Global Media, National Publics
Faculty Conveners
- Tom Wolfe, Global Studies, History, and Anthropology
Meeting of U of M Scholars
December 6
12:45 - 2:00, Nolte 125 (Library)
December 12
12:15 - 1:30, Nolte 125 (Library)
Please RSVP if you plan to attend either luncheon: igsevent@umn.edu
Overview and Research Statement
The name Klaas, Lary and I gave to our informal group, Global Medias, National Publics, is meant as a kind of place holder to mark a space of possibility, but back when we first discussed it, we were bouncing off two observations. The first was that in the last decades of the twentieth and in the first decades of the twenty-first century, an ever greater number of media texts with enormous viewer and readerships are produced by corporations owned by communication conglomerates (Bertelsmann, News Corp, Viacom, etc.) Media is big business, market logics shape the vast majority of media texts consumed across the world. Consolidation in the media business has provoked predictable responses of, on the one side, populist outrage at a perceived flattening, homogenization, and dumbing down of public discourse, and on the other hand, people sympathetic to what they consider the creative power of markets argue that the remarkable experiences available through the mass media are only possible because of the financial clout of large corporations who can create the latest technology and hire the latest stars. To do this, these companies have to envision all of humanity as their audience, even as they pay attention to the particulars of language and culture that shape reception. A second observation, perhaps in some tension with the first, was that the lives of the vast majority of residents on the planet today are lived within the communicational horizon of the national state. While we may be mesmerized by phenomena like economic globalization and the “internationalization” of consumption and education, the fact is that the lives of the vast majority of the world’s population are densely national. The nation is the vital and immediate frame of reference for everyday life. What we could call the national life is both solidified and conjured into being in the ongoing creation of a kind of national environment of texts, images, and spectacles. I do not see these observations as pointing out a contradiction to be resolved or overcome, but rather as forming a tension that can be productively analyzed.
What points of view exist that productively interrogate this phenomenon? First we might think of organizing our inquiry by using what Christine Nystrom has called the “preparadigmatic discipline” of media ecology. This interdisciplinary field posits human lives and societies as environments shaped in essential and fundamental ways by practices of communications. Media technologies, technologies of the word (Ong), create the medium within which the human species lives, and changes in the medium produce changes in both the behavior and the “makeup” of the species. Conceiving of media as constituting the semiosphere that sustains our thought and imagination invites a number of questions, questions that we might model on the anxious attention now given to the biosphere: What is the “health” of humanity’s mediated environment, its landscapes of images, stories, and news? What is happening to the ways we think about each other and ourselves? What trends and trajectories about the nature of thought, reflection, understanding, can we glimpse as we contemplate the extraordinary process of cultural splicing, discursive layering, and social mixing that is characteristic of the contemporary world? To what extent do national medias operate as separate and particular semiospheres, and to what extent can we talk of a global semiosphere? Perhaps we might push this framework of ecology even further by referring analogously to the worldwide discussion about global climate crisis. What analytic purchase can be gained from positing a “crisis” in the climates of publicness that we create with our media? Furthermore, is it not possible that these two “spheres” actually come together as we contemplate a response to such an imaginary global problem as climate change: isn’t it a mistake to assume that problems of the biosphere be separated from problems of the semiosphere?
Second, we might draw a different set of questions from the terrain of hermeneutic social science. This phrase refers to yet another interdisciplinary terrain in the academy, one that brings anthropological and philosophical ideas to bear on the project of interpreting contemporary phenomenon. Instead of assuming a broad ecological frame in which power is dissolved in the processes of system, we might pose a large and disarmingly simple question: how does media rule us? Such a question implies a Foucauldian framing of governance grounded in both institutions and subjects. How is media a terrain of governance? This might take us towards some familiar ground in cultural studies and examinations of the working of particular media texts in particular national settings, and the study of particular media genres and their particular powers for constituting subjectivities. National medias can be investigated for their particular mix of what we might call governmental idioms, including phenomena like populist forms of belonging that inhere in the tabloid press, and the gender stereotyping that inheres in “sexploitation” films, shows, and advertisements. We could ask in this same vein, how does “science journalism” present itself as an ever more powerful channel of governance, shaping an apparent knowledge of nature while obscuring the plays of power and money that are essential to the organized practice of science? Here the emphasis is on the productive power of the media’s various imaginaries. This general line of inquiry leads not so much to big questions about living in semiospheres, as to questions about democratic forms of life. Here we might ask, what forms of politics can emerge when the abstract ideal of democracy is reduced to periodic choice between mass mediated figures occupying posts whose significance is itself filtered through powerful lenses of media corporations? How is our very confusion and uncertainty that is a product of making an endless series of disheartening compromises itself a form of governance-through-media?
Third, we might consider the frame of international cultural politics. Here the inquiries might focus on the ways media participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic narratives concerning an American (neo-liberal?) way of life, as can be seen in a number of recent films, such as Babel, Pan's Labyrinth and Syriana. This refers to the ways the popular arts operate as a mode of resistance and recovery of memories that are repressed by governments and corporations. How do they get made and what does all this mean in viewing our new global world?
I mention these frameworks here not to exhaust or limit the perspectives we can take on the subject, but simply to suggest ways that a conference could stage an interesting and compelling conversation that would help unpack the topic for a broad audience.