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Killing secrets from Panama to Paradise: Understanding the ICIJ through bifurcating communicative and political affordances

Version 2 2024-06-04, 13:45
Version 1 2018-10-26, 15:18
journal contribution
posted on 2024-06-04, 13:45 authored by Luke HeemsbergenLuke Heemsbergen
This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it does in democratic governing. The empirical work focuses on how ICIJ’s data mining, manipulation and visualisation interface with traditional governing institutions of accountability. The article relates the affordances present in the ICIJ to modes of societal control that are available through Brighenti’s consideration of visibility as a social category and governmentality scholarship through three theoretical moves: bifurcating affordance theory on communicative and political planes, relaying a complimentarily delineated model of media apparatus and considering how such apparatuses shift towards proto-institutions.

History

Journal

New Media and Society

Volume

21

Pagination

693-711

Location

London, Eng.

ISSN

1461-4448

eISSN

1461-7315

Language

English

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2018, The Authors

Issue

3

Publisher

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD