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...

The Nation defined by its Boundaries

The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.

- Anderson, page 7

I find it fascinating how as social beings we are constantly defining ourselves in contrast to Others. Anderson's point that the nation is imagined as limited because it's defined in large part by its boundaries strikes me as a curious, if necessary, characteristic of how we explain and define the social structures in our world. As I processed this, the first question that came to mind was this:  If the nation is in part defined by its exclusion of all other nations, can you be a citizen of multiple nations at the same time? The legal answer, by the way, is yes in many countries and sort of in the United States. If you are becoming a naturalized citizen in the U.S., you are required to renounce any other citizenships under oath (although, the State Department doesn't often bother checking up on this anymore so you can still keep your other passport). I know this because I became a U.S. citizen about 10 years ago and am still a Mexican citizen in the eyes of Mexico.

In my experience, it's been difficult to manage the dual identity of belonging to 2 nations at the same time --  in part because establishing your national identity sometimes involves claiming that "we're" the best and always involves speaking with a point of view that comes from inside that imagined boundary ("we" being Americans by default). That's a hard transition to make! It took me years to stop referring to Americans as "you"! But eventually I did start referring to Americans as "us." My life is here and as much as I can easily access Mexico's newspapers online now, (what would Anderson make of that??) my nation as an imagined community is composed of my day-to-day interactions that are bound by American culture and physicality.

I guess the next question is whether the power of new communication tools will once again help reorganize our understanding of institutionalized imagined communities like nations? We'll have to wait and see...

Electra's Cage

These joys I have from you. They are not mine to own.

(Electra, lines 1301-1302)

Of the many discussion points teeming from reading Sophocles' Electra in conjunction with Euripides' Orestes, it is the characterization of Electra that engaged me the most. In Electra, she is living a tortured life because she refuses to turn a blind eye to the injustice of her father's death which can be interpreted as stubborn or honorable or both. She has a strong spirit which she shows through her use of language: "In such a state, my friends, one cannot be moderate and restrained nor pious either. Evil is all around me, evil is what I am compelled to practice" (lines 308-310). She never bows down in an argument with her mother nor her sister and it is only when Orestes tells her he is alive and back does she allow someone else to take the reins in her life (emotionally speaking). 

Going back to the opening quote above, this is Electra speaking to Orestes, after he tells her that when their killing mission is over she will be able to at last freely show her joy. I just find it so striking that she is so easily able to carry the weight of her anger and thirst for justice and yet be unable to consider feeling joy for herself once her need for justice is served. 

I am not sure what Sophocles is trying to convey -- maybe that both men and women are capable of feeling an injustice upon them but not going so far as to say that women should do anything about it without men's help? Taking it one step further, consider that Clytemnestra is the most hated character in the play in part for taking her destiny into her own hands. Ok, she did so at the cost of a life, but isn't the value of life arbitrary in these plays anyways? Characters seem to choose when to care about someone's life or death depending on the machinations of the story. That may be too far a reach, but it's a thought to consider about the power that women do and don't have in these plays...