Persistent Issues in the History of Communication: Identity, Power, and Justice

After combing through the weekly class discussion questions and responses, my own notes, and my blog posts throughout the semester, I've come to the conclusion that the history of communication (in the Western world) is deeply tied to three persistent issues that we as humans have always grappled with and continue to grapple with: identity, power, and justice. What I would like to do for this last post is to highlight certain points in our journey of reflection that emphasize the role of these concepts as we strive to understand where we are and where we are going.

Identity through memory and how we relate to our world
A major theme that bubbled to the top consistently for me throughout this course is the importance for us as humans to forge a personal and collective identity. It seems we've consistently managed to do this by leveraging the power of memory and by building a common cultural discourse using communication tools. We came across this phenomenon from the beginning of the course, as we took in Homer and tried to understand the mechanics and the importance of the poetic tradition as a way to memorize the values and characteristics of that society. As Havelock states in his Preface to Plato, 

the post-Homeric Greek, "is required as a civilized being to become acquainted with the history, the social organization, the technical competence and the moral imperatives of his group... this over-all body experience (we shall avoid the word 'knowledge') is incorporated in a rhythmic narrative or set of narratives which he memorises and which is subject to recall in his memory. Such is poetic tradition, essentially something he accepts uncritically, or else it fails to survive in his living memory." (page 198)

This poetic tradition, then, was not a means of creative expression, but rather a means of communicating the normative values of that time as a way to create and nurture a collective identity.

Whizzing past the evolution from oral tradition to literate society and the subsequent development of the dialectic tradition and the dramatization of ideas (I'll come back to this last one later), we find ourselves at what I see as the next major development in the use of communication tools to nurture culture building on a collective identity: the emergence of historical narration. For this we read Thucydides and Herodotus and debated the merits of choosing an 'objective' point of view versus a blatantly subjective point of view in analyzing and documenting a history. It was also interesting to see examples of the formation of "us" versus "the other" in a broader sociopolitical context and as a prelude to the collective identity of what would become the nation state.

Appropriately so, we next came to our class on "Political and Personal Identity," where we tackled the implications of our psychological anchoring of our personal and community identity with the 'family' and the evolution of that anchorage leading to our identity with a nation. Erich Fromm discusses the power of that transformation in the excerpt we read of The Sane Society, where he says,

"Nationalism, originally a progressive movement, replaced the bonds of feudalism and absolutism. The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation, rather than from his being a 'son of man.'" (page 56)

As we saw later on in the course, this identification structure was furthered along through the standardization of language (thanks, printing press!) and later the standardization of time (thanks, telegraph and railroads!). Both of these transformations embedded us with a sense that we were surrounded beyond localized geographic location with our "imagined community" of nationhood. The nation, as Benedict Anderson tells us in Imagined Communities, is a very powerful construct:

"it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings." (page 7)

To this I would add that through the technologies of mass media, i.e., radio and television, our national collective identity was strengthened even more by the cultural products we began to consume (this relates back to my second-to-last blog post on The Dangers of Fragmentation).

More importantly for our course, in all of these instances the communication technologies that we had at our disposal helped us to make these identity-related connections primarily BECAUSE of the sociopolitical context that existed when they came to be. Which leads me to the next major item: power.

Putting it all in context: power and the future of justice
So far I hope that I've described some milestones of ways in which we have used communication tools, from oral discourse to television, to validate and perpetuate the direction of our social structure. Throughout history, we have done this because it is in our nature to live socially by identifying with each other through common characteristics such as values and culture. At this point I would like to add that it is also in our nature to seek, attain, and retain power AND to seek and attain justice. It should come as no surprise that we have historically used communication tools to seek each of them out, with mixed results: for justice - see the use of the printing press to weaken the authority of the Church; for power - see the use of television to effectively hide via self and explicit censorship political power plays leading up to and throughout the Vietnam war.

In our class, we read Euripides' and Sophocles' renditions of the story of Electra, leading to a discussion about the origins of the notion of justice and what happens when it ignored by the 'official' authority - in essence, we take matters into our own hands. These readings also continued to highlight, as had our reading of Homer, how the telling of stories through drama can influence a society's understanding of shared values. After reading Barnouw, Gitlin, and Marcuse, I am convinced that the power of the dramatization of ideas is as strong, if not stronger, than ever.  The use of television to bolster the hegemonic culture of commercialization and consumerism, is for me one of the most blatant examples of the manipulation of communication tools to retain power.

Of course, being an idealist, I have hopes that new technologies like the World Wide Web and the internet have not yet been completely swallowed up by the forces of the hegemonic status quo, and that through the development of disruptive technologies, we can build a better, more just world. After all, thanks to Prometheus blind hope is one of our greatest indicators of humanity and progress!

NOTE: I did not delve into the ongoing tension between Platonic Truth and the Sophists' more pragmatic approach (that would've been another blog post of equal length!) but I will say that I still agree with my earlier sentiment that there is an inherent imbalance of power in the Platonic approach since we are expected to follow 'the few' into the light...

Multidimensional Dilemma

'Progress' is not a neutral term; it moves towards specific ends, and these ends are defined by the possibilities of ameliorating the human condition. (Marcuse, page 16)

I found the Marcuse reading extremely challenging in a variety of ways, most notably as I tried to decipher it in relation to the Carr interview while still reeling from last week's readings on television as a conduit for the hegemonic status quo. I certainly agree with Marcuse on a macro level and I find his statements powerful, especially when he writes: 

The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation - liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong the stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets. (page 7)

Marcuse lays it all out: we live in a society where more and more we are fed to believe that we have a multiplicity of false needs that we rarely question; these 'needs' ultimately help to maintain the running hamster wheel of production and profit for the select few. 

Where I get tangled up is when I think about the role of the internet and new media in joining this ongoing charade that we are generally blind to. Carr's position on Marcuse, I imagine, is to agree that these new technologies are detrimental for us in that they weaken our reflective modes of thought, making us even more susceptible to this one-dimensionality of living. 

I don't know if I agree with him on this. Yes, these new technologies pose a threat to our current thought processing systems -- but I fear that Carr is too afraid of change. Couldn't the unforeseen outcomes be better for us? Couldn't they ultimately help to liberate us from this one-dimensionality?? Honestly, I think it's too early to tell. 

The Dangers of Fragmentation

Has the explosion of new media played a role in fragmentation? If so, where is this likely to lead? (Barnouw, pg 546)

The above question is one of many posed by Barnouw at the conclusion of Tube of Plenty; it embodies one of the major concerns that came to my mind as I read his book and Gitlin's article. As I'll describe in more detail below, my concern stems from 1) an understanding of television (TV) as a psychological bond in people's understanding of the world and 2) the ability of the internet to create niche communities that bolster their own values without having to deal with arguing forces. 

I will start off on a personal note: As I've mentioned before, I am a Mexican American who came to the U.S. at the tender age of 3 years old. Several of my earliest memories are of watching TV (in English, of course) on Saturday mornings before my parents woke up; I was also known to reject meals in favor of finishing my TV-watching. In short, I grew up on TV. It was my window to the world and most importantly to the United States of America. Needless to say I was rarely represented in the shows I watched and when glimpses of Latinos showed up on the tube inevitably in cleaning lady roles or the more audacious "Speedy Gonzalez," they were dismissed by my parents as being "the other" and definitely not us (so it was a real shock when I heard my first "Hispanics clean houses" joke in high school -- nuh uh!). Clearly I was mesmerized by the power of TV at a young age. 

What I am trying to say is that my youth kind of exemplified what I read in Barnouw, that television as a medium reinforces the average person's view of the world (page 403). More importantly, it reaffirms the hegemonic status quo through a sort of 'communion' among viewers (here I'm referencing our brief religion discussion in class last week). As Gitlin states, 

...the most popular shows are those that succeed in speaking simultaneously to audiences that diverge in social class, race, gender, religion, and ideology: and this because of the mass market imperative of network television. (page 248)

Setting aside the problems that arise from this for a moment, let's consider how powerful this 'communion' can be: it can unite and elevate our society to address social injustices and inequalities, e.g., Murrow's "See it Now" take on McCarthy. 

Considering this, let's fast-forward to today where we have the internet and a plethora of news sources: we live in a world where those of us with liberal (and dare I say feminist?) tendencies prefer to read the take on news on sites where our views are lauded and applauded whereas those with more conservative tendencies flock to sites where their views are lauded and applauded. There is greater fragmentation in how we consume our news and while this may be good  for a wider dissemination of views (and for our egos), in my opinion they also breed a greater fragmentation of an already diverse society. There is less incentive for us to cooperate and compromise and so we dive further into diverging views. 

I can't say I know where this is likely to lead. I believe that the internet and emerging new media web-based platforms are powerful in many ways and that much good can come from the democratization of access to information that they provide. But I am weary of whether we can take advantage of it without proper media literacy and a well-rounded education overall...