# The corporate mass media.

# The corporate mass media. Until very recently, lots of campaigns relied on the commercial media to get their message across. Used to be, the main goal of many demonstrations was to get on TV or the front page of the local paper. Since news coverage is usually pretty superficial, the primary message that comes across is that so many people support or oppose a particular policy, but not much about the whys and wherefores. Likewise with the signs we carry on these occasions; they communicate our presence but little about our thinking, so it’s hard to tell what difference they make for passersby.

We get a little more leeway with letters to the editor, guest editorials, and the like. Especially with good columnists over time, big issues can be addressed with something like coherence. Where I live, the local daily paper kept insisting that one columnist lay off his criticisms of Halliburton and war and do more local color columns, until he quit. A local environmental organization also puts out a good paper several times a year. It’s not clear who reads it.

The internet offers much greater scope for us to tell our own stories. The question then becomes, who cares? As with any great art, we keep in mind who we are trying to reach and why-- not just just muttering to ourselves as if in a dream.


# The ‘net will set us free Dot.coms & their acolytes hail a new era of democracy, wherein chat rooms and ipods burst the chains of time and energy which shackle mass participation. Libertarian technophiles promise that the vast new access to information will lead us from bondage to Pharaoh Murdoch. And I love having so much information at my fingertips, not to mention the chance to contribute my own. If the invention of the printing press brought books to millions, indeed established a new mass reading public, the new media make it much easier for us write and talk and perform, a great benefit to people like me. And we've seen very dramatically in places like Iran how personal telecomm helps people coordinate political action.
The web also lets me immerse myself in self-serving justifications, fertilize my most delicious fears, and take refuge in an on-line enclave of people just like me. I can devote my political life to Swift boat smears, simulated scandal, and endless disinformation magically made credible by the internet echo chamber. For many users, surfing, networking and blogging become little more than gee-whiz ways to indulge the Reagan in all of us. We scan for lies and half-lies to confirm our prejudices, and cruise past any upsetting contradictions. Talk radio and the bloggers have gotten very good at handing us talking points, mantras to defend their points of view, but say little that would persuade the infidel. For some, the web is the electronic equivalent to road rage, a license to spew filth because we can’t really see the people it lands on. Far from revitalizing the public debate, these practices simply polarize us into intellectual ghettos, preaching to each other and past everyone else. World of Warcraft, pornography or the Aryan Brotherhood, we reach out our digital fingers to those who share and exalt our fantasies.

I suggest elsewhere that in taking a public position on issues we also take responsibility for our ideas, and may think them through better. I have to wonder, however, how much that argument applies to the newer media, giventhe carelessness or contempt with which some people publish personal information and opinions. Or maybe we'll see a different effect: maybe folks who have grown up wired will get used to remaking their on-line personas as easily as they change costumes in a role-playing game; and in similar fashion will be less wed to their political opinions than previous generations.

Sometimes internet discussions can become a kind of serial story, each participant considering and responding to what’s been said before. We develop our understanding and arguments in bits and pieces, borrowing ideas, reshaping them, and circulating them again for more feedback. I don’t know how this process might compare with dinner table debates with the brother-in-law or public hearings down at the town hall. The very ease of joining and dropping out of the electron stream suggests this medium cannot quite replace the implicit commitment folks bring to face-to-face dialogs among people who have long-term ties and face common problems.

Maybe we can get a lot of work done with more flexible arrangements. I wonder if 100,000 years ago people easily dropped in and out of foraging bands, or formed new ones, as their relationships changed with the people around them. Maybe loose digital communities will replace the neighborhood and workplace relationships that have been eroding anyway. The FaceBook Friend probably can’t babysit my kids or jumpstart my car on a January morning; can he help me deal with my boss or the local gangster?

Be nice to see more exchanges among folks with substantially different stories. Sites like happyfeminist occasionally crosspost to and from Christians and other contributors. But that’s hard work, and the people who do it express disappointment and frustration when they can’t convert their correspondents right away (just as we do in face-to-face encounters. The difference is, it’s a lot easier to disengage on-line than with our neighbors). I do see some new understandings emerge, as with the periodically revived interest of some Christians in dealing with structural problems of poverty and the environment. Does that come from exchange, electronic or otherwise, with liberally neighbors, or simply from sooner or later having to deal with the real world? Then there are the periodic fashions among liberals to adorn ourselves in flag pins or Jesus bumper stickers, not so new; and when it becomes the main way for us to imagine the lives of The Masses, rather condescending.

By far the most interesting thing I’ve seen is when telecomm acts as the stimulus, coordinator and recorder for lots of conversations in the community. The Obama administration proposed to gather by internet the results of many local discussions as inputs for health care reform, by I haven't seen that taking place.
If YouTube ushers in the millenium of democratic participation, I wouldn’t mind. I found the images from Iran in June 09 riveting, didn't you? (though they raised more questions than they answered.) I’ll be interested to see what becomes of this set of essays, as I self-publish on line. But I won’t hold my breath.



# Structured discussions in book clubs, classes, consciousness-raising circles, workshops, guided ecotourism, cultural tourism, good government forums, community planning meetings, support groups, oral history projects, participatory research and the like. Some of these may be sponsored by hierarchies such as government agencies, labor unions, churches, or universities which, first of all, will not tolerate challenges to their institutional interests, and whose leadership, second, may see themselves as defenders of the right and proper way of doing things in general: Let’s confine ourselves to the immediate issue, we have no mandate to explore the underlying structures, let’s follow proper procedure, don’t rile up the rank and file who can’t appreciate all the complexities, we have to be “practical”.

Other kinds of gatherings can be much more casual, structured only in the sense that a book or a common interest serves as a starting point for wide-ranging conversations, as political as people want them to be. Such groups have been a key element of the feminist movement. Aside from the absence of bosses, their helpful features include relatively small size and some continuity of membership, which allows for much more trust among the participants, and a common practice of weaving back and forth between personal and collective experience. I especially like the fact that it’s relatively easy to start and replicate such groups. The hard part is maintaining the groups over time, given what hard schedules people have. The ones I know of reinforce existing social networks; by the same token, they don’t easily gather folks from different sides of the class, gender and race walls.

A good part of my political experience comes from helping put together a series of weekend workshops about the environment, with people from a bunch of different organizations, large and small. Although every person attending was already engaged in political work, we as facilitators still had to work hard to establish trust and maintain a safe space for discussion. We did the standard things, including recruiting through previous participants, involving participants in planning and sometimes running the workshops, making sure there was a good mix, making sure everyone got a chance to speak without putting anyone on the spot, setting aside lots of time for personal sharing, following up with folks over time, sometimes for months and years. Even so, sometimes there were misunderstandings (or completely accurate understandings!) and hard feelings that interrupted learning.

When these discussions were successful, one unexpected result was that some participants recalled them as a kind of mystical confluence of learning and comradeship that could not occur in the course of their normal lives. Probably we staffers were not transparent enough about our preparations, but some people got the idea that political learning requires very special circumstances. Eventually we did hold some training the trainers sessions, to help participants foster discussions in their own neighborhoods, but they never spread as we would have liked. We could have been more systematic in asking participants to reflect on how the learning process in these sessions, so they could apply the same methods elsewhere.

# Casual conversation among friends and family, co-workers, neighbors. The distinguishing feature here is some minimal degree of trust and shared perspectives. Even so, there may be little basis or permission for political talk. Sometimes the trust is predicated on silence about political issues, including religion.

A while back I visited old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was easy to exchange signals that we all tended to vote for Democrats, or at least partnered with those who did. So we drank wine and had a polite conversation about electoral campaigns and politicians’ personalities. We all had abhorred whichever war was going on at the time. But we carefully stayed away from any of the economic issues that might have divided us.

These kind of conversations can deepen our prior understandings, add details and complexity to the stories we already have. Frykholm talks about how Tim LaHaye’s very popular and evidently much-discussed religious fantasies of the Left Behind series “provide the foundation and opportunity for readers to consider and discuss ideas and beliefs that otherwise may have remained latent” (5). And that’s an important function, even for people who are not right-wing authoritarians.

But I don’t think we can rely on spontaneous conversations around the kitchen table to tackle controversies or challenge conventional wisdom without deliberate, concerted effort.