Re-mediation, inter-mediation, trans-mediation

This article draws on performativity theory in order to analyse convergent journalism as a form of journalism that privileges the civil disposition of “I have a voice”, or citizen-driven acts of deliberating and witnessing, over the professional act of informing. Whilst this shift in the epistemology of the news from the truth of institutional expertise to the truth of ordinary voice has been welcome as a democratisation of journalism, catalysing processes of recognition that may cosmopolitanise the West, I advocate a more cautious, empirically-grounded approach that attends to variations in convergence reporting. The potential for cosmopolitan solidarity inherent in convergent journalism, I argue, lies with the insertion of ordinary voice in a broader structure of Western journalism is organised around processes of re-mediation, inter-mediation and trans-mediation. This structure that challenges existing hierarchies of place and human life and thus enables the disposition of “I have a voice” to go beyond communitarian recognition—the recognition of people like “us”—towards recognising the voice of distant others, too, as a voice worth listening and responding to.