Professor Hayden often asks the question ‘what happens to people when…?’ I feel like this is the best way to start any question. The question explores cause and effect relationships, and then we attempt to apply these relationships to reality by looking at history and our present day actions and interactions. Two things caught my attention in the reading. I would like to take these two concepts, and assuming that both are correct, see the process towards affecting people.
This segment is on communication flow and how people within their societies can be transformed. This does not exactly produce any answers, but I would like to pose a few questions in the interest of…I want to change the way you think about affecting people. Perhaps the discussion is a little more philosophical than one might expect, and maybe some might find it too simplistic, but otherwise my goal had been met by posing the questions anyway, and that goal is to affect people.
SO, first of all, how important is affecting people? How important is changing the way people think? How important is changing the way people act? How important is changing the way people communicate with each other? How important is changing the way people look at each other and themselves? There are no real answers to these questions, it’s mostly a matter of opinion; however, I want to emphasize the role of communication in all of these answers. When you have decided this for yourself, then I believe that communication will become even more important in your lives, because then you will have a communication goal in mind.
And how does communication travel? Claude Henri de Saint Simon likens the flow of blood to the heart and throughout the body to “communication routes (roads, canals and railways)” (Thussu 40). This is one of the earlier explanations for communication transmittance, and I believe one of the most important because it actually uses a physical system to compare a semi-abstract concept; one can visualize communication traveling on roads and railways in the same manner that blood flows in veins and arteries. Carey looks at communication transportation in a similar manner, and realizes that information flow could be used to control people. “Communication was view as a process and a technology that would…spread, transmit, and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and information farther and faster with the goal of controlling more people” (Carey 17). (This is pretty exciting to me—the idea that people can be manipulated through something so simple as language…and super-villains are constantly thinking of magic potions!)
Take the concept of information transmittance, and transfer it over to modernization theory.
The theory of modernization contends that “international communication is the key to the process of modernization and development for the Third World” (Thussu, 42). Using the mass media, the west (or the Global North) would help transform traditional societies (the Global south and/or NICs). D. Lerner theorized, using people in the Middle East as a model, that “media helped the process of transition from a ‘traditional’ to a ‘modernized state’, characterizing the mass media as a ‘mobility multiplier’… forcing [individuals] to reassess their traditional way of life. (Thussu 45)” The mass flow of information into an individual, disrupting their senses and beliefs in order to transplant new ideas is another interesting concept. While I do not believe that they are correct in assuming that Western ideals are modern, and vice-versa, it is important to look at the method itself. Let’s say that this IS how to modernize a country or a group, you can pump information into them like an IV, letting it flow like blood into their hearts and minds, and you can actually change what they think and how they feel. In the interest of modernization, we could look to the New Modernization Theory, as written by Inglehart and Wetzel, whose third pillar of New Modernization is that Modernization is not Westernization. This idea allows people to be modern, but still keep a majority of their customs.
That is, as opposed to getting a complete blood transfusion from donors with different blood types, the body receives some new blood from the same blood type, and their blood is passed through a blood filter and reintroduced.
Jessica F
No comments:
Post a Comment