Gustavo Ribeiro The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark 393
illustration of that development, Johnson writes about the making of the Gennifer
Flowers story – a story which started with Bill Clinton vehemently denying the affair
in response to a question posed by a journalist.
“... the Flowers controversy blossomed because of a shift in the relationship
between the national news networks and their local affiliates, a shift that made
the entire system significantly more interconnected. Until the late eighties, local
news (the six- and eleven-o’clock varieties) relied on the national network for thirty
minutes of national news footage, edited according to the august standards of the
veterans in New York. Local affiliates could either ignore the national stories or run
footage that had been supplied to them, but if the network decided the story wasn’t
newsworthy, the affiliates couldn’t cover it.
“All this changed when CNN entered the picture in the mideighties. Since the new
network lacked a pool of affiliates to provide breaking news coverage when local
events became national stories, Ted Turner embarked on a strategy of wooing local
stations with full access to the CNN news feed. Instead of a tightly edited thirty-
minute reel, the affiliates would be able to pick and choose from almost anything
that CNN cameras had captured, including stories that the executive producers in
Atlanta had decided to ignore. The Flowers episode plugged into this newly rewired
system, and the results were startling. Local news affiliates nationwide also had
access to footage of Clinton’s comment, and many of them chose to jump on the
story, even as the network honchos in New York and Washington decided to ignore
it.” (Johnson, 2001, pp.135, 136)
As Johnson points out the media machine’s ability for self-reflection and an
increasing number of media agents linked into “a kind of journalistic neural net” is
often what makes a story. (Johnson, 2001, p. 136)
One is drawn to look into the phenomenon of growing, intense interconnectivity
and the emergence of decentralised assemblages. And one will recall the statements
by top US military officials that the circulation of images of torture of Iraqi prisoners
was completely out of their hands. Not even that kind of power could suppress the
decentralised agents and instances of information exchange.
The Gennifer Flowers story shows how a quantitative change – an increase in the
amount of media agents and instances (from news networks to web sites) – can lead
to a qualitative leap to what constitutes a story.
Device interconnectivity<>blur maps the extent of networks of media and informa-
tion down to students – who emerge as information agents. Each student is a par-
ticipant in cognitive practices of recording, broadcasting, texting, chatting, surfing,
blogging, googling, etc. Interconnectivity leads to blurred identities and methods
- including the field of architecture and architectural education. The sign <> suggests
a fluctuation between the two states.
Notes
1 ”The skin is that which is deepest.”
2 La science manipule les choses et renonce à les habiter