Remarks at the International Association for Media and Communication Research Conference
25th June 2013
Tá áthas orm bheith anseo inniu ar an gcéad lá de bhur gcomhdháil, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil leis an Uachtarán Brian MacCraith agus leis an Ollamh Farrell Corcoran as ucht an cuireadh a chuir said chugam. Cuirim fíor-chaoin fáilte roimh an uile dhuine agaibh anseo go hÉirinn agus go Baile Átha Cliath. Is iomaí duine agaibh a bhfuil aistir fhada curtha de nó di, ó institiuidí acadúla éagsúla ar chuile cheard den domhan ’seo gainne.
[I am delighted to be here on the first day of your conference and I would like to thank President Brian MacCraith and Professor Farrel Corcoran for their invitation. May I welcome you all to Ireland and to Dublin. So many of you have made long journeys from your different academic institutions in different parts of our world. ]
This conference is a truly global one. It is also inter-disciplinary. You come from many different perspectives and areas of expertise but then the ambitious and overarching topic of this important conference ‘Crises, Creative Destruction and the Global Power and Communication Orders’ lends itself to a wide and varied treatment.
When I received a letter earlier this year from the President of DCU, Professor Brian MacCraith, which had been preceded by a letter from Emeritus Professor Farrel Corcoran, I read that your association founded in 1957 is the oldest association for research in this field and that it has long been recognised by UNESCO as the leading professional body for research and learning related to mediated communication. This is an impressive legacy and achievement. It is surely emphasised by the fact that 2,450 proposals came in following the call for papers, and that they come from 88 countries, making it the largest number of abstracts ever received. I am convinced not only of the importance of this conference but of the universal importance of the subject under discussion. For what indeed could be more important than the relationship of an ever more rapidly developing technological sector to what is perceived by some as our ever more fragile public world, a world that we must assume is premised on the possibility and sustenance of democratic discourse?
Your association last held its conference in Ireland in 1993. It is a year I remember very clearly. In 1993 I became Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in Ireland with responsibility for, among other things, broadcasting. Two years later, on 27 April 1995, I produced a Green Paper on Broadcasting. Its publication came one week after the publication of an Interim Report of the Competition Authority on the newspaper industry in Ireland and preceded the publication of an examination of the skills requirements of the independent film production sector in Ireland entitled ‘Training Needs to 2000’. In 1996 I was President of the Council of Broadcasting Ministers of the EU. I am, therefore, familiar with some of the issues with which the submitted papers deal.
The issues you will discuss at your conference reflect some of the fundamental debates of that period, issues that obdured, such as the definition and future of public forms of broadcasting, but new issues too have arisen and policy choices that were neglected in the intervening period have become acute in terms of the challenges they offer.
So many public policy issues remain. How is a healthy democratic public sphere to be cultivated, some would say, saved? How is the public world, in all its diversity, to be served and by which set of values? In terms of communication what may we assume is private, what is public, what is commercial, what is cultural? How is public communication to be defined, as a citizenship issue or as existing within the frame of a market?
One may ask too if the scholarly base from which suggestions for answers might come has been strengthened or weakened in recent decades. Is it as deep or as interdisciplinary as the issues require?
All the old questions remain, and not just as rich areas of academic reflection only, but as emerging legitimacy issues for publics and their States. What is it to which the public are giving their assent? Under what conditions of information access, and in what context of an ethical kind, are they doing so?
All of these questions have to be addressed in conditions of rapid change. Much of that change is forced by developments in technology and this in itself introduces some fundamental choices as to the form, purpose and application of such technology. It would be surely a mistake to neglect such questions and thereby be seduced into a romance of the form, at the cost of losing the substance or consideration of the impact of communications.
In the last decades, the ownership issue has deepened. We are far beyond the innocence of those earlier debates as to what is or what might be the limits of oligopoly or cross-ownership in terms of the public interest. Ownership has become more concentrated and yet at the same time, the commodification of ownership through traded shareholdings, has created such an uncertainty from speculation, as affects every profession within communications.
Farrel Corcoran in his ‘Television Across the World – Interrogating the Globalisation Paradigm’ published in 2007, wrote of ownership in television:
“The key element in the architecture of global television is undoubtedly the unprecedented spate of mega-mergers between giant media corporations that have emerged in the 1990s. Most of these conglomerates are North American, a few are European (Bertelsman) and Asian (Sony). Over the last decade, the increasing concentration of ownership, especially in the USA, has made it difficult to know which conglomerate owns which local outlet at any particular time. Meanwhile, these conglomerates continue to use the courts and to lobby the US Congress to remove the last few legal restraints on ownership, what one senior government regulation’ (Klinenberg 2006, p.1). Despite the corporate rhetoric, the concentrated, conglomerated and profit-drive US media system, which forms the backbone of the global television system, is hardly the result of ‘free enterprise’. It is the recipient of enormous direct and indirect subsidies and/or government-granted monopoly franchises. These include monopoly licences to radio and television networks, cable and satellite monopoly franchises, magazine postal subsidies and copyright, suggesting that ‘for these firms, the most important competition may well be in Washington, getting the cushy subsidies and licenses’ (McChesney 2006, p.1).”
Such mega-mergers are now also, of course, taking place among the search giants and social network corporations.
Does ownership really matter? This is a question that goes beyond any narrow consideration of the tension between State ownership and private commercial ownership. It poses deeper questions, ones I recall posing myself in a paper I gave in 1999. I wrote:
“At the bases of the choices we will make in the next few years are some fundamental value choices involving such questions as:
What value do we put on the public world?
What value do we put on issues beyond the immediate, beyond a single life-span?
How do we wish to remember and be remembered?
What do we wish to be free to imagine?Such value choices raise questions about the cultural space, its relationship to the economic space, and how the cultural space is to be defined: is it to be open or closed, democratic or autocratic, fixed by tradition or flexible to the contemporary and the as-yet-unremembered?
For example, if the cultural space was defined in some Arnoldian way, stressing an elitist version of the inherited tradition of the powerful, and if the focus of the beautiful, the true and the good was defined by a particular class, most would find this to be oppressive or conservative, or both. We would find it easier again to reject a statistical definition. In a curious way, there has always been public support for a definition of culture that would have critical capacity at its centre, emphasising, I suppose, that to live reflexively in one’s world is both one of the most basic and one of the most difficult instincts we share in our common humanity.
There was always, then, a debate as to what constituted cultural value. Those who made programmes knew that sometimes their work would strike a strange resonance with the past; sometimes it would be anticipatory in its innovation. Nothing was really predictable but the standard had to have, at its root, respect for freedom and creativity.
What we now face is an uncritical acceptance of the provisions of the market. A market segment has to be filled. A programme has to be provided. It can be made expensively at home or can be purchased cheaply from those who are dumping produce from abroad. These are not choices without consequence. It is not only the programme-maker who does not get to make his or her programme; it is that a story in the public world is being suppressed. It is that another group of consumers is being given a formula-produced, homogenised produce.”
It is 14 years since I wrote that.
In the intervening years concepts have been redefined and given new content but some fundamentals remain the same. Surely at the base of all the papers submitted are issues of different freedoms – freedom to think; freedom to speak; freedom to write; freedom to assemble; freedom to define one’s profession to an ethical standard?
The new technology is neither a neutral space nor is it the singular source, or the single explanatory contributor to current change. It is rather, a context, but it does have the capacity to be a determining context, even with the power to eliminate a consideration of some of these earlier, and I believe, fundamental questions. There is a certain intoxication in the new that suggests both an impatience towards, and a near rejection of, what exists at present, structures and practices that exist in a power context that calls for critique.
What has happened at discourse level?
It is interesting to ask, for example, as to what post-modernism has brought to this discourse about communications and the public world. Has it assisted or impaired our capacity to introduce alternative paradigms of understanding, explanation and policy? Perhaps it may be the case that the opportunity the Structuralists made possible for the post-modernists, and that yielded a rich literature, was not repeated in their turn by the post-modernists but that their description of a state of flux has presented us with a much reduced critical capacity.
One of the most exciting aspects of this conference is the participation of young scholars and it is all the more exciting when the titles of their papers go beyond description; go beyond immersion in the technological flux of their times.
There are so many very fine pieces and my wish for these young scholars is that they go on from insight, to delivery of new perspectives, and that above all they achieve the opportunity of contributing, through communications, research and policy, to a deepening of democracy.
They are after all wrestling with new contradictions produced in new circumstances of what might be called ‘the mind industry’. The role of the public intellectual demands a journey beyond a celebration or description of complexity. One has to make it home to a capacity to address issues of power, however, diffusely experienced. I wish I had the time to hear the papers but I look forward to reading the proceedings.
There is no time, of course, that has not been described as very challenging in communication times. In 1993 Dr. Eamon G. Hall published The Electronic Age: Telecommunication in Ireland, a study of the institutional and legal framework of the telecommunications order in Ireland and one of the first anticipations of the new challenges in those areas that would be posed by developments in technology.
The blurb on the jacket cover of his book struck an optimistic note I recall:
“The new telecommunications technologies of the electronic age may fuel unrealistic expectations, may facilitate unwanted surveillance and, in the context of broadcasting, cultivate domination and uniformity. The new technologies also have the capacity to give us greater productivity, cultural pluralism, and enrichment, a greater sense of democratisation, security and personal contentment.
Let us never forget that the new technologies are tools to aid mankind. Therein lies the challenge for all of us.”
Your conference, I’m sure, will go far beyond any simple or crude division between optimists and pessimists. After all so many communications faculties and departments drew their initial energies from faculties that included philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, linguistic studies – one could go on. The core questions of such disciplines feed into the ground of so many of the themes you have discussed.
The plenary sessions dealing, as they do, with such important themes as ‘Crisis and Shifts in Geo-Political Processes/Power’: ‘Economic and Environmental Crises and the Media’; ‘Crisis and the Affordances of the Digital Moment – Social Media’ require such a rigorous grounding, I suggest.
You will excuse me if I raise an ironic eyebrow as to ‘the utility of the concept of creative destruction’. Used as it has been from Karl Marx, who used it to explain how capitalism endured, to the contemporary corporate sector where it has been used to justify ‘downsizing’. It surely is in danger of joining ‘globalisation’, ‘sustainable development’; even ‘community’ as capable of meaning anything, and because of that contributing nothing to meaningful understanding or discourse.
Pessimists, I know will hold the view that content has become commodified, formulaic, and in parts celebrity-driven. Audiences have been fragmented and the isolated consumer of images can feed their carefully fed curiosities in a variety of ways from ever more integrated technological sources. It is not with the communications needs of active citizens our discourse deals any more, they feel, it is rather with the insatiable impulses of passive consumers.
Optimists might speak of the enabling capacity of the new technology; of the ease and frequency of interpersonal contact constituting a new and potentially radical community. Information can be transmitted in near real time facilitating events, assemblies, manifestations. This is different to previous collective actions, being as it were something of an alert or a summons to the atomised, isolated, to come together in the public space. Is the formation of the opinion then something that is formed in advance, or can it emerge and change within the shared experience?
It is possible to marshal evidence for either view but more is required than simply identifying oneself with either pessimists or optimists. Old concepts are insufficient and do need refurbishment. Simple theories of manipulation or of repressive tolerance may be reassuring for purists, but the complex present and its challenges require the taking of risks with new analyses. Old oppositions will not serve as a substitute, nor will a longing for a previous order of state control. The new and deeper democracy has to be won, and founded in the heat, and at the heart of the new technological form and its delivery.
There are of course global confrontations involved. Conflicts are inevitable. Let us not forget the controversy that followed the publication thirty years ago by UNESCO Many Voices, One World, which became known as the MacBride Report. The Report was little else than a respect for the universality of the right to communicate. The hegemony of interests controlling the field were not going to yield.
That report sought to stimulate international debate on an unequal communications planet. Its proposals were a modest suggestion that there be a global equality in the production, as what might be regarded as, the news. The response was members of UNESCO leaving the organisation at the horror of the suggestion, and even worse, the attempt at impinging the motives of those who had made submissions toward a new communications order.
Three decades on the global context has continued to evolve and change. The rapid development of new media has itself been a significant accelerator of global connectivity with new media tools allowing for sophisticated and complex levels of human interaction.
These tools allow, of course, enormous scope to improve the democratisation of communication; having much potential to change the communication flow from a vertical downwards current to a two way interactive stream. They have also, however, brought new challenges to democracy; simultaneously testing and accentuating existing forms of domination and exclusion within not only, the information-communication order but in the world order.
The powerful message which came from Many Voices, One World was the importance of hearing the many stories that make up the global narrative of a particular time, incident or era. Each of those voices are different and unique, and indeed the views and angles and perspectives from which an experience are recounted will always be varied; this, however, does not lend the overall narrative less value or less truth.
A multiplicity of cultural expressions of narratives allow us to explore the interconnected experiences of all of those involved in a point of history. It also requires us to respect the integrity of the differing voices. I am so glad that here in Dublin over the next four or five days you will be doing just that in exploring the role and impact of media and communications at this time of so called ‘crises’ – a further concept requiring definition and specificity.
The MacBride Report, and the fundamental principles which underpin it, remain relevant and important in the current global context and its conclusions continue to be a powerful communication of the values which might lie at the heart of ethical communication and media, as does the work and potential of UNESCO.
We are living in a digital age; a time when information has never been more accessible. There can be no doubt that technology has dramatically changed the way in which we relate to the world and, indeed, to each other. Today, citizens no longer depend solely on newspapers and national broadcasting corporations for information, commentary, analysis and breaking news. They have, at their fingertips, access to an enormous range of sources from which to gather knowledge, viewpoints, studies and research.
There are sources, however, and professions have spent generations in evolving the ethics, standards and practices that are best practice for their delivery. This does matter and is so often in danger from changes in technology ushered in by changes in ownership.
An editorial lean, itself influenced by ownership pressures, real or perceived, can deliver such an anxiety into the frontline practitioner as leads them to eschew best practice, taught or acquired, in their professional formation.
Technology continues to develop and how it is applied raises great ethical and moral questions for society at large and the global community. We see daily now its power for positive transformation in areas of human rights, justice and healthcare, for example, while, on the other hand, we witness regularly the power of new media and communications technologies for proselytising, incitement to hatred, or even the use of new media and communications technologies as a call to arms.
Never has there been a greater need for those who have access to such technology to be equipped with a strong ethical and moral compass. As to how this is to be sourced in a highly individualised society is a matter for debate such as yours and decision by an informed citizenry. However, it raises the importance of the public space and of an ethic socially established; of the importance of how friendship, the stranger and the social bond are defined.
Public service broadcasting, in its true and original sense, played and continues to play a critical role in deepening democracy informing citizens and strengthening the capacity of citizens to engage in debate and discussion around current affairs and politics, both local and international.
In a paper some seventeen years ago, this University’s emeritus Professor, Farrel Corcoran wrote that one of the sources of the reduction in standards in public service broadcasting is the fact that
“too few people make decisions about what the population needs to know, resulting in a one-dimensional, smooth-edged cultural flow that colonises the national symbolic environment.”
If there is a loss of discourse through public service broadcasting, if its cultural role becomes subjugated to a set of economic policies derived from a very narrow ideological furrow, we will indeed have lost an active and enormously valuable creative force and an important tool in ensuring the existence of accountable public policy.
Citizenship, the public space, the shared moment, the common history, the shared community of the imagination are under pressure to take second place to vested interests in terms of global media monopolies. There can be no doubt that public service broadcasting is at a time of crisis; its role in deepening, widening and enriching the live of the public being undermined and eroded as many broadcasters shift from viewing themselves as national service providers to participants in large commercial units. Striking a balance between broadcasting and the market place is becoming increasingly difficult as the hard technology of communications seeks to establish a hegemony over what is perceived to be the softer cultural target of broadcasting within culture. On the other hand however, citizen journalism is on the rise with a raft of implications for our societies, cultures, communities and freedoms; offering possibilities of deepening the increase but also the destructive capacity of reputational abuse and intimidation.
Today more than ever new media and communications tools have the capacity to add to and advance democracy, human rights and social justice globally in so many ways. We have seen now how use of technology has impacted on and supported democratic movements through, for instance, the Arab Spring in 2010.
More recently social media has allowed the world to see what is happening on the ground in Syria, where there is a high level of media censorship. In this case technology allows Syrian people and international journalists to exercise their fundamental human right of freedom of expression.
In many ways today, these new forms of communications have become powerful tools for freedom of expression. When for example, the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Manal Al Sharif takes the brave move of publishing a video of the seemingly everyday act of driving her car in Mecca on YouTube. Her act of dissent has been recognised by the international community with her receiving the first ever Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Today she is a worldwide force for human rights and the empowerment of women.
New communications tools are also assisting in the area of healthcare with for example, the world’s largest field trial in mobile health technology is running in South Africa to tackle the spread of HIV.
We know that access to information is fundamental in the empowering of citizens, allowing them not only control of their lives, but the ability to participate, to shape their societies and protect themselves from abuse of their rights.
We also know that the public in a democracy has to be afforded the capacity to form judgments from an array of political viewpoints offered through an increasingly diverse range of media tools.
To be the arrow not the target, as the late Raymond Williams put it in his last address to media workers and film workers, we know that it is critical that journalists can and must be allowed to speak the truth without fear or sanction; and that citizens must be allowed to evaluate and weigh an array of accurate and impartially provided evidence, and come to independent conclusions of their own.
Pluralism, real diversity and choice are critical. Students must have the opportunity too to access the various paradigms of thought. A narrow neo-utilitarianism cannot be allowed to colonise the right to a free scholarship. Informed citizenship and the right to freedom of expression and information are an essential guarantee in any true democracy and can only occur where media freedom and pluralism exist.
New media – bloggers, citizen journalists, student journalists – can and do play a part in providing a plurality of media. However, true plurality must occur at every level, within countries as much as within regions, reflecting religious and ethnic diversity. An equality of capacity for access is thus a part of the right to communicate.
In any discourse about the rights and means of communication, we must remind ourselves of the obligation we share to ensure and support press freedom around the world; to respect and enable the release of its transformative power to change and reform society and to acknowledge the contribution it makes to the crafting of democratic structures on which truly fair and inclusive societies can be built.
Mar fhocal scoir, ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil libh as ucht bhur gcuireadh sibh a aitheasc anseo trathnóna. Ní féidir aon dabht a bheith ann ach go bhfuil an-oiread dúshlán fós ann do na meáin chumarsáide neamhspleácha neamhchlaonta a bheith ann sa chéad ásc, agus go bhfuil an-oiread bacainní nach mór a leagan má táthar chun a chumasú do gach saoránach eolas a fháil, agus a scaipeadh agus a shealbhú atá neamhchlaonta, fírinneach agus soar ó chinsireacht, ar eolas é atá ómósach do chearta na saoránach sin go gcloisfí agus go dtuigfí a nglórtha.
[In conclusion, I would like to thank you for your invitation to address you here this evening. There can be no doubt that many challenges remain to the existence of an independent and impartial media and many barriers must be dismantled if all citizens are to be enabled to freely access, disseminate and consume information that is impartial, truthful, uncensored and respectful of the rights of those citizens to have their voices heard and understood. ]
I would like to congratulate the Association for all it does to promote global inclusiveness. The issues you will be addressing at this conference are of critical importance to the creation of societies which are truly democratic and have at their heart the right of each individual to participate, to contribute and to know that their voices count.
May I wish your conference every success.