Strategically Communicating

In the late ’80s, Shepard Fairey made a bunch of stickers of wrestler Andre the Giant’s face…and wrote the Obey manifesto, which said “The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning.”

Apparently Fairey’s goals have changed a bit since then.  Obey‘s readings sound more like this:

“Freaks Need T-shirts, too!  It’s that time of year again where the weirdos come out! We did up a super limited Halloween tee available exclusively on our site…Click HERE to grab one.”

You can also “grab” an Obey “thrift” t-shirt for $37 or a vinyl “Classic Varsity Jacket” for $114.

This week’s readings made me want to light a bunch of stuff on fire.  I teach high school students who can’t eat without federal assistance, and they all want Obey-ish crap for Christmas.

According to Althusser, “The ruling ideology is then the ideology of the ruling class.  But the ruling class does not maintain the ruling ideology…the bourgeoisie has to believe its own myth before it can convince others.” (M&S pg 195)

I read Althusser to say that there doesn’t have to be a purposeful conspiracy by us richies to “maintain consent”—We perpetuate control naturally.  It’s our world; the poor are just living in it.

In a world where ideology can be turned into a slogan on an overpriced t-shirt, how can movements for social change be formatted so they’re not so easily co-opted as fashion?

*Recommended reading:  Commodify Your Dissent by Thomas Frank

My last visit to a Target store made me realize that Christmas is upon us once again. As I mesmerizingly stared at the neatly arranged wall of Christmas lights, for a split second, I wished to celebrate Christmas as most Americans do.  At that moment, I also realized that living in the US for eleven years have influenced my understanding of the world around me quite heavily. 

It is not that I don’t celebrate the joy that the season brings, I do, it is just that I don’t usually go all out to decorate and hang lights in my house. I never felt the need to do so because, as a Muslim, it goes against my principles to waste resources. The book shed some light on the major holidays that Muslims observe (Ramadan) and, as you may have noticed, it is not a commercialized celebration. Due to poverty and lack of vital resources such as water, food, electricity etc, in Pakistan and Afghanistan (where I lived for twenty years) my values and ideologies had been influenced not only by my religious practices but also by my circumstances.

As O’Shaughnessy discusses in the book, ideologies are found and enforced by institutions around us. In my case, eleven years of living in the US and observing its media, attending school, being in the western retail workforce and so on has penetrated through my deepest principles through which I have understood my world up until now.  

The question is, if ideology and hegemony are communicated to us through all institutions surrounding us, are there enough culture jamming and counter hegemonic practices to help reverse the effect?

Do the media affect or reflect the world?
Do we speak language, or does language speak us? (as posed by Martin Heidegger)

One of the great challenges for a culture is to study itself, its own behaviors, and to attempt to objectively interpret the meaning of its social constructs. When considering the influence of media — a manmade construct — on the world, one must simultaneously turn around and consider the influence of the world on media. After all, the media exists in the world and was created by the very beings who are affected by the messages it sends. It’s a cycle. It’s a symbiosis. The media affects the world it aspires to reflect.

In the midst of the study and practice of communication, it is all too easy to believe that we, as communicators, are beyond the reach of media at any given moment. Wearing the “Expert” hat can inspire an “us/them” mentality in which the communications professional forgets that s/he is a citizen of the world that the media influences. As this week’s Media Monitor assignment illustrated, we are in no way immune to the message of media.

How do we, as communicators, confidently harness the power of the media — the primary tool of our trade — while acknowledging our own impressionable humanity and susceptibility to it’s voice?

Print is dead! – We all heard and maybe also believed in that over the course of recent history. But according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, the future of print media might not be quiet as dark after all. And who would have thought that this trend is mainly spurred by the increase in tablet users?

According to a survey of news use on mobile devices by Pew’s “Project for Exellence in Journalism (PEJ)”, most tablet users actually have yet to emphasize the “mobile” capabilities of their device. 85 percent of tablet users, who use their device for news over the course of a week, tend to do so while being at home and not on the go.
For power users, the tablet is often accompanied by a computer (77 %), a smartphone (54 %), and by print products (50%)! One in four power users also uses all four platforms as a source for news and information. This behavior left Pew wondering if a new a kind of “multi-platform” news consumer is developing. After all, the digital news consumer may still remain loyal to its print subscriptions.

As O’Shaughnessy and Stadler point out, the success or failure of a particular media is influenced by a variety of determinants (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2012, pp. 6). Is the mentioned uphold of print articles only the last uprising on our way to a fully digital consumption of news and information, or is there life in the old dog yet? We as the audiences along with our media habits play a large role in making this decision – and at the end time will tell.

I find the decentralization, personalization and interactivity of the internet powerful. I recently sent a link to a friend of a blogging community for those who hate cilantro. She is a loud and vocal hater of cilantro. Who would have thought there were others out there and they were so organized? This same friend adopted a toddler from Kyrgyzstan and traveled twice to Bishkek to see her little girl in the orphanage. Through her blog she was able to educate her family and friends about her daughter’s background and also keep in touch with other parents in the same adoption program who were waiting for their paperwork to settle. She also blogged during her trips to keep everyone apprised of what she was learning at the site visits. It was through some critical pieces of information that these parents shared with each other that she was able to learn that the “rules” of the country were changing regarding adoptions which she needed to put pressure on the agency to finalize. It turned out well but it was a close call. Some families never got their children before the country closed adoptions down.

I find my internet searches are many times about real or imagined ailments that bring up a host of information from the Mayo Clinic to a doctor’s site Great Britain. If I do talk to my own doctor, it’s about half the time that they might agree with my “self-diagnosis” — a reminder to consider the source. But the fact that I can get information in seconds on everything from Bishkek to cilantro to headaches, even if some of it is amateur generated and ill-informed, is I believe a step forward, if read with a critical eye. It’s at least as reliable as talking to a friend and a darn sight easier than looking things up in the World Book Encyclopedia.

QUESTION: As we become more and more “producers” of our own lives: Tweeting, Facebooking, Blogging, responding to and sharing articles and videos, “liking” organizations and political groups, promoting  favorite causes: How much is too much? Are we sharing too much of ourselves? What is gained and what is lost? And as internet surveillance tools get more and more sophisticated, has the horse left the barn on our privacy?

Throughout my reading of Part 1, I was continually reminded of the Radiolab’s “The Fact of the Matter” released the week prior. This episode focused on how a seemingly simple set of facts can actually point us to multiple understandings of The Truth.

It seems to me that according to Media and Society authors O’Shauhnessy and Stadler, there is no such thing as nonficton—There is only creative nonfiction.

Throughout Part 1 of their text, they make it clear that we can’t tell The Truth because (even if we were somehow capable), objective reality can’t be relayed through language. Cameras are depicted not as documentary devices, but as lenses that mislead us with two-dimensional representations that are the product of countless creative choices. And, last but not least, our very maps don’t tell us the truth because the European cartographer’s cartel benefit from the status-quo.

With all this in mind, if journalists are meant to be mediators between reality and its occupants, how are we to be seen as anything other than manipulative? How can any journalistic creation be anything other than “the truth as its creator sees it,” and thereby become unlikely to be heard by anyone who has a contrary opinion? Was it ever any different?