MIT here I come!

school has started, and already i've experienced a number of issues. i have one writing class in a computer lab and the other class is simply in a technology "smart room". as a friend of mine said today, "ah, the problems of the first world." ironic given the location of Temple University. i've been working diligently on my reading lists for my comprehensive exams, and trying to find time to continue working on the ethnographic study that i began last semester.

in the midst of all this, i'm anxiously anticipating word regarding the conferences that i hope to attend. the current tally is as follows: international communication association no, humanitarian media foundation don't know, media in transition at MIT yes, and finally future of journalism in the uk don't know. and i'm not finished yet because i would like to submit to AEJMC. i'm excited and scared by the MIT conference. it seems like a good place to be. one of the organizers, i believe, is henry jenkins. for those who have read his work on convergence culture, if you're a fan, well, you're probably excited for me. for those who have not read his work on convergence culture, you should. not my area but really exciting to read.

exciting, of course, from a geeky perspective.

following this semester, i will know more about journalism, ethnography, political economy, african media, and kenya than i ever hoped to know. and i will be well on my way to forging my dissertation proposal. this adventure seems like the kind of journey where i must learn to go with the flow. i'm still just neurotic enough to drive my profs crazy when i continually check on their progress - something which i think should be the other way around. i'm still anxious enough to worry myself senseless because i really have no idea how to get myself over to kenya. or africa. i have no idea how to get myself to canada, and that's not really far away. and i'm overzealous enough to think that trying to read half of my reading list for one subject area is a good idea.

yes, i must learn to pace myself.

which is never easy for me to do.

in the end i'm sure it will be fine. i had no idea in 2006 how to get myself to philadelphia. but i'm here. i had no idea how to get myself through the first semester, and i'm finishing my coursework. we work it out, as i tell my students, many of whom are worried about the job market. i reply in kind by asking if they had considered graduate school or backpacking across europe. both seemed to work for most of my friends. even with the economy and uncertainty, i consider myself lucky. and i really can't complain. no matter what happens to the economy, people will always need media, and in that respect, i will always have a job.

long time

...i hate when i leave off and don't pick up until a couple months later. it was an interesting semester. rest assured if you ever have any doubts about your writing, then an advanced degree might or might not be the place to work those doubts out. given the nature of our work as scholars, well, sometimes under deadline and grading papers, ideas get tangled in your head. or at least in mine.

so i struggled with my writing. i struggled with learning and using a couple of new methodologies. i never thought a couple of years ago that i would be in a newspaper doing ethnography. not that i doubted my ability, per se. but because i never gave it much thought. i used survey research for my thesis, and i figured that i would be confined to statistics for the rest of my life. when i looked into programs, i wanted to find programs that could teach me both quantitative and qualitative methods. thankfully i found one.

when i began the semester, i wasn't sure what i would study at these newspapers. i wish i could divulge the names, but given the nature of the research, i cannot. i wanted to understand how journalists at both papers thought about their jobs, especially given the tremendous changes in American journalism. while i plan to continue the study into the spring, i found some interesting results. i will write about those soon.

i have also managed to finish my first discourse analysis. for both studies, i argue that journalists belong to an interpretive community. Barbie Zelizer first proposed the idea, and borrowed it from literary criticism. it became an interesting perspective to analyze what the journalistic community said about relationships among editors and owners. journalism trade publications, which were set up as a form of criticism, were not necessarily critical. i think it requires more study, but the experience was interesting.

i am currently getting ready for my courses. i finished my coursework last semester, but i have opted to take a journalism history class. i will also continue the ethnography of the two local papers; i hope to apply for a grant to finish the project. i am also learning about political economy. i will take my comps at the end of the semester, and frankly, i can't wait for the exams to be over.

either way, i am working toward understanding journalism in a globalized world. my interest in africa has only grown; while i had hoped to work in the democratic republic of congo, my inability to speak french stiffled that hope. so i have set my focus on kenya. my interest primarily rests on one primary question: what do journalists think about their profession? from there, a number of questions arise, including how well do american values work in a post-colonial, developing country?

i believe that we might share universal principles. but how those principles are set in motion with practice might be completely different. garcia canclini's view of hybrid culture as "decentered and multidetermined" is useful. i struggled with traditional communications theorists who argued that power should be viewed as vertical and hierarchical. i am excited to unpack these ideas. i believe the next semester will be incredible as my research interests continue to become more clear.

Word to the Wise

Just as a special word to those visiting my blog from search engines. While I do not mention photo credits on my blog, you only need to click the picture to find the original source. This technique seems much more effective than droning on about other peoples' work. Happy Hunting.

Some thoughts on American journalism

These are some responses to the readings in my critical perspectives of journalism class. I would love some feedback. I realize these thoughts might seem incomplete or underdeveloped, but the length requirement was four to five pages.

As the press in the United States has changed and grown, its role and its characteristics have been re-imagined from time to time. The readings for this week highlight major conceptions about the press’s existence through history, its role as arbiter and mediator between the public and its government, as well as various perspectives on the tone and tenor of its purpose. Some of these essays address the current media ecology with scant attention to the global picture and its implications for American journalism; some of these essays, such as McComb’s rehashing of agenda-setting, fail to account for these issues entirely. Trade liberalization, technological advance, erosion of public institutions, and the growing power of transnational corporations have changed our relationship with the world. Overall, commercialization enabled the growth of professionalism in American journalism, providing social space for the role and function to change and expand. However, the tension between commercialization and professionalism remain at odds, with commercialization overpowering professionalism within journalism. Journalism’s role in American society needs revision, given the current media landscape as well as changes globally.
Schudson and Tifft indicate with their essay that commercialization, which is essentially freedom of ownership, has safeguarded and promoted the exchange of information, and became an integral part of the press in political life. Over the years, journalism’s role begins to take on meanings in American society, as journalists respond to their industry and the world around them. Schudson and Tifft point out the adversarial culture adopted by the press following Watergate and Vietnam, as well as the culture of objectivity that began as aspiration and turned eventually into “ideology”. The commercial aspect of the press was adopted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and was used to illustrate how the merit of ideas can be adopted or rejected (Schmul & Picard. As Holmes wrote: “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market” (p. 144).
Commercialization and professionalization have come to a head, and as newspapers have been absorbed into larger media companies, whose primary objective is to make money, journalism’s role in America’s democracy has begun to wane. If lapses in coverage and ethical breeches fail to convey the severity of the problem, then we should turn our attention lack of attention that the average American devotes to issues related to politics. By why are these issues so important?
Each of these essays alluded to a larger function that has grown over the years: its function to keep people in the know about their government. It is this conceptualization of the press should give us cause to pause and evaluate the journalism’s job at certain points in history. It is also this idea that required scholars and journalists to assess who has participated in the marketplace of ideas. The press’s power, while its degree of effect is a matter of contention, is seen in its ability to set the public agenda (McCombs). However, agenda setting only accounts for media influence on the public agenda but fails to address a more pervasive trend. Increasingly those in power find ways to manipulate or bypass the press completely. Bush’s executive order to create the Office of Homeland Security, which subsequently led to the largest government reorganization since Truman, occurred with little discussion in the media. The need for assessment and revision of American journalism is not farfetched.
Changes in social fabric, especially in media landscape, have contributed to changes in its role and function. As indicated earlier, Schudson and Tifft indicate a number of ways in which journalism grew into a profession. The perspectives of journalism are far from uniform. Zelizer begins by using the “frame of mind” (p. 66) explanation of journalism but eventually concludes the journalist should be one who can step outside of himself or herself to see events in a different light (p. 77). One of the most contentious roles resides in the press’s role as watchdog. As Bennett and Serrin argue, watchdog journalists scrutinize, document, investigate, and relate matters of public concern (p. 169). While they offer ways to strengthen the watchdog role as a time when the press is “embattled”, they indicate in their essay not all journalists engage in these activities. Even if journalists do not engage in investigative journalism, Patterson and Seib argue the journalists must do more to “encourage citizens to think about what they are seeing and hearing” (p. 199). Thorson argues news use indicates strongly positive attitudes toward civic engagement, and education still remains a strong indicator of news use. However, young Americans have disengaged on many levels.
These roles are not embraced by all of journalism’s professionals, and as Patterson and Seib illustrate, journalism must compete with numerous sources of information. Credibility and reliability then becomes suspect because none of us really know how to filter and evaluate the thousands of sources of information on the Web. If the marketplace is an apt metaphor for ideas, then we should conceptualize it now as the dusty streets of Mumbai, where noisy merchants compete for attention, not as a place that follows Smith’s idea of market economics. It is a place where finding useful items requires critical and thoughtful strategy. We must think of Smith’s ideas of market economics similarly to Einstein’s re-imagination of Newton’s Law of Gravity. When the idea failed to encompass the phenomena completely, Keynes and others re-imagined the market economics to include the idea of supply and demand. The concept had not occurred to Smith because it was beyond his realm of possibility as he walked the streets of London. The metaphor is a social space that can be reworked. And journalism is just that. It is a space and like other spaces we imagine its function. Over the years its function has been re-imagined and reassessed to reflect changes in society and the media landscape. As part of the larger system, we are socialized to its function, as students, as professionals. As human beings, we make sense of it.
Changes have now dramatically altered how our world operates as well as how we experience the world. Many of these essays illustrate that we are amidst change; Schudson and Tifft wrote as their essay drew to a close that “(F)ewer Americans appeared to value the media’s role as surrogates for the public or its function as a filter through which inaccuracy, imbalance, and unfairness are sifted out” (Schudson & Tifft, p. 42). Curran also points out that many Americans turn to other organizations, institutions, or groups to facilitate mediation with the government. While Schmul and Picard end on a positive note, they do argue that “Rampant commercialization and underlying changes in the economics of media that remove incentives for many firms to make expenditures for costly and less profitable content that serves the marketplace of ideas” (p. 152).
Change is invariably part of life, especially with respect to humankind. Although the death of newspapers might well be an exaggeration, our society has changed. We experience time and space much differently than ever before. We have connectivity with one another that is much more pronounced than ever before. We think of our freedom not only in terms of free will but with respect to fast food, brand names, and cell phone usage. We have more information about most places around the globe, but we have rarely think about WHAT WE ACTUALLY KNOW about these places. We are consistently bombarded with media messages that are incomplete and/or decontextualized.

What has happened to the nation’s news media is not complex, as the Project for Journalism Excellence suggests. At a time when America’s role abroad has taken on global proportions, the nation’s media and their global reach has receded, relying only on a few information wholesalers. At a time when global capitalism’s sway holds more weight than public institutions within the realm of the sovereign nation-state, journalism has a surprising lack of insight on how these shifts in power affect people around the globe. At a time when transparency is desperately needed, corporations have taken hold of the press. While tried and true journalists might still exist, they live in an increasingly noisy media ecology, which tailors to younger audiences who simply ignore information and news rather than trying to filter out what they need. Our demands as a society are much different.
If journalism helps us make sense of our world and by doing so enables greater participation in self-governance, then certainly the way in which we think of journalism should be re-imagined. By providing a partial and decontextualized picture of the world, it becomes difficult to discern what changes in our world might mean, particularly when they derive from something as complex as globalization. It stands to reason many journalists possess a less than adequate understanding of these processes. We cannot argue that journalism should remain the course if journalism functions as a bridge between the public and its government. If journalists provide necessary awareness about the operations of government to enable self-governance, then our role as journalists must fit within the tools necessary for citizens to person the task. However, we cannot begin to assess the media landscape and understand our place without first acknowledging fundamental shifts in how we are governed, and the powers that exist to do so, whether they are elected or not.

*All readings come from the reader, The Press. Particularly Chapters 2, 4, 7 through 12. If you haven't picked it up, by all means, buy it yourself. Don't take my word for it.

A perspective on globalization

So class is finally finished – the class that I was teaching, that is – and I have had a few weeks off. I have used part of that time to exercise, clean, and prepare for the next two semesters. I also traveled home to see the family unit. Most of my trip was spent dodging my father’s arguments, which typically begin with “Obama is an idiot”, and the most recent, “Well, Americans just aren’t going to stand for globalization because this is a country of independently minded individuals.” True that, dad (on the second part, not the first).

I argued with him for a second before I realized that his idea of globalization is so far from what the actual phenomena is, and dare I speak ill of my father by saying overly simplified. Apparently somewhere in the annals of conservative talk radio, my father has forged an idea of globalization as something forthcoming, preventable, and disparaging to his freedom.

Welcome to globalization, dad. We’re here already. Apparently he – and whomever he’s getting his information from – hasn’t received the memo. I would pick on old, middle class white guys in the United States; however, I’m not sure that’s the issue. It might be part of the issue, though. It’s difficult to see your privilege when you are perched atop, if you know what I mean.

I have explained my previous posts how I feel about news coverage. And globalization is no exception. When you take oversimplified views of highly complex issues, well, you walk around thinking you know something when you really don’t. The adage in this country that we simply need to read the news to become informed citizens in this case doesn’t necessarily work. Anyone want to experiment with that idea? Let me know how that works out for you.

Globalization is such a large, far-reaching phenomena that you could – I don’t know – read for two years in a PhD program and still not have a handle on the issues, especially since it changes so quickly. This brief entry will address just the broad categories that I usually consider, and they are by no means comprehensive. But I highly encourage people to investigate these issues. It is globalization in my mind that brings up questions like: are the banks involved in the mortgage crisis actually U.S. corporations? If not, why should we consider bailing them out? Why is the U.S. government not regulating credit, so that not just anyone can buy a house? Why is it possible for lending institutions to extend the credit of those consumers who might not be able to pay back the money? How would this play out on the international scene – would the WTO intervene to penalize the U.S. government for protecting consumers?

All of these issues are integrated, and we are in NO WAY independent from the rest of the world. We haven’t been for a very long time. When considering globalization, I usually think of three arenas: economic, political, and cultural. I think of these three realms not because globalization really affects all three directly; however, they appear quite frequently in the literature.

Political
So let’s start with political, since my father is convinced that political globalization involves usurpation of American sovereignty in a globalized world. What he really means is that America wouldn’t be the big kid on the block. We might actually be accountable. And you know if we were actually accountable, our power and authority might not be construed as legitimate, which I take it is not the case in many places around the globe. My answer to his fear – since I didn’t get very far with him due to his incessant talking over me – there is no overarching world governance. The closest thing to it, perhaps, would be the United Nations (UN), and the UN yields far less power that the World Trade Organization (WTO), in my opinion.

In the field of political science, and please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong because this is not my field, there are many ways of describing international relations. Two of those ways have been classical realism and neorealism; neither description really places anyone in charge politically, other than the most powerful nation. They are structural perspectives, which imagine the international scene organized in a particular way but for which there is no world power.

Part of the problem is this issue. Although there is no overarching governance, we have international law, which dictates order for the system. Tiny rules like not attacking other countries and holding national sovereignty in the highest esteem have kind of kept everything in place politically. But sometimes countries don’t feel like they need to adhere to these rules. They invade other countries on behalf of the world. Invade, in this case, is the appropriate word. Because when rogue states have placed the welfare of their people at a minimum, the UN typically has voted to send peacekeepers, always trying to maintain the sovereignty of the nation. (In the case of Kosovo and East Timor, the UN departed from this by actually creating its own civil authority).

From my perspective, the UN is a quasi-governmental entity; while it promulgates ethical behavior for both member nations as well as its own actions, it is not necessarily binding if the member nations decide they don’t want to go along. With noncompliance, there exist no consequences. For example, the United States government regularly checks prisons across the country for compliance. In the event of noncompliance, the federal government can intercede – it’s automatic. They do not have to petition anyone nor wait for a vote of Congress. The job of that government group is to keep prisons up to snuff. The UN cannot necessarily do the same thing. If it could, there would be no need for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or the WTO.

Economic
Speaking of the IMF, WB, and WTO, there are also dimensions of globalization that reside within the economic realm. When I told my father that he should be more concerned about the WTO, I wasn’t leading him astray. A number of the reactions toward globalization and the West in particular have hinged on the denigration of national sovereignty as well as lack of action on behalf of the world’s poorest, most marginalized people, to name a couple. Without meaning to, I’m sure, we have enabled those in the most privileged positions to imagine our economic system. Our economic system, for me, is in part a political one. We place a great deal of faith in our political system, by recognizing the legitimacy of those in power to make binding decisions for us. Though we do not realize it, we have enabled corporations to do the same. On a very basic level, we could argue that the political system affords elected officials to decided what and how; likewise, we could argue the economic system enables those who are able to collect and use capital to decide who gets what as well as the conditions under which those resources are doled.

To oversimplify again, we could see two different veins of economic globalization. The first exists in the realm of the nation-state, where monetary and fiscal policy help determine the lifeblood for a people. The second realm exists in the corporate realm, where corporations with loyalties to shareholders search the world for resources. Corporations look for cheap materials, labor, and transportation in order to offer a product at lower prices. With respect to the nation-state, many have accepted aid from other nation-states or international organizations to promote development. There is an entire field of study devoted to development, the field itself has experienced paradigmatic shifts away from the original intention following the end of colonialism. When the word “liberalization” appears with respect to developing countries, typically we mean that governments are taking steps to liberalize trade by privatizing aspects devoted to public welfare, removing trade barriers, and generally accepting policies suggested by the IMF and WB. Sometimes these policies are diametrically opposed to promotion of a healthy state government, hence the resistance at grassroot levels.

On the other end, corporations have worked their way around the globe, probing markets for cheap resources and streamlining – financially – their production lines. Many complain about global and transnational corporations for a number of reasons; however, I will only touch on two. First, these corporations bring with them a cultural logic from other places; some fear this cultural infusion places culture in jeopardy (see below). Secondly, globalization has given rise to really funky practices, which corporations use to skirt national or international law. One aspect of this would be the export processing zones, which governments create to enable corporations to operate without adherence to national laws. Let us not romanticize either way about the corporation; yes, they have a great deal of power over pivotal aspects of our lives, and yes, they might actually run more efficiently and effectively than public entities because of their drive toward the bottom line. But they are not entirely the problem; some responsibility resides with consumers and their allowance for corporations to write the cultural rules. And now we have our final category.

Cultural
The realm of culture is where I do my heavy lifting, academically and philosophically. And previous blogs, I have explained some of the literature concerning the globalization of culture. Essentially we know that when you take human artifacts, such as television shows, fast food restaurants, or music, to places beyond their local context, something happens to culture where these items were imported. At this point, scholars disagree about the impact, its severity, and its meaning. I actually swing toward hybridity theory as a theoretical tool, but others have been quite critical in their approaches. In a way, I have come to see the two previous realms, political and economic, as rudimentary to understanding the processes of globalization with respect to culture. But I do not mean what other scholars intimate.

Let’s take a developing country in Africa. How about the Democratic Republic of Congo? The DRC is trying to find stability within its political and economic spheres in order to develop and grow. When the West interceded, it did so with a purpose. The West touts both democratic governance and liberalization as the best goals to strive for. However, as we provide the DRC with aid attached to policies designed to reach these goals, we are coaxing them to organize or conceptualize their world like ours. You say, “Well, who wouldn’t want to be free?” That’s a good question.

But the root of the problem is, who defines freedom? When the DRC fails to live up to the standards promulgated by the UN, or the U.S., or perhaps even Freedom House, we judge them harshly, downplaying their progress to focus on the expanse of their difference from us. That is the manipulation of culture, or the use of what Joseph Nye called, “soft power”. When you add media artifacts to the mix, such as Jay-Z or Law and Order, then the globalization is greatly complicated. These exchanges are facilitated by the ease at which we can communication and travel, as Tomlinson and others have explained.

My concern, as a scholar and journalist, lies with these connections among economic, political, and cultural. When we tell the DRC that it should strive for democratic rule, we also include either explicitly or implicitly that democratic rule requires a strong, independent media system. This strong, independent media system would follow the American model, and would ultimately be free from both government interference and funding. As we pull back the lens for a wider view, we see that politically, culturally, and economically, the flow of information globally belongs to two primary companies, the Associated Press and Reuters. There is danger in deriving what we know about the world simply from two sources, even if these sources pool information from a variety of points.

In closing, there are several different ways to explore these processes of globalization; one cannot take a myopic view without linking the claim back to this integration. The realization that we are integrating – that what we do in one place really affects other places – still might be an ethereal perspective for many. My father’s generation grew up at a time when the threat of both Soviets and nuclear holocaust became deeply ingrained in their worldview. From his perspective as well as many others, it does not matter whether our actions in the Middle East or other places in the globe are not well received or cause irreparable harm. What does matter is that he is safe and can sleep well at night knowing the U.S. government has his back. But that is the luxury of the white American male; the system exists to protect his privilege.

However, for many others, this integration is all too close to home. This integration has caused food shortages, fuels discontent among ethnic groups, displaces large groups of people, and governmental instability. I do not believe that I have the answers to help many around the globe to solve these problems; I do have, however, resources about how the media system works within one nation-state. I have the ability to help others to develop themselves, hopefully without the caveats that are used as stick or carrot. I have the ability to help my fellow Americans better understand these processes that inextricably bind them to people at all points around the world materially.

As Homi Bhabha wrote in the preface to The Location of Culture:

“In keeping with the spirit of the ‘right to narrate’ as a means to achieving our own national or communal identity in a global world, demands that we revise our sense of symbolic citizenship, our myths of belonging, by identifying ourselves with the ‘starting-points’ of other national and international histories and geographies” (p. xx).

Addressing globalization requires leaders and constituents who have a strong foundational knowledge in what these processes are. We can only truly change the course of history if we understand where we must go; however, we cannot fully appraise our path without first understanding where we are. To do both, we need an open and inclusive discourse about creating opportunities.

Temple Writing Academy

As I stated on my other blog, I'm in the process of preparing for tomorrow. I will make this post brief. I'm a little disappointed that I haven't worked on more research this summer, and that I haven't posted more to my blogs. However, I am working toward understanding how to edit video for the class that I am teaching.

I have been uploading video for the past few days. Check it out and let the students know what you think. I would also be happy to hear constructive criticism. In the meantime, I am working on both papers from the past semester, the first dealing with journalistic practices in Africa and the other exploring how AP and Reuters are constructing the idea of global through their operations. They should be finished soon, so I hope to have something to blog about.

To reach the YouTube channel, click here.

New Blog

I finished my second year, and now I guess I need to update everything, as I am now a third year PhD student. It was a difficult ride, and as I indicated in previous posts, I hope to blog more about it. However, it felt weird blogging about my research ideas and my personal life on one blog. I have thought about over the past year. When I began this blog, my intention was to simply provide my thought processes as I work toward a dissertation topic.

But it doesn't leave much room for fun stuff, and many of those who read my MySpace blog felt my research blog is a little out there for them. After struggling with it, and talking to people, I decided I would begin another blog. Staying true to my intention for this blog, I hope to continue to update my progress as a scholar. I think many are thrown by the name of this blog; I can't blame them. If you're from the United States, I could see how one would experience cognitive dissonance upon seeing the name. If you are from elsewhere, you might simply think that I am a "stupid American" and read no further. But I have noticed over the past few months that many do stop and read, at least for a little bit.

My new blog will deal with my "other life", as I indicated in my most recent post. I named the blog "A Creation of my Own" for many reasons. As in my academic life, I am encouraged by some and discouraged by others about being who I am. And I must be truthful. Many aspects of my identity had not received a great amount of attention. For example, I have been out for several years but have never given it much serious thought until the last few years.

Most recently, I began devoting a great deal of thought to the idea of imaginative space, an idea used by some globalization theorists borrowed from Foucault as well as others to explain this cognitive area that allows us to dream of ourselves as something other than what we are. I designed my class for the Temple Writing Academy solely around this idea. Although the class will deal primarily with argumentation and persuasion, I constructed it with the idea that through language and visuals, my students could manipulate ideas, imagine themselves in different ways. Like my Tae Kwon Do master once said, "If you can see it, you can do it." I want to help them obtain the tools to empower themselves. There is no saving going on here - I have social capital that I can give to them. They have the choice, now or later, to use these tools in the best way that they see fit.

I would not have thought so much about this class if I didn't also see this empowerment as a need that I also had. It has been a long road to get where I am, and I have often wasted time thinking about where I could have been if I had been empowered to think in the ways that I know think. Again, though, as I pointed out in my recent post on the other blog, I am exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what I need to be doing.

I took some time off from the academics, to get my bearings and think about the next year. I will resume work soon, so I will be back out here blogging about my ideas. I hope in the next couple of years to travel to Africa as well as Europe. I am interested in understanding different press models that exist, not just the American model. I am interested in journalistic practices, not just the American practices. I will get there, and it will take time. In the end, I will look back at these entries as milestones in my career, my life, and my perspectives.