I consider here the dual erasure now under way in media studies: one has to do with the non-Atlantic world, non-English productions, and non-cosmopolitan worlds, which were strangely relevant in a bi-polar world but have become oddly marginal in a fragmented, multi-polar world. The other erasure is of those subjects once thought to be central to media and communication studies: propaganda, advertising, news, and such fundamental problems as “communication” itself. I suggest that these two erasures are
connected.
“Miscommunication” is one of these zombie topics which has been buried under such phenomena as fake news, opinion bots, social media personae, and the like. The lack of interest in miscommunication is tied to the decreasing interest in communication, especially among media theorists. This is a symptom of the growing gap between media studies and communication studies.
Communication studies was a field born in the crucible of the Cold War, when scholars based in the United States agreed that the war against communism had to have a significant “soft” component, consisting of the international cultural export of American cultural forms and messages through such vehicles as The Voice of America and the United States Information Service, and by building the institutions of journalism, opinion-building and press freedom in the new nations of the global South. Thus, the lines between propaganda and communication were significantly blurred in the sixties and seventies of the last century, though in the United States it was a central article of faith that “we” practiced communication and “they” practiced propaganda, both internally and externally. A topic such as advertising was regarded as a benign form of propaganda, since it served the interests of both democracy and capitalism.
Communication studies also had significant links in the United States to linguistics and to the general interest in language as the prime human means of communication. Thus, for example, the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania had a strong group of scholars, including Dell Hymes, Steven Feld, Ray Birdwhistell, and Erving Goffman, who worked on linguistic forms and practices during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Media studies was not a really well-established form in this period, when it
was confined to such Canadian scholars as Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, and their acolytes in the United States.
Miscommunication was a crucial topic in these decades, of interest to students of electoral campaigns, of truth in advertising, and of the relationship between generations, genders and ethnic groups. It was seen as the dark and revealing side of communication, and as a problem to be overcome by clarity, sincerity and conviction. Starting in the 1990’s, media studies emerged as the Trojan in the communications horse, and a whole field began to emerge around such topics as codes, systems, interfaces, screens, grids, networks and algorithms. There is an obvious genealogy for this development in the cybernetic interests of the 1950’s and the renewed interest in science, technology and infrastructure among humanists, especially in the United States, since the 1990’s. Since this time, English literature scholars, tired of studying cinema, fashion, and colonialism, have turned their attention to media, through such
inventions as the digital humanities. Philosophy was soon to follow, with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Badiou recruited to the study of video-games, sonic archives and photography. All of a sudden media studies became a high-end humanities field, in direct dialogue with the hard sciences, and with no further need of the fogeys of an older social science, abandoned to studies of propaganda, advertising and yes, communication.
This is the short story of what happened to miscommunication as a topic of interest after the 1980’s. But for it to become a dead topic, one other shoe had to drop and that too is a result of the digital revolution. This second shoe is the birth of the fake as the main currency of news, social media and politics. The victory of fakeness in the public sphere is enabled by the anonymity of digital media as well as its prolixity, but it also thrives in the atmosphere of post-truth as an epistemic regime. In this new world, fakes operate simultaneously with their others, the stage props of which the real is built. In this sense the documentary fiction and the fictional fact support and propagate one another synchronically. In the pre-digital world there was necessarily a temporal gap between original and fake, thing and image, event and report. In the digital era, that gap has vanished in a world of simultaneity. Communication and
miscommunication require this temporal gap, and with its disappearance, these topics have themselves vanished, leaving behind the favored objects of media studies, since the algorithmic world is about patterns, networks and signals which come vanishingly close to eliminating duration altogether. The world of post-truth is thus not relativistic, cynical or opportunistic. It is a world which has lost interest in both communication and miscommunication, since both these phenomena rely on the temporality of impression, digestion, reaction and response. When this sequencing is lost to digital simultaneity, what remains are an endless network of impressions, opinions, postures and framings, that are no longer susceptible to the diachrony of natural communication. Post-truth regimes are built on the logic of pure synchrony.
For this reason, in the dominant spaces of media theory, history has become the history of devices, society has become mere connectivity, tools have become apps, and the person has become the profile. This state of affairs is a disciplinary illusion, which does not reflect or engage the lives of ninety per cent of mankind, which lives in a world of bodily risk, morbidity, suffering by exclusion, and ruthless stigmatization on the grounds of race, caste, citizenship and gender. Theirs is a world in which communication and miscommunication still count, but the discipline media studies remains libidinally attached to high technology, theory-induced vertigo, and disciplinary myopia. Its world thrives in the zones north of injustice and west of communication.
August 11, 2020
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