Editors' Diatribe: Access

-- So how are you enjoying Communication Studies?
-- Great, we get to watch TV for homework.

Like a scene out of some bad slice-of-life commercial, many Communications students find themselves repeating dialogue like this to their friends -- the ones in "real" fields of study. Or worse, we're not even allowed to disparage ourselves before disdainful peers or uncomprehending elders do it for us. For some reason, people just stop taking you seriously when you tell them you're writing your term paper on Bryan Adams...

Hardly surprising that the sphere of popular culture preoccupies students of the media, though; it's just so . . . accessible, from the television screens in our living rooms, to the sounds of radio that fill the commercial zones of the city, without forgetting that [insert director's name here] flick that everyone's talking about these days.

As pointed out in our panel discussion, though, access can mean a lot of different things. These days, it's a word that's on everyone's lips, from the media corporations lobbying the government to help them provide us all with more access (consumer choice), to various marginalised and grassroots groups trying to open up spaces of access into the media environment (participation). The accessibility of pop culture, then, is only one way of using that word; part of studying communications is thinking through what we mean by access, be it the access of viewers to services, the ability to comprehend complex semiological messages, or the specialized and expensive training and education required to operate media technology, to create experiences that "work". So if everyone's buzzing about access, it just points to how the here and now of the mid-1990s are part of a shifting media environment, where great opportunities and great dangers are perceived by all sides.

Watching TV for homework, or hanging out in the metro to figure out what all the muzak is for, is part of a project of bringing everyday life into the academic sphere -- connecting it to larger questions of access. In the pages that follow, Bram Abramson, Caroline Martel, and Tamu Townsend discuss how identities are articulated and contested through popular culture, whether in late-night infomercials, television miniseries, or black hairstyles. Yanick Létourneau, Philippa Klein, Nuria Enciso, and Eileen Stack take up this concern with identities, looking at representations of those traditionally denied access to image-making. And, from the other side of the screen, Jennifer Hollett explains how Oprah Winfrey gains access to the lives of her audience through a "parasocial" relationship.

Of course, issues of access extend beyond popular culture. Vincent Dow and Neil Kandalgaonkar map out some of the ways in which the onslaught of technology and its unfamiliar functions affect individual agency -- both imprisoning and empowering. This concern with the specialised techniques and technologies of communication is also reflected in Wendy Chadwick's exploration of where public relations ends and propaganda begins.

Implicit in all of this is a concern with communication as not simply an exchange of information, but as the process by which culture is produced. This means that access to media production and to media products is access to creating culture -- what's at stake is our full participation in society. As outlined by Marc Raboy of Université de Montréal in our round table discussion, this participation demands understanding "access" as more than either having access to 500 different channels or being granted access to 15 minutes of air time on one of them. "Access" also has to include the struggle over the process itself -- access to the places where the decisions about media are being made, be they corporate board rooms or government hearing rooms.

Students in Canada this year assembled in record numbers to protest budget cuts which, for better or for worse, fundamentally change the relationship they have to their government. Despite overwhelming numbers, virtually the entirety of Canadian mainstream media dismissed the protest as unsuccessful, or at worst a distasteful assembly of immature freeloaders. Here in Montreal, it was only some days after a local daily described an unprecedentedly large strike turnout as a one-paragraph traffic disturbance1, that it permitted a response by two Concordia student journalists onto their editorial page -- heavily edited.

As the above example underlines -- and contrary to what you may have heard on the radio -- access is not automatic for the people. Like access to communication, access to education is not an isolated issue; it is played out around us every day. We hope that this issue of Mediatribe contributes to opening up "access".

The Mediatribe collective 1994-95:
Bram Abramson
Neil Kandalgaonkar
Eileen Stack