely
distributed, seamless intertext. (pp. 109-110; italics mine)

Boczkoski has expanded in recent years on this phenomenon in several articles and
presentations with names like “Technology, monitoring and imitation in contemporary
news work” (2009), “When more media equals less news” (2007), and “Imitation in an
Age of Information Abundance” (2008).
But as I insinuate above, while journalism studies certainly appreciates coherence
as a phenomenon, elsewhere it has been teased out further as an epistemological
strategy—a way of knowing about the world. And it’s here that I wish to cast some
additional attention in the hope that some of what has been said in fields like science
studies and the sociology of knowledge will in turn benefit the way we view not just
journalism, but many forms of online discourse. For this exercise, I take Latour’s work
as my starting point, as he introduces several constructs that have since been adopted or
adapted by scholars like Galison and Star, who will soon figure into our discussion on
the interaction of knowledge systems.
Latour’s take on coherence, stemming from the sociology of scientific knowledge,
has been developed across numerous works, including the books Laboratory Life
(Latour & Woolgar, 1986) and Science in Action (1987), as well as the scholarly essays,
“Drawing Things Together” (1988) and “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista” (1995). It relies on
numerous constructs, but for the purposes of my present discussion I wish to focus on
three: deflation, inscription, and optical consistency.
Latour (with Woolgar, 1986) notes that scientists (and members other
professions as well) make progress in their work by reducing the external world to
manipulable representations. In a classic example, from “Drawing Things
Together” (Latour, 1988) a geographer reduces a rocky coastline to a two-dimensional

map. This might be viewed as simplification, or simply the discarding of all but those
characteristics of the coastline that are most salient to the tasks the map is intended to
facilitate. Such reductions often happen in successive stages. For instance, a biologist
might begin her work by removing the phenomenon under study from the external
world and placing it in a controlled laboratory setup. Next she might use instruments to
record particular data from her experiment, preserving the columns of numbers and
discarding the physical experimental setup at the end of the day. Subsequently the long
columns of numbers might be filed away in favor of a representative graph derived from
them—and so on and so forth. This process whereby the external world is successively
reduced to increasingly compact representations is known as deflation, and the end
products of the process—maps, tables, graphs, and so on—are inscriptions (Latour &
Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 1987, 1988, 1995).
Also important for Latour (1988) is the notion of optical consistency, which is in
many ways simply another way of getting at the notion of coherence. Latour suggests
that the inscriptions desired by scientists are not just concise representations of the real
world—i.e., researchers are not simply after a correspondence notion of truth. Rather,
what are desired are comparable representations of the world—maps of different
prospective navigation routes with the same scale and legend, graphs of different
laboratory trials represented in the same units, engineering schematics of the same
machine shown from different angles. For Latour, the power and influence of modern
science derive from its ability to make comparisons, to see similarities and
discrepancies, and thereby to create internally consistent theories of various
phenomena on which to act. In short, scientists seek coherence. And, according to

Latour (1988), inscriptions are the tool that make this possible. Citing Eisenstein
(1979), he goes so far as to suggest that the ability to compare in short order discrepant
representations of different cosmologies was in part responsible for kicking off modern
astronomy:
The Copernican revolution...is an idealist rendering of a very simple mechanism:
if we cannot go to the earth, let the earth come to us, or, more accurately, let us
all go to many places on the earth, and come back with the same but different
homogenous pictures, that can be gathered, compared, superimposed, and
redrawn in a few places, together with the carefully labelled specimens of rocks
and fossils. (Latour, 1988, p. 37)
Latour (1988) sees deflation, inscription, and optical consistency at work, not just in
science, however, but across all our modern institutions. The functioning of markets
and whole economies, for instance, rely greatly on the deflation of myriad costs, sales,
payments, and other transactional data into inscriptions like the Dow Jones Industrial
Average or the Gross Domestic Product. Indeed, reducing the whole economy to a tiny
set of numeric indicators comparable across decades or nations represents a
tremendous process of deflation and a powerful drive toward optical consistency.
Moreover, as I have argued above, systems of knowledge are no longer limited to the
institutional settings Latour initially envisioned. If the Dow is a remarkable exercise in
deflation and inscription, so are the myriad Google Maps mashups produced by Internet
users in their spare time.
Latour’s work demonstrates at least two things presently of interest to us. First,
coherence is a powerful resource—when maintained, it allows humans to do everything

from navigate coastlines to set market prices. Second, coherence doesn’t simply happen
—coherence is hard work that involves constant monitoring and interpretation of new
information. Moreover, many social scientists, from communication researchers like
Brenda Dervin (1989) and Karl Weick (1995) to anthropologists like Gay Becker (1999)
have suggested that people seek coherence in their everyday lives—it isn’t merely the
preserve of biologists and cartographers.
I would like to argue that, as with Schudson’s (2003) observation of journalistic
practices, every distinct epistemic culture strives for internal consistency, for coherence.
Moreover, while focusing above on the work of a single researcher within science studies
provides a clear narrative, observations about the importance of coherence in knowledge
production aren’t unique to Latour, but are evident throughout the sociology of
scientific knowledge. 4 Moreover, in line with Boczkowski’s (2009) observations,
maintaining such coherence often involves careful monitoring of one’s information
environment. When a journalist writes a news story, it must be make sense within the
context of all the other news stories on the same subject, with regard to the journalist’s
prior knowledge of the subject, the information provided by her sources, and whatever
knowledge the author’s audience might be assumed to possess (Tuchman, 1978; Gans,
4 To give just a few examples, Collins (1981) argues that researchers often attempt to deflect attention
from contingency and situatedness in their research reports, so as to provide more compelling, internally
consistent accounts of the phenomena under study. Starr and Griesemer (1989), whose work is attended
to more closely later in the paper, focus on scientists strategies for “developing and maintaining
coherence” (p. 393) across social worlds. Karl Popper’s (2002) notion of falsifiability as the proper
demarcation for scientific study relies heavily on the maintenance of the internal consistency of
knowledge. Kuhn’s (1970) paradigms are marked by their coherence and break down, in part, when
scientists defect or are reared into competing ontological schemes. Galison (1997) notes that Kuhn’s work
is in fact part of a larger tradition within social studies of science that underscores the importance of
researchers’ internally consistent conceptual schemes. Moreover, Galison’s (1997) own work on
subcultures within microphysics illustrates that individual subcultures within the sciences can be largely
autonomous, with the ability to withstand challenges from without, partly because the strength and
expansiveness of each subculture’s internally consistent logic leads scientists to tolerate substantial
amounts of disconfirming data before abandoning a theory or experimental regimen.
1979; Schudson, 2003). A reporter, then—as well as everyone else who touches a news
story on its way to publication (Hetherington, 1985)—must monitor all these things in
the environment to maintain coherence. Part of the act of publishing is the work of
making a text coherent with the environment into which it is deployed. And again, not
to privilege journalism, this is presumably true not only for professional reporters and
editors, but also for bloggers, discussion forum participants, Wikipedians, YouTubers,
and other online content producers.
Interacting Systems of Knowledge
At this point, it’s worth taking a moment to summarize—and perhaps clarify—
what I’ve attempted to accomplish thus far. I’ve argued that traditional media sociology
predominantly portrays the mass media as a bottleneck in the dissemination of
information, which interest groups attempt to access by carefully packaging their claims
to suit selection criteria. While this is a reasonable view, which captures much about
how journalistic institutions filter information and construct a particular view of reality,
it is no longer sufficient to explain how information is produced for consumption in a
networked information environment where the spread of stories is explicitly mediated
by sharing and search, and visibly embedded in a wide variety of conversations—
effectively making journalists claims-makers of a sort themselves. 5 I have argued that
5I say “explicitly” here because, of course, our experience of media has always been mediated by social
sharing. This is the very basis of the “two-step flow” model of communication (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 2006).
Newspapers and nightly news certainly had a broader reach in the mid-Twentieth Century than they do
today, but it’s interesting to consider the extent to which online social media have reshaped the flow of
mass media information versus the extent to which they have merely made it explicit. Before data began
rolling in on clickthroughs, unique visitors, and site “stickiness,” newspapers were free to assume—or
more to the point, encourage advertisers to assume—that every story in the paper was read by every
subscriber. But selectivity about what to read and what to share has undoubtedly been with us since long
before the Web. Even if we grant this, however, we shouldn’t underestimate the significance of this new
explicitness for the way legacy media operate in the digital age (Turow, 2005).
the online communities that consume and discuss news products in the course of their
own forms of cultural production should be viewed as small and large epistemic
cultures, with information gathering resources deployed in particular patterns arising
from “affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence” (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 1). Each of
their cultural products “contains its own inherent logic, its web of facticity and
associated narrative form, and so structures what can and will be reported” (Tuchman,
1978, p. 217). These epistemic cultures may be distinctive, but they do not exist in
isolation. Rather, they intersect with many others by virtue of aligned or conflicting
interests and multiple membership. As such, each epistemic culture’s maintenance of
coherence takes place as it influences, is influenced by, borrows from, and trades with
others. It is the dynamics of such intersections of knowledge systems to which I now
turn.
Intermedia Influence
Intermedia agenda setting. Traditionally, when communication scholars have
examined the question of how journalists influence and are influenced by other media,
the question has been framed as one of “intermedia agenda setting”—how different news
outlets influence one another’s selection of topics, or how agendas aired through other
institutionalized media (e.g., political advertising) make their way into the news (for
examples, see Danielian & Reese, 1989 and Roberts & McCombs, 1994). Moreover,
where new forms of social media have been considered in relation to mass media, the
top down focus of traditional agenda setting research has generally been retained,
situating electronic forums as publics to be influenced by mass media (see, for example
Roberts, Wanta & Dzwo, 2002 and Wallsten, 2007). Only recently have studies begun
to examine the prospect of mutual influence between social media forms like blogs and
mainstream media outlets, and in doing they have run sharply up against the limitations
of methodological and theoretical lenses developed for examining the interaction of
small numbers of neatly bounded mass media organizations (Chaffee & Metzger, 2001;
Wallsten, 2007). As such, in my view it is more promising to shift attention to other
well-developed theories that are specifically built to deal with the interaction of myriad
groups with different characteristics and agendas than to continue modifying and
reassembling traditional theories of intermedia agenda setting to cope with new media
forms.
The public arenas model. Another, alternative model sometimes taken up in
communication research is Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) public arenas model, which
contrasts the fact that a near infinite number of social problems could, in principle,
grace the public agenda with the reality that the “public agenda” is hosted by media with
finite carrying capacities—newspapers with their set number of column inches,
television news with its fixed minutes of airtime. Myriad prospective public problems
compete on the basis of their respective cultural attributes in a vast battle for the limited
number of slots on this public agenda. In principle, what ensues is much like natural
selection, but it is the filtering mechanisms of news institutions and other public arenas
that are brought to bear on the field of potential public problems, withering unpalatable
claims and letting only the must culturally appealing survive in the spotlight, where they
remain for a time, only to be picked off by new claims better adapted to the needs of the
moment. Intermedia influence in the public arenas model occurs when particularly
successful claims exceed the carrying capacity of a given medium and spill over from
one medium to another, such as when a newspaper story is picked up by the evening
news, or television’s movie of the week is “ripped from the headlines.”
Recently, with the rise of online newspapers and 24-hour cable news, the finite
carrying capacity of news media have become more about the limits of attention and
resources than the constraints of physical media or airtime. But the model still holds in
principle,6 and there are many aspects of it that I want to hold on to as the discussion
moves forward. While Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) generally hold to an institutional
view of public arenas, noting “the importance of the selections made by well-positioned
cultural ‘gatekeepers’” (p. 55), they do not insist on the news media as the only space for
public deliberation. As such, authors like Maratea (2008) have had some success
translating an expanded concept of “public arenas” to new media environs. Further,
there is nothing in principle that prevents the keepers of public arenas in Hilgartner and
Bosk’s (1988) model from being claims makers themselves, packaging their cultural
products to play well in other spaces and meet the selection criteria of, and spill over
into, the greatest number of outlets.
Boundary Objects and Trading Zones
In the field of science studies, the intersection of different systems of knowledge
has been a favorite subject of study. Kuhn (1970), for instance, achieved something akin
to academic immortality for examining how scientific paradigms clash and eventually
6 It’s worth noting that while the public arenas model has been generally supported, there have been cases
in which the model has received only mixed support—see Hertog, Finnegan, & Kahn, 1994 for one such
example. It is encouraging, however, that a recent study (Maratea, 2008) applying the model to case
studies of public problems on the Web suggested the theory may hold up well for online media.
upend one another. Subsequently, Barnes and Bloor (1982), along with other scholars
like Collins (1981a; 1992) and Pinch (with Collins, 1998) pursued an “empirical program
of relativism” aimed at examining scientific controversies—all of which was intended to
open up competing systems of belief within science from a sociological perspective. In
looking at new media, there are, no doubt lessons to be learned and applied from the
relativistic program. For the present, however, I am far more interested in how different
epistemic cultures coexist generatively than how they ultimately battle to the death. As
such, it’s appropriate to focus on two theoretical frameworks from science studies that
examine the process of “developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting
social worlds” (Star & Griesemer, 1989).
Boundary objects. Star and Griesemer (1989) recognized that knowledge-
building endeavors often require collaboration from diverse groups with only partially
aligned interests and worldviews. In exploring this state of affairs, the authors took as
their example one of California’s early natural history museums and the means by which
it went about building out its collection of data and specimens. Each of the groups of
stakeholders who participated—some centrally, others peripherally—in the museum’s
endeavors had very different interests in mind. The donor who funded the University of
California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology sought, through her charity and personal
hunting prowess, to preserve specimens of vanishing wildlife, which required the
widespread acquisition of relatively intact furry and feathered corpses. The museum
director sought to make a name for himself in the ecology research community, which
necessitated not only good specimens but accurately collected data about each find,
sufficient for aggregation, comparison, and theory building (think of Latour’s

inscriptions here). The university administration cared little about wildlife preservation
or assembling a massive collection of stuffed animals, per se, but sought to legitimate
the young University of California on the national stage, while making it a local cultural
center. The amateur naturalists who occasionally brought in specimens wanted to aid
the museum’s scientific pursuits, but were also eager to receive official recognition for
their hobbyist naturalism. Trappers could also be persuaded to capture and part with
choice specimens, but were generally only interested in cash, or other exchanges that
benefitted them directly, such as the receipt of other pelts in exchange for those they
contributed or information on promising hunting territories.
Amid this tangled mesh of divergent interests were limited areas of alignment
and overlap, made possible by the existence—and at times the creation—of boundary
objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989). Boundary objects may be symbolic or physical objects
—like cash, points on a map, or otter pelts—which often mean different things or are
valued for different reasons within the distinctive cultures of various stakeholders. But,
importantly, they are identifiable to everyone at the table, and thus become a means for
translating the interests of one group into the terms of another. In the case of the
museum, each party’s use of boundary objects to partially align and further their
individual interests with those of others gave rise to a unique, heterogeneous system for
enlisting, distributing, and managing one another’s labor and capital in a way that
ultimately not only allowed for the museum’s continued functioning, but distinctly
shaped the knowledge produced by it. Boundary objects are thus an important
construct. They demonstrate how distinct cultures (including epistemic cultures) may
coordinate with one another in a way that furthers their individual interests, without
foundering on the rocks of their ontological differences. As Star & Griesemer (1989) put
it, “the creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing
and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds” (p. 393). Moreover, the
construct suggests that the shape that such alliances take impacts the frame—in
Tuchman’s (1978) sense—from which each culture derives its understanding of the
world.
Trading zones. Like Star and Griesemer (1989), Galison (1997) takes up the
problem of how it is that different cultures can at once be heavily interdependent—such
as is the case with theoretical and experimental physicists—while remaining largely
autonomous and distinctive. In answer to the problem, he draws from anthropological
notions of trade, noting that it is possible for different cultures to engage in commerce
while maintaining distinct, and even opposing worldviews. Rather than boundary
objects, he proposes that autonomous subcultures develop languages of trade, or
pidgins, through which to interact with one another. Many of his key examples come
from the collaboration of American physicists and engineers on defense projects during
World War II. To collaborate on the bleeding edge technology of radar, for instance,
theorist Julian Schwinger and his engineering contemporaries developed a pidgin that
served to reduce high theory to the bare essentials needed by engineers and vice versa.
The resulting calculations and schematics were neither physical theory nor engineering
schematics in the classical sense of either. Nor were electrical engineers and theoretical
physicists becoming experts in one another’s domains, which were not even terribly
consistent with one another. Rather, the two subcultures had developed a pidgin that
allowed both to further knowledge within their own domain without stepping outside of
their unique systems of knowledge.
Galison (1997), through his examples, portrays pidgins as being born out of
pragmatic necessity, though certainly he leaves open the possibility that they may at
times be forged of convenience. But whether they arise in the frenetic heat of the
moment or for simpler reasons, pidgins can often be unstable, resulting from temporary
alliances that disintegrate once everyone’s needs are met. They may also develop into
sophisticated creoles—rich systems of meaning capable of sustaining their own
epistemic cultures.
Trading zones are the areas of partial alignment in intersecting systems of
knowledge that spawn and sustain pidgins and creoles. These may be concepts of
mutual interest or physical objects (e.g., various radar apparatus). They may also be
physical spaces, such as shared laboratories. Galison (1997) points to the initial
architecture of postwar labs like Brookhaven, which simultaneously underscored the
separation between the professional identities of different groups of physicists while
foregrounding opportunities for coordination between them. Such decisions about
architecture will be considered further in my subsequent paper on the design of new
media spaces. For now, it’s enough to underscore that for Galison (1997), as for Leigh
and Griesemer (1989), the manner in which different epistemic cultures coordinate—
whether out of necessity or historical accident—around their partially aligned interests,
both allows for the generative coexistence of different systems of knowledge, and
influences the sort of knowledge that is ultimately produced within each.

Interoperable Systems of Knowledge
Again, I’d like to view different centers of online cultural production—whether
online communities (“produsage communities” in Bruns’ [2008] phrase), professional
newsrooms, or other organizational sources of content—as individual epistemic cultures
that interact to produce intersecting systems of knowledge. 7 It is time, at long last, to
pull together the various elements of my discussion thus far into a single lens for
examining such interactions and studying the manner in which information flows and
meaning is constructed across and between intersecting systems of knowledge on the
Internet.
Circles of Coherence
I have argued that each epistemic culture strives to maintain coherence, to
remain internally consistent, as it deals with new information and spins out the system
of knowledge around which its practices center. And I have also stated that an essential
part of the act of publishing is the work of making a text coherent with the environment
into which it is deployed. Star and Griesemer (1989) hold open the possibility of the
coherence of texts across social worlds, but here I’d like to draw a boundary between
local and global coherence. It is likely impossible that any published text would be
consistent with every other. And in fact, this is the persistent worry of scholars like Van
Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (1996), Robert Putnam (2000), Rosen (2004), and Sunstein
(2007, 2009)—all of whom have suggested that as discourse online becomes more
7Note that I’d like to draw a distinction here between Websites (or other online forums) and centers of
production. It would be a mistake to equate the two, as a single Website may contain many different
communities or be maintained by multiple groups of professionals. Similarly, a single epistemic culture
may exist across multiple Websites.
polarized, mutually agreed upon truths will become harder to come by. In short,
publishers within a given epistemic culture will be far more concerned with making
their texts locally coherent than globally coherent. For example, Adamic & Glance
(2005) have shown that conservative and liberal blogs link far more often to other
politically similar blogs than to their partisan counterparts across the aisle. Along with
Sunstein (2007), I venture to say that a liberal blogger will likely want to publish a text
that is coherent within the context of the liberal blogs and other sources she links to, but
find it less necessary to be consistent with conservative bloggers’ framings of her
subject. Indeed, if one partisan blogger isn’t reading the other’s work in the first place—
as is often the case—it’s safe to assume that coherence between the two isn’t a great
concern. In Galison’s (1997) terms, not all cultures are ideologically “near enough to
trade” (p. 803). Moreover, on those occasions when partisan blogs do reference across
the aisle, additional work is presumably necessary in order to show why the opposing
view is wrong or otherwise make it consistent with the local discourse (Sunstein, 2007).
In this way, we might imagine individual posts or distinctive epistemic cultures
online as existing within limited circles of coherence. A particular post, for instance,
might be consistent with the individual author’s existing knowledge of a subject, with
everything else the post links to, with the presumed expectations of the audience, and so
on and so forth. But these are limited requirements for consistency, and outside of them
the post may cease to be coherent with other texts and audiences. The work that
authors do to make their text coherent with particular others is thus selective. Whether,
in a given instance, this has to do with partisan thinking, unique interests, social and
cultural influences, or simply the very real limits of an individual’s attention, global
coherence is impossible—and local coherence constitutes a choice laden with the
author’s values and priorities about which sources are worth paying attention to, which
audiences are worth addressing. To put the issue back into Schudson’s (2003) language,
intertexts have seams.
Bounding Epistemic Cultures and Circles of Coherence
In developing the theoretical tools laid out here, I do not wish to make the
mistake of conflating Websites with online communities or epistemic cultures. Web
domains and epistemic cultures are not one in the same—many communities may exist
within a Website like Twitter or Daily Kos, while in other instances a single community
may span multiple Websites. I have thus far been discussing epistemic cultures as
though each were monolithic, but the reality of cultural production—and especially the
commons-based peer production that is characteristic of online communities—is much
more fluid and far less tightly bounded (Deuze, 2007; Bruns, 2008). For Bruns,
individuals may move closer or further from the center of activity in a given community,
but there is no hard outer edge demarcating who is or is not a member, save perhaps for
the exclusion of individuals who have never participated. Moreover, sociologists of
scientific knowledge like Star and Griesemer (1989) and Law (1989) are quick to point
out that a network of texts or collaborations, and no doubt an “epistemic culture,” looks
very different depending on the initial point at which you start to trace it out. This is a
point echoed by Haythornthwaite (2007) and other communication researchers who
have called for an upending of the notion of “online communities” in favor of the study
of “online social networks.” From a network perspective, who is and who is not part of a
given “community” is greatly dependent on how one defines links between individuals
and whether this accords with social reality (Haythornthwaite, 2007).
But if the network is at times a more nuanced tool for examining relationships
online—between varying combinations of texts, bodies of work, and individuals—there
is undoubtedly still great utility in being able to speak at times of such groupings as
communities or cultures. Bruns (2008) unequivocally accepts the network view of
online collaboration, but still speaks of “produsage communities.” Similarly Star and
Griesemer (1989) employ a network perspective, while identifying their historical
subjects as distinct communities consisting of trappers, collectors, university
administrators, and so forth. Law (1989) also is able to speak of shipbuilders, sailors,
astronomers, and so on in his analyses—not as clusters in a network, but as distinct
groups—while acknowledging that each is on some level embedded in a far more
nuanced set of network relations.
For my own part, I wish to retain the shorthand of epistemic cultures to speak of
groups online who understand themselves to be a community with a corpus of shared
meanings and associations, and who have in common all of the attributes of a
knowledge frame in Tuchman’s sense: an identifiable epistemic net for retrieving
information about the world, a set of typifications for distributing attention and
resources, and shared standards for what constitutes a sufficient web of facticity for
establishing new knowledge. 8 I contend that we can employ the term “epistemic
cultures” while all the while recognizing that such relations are undergirded by a
8 Down the road, it may be appropriate to further adapt Tuchman’s terminology. Already I have taken the
liberty of shifting from her phrase “news net” to “epistemic net” to encompass non-journalistic cultures.
However, the fact remains that her adoption in 1978 of terms like “web” and “net” may well prove
confusing for discussing the Internet.
network structure. Meanwhile, my construct of circles of coherence is very much a
network construct, which seeks to draw explicit links between an individual or text and
the sources it draws from on the one hand, the audiences it addresses on the other. My
intent is that the two terms will complement one another to explicate aspects of
interacting knowledge systems that neither could in isolation.
Active Versus Passive Coordination
While there are many lessons to be derived from Star and Griesemer (1989) and
from Galison (1997) as to the manner in which epistemic cultures which are quite
different can persist autonomously while selectively drawing on and benefitting from
one another’s activities, the bulk of examples from both involve active coordination on
the part of groups on either side of a trade or aligned around a particular set of
boundary objects. Trappers and museum curators must agree on the price of a pelt,
physicists and engineers worked closely with one another in their language of trade to
produce radar technologies. Certainly active collaboration between groups happens all
the time online. MSNBC.com has arranged to republish articles from
WashingtonPost.com. IBM hosts conferences for open source developers. Bloggers
assemble at Meetups and put on conventions. None of these things could happen
without engagement and collaboration between the involved parties. But when we look
at how information circulates on a day to day basis online—especially through sharing
and search—we’re more often looking at passive coordination. A journalist or a blogger
publishes a piece which includes desirable audiences within its circle of coherence. The
text and page structure may be optimized for the best possible placement by search
engines. She may publish the story at a time when site traffic is likely to be high in order
to boost its visibility. She may even convince friends to vote up the story on Digg or post
it to Facebook. But generally speaking, the author of a piece cannot by sheer force of
will make the bulk of users online share an article or even pay attention to it. If we view
a piece of content posted in such a fashion as belonging to a boundary object, it is of a
variety Star and Griesemer (1989) termed a “repository”—a collection of items indexed
such that “people from different worlds can use or borrow from the ‘pile’ for their own
purposes without having directly to negotiate differences in purpose” (p. 410). Users
can take (or leave) a blog post or news story by sharing it to their favorite sites without
negotiating with the publisher as to the specific context of its use. Certainly, the original
publisher gets something in return by allowing their content to be shared—attention,
“Google juice,” page impressions that perhaps lead to ad revenue—but compared to
more engaged forms of transaction, there is very little resembling mutual coordination
between parties in such an exchange. Galison (1997) and Star and Griesemer (2008)
have given us a sophisticated vocabulary for talking about active coordination, and some
vocabulary for discussing passive coordination. Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) claim
makers, packaging messages for uptake by particular, or even multiple arenas come
closer to the desired picture here. However, Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) spend more
time on the selection principles of public arenas than on the strategies adopted by claim
makers. And given how much information online travels through passive coordination
(Shirky, 2008; Bruns, 2008), I argue that we would do well to extend our vocabulary for
discussing such arrangements.

Epistemic Interoperability
The language of engineering gives us a nice metaphor for thinking about selective
coherence and passive coordination. In the parlance of engineers, we might say that by
deploying their content within a particular circle of coherence, authors in a sense are
constructing their texts to be interoperable with certain other texts, audience
expectations, and discourses—and inoperable with others. Like developers who design a
software application or electrical engineers who build an iPod accessory, producers who
want to address particular audiences must pay attention to the standards that will allow
their text to operate in the desired environment. But this sort of coordination is
ultimately passive—like the engineers building accessories, content providers cannot
ultimately force audiences to use their inventions. 9
This principle of interoperability is certainly important when content producers
are attempting to encourage the uptake of their work by other epistemic cultures. But it
is equally essential within the creator’s own epistemic culture. In Schudson’s (2003)
interinstitutional news coherence, every news story has to make sense in the context of
every other on the same subject. A Wikipedia article on the “sociology of childhood” is
formatted for consistency of content and style with other articles maintained by the
site’s Sociology WikiProject—a community of users interested in the field. Users on the
liberal political blog Daily Kos are encouraged to either back up all assertions they make
9 One might argue in response that the use of some engineers’ inventions are impossible to avoid, pointing
out that some technologies, like seatbelts are mandated and some tasks cannot be completed without the
use of specialized machinery. And I would agree. There are similarly situations where the possession of
certain information or even the adoption of particular conceptual schemes become mandatory for people
to function in society or complete particular tasks. This is a matter taken up by Law (1989) in his work on
heterogeneous engineering, which I will revisit in my subsequent paper.
in their posts with links to “reputable sources” or “perhaps reconsider writing [at
all]” (dKosopedia, 2004). And so on and so forth.
At the same time, there are discursive mechanisms in play to prevent the
interoperation of certain texts. The use of partisan language and esoteric slang abound
online, as do discussions employing mutually exclusive issue frames. And such
inoperability isn’t limited to partisan sites or obscure online discussions. In my recent
study of network news blogs, I found that authors sometimes employ discursive styles
that arguably discourage substantive commenting (Braun, 2010).
Conclusion
The benefit of using this language—epistemic cultures, circles of coherence and
epistemic interoperability—is that it extends the lens of traditional sociological work on
journalism while keeping its insights. We maintain an awareness of how the news frame
produces selection effects that result in a very particular construction of reality. We
continue to understand how issue sponsors package their claims in ways they believe
will make their issues thrive within the news frame. At the same time, our new lens
takes the mass media in general and journalism in particular off their pedestals. Just as
science and technology scholars introduced their empirical program of relativism,
finally making room for satisfying sociological explanations of science by de-privileging
its claims, so we can better understand how journalism functions within the larger
ecology of new media by treating it as just one epistemic culture among many coexisting
and interacting systems of knowledge.

The lens I have constructed in this essay also gives us a way of thinking about
why the content of particular online media might be similar or different from one
another that is preferable, in my view, to the more traditional lens within
communication of intermedia agenda setting. The commonplace description of agenda
setting research, that the media “don’t tell audiences what to think, but what to think
about” (Kosicki, 1993) continues to see the balance of agency—even if that agency is
somewhat limited—on the side of publishers at the expense of audiences. In general,
communication research has advanced when it has given more agency to audiences,
taken a relatively limited view of media effects, and treated the exchange of information
as a dialogic, rather than a one-way process (Bauer, 1971; Lowery & De Fleur, 1983;
Lewenstein, 1995). Viewing centers of content production as epistemic cultures
organized around systems of knowledge that interoperate selectively with others is, in
my view, a step toward balancing the accounts of media and consumer agency as we
progress further into a century in which the gatekeeping role of legacy media has begun
to decline (Chaffee & Metzger, 2001), while the role of consumers has begun expanding
to include content production (Bruns, 2008). Under such a lens, two distinct discourses
that draw from the same sources, address themselves to a shared audience, or otherwise
interoperate will necessarily exist within overlapping circles of coherence, and thus we
have a reason to assume that their content will be similar. Likewise, when two
discourses are inoperable together we have a language for talking about that as well.
And when different content producers actively collaborate, not only does the language of
epistemic interoperability still hold, but the rich lexicon of trading zones (Galison,
1997), boundary objects (Leigh & Griesemer, 1989), and public arenas (Hilgartner &
Bosk, 1988) is opened further up to us as well to provide an ever fuller description of the
interaction of systems of knowledge.
Lastly, there is also a sense in which the language of interoperability applies to
online discourse in a non-metaphorical sense. If what I’ve described above is epistemic
interoperability, there is also architectural interoperability to be considered, including
among other things, technological affordances provided by publishers for propagating
content (as with social bookmarking tools on the Web) and constraints (like DRM) for
reigning in its spread. As I argue in my subsequent paper, in the digital media
environment, not only is architectural interoperability equally a way of determining
where your content goes and how it interacts with different audiences and discourses,
both epistemic and architectural interoperability are actively employed together as
instruments in the toolbox of the heterogeneous engineer.

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Epistemic Interoperability (Early Draft of A Dissertation Chapter)

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Epistemic Interoperability 1

Running head: EPISTEMIC INTEROPERABILITY

Sharing the News:

Cornell Dept. of Communication

framework for understanding changes in the practice of publishing news stories, as

audiences. It will eventually be paired with a chapter on “architectural

interoperability,” that outlines the manner in which the technological infrastructures

will be presented at conferences this year—ask me for details.

In 1978, Gaye Tuchman encouraged sociologists and media scholars to consider

communication that examines journalistic practices, coming as it does from decades

in which journalists serve as gatekeepers, limiting public access to information. I assert

systems of knowledge. Subsequently, I review several existing lenses within

considered in relation to news production, as well as the production practices of other

The Logic of Gates

products represent complete, veridical accounts of reality.

attention of sociologists began quickly to encompass the implications of these findings

media-savvy interest groups adopt “dramaturgical styles of activism” (Epstein, 1996, p.

(1988) put it,

environments by packaging their claims in a form that is dramatic, succinct, and

employs novel symbols or classical theatrical tropes, or by framing their claims in

media to be gatekeepers, media sociologists and other scholars of communication have

organizations form a bottleneck in the public discourse, selectively controlling

their concerns to public. Without questioning the validity or extraordinary depth of

outside its center of balance.

The Conversation Economy

with non-subscribers. Moreover, the two methods—search and sharing—tend to work

news, the influence—and subsequently the readership and revenue—of paywalled

reaped the benefits.

journalists on social networking sites. (p. 4)

how journalistic practices are adapting to the digital environment.

In writing about the various challenges presented to traditional theories of media

by digital communication technologies, Chaffee and Metzger (2001) note that, “a

finite number of news sources or outlets...selected by professional gatekeepers who

internet (e.g., journalism) to concerned citizens to comic book fans to children.

“audiences,” “news” and “not news” constitute a tremendous opportunity to develop

new alternative and interdisciplinary lenses on intermedia influence. In doing so, I

argue that it is productive to de-privilege professional journalism as a subject of inquiry

and to think of it as one among many intersecting systems of knowledge produced by

to the way information travels and meaning is constructed online.

News as a System of Knowledge (Among Many)

Gaye Tuchman’s 1978 newsroom ethnography, Making News has become a

great contributions is to re-envision the study of journalism as an exercise in the

sociology of knowledge. She flags journalism as just one among numerous

“organizationally and professionally produced” systems of knowledge, including science

economy refashioning themselves as producers of cultural products and intellectual

produced, not by professionals or creative industries, but through commons-based peer

production undertaken by loosely confederated groups of individuals collaborating for

networks of collaborators that grow up around these projects as “produsage

systems of knowledge, which in turn are generally grounded in common objects of

of cooperation aimed at building a common artifact, such as a software release or an

linking activity is aggregated by a search engine (Shirky, 2008; Bruns, 2008). In

another’s contributions to the ongoing discussion, irrespective of any intent to create

any artifact beyond the forum itself.

In light of all these observations, we can begin to consider different online

communities2 as epistemic cultures in Knorr Cetina’s (1997, 2001) sense, each

evolving pieces of peer-produced software or the evolving sense of “community” itself.

journalism, amenable to study as systems of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge,

Tuchman first suggested we consider journalism a system of knowledge akin to scientific

Before moving on to a discussion of how different systems of knowledge interact,

itself, but in her words, “the construction of the machineries of knowledge

necessity, and historical coincidence” (p. 1) that surround different communities of

become a knowledge society, we must ultimately consider the notion of epistemic

informal systems of knowledge production and ultimately into our everyday