The key position Communication occupies in the Women's Studies major formalizes the department's long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary work in gender studies and to the Women's Studies program in particular. Under the tutelage of Chandra Mukerji and Helene Keyssar, and with the addition of feminist political theorist Val Hartouni to the faculty in 1990, Communication's offerings in feminist studies have expanded significantly. Moreover, in releasing Hartouni for the last two years to teach in the Women's Studies introductory sequence, the department has contributed to the program's stability at a crucial point in its development. While Hartouni will continue to function as an important bridge between Communication and Women's Studies, the program looks forward to the participation of other Communication faculty in its introductory and upper division sequences.
Upper division Communication courses that presently count towards the Women's Studies major include Comm/Cul 108 "Images of Women,"
The following papers were presented:
Yrjo Engestrom: "Heterogeneity and Shared Cognition in Multi-professional Medical Teams" (on developmental work research in Finnish health centers - from theory to intervention).
Ed Hutchins: "The Heterogeneous, Heterochronous Process of Flightdeck Expertise" (on communication in airline cockpit flight- simulation).
Steve Reder: "Collaboration and Constraint: The Macrostructuring of Co-operative Activity" (on educators' work strategies, craft, and experience).
Lucy Suchman: "Technologies of Accountability" (on airline terminal ramp operations and control).
Barry Saferstein: "Occupational Expertise and the Dominance of Local Knowledge" (on teamwork in network television script-writing meetings).
Phil Agre acted as discussant for each of the talks. Issues raised in the discussion included the relevance of symbolic interactionism to these strategies of research; responsible and responsive approaches to ethnography and ethnomethodology; the practical implications of various arguments underlying claims about the nature of expertise; and the connection between themes raised in the papers and possibilities for other kinds of computer-supported collaborative work.
Professors Michael Cole and Yrjo Engestrom and Communication graduate students Katherine Brown, Carol Christopher, and Judith Gregory are members of The Research Group on Expertise as Collaborative Activity. The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition serves as the group's work space, library and research base for reading groups and seminars around research on work.
Three articles in a special issue on work from the October 1991 Quarterly Newsletter of L.C.H.C. introduced the school of thought called Developmental Work Research and included Engestrom, Brown, Christopher and Gregory's paper "Coordination, Cooperation and Communication in the Courts: Expansive Transitions in Legal Work".
Future plans for the group include the possibility of a multi-site developmental work research project with Yrjo Engestrom beginning in the Fall of 1992.
So it seems an appropriate moment for ComNotes to initiate some general discussion about the quality and character of undergraduate education in this department. The following responses to our call for comment in the last issue should help get the discussion rolling.
"I feel that every student should be exposed to critical thinking," says Andrea MacDonald, a senior majoring in Communication: "This wouldn't happen if the program became 'vocational'. So I would stick to the theory. It might be useful to broaden the topic offerings so that students could get more practical experience... [but] I came to this department because of its theoretical emphasis."
Dennis Mazzocco, a Communication graduate student, agrees: "I feel very strongly that undergraduate education should not be purely vocational. [But]... the single most important skill that is sorely needed in the communications fields is writing. Yet I know many of my colleagues in the television world who lack the confidence to write and edit a solid five-page term paper. I think that a college education should prepare for critical thinking... [Tell] them what the 'game' is all about, and at least [attempt] to give them some measure of empowerment..."
Professor Mike Cole: "Is our department too theoretical? It has been a while since I taught Com 150, but when I have taught it, I have always combined a look back over the 4-5 years of study of communication with a look forward to 'next year.' As a part of the 'look forward' I encourage the students to invite to class various professionals whose work interests them and who might serve as a model for what they would like to be doing a year hence...
"Every single one of these people said that what they wanted in a new staff person was someone who could pick up a newspaper or watch an evening of TV and say what the content of communication around them meant for what they should be doing on the job. They did not want technically proficient people who could not 'read the situation' in a deep way. They encouraged students to do internships to get a taste of what they would be in for and they thought that some skill acquisition was important. But they generally like UCSD graduates because of their ability to read and learn.
"...I strongly believe in combining theoretical work with practice, a belief embodied in both my teaching and research. UCSD affords the opportunity for students to do the same, although it often takes initiative and resolve to accomplishment it."
At the first class meeting I made my confessions to the class. One, you might as well know, since the bias will leak out anyway, that I am constitutionally hostile to advertising. Two, since I don't let my students conflate prejudice with reasoning, I won't either. The truth is, while I have a lot of opinions about advertising and society (including the suggestion that this class should really be titled simply "Advertising Society"), I haven't yet made up my mind on many of the larger political and philosophical questions raised in much of the reading. (Along with Michael Schudson's Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, we read Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements, Stuart Ewen's Captains of Consciousness, and Sut Jhally's The Codes of Advertising.)
My confession doesn't work. I constantly have to sidestep leading questions which seem to suggest that I, and not Ferdinand de Saussure, invented semiology. I am almost able to take credit for the theory of commodity fetishism, but at last it is clear that the honor goes to Karl Marx. This sparring goes on for weeks, until the class realizes that I am presenting to them a variety of theories and arguments from which they will have to choose.
At the first session I tell them that their job is to figure out their own positions on the various debates we encounter. Your task, I emphasize, is not to find out what I think and then replay that line to me. (Of course, it helps this progressive pedagogy along nicely if in fact the instructor does not know what he thinks.) As the class progresses, we watch a number of public TV documentaries which take the standard critical liberal line on advertising. Mostly these are taken at face value by the group. But during one session, a rather bold student actually criticizes Bill Moyers. The Heavens do not fall.
Later on, I am asked quite directly about my opinion of the use of TV ads in the U.S. political process. Smiles appear on faces. I am on the spot. Since I know exactly what I think about this, I tell them. They look relieved. Perhaps they think that my teaching strategy is a trick, that there is a secret prize for the student who can discover what Dr. Goodwin really thinks of those Michael Jackson Pepsi ads.
Of course, there is a place for the polemical class, for the instructor as dictator, the professor as provocateur. (Which is precisely how I intend to proceed with my music TV class next quarter.) But not all classes need operate that way - and even where they do, you'd hope that the purpose is to generate an argument with the instructor.
Once, in about the second or third week, there was a debate in class about stereotypes in ads and eventually I had to say to someone, look, I just don't happen to agree with you on this, but that's fine, you have your position and I have mine. There were audible sniggers in the classroom, as if I'd just uttered a rude word in public.
If this little incident is a straw in the wind of contemporary university life, it may suggest several lessons. First, apocalyptic anxieties about the intellectually stultifying influence of "politically correct" prejudice are probably ill- founded. I was not obliged to meet a standard of political correctness, after all. My article was accepted as I wrote it. I received politically correct counsel (that may or may not have been intellectually correct), not politically correct censorship or censure.
Second, there is indeed in universities today the noxious smoke of political correctness, even if it is much less than a raging fire. It began, I think, for the best of reasons: the legitimate interest of scholars reviewing the historical past and rethinking the present academic curriculum to include the perspective of peoples traditionally relegated to the margins. This has been one of the most dramatic and salutary developments in higher education of the past generation. Even so, it has produced tendencies to authoritarianism, rigidity, and intolerance, not unlike the features of intellectual life it meant to overthrow.
Third, even within the fields (notably literature and social history) and even among the people most sympathetic to rewriting scholarly standards and practices, there is suspicion that self-styled radicalism has become self-justifying orthodoxy. Thus my editor recommended my attention to race, class, and gender but gave me permission by his language ("the trinity") to ignore his advice.
My impression is that most of academic life at UCSD is blissfully unaffected by concerns about political correctness. But I have long wondered about the political orientation of the Communication Department. Different intellectual and political orthodoxies cluster in different departments, and they by no means all fit the popular model of political correctness. Some departmental orthodoxies are openly hostile to politically correct presuppositions. What of Communication?
Faculty and graduate students in this department, as a whole, have political views well to the left side of the American political spectrum. You did not have to wonder whether your co-inhabitants of the Media Center sympathized more with Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill, for instance. Sympathy with Hill could be taken for granted. You did not have to wonder whether people distrusted the orchestrated fervor leading up to the Gulf war. Of course they did.
The question is whether this has an unhappy effect on the teaching and intellectual atmosphere in the department. On the whole, I don't think political opinion has enslaved thinking or teaching. Students are not punished for having the "wrong" politics. Colleagues are not punished or shunned for expressing views that run against the pet causes of the left. (Not that it was easy to say to colleagues, although I did, that I was ambivalent about the Gulf war and thought it raised very different moral and political questions from sending troops to Vietnam or aiding the contras in Nicaragua.)
Still, I sense confusion in some of our classes between "critical thinking," which it is a teacher's job to encourage, and criticism of American government policy or the American economic system, which should be encouraged only because no existing ideas or institutions should be unfit for critical analysis, least of all those with so much power in our lives. But by the same token, "oppositional" ideas should also be critically scrutinized. Are they?
Students in my course on advertising have often told me that it is the only course they know in the department that does not take for granted the morally unredeemable character of commercial advertising. That would not trouble me if I thought advertising to be an institution ringingly reaffirmed and regularly touted in the mainstream culture. Then the leftish consensus in the department could be judged a laudable provocation to the rightish conventional thinking in the students' culture at large.
But, in fact, nearly all intellectuals find advertisements anathema. Most do so, I think, without having thought very hard about the matter. Can you name even one intellectual engaged in public discussion over the social value of advertising who would wholeheartedly defend it?
I think our students arrive in our classes aware that advertising is not intellectually respectable, armed with some sort of instinctive ecological consciousness reinforced in the schools from kindergarten on that makes them skeptical about consumer culture, imbued with some loosely constructed vision of a society of equal opportunity. If this is so, do we serve students well to reinforce these preconceptions rather than to challenge them? Should we not be asking students to test their views against the best alternative views - right, left, and center?
We know too little about what incoming students think. (Perhaps they know too little about what they think, too.) Students' presuppositions are a primary resource for a teacher; operating against them seems to me one of the best ways to promote the kind of deeper criticism and self-questioning I think college education should encourage.
But I think that the radical point of the critique has been lost, both at MIT and everywhere else. MIT now is simply nicer to the tools: it makes them take more humanities courses and it has some good psychotherapists. The system is still not geared to helping anybody develop any sort of mature agency. Tools often arrive in graduate school and industry with little practice in running their own lives, having their own plans, questioning authority, or possessing or acting upon any non-trivial understanding the world around them. As Bowles and Gintis have pointed out, this is just fine with most employers, which may in some sense be the point.
A lot of what we teach here at UCSD concerns precisely these topics; serious ideas about power and knowledge and resistance and language and history are not just academic codes. Nonetheless, these abstract concepts tend to be distant from one's lived experience. Connecting theory to experience and experience to agency requires two things: (i) a concrete understanding of how one's own world actually operates; and (ii) some concrete training in what I will call "professional skills". I use this latter phrase because it sounds 90s; it includes all the practical skills you need to actually get something done in the world, whether in industry, academia, or political work. Professional skills include reading, writing, networking, participating in collective work, conversing with people in professional contexts, getting ahold of information, being aware of the operation of power, organizing people, and acting ethically when confronted with impossible choices and plausible rationalizations. Nobody is born being able to do any of this. I propose that we teach it.
Unfortunately, it is nearly senseless to try teaching people to think and act for themselves. You can't just fill people's heads with left-wing cant. Nobody learns anything until it becomes a part of their concrete experience and everyday practice. How can you learn about professional skills until you've become a professional? For that matter, how can you learn anything about communication - or about history or literature or philosophy, or anything else of the sort - unless you've had children, been laid off, been badly shaken up by a play, known someone who died, or spent time really talking with someone from a different culture or social class? It is a common enough question. It is also the reason why so many teachers, whatever their politics, regret the barriers between the university and the rest of the world.
So what is to be done? I have some guesses. In Comm/HIP 133 next term, I will try in a rudimentary way to put lectures on professional skills together with an opportunity to give these skills a try. The course will run on two tracks. On Tuesdays (more or less) the lectures will concern the workings of language in science and technology, surveying a variety of methods from linguistics to literature to sociology. On Thursdays the lectures will concern professional skills, with one each (tentatively) on reading, writing, interviewing people, working in archives, networking, power, ethics, and agency. The readings for this latter part of the course will include remarkable things like Robert Jackall's ethnographic study of business ethics and Giambattista Vico's "On the Study Methods of Our Time". We'll put these two halves together in the course project, a research paper on some aspect of language in science and technology. This can mean a lot of things, from physics journals to computer jargon to public hearings on environmental issues to newspaper advertisements for plastic surgery to the poetry written on the walls of the steam tunnels at Caltech. In the future I'm hoping (fingers crossed) to run a vastly more ambitious course about professional skills; stay tuned.
Graduate student MARYELLEN BOYLE has organized a panel on recent developments in the mass media in Eastern Europe that has been accepted for the program at the 1992 International Communication Association convention in Miami in May.
Visiting professor ANDREW GOODWIN has recently published "Popular Music and Postmodern Theory" in Cultural Studies (vol. 5 no. 3) and has edited a new edition of Richard Hoggart's classic Uses of Literacy (Transaction) with a lengthy - and critical - introductory essay.
The lecture ROBERT HORWITZ gave in South Africa in the fall will be published in revised form in Telecommunications Policy as "The Politics of Telecommunications Reform in South Africa." Professor Horwitz is planning a return trip to South Africa this summer for research on regulatory structures and the reform of telecommunications and electricity sectors in South Africa.
VINCE RAFAEL has been awarded a University of California Humanities Research Fellowship to spend two quarters in 1992-93 at the Humanities Research Institute at UC-Irvine, participating in an interdisciplinary research project on "Transformations: Media, the Arts, and Popular Culture," a project of the Minority Discourse research group. His project is "Colonizing the National and Nationalizing the Colonial."
Graduate student RIVKA RIBAK and former visiting professor Tamar Liebes have jointly published "Democracy at Risk: The Reflection of Political Alienation in Attitudes Toward the Media," in Communication Theory (1991) 1:239-52.
HERB SCHILLER co-authored "The Ideology of International Communications," published in January by the Institute for Media Analysis (New York), monograph series no. 4.
MICHAEL SCHUDSON has published "Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case" in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT Press).
Visiting lecturer SANDY STONE has recently published "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto" in Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein, eds., Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (Routledge) and "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures" in Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press). She is editing an anthology for MIT Press scheduled for 1993 publication, The Challenge of Virtual Systems: Adventures in the Boundaries of Technology, Society, and Nature.
Under the new arrangement, graduate students will normally do most of their methods courses in their second year.
A second change in the curriculum is the addition of a new required core course to be taken by incoming students in their first quarter, a course on the history of communication research. This course will be designed to socialize students into the field and to provide them with some common resources and reference points for their career in and after graduate school.
The comprehensive examinations that test students at the end of the first year of work will test only the 200 A-B-C sequence in communication theory and the new seminar on the history of communication research.
Continuing students in the program are eligible to take any of the methods courses. They will not be eligible to take the first-year history of communication research seminar. =- Communication Department Coursegroup Coursegroup has been a weekly ritual of this Department for the last decade-every Wednesday from 12:30 until 2. Although the audience has varied (especially with the introduction of a graduate program six years ago), and although this meeting space is sometimes interrupted by the need for faculty meetings, Coursegroup still allows room for public discussion of issues important to members of this Department. In this sense, it's a place for realizing what Victor Turner called communitas, among the faculty, grad students, undergrads, and the staff.
This past quarter, four visitors have presented research results at Coursegroup: Tim Pilgrim, Claire Ramsey, and Jack Banks (all visiting scholars this year in the Department), as well as Professor Robert McChesney from the University of Wisconsin at Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In this issue we review Pilgrim and Ramsey's presentations. In the next issue we will review Banks and McChesney.
Pilgrim's research concerns JOAs (Joint Operating Agreements)-contractual agreements between competing but struggling newspapers within a city to combine their non-news functions, including printing, circulation, advertising, and distribution, in order to preserve each paper's editorial voice. (San Diego's latest merger, which created the San Diego Union Tribune in February, is not a JOA because both papers were already owned by Copley.) JOAs are a legal result of Congressional legislation known as the "Newspaper Preservation Act".
But JOAs have not necessarily had the kind of positive effects that were the intent of the legislation. Pilgrim looked at the arrangement between the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to determine what role the Seattle JOA has played in the market. These two papers, he found, have ceased to focus on competition with each other and have, instead, focused on the suburbs, making the other dailies in the market less viable economically and editorially.
Have they effectively cartelized the Seattle newspaper market? Pilgrim concludes that newspaper preservation as provided by the Seattle JOA has, in fact, not enhanced the region's collective newspapers' ability to provide more and better news of public affairs. Communication students will have a chance to engage in questions of economics in news production in the spring; Pilgrim will teach the second quarter of the "American News Media" course (Comm/SF 171b).
Ramsey's research focuses on early literacy in deaf American children. Since the 1970s, deaf elementary education has taken place primarily in local public schools-"mainstreaming," a change which seems to have significant consequences for the children. Ramsey asks, "what is it about mainstreaming that attracts hearing people, especially teachers and parents of of deaf children, and at the same time repels Deaf people?"
To pose her research questions, Ramsey conducted a one-year ethnographic study of the 13 deaf children attending the mainstreaming program at the "Aspen School." She is currently analyzing the data that she collected, which shows especially rich interaction among the deaf children and much more restricted interaction between deaf and hearing children and between deaf children and hearing teachers.
Ramsey criticizes the "ideological context in which the mainstreaming of deaf children is embedded in the United States"-most easily recognizable on television shows, for instance, in which easy communication with hearing children is a possibility for a deaf child.
Ramsey is concerned that presentation of such an idealized picture mythologizes and romanticizes the very real communication inhibitors involved. For instance, she found at Aspen School, in an integrated-mainstreamed-classroom "hearing children interacting with deaf children the way many of us interact with our pets-provoking them into reacting, including teasing and poking fun at them, and communicating with them in language that is either unintelligible, or directive, or evaluative."
What kinds of conclusions are possible to draw from her data? She says:
"I think that deaf people recognize that the offer of
assimilation through mainstreaming constitutes a
bargain, and that this deal is based on an illusion.
If the hearing institutions offer equal opportunity
and fairness and if the people who work in these
institutions promise to overlook their deviance and
act nice to deaf children, then the deaf children
have a duty to live up to their side of the bargain.
Assimilation through speaking English and being a
hearing person is simply not a possible life for a
profoundly Deaf person....
"If I ask Deaf adults about the young generation,
they come right to the point. They tell me that
young Deaf people cannot communicate, that the
older Deaf people cannot understand their signing,
and that they do not know how to 'be' in the world-
they give me examples that range from concerns
about self-sufficiency, ...to sincere worries about
young deaf people's basic skills and their ability to
interact in groups....
"There are other voices, asking similar questions
about the wisdom of proceeding as if all children
were the 'the same.' Maria de la Luz Reyes calls
this phenomenon 'one size fits all' education. That
is, schools absorb diversity by refusing to 'notice'
differences. They offer a certain instruction to all
students, and if it doesn't work, it must be the
students' fault, since by definition it is equal to
all."
Activity theory is a way to look at an activity in which people are already involved, and to help find ways to make those activities creative, productive, and fulfilling for participants. It also provides tools for creating new activity. An example from Yrjo Engestrom's Learning by Expanding describes health care provision. Providing health care is more than just a single action. It is a whole system of actions and operations, motivated by goals and objectives, and mediated by cultural artifacts, among which human language is primary.
Typically, the object of a health care provider is maintaining the health of patients. As technology provides more possibilities for health care and diagnosis, and as individuals must confront "society" through bureaucracy or other formal institutions in more and more aspects of their personal lives, however, providing good health care may become a process that's just too complex for a single physician to master.
Instead, a whole community of people may be required - social workers, medical technicians, welfare providers, therapists, day care providers and patients actively taking part in their own health maintenance. It is a community where expertise is distributed among those who participate in it through their own activity. The people within this community have rules, tacit or stated, about how their activity is conducted. They use a wide variety of artifactual systems (tools) to mediate their activity. These tools are essential resources for organizing the division of labor. Providing health care can now be conceived of as a shared, culturally mediated, and social activity. The activity of each participant has or might have the same object.
However, within and at the intersection of any of the elements of activity - community, tools, rules, object, division of labor, and subjects themselves - contradictions are constantly arising (for example, the rules for providing health and the tools that are used in doing so may actually work against each other). Often in everyday activity, we overlook these kinds of contradictions and just continue to do things in the same way. (A likely place to look for that is the large bureaucracies we all encounter regularly.)
From time to time, however, contradiction leads to crisis. Something must be done. In these moments of crisis, great or small, people working, playing, or learning in community create truly new, unexpected, unpredictable tools, ways of interacting and dividing labor. One of the goals of activity theory is to try to capture the way people working together create tentative new solutions, and to help them do more than patch an old awkward method, to move toward a whole new system - an expansion of their activity, something that brings all the parts of a system together in a new way. But no solution is fixed and activity theory works with this notion up front - not as a concession or an afterthought. Contrary to other mainstream workplace research, activity theory seeks to institutionalize the process of participants in activity systems coming together to create their own expansive transitions. The role of the participant-researcher is to encourage the resident participants to include such processes as a matter of course in their regular activity. And although the focus of our working group efforts is the workplace, activity theory has applications in many other areas including play, learning, and artistic creation.
Activity theorists in this university often encounter one other question: "Well, this is all very interesting and sounds very good. But what does it have to do with communication? Isn't communication about image content and production?"
This kind of question has recurred often in international debates about activity theory, where those who emphasize mediational means and those who emphasize social institutions trade criticism. A focus of concern for people at UCSD interested in activity theory is to overcome such either/or approaches to the questions of human activity. In this sense, it is very much a part of the departmental philosophy which conceives of binary oppositions (man/woman, good/bad, mind/body, universal/particular) as culturally derived dualities and seeks to understand how such dualities are created and function, and how one comes to be privileged over the other Another characteristic of activity theory at UCSD is its commitment to the idea that research should include both moments of theory and moments of practice.
Activity theory is among the theories that hold that through shared productive activities humans first developed their communicative capacity. Furthermore, it is through these shared activities that new tools have developed, whether one has in mind languages, computers, or hammers. Tools carry our social and cultural histories within them, in the way they're used, in the way we think of them, in the memories we invoke to make sense of their uses. They are a physical manifestation of the histories of ideas and human evolution. Activity theory reunites the mental and the physical aspects of human communication, marking the union as crucial to the process of creativity out of which new ideas, new forms of activity are born.
If you're interested in more information about activity theory, come join a class or seminar in activity theory, or stop by and talk to one of the faculty and learn the secret handshake.
This past year I worked on several projects. I was a consultant for the City University of New York's Center for Puerto Rican Studies, helping them develop a pilot satellite series for university television stations, The Satellite University Network. On the "De Peliculas Project," my associates and I have annotated over 7,000 separate film sources that deal with Latin America as a subject. The film aspect of the project (a feature film) is almost complete. A screening of the work in progress is scheduled for the Whitney Museum this spring.
I was also busy with an exhibit at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. This new art museum has become famous for its post- modern architecture and trendy art exhibits. Paper Tiger, the activist media organization that I co- founded in 1981, was invited to celebrate our tenth anniversary with an installation in three galleries. The galleries were turned into a "Paper Tiger Dream House" with comfy sofas for video viewing and a computer terminal hooked up to Peacenet and Econet for participatory research by gallery visitors. A newsstand of over 2000 alternative newspapers and magazines from all over the world was included in the exhibit. Vis Arts MFA grad and Communication Visiting Lecturer, John Walden, constructed an elaborate moving wall of graphics for the exhibit.
The installation was an immediate hit. Workshops on media criticism for youth were requested by Columbus area elementary and high school teachers and bus loads of school children from all over Ohio came to the show, as did thousands of art lovers and curious tourists. As part of the exhibit, Paper Tiger published a book: Roar, The Paper Tiger Guide to Media Activism. Several galleries both in the United States and abroad have expressed interest in future installations.
While I was away from UCSD the Gulf War came and went, and several colleagues and I raised over $120,000 from foundations and individuals to produce a ten-part series, The Gulf Crisis TV Project, to give an alternative view of the war. GCTVP was shown on 400 public access stations and 40 PBS stations in the U.S. It was also used by activist organizations for teach-ins and meetings. It was shown on Channel Four in London and received the largest audience for the channel for the month of January. It was also shown in France, Scotland, Portugal, Holland, Austria, Brazil, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico and Australia. I was invited to the Berlin Film Festival in February, 1991 to screen the series there. In addition to the festival screening, it was shown by pacifist organizations in Berlin and in several German cities who at that time were playing an important role in sheltering soldiers who refused duty in the Gulf. The Gulf Crisis TV Project was described in an extensive article in a special edition on media and the war in Le Monde Diplomatique, next to an article by Herb Schiller! A review of the project is in the January issue of Afterimage, from the Visual Studies Workshop, and the entire Spring issue of Video Guide from Vancouver will be devoted to a report on the project. The following are excerpts from that report:
In early September, my hometown of Woodstock, NY, held a rally for peace in the Gulf- organized by Vietnam vets. I heard about it late and hurried to the rally. I came running across the field clutching my Hi-8 camera and my tripod, trying to screw on the "handy snap mount" for the tripod as I ran, eager to catch the last poem by a pair of vet poets who were reciting to the beat of congas. In Woodstock you can always count on pretty good music at rallies. As I got to the stage, close enough to use the in-camera mike, I was surprised to find that there was already a camcorder taping: one of the vets had set up his own. Hmm...I thought...this time around the vets are covering their own resistance. The camcorder war had begun.
The Gulf Crisis TV Project was officially organized at one of the weekly meetings of Paper Tiger the next week. People were eager to do something to stop the mad rush to war. Tapes were already coming into the office. People called asking what we were going to do, or volunteering to help us. But could a series of programs be up-linked before the war started? What were the resources we needed? Paper Tiger has some minimal production equipment and an off-line editing space. Deep Dish TV has a network of several hundred cable access stations who were willing and able to down-link programming. We sent out a call for tapes and within a few weeks had received over 150 from as many locations. They were testimonies, teach-ins, demonstrations, town meetings. After days of all- night editing we put them together into four half- hour programs which we up-linked to public access and PBS on January 7. Hundreds of public access channels showed them: some around the clock for several days. WNET in New York showed the series three times in prime time in that week before the war.
There was an outpouring of gratitude for the series- and immediate requests followed: when were the next programs coming? The contrast between the kind of information that we were able to provide and what was on the tube every night became more and more apparent. While the polls showed that a wide majority supported the war, there were many polls that showed that people realized that the media wasn't showing the whole picture.
The GCTVP office became a sort of clearing house for both media activities and activist actions in general. Hundreds of tapes were sent in, even though we never did a general tape solicitation for the second series. Dozens of volunteers who had heard vaguely about the project and wanted to do something against the war signed up to log tapes or work in the office. The production staff became so large that it was difficult to keep the communication lines open. People would log a tape that was perfect for one of the programs, but the program producers would not have the time to read the logs, or check the in-coming stacks. Research was requested and done by highly qualified and talented volunteers. Information was gathered, but not retrieved. It was an overload of information. The kind of chaotic production panic that we experienced was probably inevitable given the stress, the urgency, the absence of structure and the extreme low budget of what had grown to be a huge operation connecting hundreds of people.
For the first programs of the series, we had been motivated with the urgent need to stop the war from happening. Once it had started with its inexorable pattern of destruction and violence, it was hard to feel any power to affect the outcome. What kept us going was the flood of responses to the first series. Many people were feeling down but commented on how they had needed the first series because of the hope it projected by bearing witness to the vital resistance in many regions of this country. The mainstream media coverage was getting worse and worse. People urged us to keep providing an alternative.
I think the Gulf Crisis TV Project tapes were seen by more people in a shorter time than any other independently produced and distributed video work in the history of the medium. It was the special circumstances of the rush to stop the war that energized the production.
The war was supposed to have been a glorious answer to the Vietnam syndrome. But maybe the Iraq syndrome will be an even harder questioning of the U.S. military. The fact that the Gulf situation has so summarily been dismissed from the organs of the consciousness industry may be because the American people are beginning to sense the reality of the war. The image of its effect on Iraq has been seared into their brains with undeniably horrifying photojournalism of dying children and ecological devastation. That picture is apt to get worse for years to come. Moreover, the reality of the situation at home is as bleak as the faded yellow ribbons on the gates of the now closed GM plants.
The war came and went, but it wasn't without a response. We responded and our response is still playing on many cable systems around the country. Many have played it as an anniversary reminder of the other side of the war. Maybe one of those laid- off GM workers will switch on the TV and see the still vibrant anger of War on the Homefront or Operation Dissidence and make a tape with her union.
Meanwhile the price of camcorders is dropping.
After a twelve-year stint as a producer and director at a national U.S. television network, I resigned in 1988 in order to rescue my sanity and physical well-being. Despite four Emmys, several other prominent industry awards, and an exciting career in which I collaborated on many successful and critically-acclaimed network television specials, I was scared and without hope.
With my network career over at 34, I took a year off. During that time I accepted some freelance work with NBC and others but eventually decided to earn a master's degree that would qualify me for a college teaching position somewhere. In graduate school however, I discovered that my network discomfort was not just that of a corporate misfit's career gone awry. I found that there were many scholars in the U.S. (and around the world for that matter) studying many of the same developments within the communications industries that had forced me to leave, but that I could not articulate with any precision or clarity. Their writings and speeches helped me to make sense of my own career confusion and, at the same time, provided me with a confidence that I could be both a scholar and an artist. I could use my professional experiences to add to the growing body of research on media industry structure, and its relationship to the global culture.
Computer technology has transformed the media workplace into an efficient, but robot-like factory in less than a decade. The broadcasting industry that I thought I loved was more resembling the world that both of my grandfathers faced in the Pennsylvania coal mines of the 1920s and 1930s. I was becoming a cog in the engine of U.S. cultural and information production, and I didn't like it.
I was sure that media production workers would become the working-class of the 1990s. I was "expected" to work overtime on-demand, or face the penalty of being labelled "not a team player"-a horrible fate in the corporate world. Near the time of my resignation, my weekly schedule was so adjusted for productivity gains that my work-week was divided into five different shifts, extending from 8 in the morning through 5 the next morning. My union was powerless to stop these transgressions, since management always managed to operate within the strict confines of collective bargaining agreements developed in the "good 'ole unautomated days" when humans beings were still in demand in the U.S. political-economy.
I sensed that the industrial tyranny of my immigrant forefathers' days would find me as well, even though for so long I thought that I was somehow blessed to be working in the media. I was sure that I would eventually owe my soul to the very same "company-store kind of life" that they once did-even with all of the computers and automation devices that I was told would make my job easier (so much for the so-called post- industrial utopia in which "labor-friendly" information technology would free me to do more creative work).
At my former employ, and at others since, I have seen the growing totalitarianism of "MBA-think" slowly and insidiously transforming the workplace. My former colleagues-who remain behind-show me their frustration today with grim faces and unhappy eyes, as they often dream of how it used to be. The Gramscian theory of hegemony has been especially helpful as I struggle to understand why so many workers will not, or better yet cannot, stop participating in their own domination.
Last August, CBS offered me 25% of the compensation to work on Albertville that I received from NBC at the Summer Olympics in 1988 (in 1992 CBS became the first Olympic network to refuse an agreement with its unions). In my "hiring" telephone interview with a relatively high-level CBS Olympic executive, I questioned the legitimacy of the networks' wage reductions. Television networks do have 10-20% smaller audiences today, but not the network owned-and-operated stations- all of which are enjoying all-time profit highs. I also questioned CBS's refusal to pay its Olympic employees overtime and other union-required pension and health benefits that have been heretofore accepted as standard labor practice in the U.S. (generally one works 12-18 hours per day for the "duration," with no days off, and with occasional around-the-clock tours when necessary).
I was told that the CBS chairman of the board, Laurence Tisch, did not like to have "surprises"- like uncertain costs or expenses (i.e. overtime or other extra-work bonuses). "Why do I have to suffer for the CBS profit-margin, when others do not?" I argued on the telephone: "Not paying overtime might make Mr. Tisch feel more comfortable; will he also guarantee that there would be 75% less work or pressure than I faced while working on my previous five Olympic telecasts?"
I chose not to go, but there were many others who went; some had families to support, others had rent to pay. This year, Mr. Tisch, and many of the CBS, Inc. board of directors, will likely earn several hundred times more than what many production workers earned for their month in Albertville. After two years of continuously "predicting" losses of up to $50 million on the Olympics, CBS now reports that it will break even on the Olympics-surely not as a result of overtime savings, but because of the higher ratings that many of its underpaid workers helped to achieve. The network's labor position-in a time of increasing concentration of ownership and advancing technology-now seems to be, "heads I win, tails you lose."
Perhaps I am living a relatively serf-like existence as a graduate student, but I think that I am now far better off than I was a few years ago when I supposedly "had it all." At the networks, I was paid specifically not to question authority, or the mercurial network logic. At least now, I have a "future" studying about how power operates in theory, as well as in the world. The investment that I make now is in the knowledge and critical thinking skills that I acquire-a better return all around, I think, for myself, my future students, and society. I suspect that both of my coal-mining grandfathers would agree.
Mazzocco, a UCSD communication Ph.D. student,
will complete his first year in June. He will be one
of several NBC Associate Directors who will be
working on the 1992 Summer Olympics this July,
where he will be assigned to the boxing venue in
the Barcelona working-class suburb of Badilona.
This will be Mazzocco's first time at a sporting
venue; his previous Olympic assignments had been
in the videotape editing rooms in the International
Broadcast Center (IBC), where the various Olympic
images are collected, mixed, and eventually sent on
to the global television audience.
As it did in 1988, NBC agreed to a union contract
for many, but not all, of its Barcelona-bound
employees. Though they will earn considerably less
than they would have for comparable work
performed in the U.S., many NBC Olympic workers
will receive overtime, as well as pension and
health benefits, unlike the CBS workers in
Albertville
Luana Plunkett and Neil Morrison are living in San Francisco and have been producing a local public access news series. Their video portrait of an old Native Californian, "The Last Kwayanii" (made in collaboration with Matt Scoggins while they were students at UCSD), has been shown in a number of venues, including a Deep Dish environmental series. It was reviewed in a recent issue of Afterimage. Luana and Neil have done several segments for the national PBS series, The 90's.
Cheche Martinez and Colin Jessop collaborated on a program called "Sin Fronteras," about the Simpson- Rodino Immigration Act, with a San Diego municipal grant on The Satellite University Network's "The Browning of America". Cheche also made two programs in Mexico, "Lucha Libre: the Story of Super Barrio" and "Tiempo De Hibridos" featuring Guatemalan writer Rigoberto Menchu and former UCSD professor, Jean Franco. These programs were uplinked in a national series on the Deep Dish network. Colin has been working with the new low-power TV station, Channel 17, in San Diego. Cheche is working on a program about the Columbus quinticentenial from the point of view of the Cuna Indians of Panama. Footage from his work in the San Blas islands will be seen this spring on The 90's on PBS.
Quan Lelan is doing graduate work at USC and has won several awards for his filmmaking, including a special student award at the Asian American Film Festival, sponsored by Asian Cinevision.
There are several other UCSD students in the graduate film program at USC: Sonia Schenk, Paul Haddad, Steven Smith and Alan Starbuck.
While a student in Communication at UCSD, Yasuyo Kondo organized a screening of video art from Japan at the newly opened Ocean View Lounge. She has been doing similar work in Japan recently, organizing music and performance art performances for galleries and other art spaces.
Ana Perez is working at the Human Rights Office in Guatemala City. She is helping to investigate the killing of Myrna Mack, a researcher who was murdered by right wing terrorists. Mack was a close friend of Communication Department Professor Harley Shaiken and was a research associate of Beatriz Manz, Harley's wife. Ana's work is obviously quite dangerous, as there has already been one death associated with this investigation. She is putting some of the testimonies she is collecting on video for a documentary about Myrna's work to distribute in the U.S. and to human rights organizations world wide.
Jill Small, a Com/Gen 100 star e-mail participant, has been working in San Francisco with Global Communications with Eco Net: a computer mail/conference system that deals with ecological issues. This service has been important for non- profit organizations doing ecological activism, providing them with shared access to data about the environment.
Lisa Kemp, also a Com/Gen e-mail communicator, now works for PEN, the community electronic mail and bulletin board computer system for the city of Santa Monica. Terminals are placed in supermarkets, libraries, senior centers and a homeless shelter and citizens hold discussion amongst themselves and with the city council.
When the Gulf war broke out, anti-American sentiment enveloped the city, and news based on American standards and censorship was becoming internationally acceptable. I was struck by the fact that all basic rules of journalism were being broken in that an event was being covered by only one source without any information which would counteract this seemingly international propaganda. Because of my status as sole American with no access to American influence except the news, and with the media presenting the Untied States as totally pro-war, even a distantly accurate perspective on what was really happening was difficult to come by. I became quite anti- American, not only in relation to the war, but in my inability to align myself with any notions of "American-ness."
One day a stranger approached me in the grocery store. Apparently sensitive to my being an American, she informed me of an American documentary on the Gulf war. I found myself in a tiny art theatre on the outskirts of town where an American woman representing Paper Tiger television briefly introduced and then showed a video based on the anti-war movement in the U. S. It was overwhelming to see a video which represented a sector of the American population with which I could associate myself. Prior to viewing this video, I assumed Americans wholeheartedly supported the war and I felt somewhat lost, and separated from an identity that was supposed to fit.
In a sense, the video opened up a door that allowed me to see a side of the American consciousness I had previously been blind to. How strange to somehow regain American identity through viewing a low budget production based on media analysis in Lisbon, Portugal.
IMPORTANT NOTE HIP 175: has been replaced. The new course and number are: HIP 133: Language in Science and Technology (Agre) Section ID 150838 - TTh 11:30 - 12:50, WLH2115
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