My name is Mark Ramadan and I’m a senior double concentrating in International Relations and Economics. I’ll admit upfront that I’ve been an internet addict since before AOL existed, and in this time I’ve fervently followed the various stages of online media production and distribution. I think we’re at an incredibly exciting time for media in the internet age, one in which the production costs have dropped to nearly nothing and distribution costs are literally nothing—one in which consumer power far outweighs traditional “producer” power. More importantly, it is a time in which niche ideas and opinions are given equal access to interested minds alongside those greater adopted by the mainstream. The result of this shift in roles will have important ramifications globally, not just those with access to the internet, and it is on this eve of a pseudo-revolution in media that I think it would be incredibly valuable to revisit its history and theory as a communication tool. I will bring to the class my knowledge of modern, online media, as well as my passion for production. From a more personal standpoint, my International Relations concentration has largely focused on economic development thus far, and I think it is critically important, especially at an institution like Brown, to be given the opportunity to delve into a more interdisciplinary, diverse, and distinctly different seminar, and I think this course is the perfect prospect for me to accomplish this.

A speaker and an audience mutually enter into an implicit contract at the outset of a speech, lecture, or presentation: the speaker is there to impart knowledge, and an audience is there to absorb it. There is no pretense that the speaker would present falsified or inaccurate information, but rather the opposite: the speaker has come to share genuine knowledge, and the audience is there to learn. Thus, by this mutually beneficial understanding, the speaker’s reputation is bound to his or her words, and the audience is thus guaranteed an interesting experience. However, the problem lies not in the speaker or the audience individually, but instead in the act of communication itself, which is what this article articulates. Communication is imperfect: because all spoken messages are subject to summaries by the audience, and a summary necessarily produces, at best an incomplete version, and at worst a bastardization of the intended message, the audience is likely to leave with a distorted, or perhaps fictional understanding of the material. In turn, the speaker is held accountable for not just words spoken, but words heard and transcribed, and the two are not the same.

What the author means, then, by “language is always on the side of power” is that, by the implicit contract described above, the audience is placing the power of truth and credibility into the hands of the speaker, whether this is advisable or not. And, because of the trappings of communication itself, there can be no innocence in speech, and thus no safety. It should be noted that a “speaker” is anyone dictating any material through any medium, whether it is a professor at the head of a lecture hall or it is a newscaster on CNN, and therein lies the crux of the issue: the global audience relies on a communication medium, whether television or otherwise, to gain factual, objective news. However, any communication is both subject to distortion and believability, a dangerous combination in the broadcasting arena.