I spent the first year of my undergraduate experience as a film and television major at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts before transferring to Brown to pursue a liberal arts education. I am currently a senior in my last semester at Brown. I concentrate in architectural studies, but my true passion is documentary filmmaking and I have engaged this passion over the past three years through documentary, anthropology and history courses at Brown, working as an artist mentor in filmmaking at a Providence youth arts non-profit called New Urban Arts, interning with a youth media non-profit in Charlottesville, Virginia, and working on a Watson fellowship as Public Information and Media intern with the International Rescue Committee in Thailand this past summer. My decision to leave an intensive film training program at NYU in favor of a liberal arts education at Brown was rooted in my belief that filmmaking (especially documentary filmmaking) itself is not the driving force for ideas, but rather ideas are the driving force and film (media) is a uniquely powerful instrument for turning those ideas into real change. When I graduate in a few months, I plan to pursue documentary work and in my last time at Brown my goal is to expand my understanding of what “documentary work” means, and what, in fact, a media-maker is capable of on an international scale. Last semester I had the privilege of taking a course called “The Good Fight: Documentary Work and Social Change”. In thinking about the title of the course and what it meant for me personally (and this is also the reason “Global Media” is a logical next step), I arrived at this: ‘The good fight is the fight to create opportunities for empowerment and connection through one of the most powerful forces at our disposal: the media. In video and film technology we have an awesome tool for reaching out across traditional boundaries, giving voices to those who would otherwise be silent, and binding people through honesty and common experience. The good fight can be fought on a small or large scale, as long as the fundamental goals of the fight do not become lost in the search for something artificially real. The good fight is a process, not necessarily a product.'

Looking back on this idea of striving for an effective process to connect people and experiences (what else is media, really?) while reading Barthes’ Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers, lent a particular resonance to the text not only as a piece on teaching, but also as a piece on communicating, and as such, also a piece on media-making and messaging. Barthes assumes a top-down “teacher”-“student” relationship of exchange in which the “teacher” holds power of speech and position over the “student”. When, on page 311, he writes, “No help for it: language is always on the side of power; to speak is to exercise a will to power: in the space of speech, no innocence, no safety,” he points also to a fundamental challenge of the “teacher”, and I would venture to say that his discussion could be broadened to equally include the “media-maker”. His essay resonates loudly today in an environment of unprecedented access to information seemingly limitless forms with which to mediate/communicate that access.

With regard to the relationship of speech to writing, the Democratic primaries seem a perfect example of the ‘powerful’/’puncturable’ position of the teacher/speaker (I will conflate the two here). Clinton and Obama each have their points, well-researched, well-spoken, but they are open immediately to criticism (crisis) when the other candidate takes jabs (it is not even an issue of positioning here, as they are side by side and above the audience). Barthes describes the very situation: “…when the teacher speaks to his audience, the Other is always there, puncturing his discourse; and his discourse, though sustained by an impeccable intelligence, armed with scientific “rigor” or political “radicality,” would still be punctured: it suffices that I speak, that my speech flows, for it to flow away” (313)). Presumably, writing does not expose one to the same level of immediate and interruptive nakedness. I would argue, however, that blogging might actually disrupt the speaking/writing binary Barthes proposes, by increasing the speed and availability of the latter and thus exposing it to some of the same “out in the open” dangers that Barthes ascribes to the former. What that means for this class is that we are dealing in a realm of entirely new possibilities for communication and that through the technology (and equally, new ideas about positioning) at our disposal, the speech/writing binary is only one of myriad binaries we have the power to destroy. This means we can create an international playing field with traditional and non-traditional players if we can get our imaginations juiced up to envision it.

-Bremen Donovan