From shorthand to mobile phones

This chapter looks at shorthand and the cell phone as two different media with shared objectives of supposedly securing objective and verifiable evidence for journalists. This chapter briefly traces their development in North America and the United Kingdom to argue that both shape journalism as a practice and profession even as they, in turn, are discursively constructed by and situated in journalists’ quest to establish their authority to define what is real. A historical study of recording technologies ultimately demonstrates both a continuing desire to escape the “imperfect medium” of the human body in favor of one that is able to better select, process, and store information, and the ultimate futility of that desire. If they fail, it is at least partly because those tools are already embedded with certain values of who is human, who is trustworthy, and who is or can be objective.