global voices, one world

After attending ICA in Chicago then going back to Philadelphia for the 7th Chinese Internet Research conference I helped organize, I will finally have some rest in a few hours once I am done with my public talk at Harvard! 

The talk will be webcast live. Hope you can join me on the interwebs.

Here’s the teaser:

This project attempts to help us understand the cultures, practices and people of a new kind of news production environment: Global Voices, an international project that brings together and translates blogs and citizen media from around the world in order to, “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”

Drawing on Global Voices as an exemplar, I argue that we need to move beyond objectivity towards “hospitality” in pursuing the potential of journalism in a networked world. Roger Silverstone defines hospitality as the “ethical obligation to listen.” Indeed, in a world where the internet makes it so much easier for everybody to speak, Global Voices asks us: “The world is talking. Are you listening?” What is ultimately at stake is perhaps best described by Silverstone, who argues that, “it is only by attending to the realities of global communication, but also and even more so to its possibilities, that we will be able to reverse what otherwise will be a downward spiral towards increasing global incomprehension and inhumanity.”

Global Voices shows us that we would do ourselves a disservice by limiting our imagination to the ideal type of journalism from a previous era. Without expanding our imagination, we cannot hope to understand how the internet might alter the constraints of the relationship between journalism and democracy for the better. Indeed, communication scholar James Carey helped us understand that “the meaning of democracy changes over time because forms of communication with which to conduct politics change.”

Jan Servaes, Reflections on the Differences in Asian and European Values and Communication Modes, Asian Journal of Communication¸ volume 10, number 2, 2000. pp. 53-70.

Journalism & The Academy, Dr. Zelizer

By Lokman Tsui

Servaes takes on an ambitious project in discussing the differences in Asian and European values and how they impact communication modes. He uses two cases, human rights and Thai culture, as points of reference.

He starts with the straw man: globalization and modernization is supposed to lead to homogenization and convergence of cultures. He argues that modernization does not necessarily change cultural values. Rather he suggests that social change is more like the building of a web, than the building of a chain. So how do we research the complexity of this?

He stresses the importance of acknowledging the past. Servaes refers to Said’s famous Orientalism thesis which argues that what we know about the East is not derived from access to objective knowledge about the Orient, but comes from a ‘set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism’ (p55). In other words: “Europeans look at Asian values with Western eyes, while Asians view Western values with Asian eyes” (p55). The task of the researcher is to reveal these distinctive structures of meaning.  

One major difference is how the Self, composed of both individual and group identifications, is conceptualized. What gets stressed is different from each culture, but that we should not confuse this with an either/or choice. He flags the danger of assuming that found differences between societies can also explain for difference in behavior of its individual members. Another difference is a holistic (Asian) versus a Cartesian (European) way of thinking. As a consequence, Eastern culture is dominated by harmony, Western by power. Servaes continues with differences in modes of communication, while emphasizing he is talking about ideal types so that his arguments are not taken as stereotypes. One example he uses is how social relations patterns are different: where in the West the assumed mode is equality, in the East it is hierarchy. Another difference is that Asians talk indirect and implicit, and prefer a holistic or total communication, or ‘no communication’ if that is not possible.

Servaes continues in his article to relate these differences to Thai culture and the discussion on the ‘universality’ of human rights, providing us the challenge to think how we can go from cultural relativism to cultural diversity.

Elliot King, Towards International History of Journalism,

In Journalism Studies, Volume 4, Number 1, 2003, pp.121-131.

 

This is a collection of essays and debate, discussing the idea that we should start considering developing an international history of journalism. It came forth out of a panel organized at a joint meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association and the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Three Canadian scholars presented their views on the issue of creating an international perspective on the history of journalism, followed by a roundtable including scholars from the United States (and one from Paraguay).

 

Why A Call for International History?

There is a growing realization of the limited scope of much work done in the field of journalism history. The limited scope is not just with regard to the (non-existing) international nature of journalism history, but even within US journalism history, it is a shame that much of the work is (unduly) New-York centric and print-centric.

 

Towards an International History: Strategies
Several strategies were mentioned that can help us overcome the nation-state framework most journalism history research is embedded in. These include:

 

1. Comparative research – the best way to explain similarities and variations.

Taking my cue from Siebert et al.’s (1956) Four Theories of the Press:

1. • “Why is journalism as it is?”
   • “Why does it apparently serve different purposes and appear in widely different forms in different countries?”

 

2. Transnational research

Some suggestions include focusing on institutions or technologies that are “inherently” international, such as the news agency, the telegraph. Other suggestions included focusing on flows of people (diaspora, migration) and the flow of news as a commodity, in order to expand our inquiry.

 

3. Subnational research

Being aware, and using different lenses to write the history of journalism, for example, the lens of feminism or subculture. Curran (2002) in Media and Power, for example, presents six different versions of media history, including a liberal, feminist, populist, libertarian, anthropological and radical version.

 

4. Interdisciplinary research

The challenge is to work together with other disciplines, such as literature and history departments, in order to benefit from each other’s work.

 

Towards an International History: Challenges

Challenges to developing an international history of journalism history include:

 

1. National histories of journalism are often lacking. How can we do comparative research if the building blocks are not there yet?

First, there is a problem of shallow research, there is simply not enough to work with. It highlights the importance of keeping good archives. One researcher cited the subsequent problem of the literature review being too shallow. However, this does raise the issue of how ‘marginal’ research is framed. Do we write for a niche audience or do we broaden it to a general level, making it relevant for the mainstream? But then, why does the mainstream (US?) have no interest for events taking place in other countries, “unless there is some direct impact on them or their nation”? (126).

 

2. Knowledge of languages, cultures often lacking

Is this a cheap excuse? “I am never going to get to know French history as well as somebody who has gone to graduate school and studied it” (128). The challenge, I suggest, here is overcoming the idea that cultural proximity, through language and cultural knowledge, is necessary for research. How can we do this? First, I suggest you do know your ‘own’ culture and history and you can work with that. Second, there is a challenge for research, especially comparative research, to see cultural distance not as a deficiency but as an opportunity for (comparative) research.

 

3. Turning the arrow of causality around

Instead of asking, how does society, whether it is the nation-state or another conceptualization of society, shape journalism and the news, we should start considering how does news shape society, especially on an international level?

 

4. The ultimate challenge: Why should we care??

The challenge is there to think normatively about an international history of journalism.  Can we do better than justify it with “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if we could hear what everybody is doing?” (129).

 

Literature

Curran, J. 2002, Media and power, Routledge, London ; New York.

Siebert, F.S. 1956, Four theories of the press : the authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility, and Soviet communist concepts of what the press should be and do, University of Illinois Press, Urbana.