The spirits I summoned – the ambiguity of the spirits of the net in context of learning

You have just called a friend about a planned trip to India and, magically, the latest flight and hotel offers are displayed on the phone. Immediately, the route to the planned destination is one click away, automatically displaying your home in the right place on the map, all based on individual GPS data – spooky, isn’t it? After arriving, the map on your mobile phone guides you to your destination, using AR (augmented reality) elements on your display. The software recognizes your location and identifies the surroundings such as street signs, buildings and intersections – as if it were going to have a life on its own. Rather reassuring is the possible future option of the American company Google, which will show you particularly well-lit routes to destinations in foreign countries – as if the app had an awareness of your fears. There we create foreign correspondence, simply by using a website service for translation – free of charge. You enter the text in your mother tongue, whereby the software learns from user errors and is constantly improving. The results are surprisingly good and I wonder to what extent the profession of translating will be- come unnecessary in the future – comfortable, but somehow also scary.

Scoop

The state of foreign reporting today is paradoxical. New technology makes some aspects of foreign reporting faster and easier; it has also raised old problems of trust and the high cost of foreign news that were first seen in the 19th century. This chapter situates today’s new developments in media economics and technology in the context of the 19th-century’s foreign correspondence, which was full of hoaxes and bogus reporting, as well as outstanding correspondents on the ground. Our current moment is a recalibration of three trade-offs in foreign correspondence: managed news vs. independence, speed vs. superficiality, and abundant sources vs. reliability. We examine these trade-offs by looking at modern American and European foreign correspondents, who have long grappled with truth and trust in news.

Introduction

The introduction to this book begins with a detailed description of what news fixers are and how their work has evolved over time. Since the book focuses primarily on news fixing in the 21st century, the introduction historicizes the figure of the fixer, illuminating the fixer’s connections to the interpreters or guides hired by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists of past centuries. This brief but necessary historicization is firmly rooted within the critical framework of postcolonial studies, a theoretical lens that helps me explain the deeply entrenched tradition of colonial dependence on regionally specific knowledge—knowledge that unfortunately did not prevent the misrepresentation and exploitation of the people living in these other places. The introduction then moves to an examination of the news fixers’ current role within the larger ecosystem of international reporting. Building off the rich literature found in the field of journalism studies, which examines the various elements of the labor of foreign correspondence, the introduction will show that a space must be made within journalism scholarship for the study of news fixers. What is more, the field of global journalism ethics also has much to gain from a closer examination of these locally based media employees.

New Nordic Environments in Eyvind Johnson’s Factual and Fictional Prose, 1928–1932

The main aim of the article is to offer a closer examination of interfaces between Johnson’s factual and fictional modes of writing around 1930, with a particular emphasis on analysing accounts and appreciations of modern environments, infrastructures and mentalities in “peripheral” as well as “central” Swedish locations. To frame theoretically this examination, the article opens by considering some aspects of the current scholarly discourses on the hybrid genre of travel writing, to which the nonfictional texts in question broadly belong, and on the interrelationship between factual and fictional modes of representation. The article goes on to consider three of Johnson’s newspaper reportage pieces that may be located in the subgenre of domestic travel writing, popular in the interwar period, while they also, as “foreign” correspondence of sorts, contribute to confounding the very concept of home nation as well as challenging the distinction between “off-centre” and “centre” in the nation space. In its third phase, the article discusses two novels that illustrate, respectively, the “marginal” and the metropolitan variant of domestic modernism in Johnson’s fictional work, thus complementing the reportage pieces. The article concludes by situating the discussion of Johnson’s narratives in the context of new approaches to Scandinavian literary modernism.