While I won’t speak for everyone (a common mistake; misery does like company), the following is more than likely true of most seniors: we’re only now recognizing the gaping holes in our academic curricula. As a second semester senior, IR-Global Security concentrator, my inexperience with economics and the international monetary system is the latest in a series of problems for professional plans within “international development”. So, deficiency thus identified, I spent the past three weeks in a seminar on international financial crises, losing myself (and my sense of humor) to economic jargon and things about which, to be honest, interested me not at all. For the time-being, I’m perfectly happy in my ignorance, going about believing that economics can be taken for granted and, where not, explained through social and political happenings. And, while I’ll someday embrace the discipline out of necessity, thanks to the option of a preferred alternative, today is not that day. So, I’m a late-comer to the class.
Fortunately (a real overstretch of “silver-lining”), international finance and debt crises aren’t all that’s wanting in my academic portfolio: the little experience I’ve had living in an internationally-discussed climate of change and/or crisis interested me in the relationship between images of conflicts and personalities and their spatially (or socially/culturally/politically etc.) disparate recipients. The exchange of ideas and “realities” across borders is remarkable for the effects on involved parties. What’s most concerning about global media is how each exchange must every time be questioned for bias and [physical and ideological] lenses.
What then do global media accomplish? In my experience: [irrational] panic in my parents. Last summer I worked for about three months in Ethiopia, mostly in the capital, Addis Ababa. The day I arrived, the New York Times published an article that began: “In the Ogaden Desert, Ethiopia, the rebels march 300 strong across the crunchy earth, young men with dreadlocks and AK-47s slung over their shoulders” (“In Etiopia, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality,” New York Times, June 18, 2007). I can only imagine how the image of dreaded, gun-toting men, not yet learned in the best practices of the human rights regime, terrorized my mother. For those of us “on the ground,” however, we had absolutely no idea what journalist Jeffrey Gentleman and contributing reporter, Will Connors (with whom my colleagues and I later had dinner), were talking about. “What goes on here,” the article continued, “seems to be starkly different from the carefully constructed up-and-coming image that Ethiopia – a country that the United States increasingly relies on to fight militant Islam in the Horn of Africa – tries to project.”
The power of media is their projection of agendas that either increase or decrease the subject’s legitimacy in the eyes of the “global community.” The Times article cites two viewpoints on the state of Ethiopian democratic and human rights-related affairs, and my experience in the country identifies with neither of them. The media have enormous influence over the world paradigms into which we fit new information, and I’m interested to look at their many forms and get a better idea of which is most persuasive (read: persuasive ≠ objective).
Persuasion requires that an argument stand up to questioning, and Barthes makes a related point: “To question is to interpellate…so a game is set up: although each side knows just what the other’s intentions are, the game demands a response to the content, not to the way that content is framed” (319). This non-violent questioning is exactly what blogs encourage, as does this class. It seems that the strongest teacher-student relationship is that in which both parties take ownership for their speech by putting it out for public consumption and/or criticism. Writing does not as often come up against such immediate and pointed criticism except for in the new generation of media – blogging, in which, due to anonymity, ideas may be even more aggressively challenged for their objectivity. That looks to be one of the more interesting parts of this class – the exchange (albeit not in this case anonymous) of criticism of our written opinions. Writing, Barthes says, “has no smell” because of a temporal and spatial separation from the creator. I find this argument less persuasive for two – among a potential “many” – reasons: our blogs will “smell,” as did the reporting of my friend, Will Connors, who was forcibly deported to Nairobi after the second bad-press Times article ran in late July (“Ethiopia is Said to Block Food to Rebel Region”, New York Times, July 22, 2007).
As for the “over-mediated” death of Heath Ledger: it’s striking how profoundly the media have made celebrities a part of our emotional lives. The bloggers on Ledger’s death are at once so upset and so confused about his drug- and depression-related fall that you can’t help but recognize two things: first, media have a persuasive effect on what and who is important to us; and, second, media often don’t know – or tell – the half of it.