After Objectivity?

This essay takes Schudson’s pioneering work in the historical sociology of journalism as the starting point for an argument as to why the concept of objectivity can and must be re-evaluated in the digital era, if such a thing as a globalised public sphere, able to support further democratic progress in the decades ahead, is to be built from the “cultural chaos” of the internet. It explores the often ambivalent role a revised, more nuanced notion of objectivity plays in the legitimation of the proliferating journalisms and quasi-journalisms—what I will refer to collectively as the cultural form of factuality—now competing for users, market share and revenue on the internet. Finally, I will make some suggestions as to what objectivity could come to mean in the post-factual era.