Journalism and change in the experience of time in Western societies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the temporality produced by journalistic practice and the ways journalism has a privilege to build a specific type of social experience of the present time. This inquiry carries out a historical journey, but it is not our purpose to present a history of press in the sense of a history of institutions, particular genres and languages. Instead, this investigation develops a historical study in order to identify social temporal phenomena produced by journalism, and to express them in the form of descriptive categories, which give regularity to a diversity of temporal phenomena: instantaneity, simultaneity, periodicity, novelty, and public disclosure. Besides, we consider this work a theoretical study that uses historical elements to analyze, through a sociological approach, fundamental aspects of a social constitution of journalistic temporality.