Book part:

Noisy Internet! Web Journalism as an Epitome of the Internet’s Acousticness

Spreading news has been one of the main functions of the internet from its very beginnings. As early as the beginning of the 1980s newspaper publishers started to offer news not just on paper, but online. This serves us as the starting point to scrutinize web journalism. Referring to certain moments in the history of e-newspapers and their utilization of more and more web and social media services, we want to investigate how the change in journalism epitomizes certain characteristics of the internet—or, to be more precise, how certain misconceptions of what e-papers are and of what the internet is overlap. Aiming for a better understanding of today’s digital culture we try to develop an idea of what we call the “acousticness,” or “noisiness,” of the internet, as opposed to the internet’s common conceptualization in visual terms.