PANEL DISCUSSION

Beyond Buzzwords:
Ensuring access in a shifting media environment

Bram Abramson (Mediatribe): Good afternoon, and welcome to the Mediatribe 1995 panel discussion on media access and institutional sites for change. What we want to look at is especially the roles of different institutions and organisations in creating a space for media access, because as much as we might all talk about the importance of access to the media, it is only through institutions and institutional structures that this can happen. The question, then, is how different institutions interact in the "changing media environment", and how people can get involved in those institutions and in creating access. Shawn Yerxa and Marc Raboy will each give a short presentation which followed by a discussion period "free-for-all".

Shawn Yerxa: And I hope that through the discussion, we'll get to talk about some of the specific initiatives and things that I've been involved in, rather than dwell on that in the few minutes I'm going to talk. I wanted to present a project, the way that I see it and the way that my studies and my work have converged.

So I've entitled this "Beyond Buzzwords: Re-appropriation and Democratization".I want very much to thank Mediatribe and Bram for inviting me to participate in this event. I am particularly thankful that this event is happening. This, and events like it, which seem to be appearing with greater frequency, are essential steps in the project at the heart of this discussion, a project which I will address.

I am directly involved with two organizations which are working for change, CRITICAL and P-IHAC. CRITICAL, the full name of which is Students for Socially Responsible Communication Study, is an organization which grew out of the actions of a group of students in the University of Ottawa's Department of Communication. Their concern, and mine, is that their education was being unduly limited by overlooking critical approaches to communication study. We are working to change the department both internally and they way it relates to the community outside the university. CRITICAL has since expanded its scope to consider establishing a centre for critical communication study which would serve as a resource and research centre for students and social activists.

P-IHAC, or The Public Information Highway Advisory Council, was established, by myself and Marita Moll of the Canadian Teachers' Federation, in response to what we felt was the almost total absence of public voice in the policy debates surrounding the information highway. We work primarily through the Internet and the National Capital FreeNet to raise awareness, in both the computer mediated medium and the popular media, of the issues at stake. We also try to intervene in the formal process wherever possible.

I do not want to dwell on these organizations, or the work they do, as I expect that much of that will come out in our discussion to follow.

What I am going to do instead, given this opportunity to speak, is relate how my experiences working with these organizations and my school work have intertwined. The story is an easy and short one to tell because it is a story which we are all familiar with. It is a story we live everyday. This is the story of a society which, in many ways has gone off the rails. A society in which public goods are exploited for corporate/private profit. A society where initiatives are discussed only in terms of vacant assumptions inherent in the language of exchange values, commodity values, and rational economic actors, the language of neo-classical economics.

More explicitly, this society, ours, offers incentives to corporations while increasing our direct costs in education, books, and food. Our society reduces taxes on cigarettes at the direct expense of human life. Our society promotes competitionand economic rationalization as routes to efficiency and innovation. If offers these at the expense of our access to information, our privacy, our jobs, and the continued de-skilling and alienation of our labour. We all know the story. What may not be so clear is where this is taking us.

Sut Jhally spoke at CRITICAL's symposium in Ottawa last fall. The talk Jhally delivered was entitled "Commercial culture, collective values, and the future of the species." Jhally finds these concepts inextricably linked, and I concur. Jhally considers the justification for the Gulf War, made explicit in the early run up to it, as symbolic of where we are headed. That War was justified by the need to protect a lifestyle. Granted the U.S. government changed the message after a short while, but the initial justification was the protection of the `American Way of Life.' Perhaps we should pause and consider that. The exchange of lives for a way of life. How long will it be before we turn this same barbaric behaviour against ourselves? How high do the crime rates have to get? How many starving people? How many homeless people frozen to the sidewalk? Before we complete this return to social Darwinism and all the horrors that concept entails?

How can I suggest we will allow it to go that far? Aside from taking a look around our inner cities and realizing that it may indeed be here now, I offer two reasons. First, we have been there before. Hitler's polices, in the context of their time and place and to a large enough degree, were considered reasonable and accepted. They were accepted then in much the same way that the neo-liberal fantasies of our day are. Perhaps this time, instead of Jews, the target will be displaced Africans, the homeless, the hungry, and any other dispossessed group who force into the light the fundamental flaws in the global-information-economic fantasies sweeping the land.

Secondly, these policies are being sold, in much the same way, using many of the same techniques, as Coca-Cola and beer. That is to suggest they are being sold very effectively. Central to this sales job are buzzwords. More precisely, these buzzwords are "euphemisms" and "doublespeak". These represent ambiguous terms, relying on myths, which garner our attention, hint at a ring of truth, yet provide no concreteness. These buzzwords allow the manipulation of our ideas, particularly effective today where people's attention is short and we are driven by the stress of our day to day lives.

When government talks about an information highway in an information economy, what are they really talking about? Whoever gets to define these terms shapes the impact they will have on our lives.

Let me give you an example, competition. If we listen to the news we could easily believe that the recent discovery of competition was equivalent of the second coming. Competition promises us, according to the federal government and right wing `objective' academics, jobs, innovation, and a dynamic and productive economy; to name just a few of the claims.

Now, let me suggest that this is the same competition which gave us among the most concentrated media ownership in the world. The same competition which provides us with commodities with prices inflated by our value-adding economy, such as in the case of a GM car for which thirty percent of the price is attributed to marketing and advertising. This is the same phenomenon which provides for monopoly capitalism, where innovative companies are simply bought by massive multi-nationals.

Does this kind of competition sound like a great plan for our economy? Perhaps not. Perhaps we should consider it beyond the simplistic assertions of the right, beyond its impact as a buzzword.

So, what can we do about it? I see several necessary steps. I will mention each step but I will address only the latter one at length. First, we have to engage our community. We have to challenge mindless repetition and dogma wherever and whenever we hear it. This first step is vital, difficult, and should not be understated; change starts with you and I.

Secondly, we have to reassert our principles and morals. Fairness, justice, free speech, co-operation, and democracy are just a few examples of commonly held personal values which we have to demand in our public sphere. By building public space based on these values we must also take the good with the bad. What I mean by that is that along with an open society come bad ideas, obscenity, and discrimination. We can best engage these challenges in public, where they can be exposed for what they really are.

Thirdly, and this is where our role as communication students brings us special attention, we have to take back the media and our language; back to buzzwords, but first a caution.

This focus on the buzzwords, or euphemisms, of neo-liberalism, while important, should not detract from the reality of their origins or impacts. Public policies such as these, and the language they hide within, are the result of the exercise of real power and have very real implications for our daily lives. What such a focus does provide is a central point, given the centrality of communication to social existence, for intervention in our role as students of communication. As Vaclav Havel suggests "to be wary of words and the horrors that might slumber inconspicuously within them, isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?"

We can work with the intellectual tools we have and the resources the university provides us with to change our reality, a reality constructed under the guise of buzzwords. We can use our research to add a counter weight to the positivist corporate research which is increasingly finding a place in the university. We can provide policy analysis to organizations starved for resources. We can help those organizations gain access to media by preparing material in the consumable format journalists need it in. By opening the doors of university media, the most accepting we have, to outside organizations. We can use the media to define the metaphors in human and socially responsible ways. If nothing else we keep those with other goals on the run trying to create and sell new euphemisms.

Most importantly, and most generally, we can engage the political process and demand change. To build communities of dissent in isolation only allows the buzzword manufacturers, also trained here in the communication departments of our universities, to have their way with the public. In other words, we cannot reject the process as unfair and unrepresentative, which it is, we have to engage it and demand change from both inside it and out.

Our project then is one of building bridges, facilitating, and de-bunking. We can work to build the necessary bridges between the social movements working for change and the university, thereby helping to provide both research and access to media. We can facilitate the construction of appropriate metaphors with which policy issues are debated and sold. We can de-bunk the neo-liberal myths, the rhetoric of technological determinism and economic determinism, and restore a human face to the political process in this country.

This is a role which we as communication students, familiar with these concepts, and the horrors which slumber within the euphemisms, are particularly well placed for.

Why take up this role? Because we bear a great responsibility to take action. We owe that responsibility to a society which, however in question today at one time, understood the importance of funding intellectual labour and held the expectation of a return on investment. That return is overdue and its time to start providing the dividends.

Ours then, is a project about engaging our public discourse and taking back our language. Re-appropriating it and democratizing it.

Thank you.

BA: Thank you, Shawn. Professor Raboy?

Marc Raboy: Thank you. When I spoke with Bram earlier, he asked me to focus on the role of the academic both within and outside the university environment, in intervening in media and communications issues. I was very happy to accept this invitation because that's a subject that's very close to my heart -- in fact, it's very much with a view towards doing that kind of political work that I became an academic in the first place, after having gone through two careers as a journalist and a so-called community organizer. (laughter)

But the way I found that I could be most effective and at the same time get some personal satisfaction -- and also, not parenthetically, earn a living -- was to get involved in the university. That is to say, in the late 70s, I went back to school relatively late in life for what I thought was one year, doing a master's degree in communications, and here I am -- so one thing led to another. I consider it a great privilege to be in the position I am: basically, they pay me to do what I enjoy doing, and I feel that I am occasionally effective in one way or another. I find it easy to write about things I've been thinking about, and I get a certain amount of feedback which indicates to me that it has some kind of impact out there -- not only within the university, but outside the university as well.

But what I really want to talk about is the other things that I do, and which I think are of the type that other people who are involved in the university The Institut canadien d'éducation des adultes was originally a spinoff of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, and so I wasn't kidding when I said there is no translation as such, because there are actually two main national adult education organizations in Canada. One of them is the Canadian Association for Adult Education and the other is the Insitut canadien pour l'education des adultes, and they have basically divided the territory linguistically between themselves, so you don't often hear very much about the CAAE in Quebec, while the ICEA, although its main orientation is Quebec, has a pan-Canadian orientation with regard to the various francophone communities outside Quebec, for which it is a very important organization.

Historically, the adult education movement in Canada has been extremely involved in communication activity. If you know something about the history of Canadian broadcasting -- if the name of the Canadian Radio League, later the Canadian Broadcasting League, means anything to you -- people like Graham Spry and so on who are very much closely associated with the origins of public broadcasting in Canada and broadcasting generally were very close to the adult education movement. There are people in the adult education movement who are extremely involved, going back to the 1920s and 1930s, in the creation and development of Canadian broadcasting. The famous CBC radio forum programs, first the Farm Forum and then the Citizens' Forum in the 1940s and 1950s, were initially a project of the adult education movement, which proposed it to the CBC and which was very much involved in the ongoing development and operation of those programs. That was in an era when it was much more possible than today for community organizations to be involved in programming and in what actually went on the air.

Well. In the late 1940s, a number of people in Quebec, feeling the need for an autonomous francophone perspective on communications and to address communication issues with that perspective, created the Insitut canadien d'éducation des adultes, and among the original leaders of this organization were people like Claude Ryan and Pierre Juneau, and others of that generation and ilk. And, beginning in the 1950s, the ICEA was one of the first organizations in Quebec to get seriously involved in research on television, and in intervention in policy debates. I believe the first brief they submitted goes back to the Fowler Royal Commission on Broadcasting in the 1950s. In the 1960s, going along with the general thrust of Quebec politics at the time, the organization redefined itself and appropriated a lot of the activist energies of the surrounding milieu -- notably labour unions, the emerging groupes populaire, community organizations. And to this day, these organizations are very involved in the the ICEA.

The institute itself is a non-profit association which survives off of essentially federal and a bit of provincial funding. In terms of the spheres of acitivity in which the association's involved, there is, obviously, adult education in a formal sense, and there's also éducation populaire, which is whatever comes out of the community in the way of education projects. Then there's communication, which is a distinct area under the umbrella of the Institute and which is justified by the belief that increasingly, communication and mass media are where people are getting information that corresponds to a definition of education -- particularly, non-formal education, something that used to be called adult education. So Les médias: une école insoupçonnée was the title of a document that the Institute published about 25 years ago, and which laid out a perspective of media as an institution of lifelong education. The various activities that the communication branch of the Institute gets involved in have that thrust and deal with the democratization of media and communication, improving access to media and communication, and placing a value on the social and cultural aspects and importance of media, ultimately putting forward the notion that media as social institutions are central to the exercise of citizenship in a democratic society.

But policy intervention is certainly the activity that takes the most energy, and there is a Groupe de travail which meets regularly; out of about 20 to 25 people you will find three or four academics like myself; the union federations, the CEQ, the CSN, the FTQ come and go; unions specifically involved in communications workers, people working at Radio-Quebec and Radio-Canada -- occasionally some of the private sector unions, the Fédération professionel des journalistes du Québec, but more often the journalists' unions who come in through the CSN, the techinicans from Videotron, who handle the cable community channel, among other things, are actively involved. Then there's another level of community media organizations, like AMARC (World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters), and ARCQ (Assocation des radios communautaires du Québec), Vidéo Tiers-Monde, and Vidéazimut, which are the local and international video organizations, are involved. And then there is another level of participants, community organizations or political organizations which do not exclusively focus on media, like the Ligue des droits et libertés, Federation national des consommateurs et consommatrices du Quebec, and Évaluation-médias. We meet around a table like this, and it's a fantastic resource as to what is going on and other work that is being done. So at one level it serves as an exchange of information, and then at another level we work on very specific dossiers.

Lina Trudel, as an employee of ICEA, has been coordinating our group since the 1970s, doing all the writing, and does a fantastic job of synthesizing the information that people bring to the table. If you look at the number of times that ICEA briefs are actually cited in task force reports like Caplan-Sauvageau or in CRTC decisions here and there or are in read into Hansard, usually by opposition MPs (laughter) when they're trying to make a point.

There's certainly an effect there. When I have studied the policy process I can see a definite impact that groups such as this have on actual policy outcomes. Now the problem is when official policy comes to be translated into concrete programs and concrete measures there tends to be a gap, or sort of a blockage. And that I think is a political problem that we have to deal with as a society. I mean if you look a the broadcasting act of 1991, there are some things in there about community broadcasting, about opportunities for women and ethnic groups and native people and so on. Well, where is it in the actual institutions? As I said, that's another hurdle. But certainly in the formal texts of the legislation there were things in there which were not there originally, and which the industrial organizations and their lobbies did not want to see in there, and which got in there anyway, because people persisted, and because they were able to mobilize a certain force. As an academic, I think I have a responsibility to be involved in things like this.

Have I used any buzzwords? And which ones? I'm not sure, but I made a note here before I came, about access, as being a buzzword, and a particularly, an appropriate one in the context of current debates around information superhighways and other things. It's also very interesting, and I've been surprised as to what extent that word is turning up in the literature, and in policy debates in very unlikely places. In the last year or two, I've been to conferences where the word access is actually in the title, in very far-flung parts of the world. It's a term that used to be associated with marginal types of media, intervention, community media and so on; I mean, access provisions are usually seen as ways of making of for the shortcomings of mainstream media systems. But increasingly, we're finding that word in the mainstream of policy debate. Access to new services, new infrastructures, is an essential element of the policy discourse. And I think that's something that can be very positively used by people who want ot demand certain types of services, certain types of access to the center of the system -- not only to pockets which aren't profitable for businesses to go into.

One of the things I insist on when I look at the term of access is that it has to be looked at at multiple levels. I mean, you have multiple levels of access to the means of communciation: in other words, everyone should have the right to speak. You also have a notion of access as being able to receive everything that is available, on an equitable basis. Those are two very different approaches, and especially when you see industrial groups talking about access, they're usually only talking about one or the other, depending on where they're coming from and where they're getting their bread and butter. But when you talk about the two together, then it becomes a very complicated policy issue. And it's certainly necessary to talk about the two together in order to put forward policy positions which have a social and cultural as opposed to an industrial and economic basis. The third aspect of access, then, is access to the process itself -- access to the places where the decisions about media are being taken. And of course, that's something that is implicit in the Canadian tradition of public consultations, and so on, but it's not something that is mentioned in a very explicit way.

And so in the next round, or in the ongoing round of CRTC hearings on the changes to be made in the regulatory framework vis-à-vis the convergence of cable and telecom and so on, there's going to be a crucial debate around the redefinition of the notion of access. Because at the present time, the Broadcast Act says one thing and the Telecommunications Act says another, and they're not talking about the same thing. And whatever shape the so-called information superhighway's going to take, the question of access is going to be absolutely critical. This definition is very much up in the air because there are so many different economic interests at play, and they're in competition with each other to see who eats who and who disappears and who becomes the king of the castle. Given this context, I think, normally disempowered or relatively disempowered people are in a position to put something on the table with a reasonable expectation that if their interest coincides with one of the competing economic interests there can be a certain synergy there, and a certain at least strategic or tacit alliance emerges. What often happens when there are competing economic interests is that the political decision-makers look for something that they can use to legitimate the decision that they're going to take in favor of one or the other economic interest. So it's an interesting time to be doing the kinds of things that Shawn is doing, that are being done through ICEA and many of the consituent groups.

But this isn't the only thing that one can do as an academic. The way in which we do research, for example, while being rigorous and conforming to all the institutional criteria, can also be done in a way that it is an intervention, and can be useful and meaningful -- you never know where it's going to end up and who's going to be able to use it. Another area that I mentioned very very briefly in passing is that of media education, which is extremely critical: at one level we develop a very specialized expertise in the way we look at media and decode the message and analyze institutions, but there are millions and millions of people in the surrounding society who aren't going to go towards developing that kind of expertise, but who are subjected to media in their daily lives. Anything that we can do in terms of raising people's consciousness about what actually goes into making a television program or who owns the press and so on, but in a grassroots way, but is a very useful kind of intervention. It can be fashionable sometimes to just dismiss everything that goes on in mainstream media, but the people working in mainstream media institutions often have the same kinds of goals and are often there because they have some kind of social conscience as well. And the struggles that they get involved in through their professional associations, their unions and so on, are worth looking at and solidarizing with (if that's a word) when the opportunity presents itself.

Of course, the other area that I want to mention is everything in the area of alternative media, whether it be in the form of a student publication, or people who unfortunately weren't here today on the panel, anything we can do to make it easier for people to appropriate a bit of media space, to take things into their own hands, to develop their own means of communication is obviously a fantastic thing. So let me stop there.

Question (Denis Paraskevas): You talked about appropriating media space, and often we hear about criticism against the media. But many professors tell us this, that media is an industry, as a car manufacturer does cars, so it wouldn't occur to me to go appropriate cars. So how do you justify the right that a minority has to appropriate media space if we consider that media is an industry?

MR: To me, media is the same as the health care system or the education system. At one point, I remember when we used to have to pay to go to the doctor, and then somebody came along with the ridiculous idea that there should be a socialized health care system in Canada and a lot of people said `but this is ridiculous!' So it really depends where you're starting from and how you conceive it. In Canada, legally, I mean it's right there in article three of the broadcasting act, the Canadian broacasting system is an public service, essential for bla bla bla bla bla bla! And then, you have a whole list of other things that follow. Even when Ted Rogers goes to the CRTC and says `I want to buy MacLean-Hunter', he has to somehow structure that demand to make it appear to be in the public interest.

Now at the other end, it's equally legitimate for anybody to go to their local MP or the CRTC or wherever and say `we need this kind of representation in the media and we're not getting it.' So I think it actually is quite easy to politically legitimate the demand. Now what makes it a reasonable demand or a demand that somebody's going to want to listen to, feel that they need to listen to? That's another question.

I would come back to what you said earlier, when you said in order to achieve what -- why do all this? Well, we have to be very careful here. I take a long view. I'm living in a society with a certain kind of political culture. And personally, I see a lot of weaknesses to the political culture, a lot of shortcomings to my society, and I think that media can be a critical institution over a long period of time, really changing the political culture, which I think is the kind of change that's necessary if we really want to change society. It's really a very difficult and long-term process. Because when you come right down to it, most people are looking to be entertained, and titillated, and amused by their media system and so, if I go up, and say we need more of these very kind of earnest things on television. So fine. We'll have one channel out of the 500 for earnest people. And that really won't change anything. So this is why it's necessary to have a certain subtlety in the approach and really focus on the mainstream of the system.

When you talk about access to the whole wide range of production, a lot of cultural production doesn't circulate for all kinds of structural reasons. So the question of the spectator being able to decode messages, to help the spectator -- that's not really the issue. Of course, any intelligent person can make their own meaning, but they have to have access to the messages in the first place. And if they don't have access to it because it's not offered, or it's being offered at a price that they can't afford, or for any of the other structual reasons that prevent the actual products from reaching its market ... the problem is when you say that media is an industry, and how are we going to make it, to rationalize it as an industry; then you have to look in terms of large aggregate markets, and you have to look in terms of what is going to be profitable, what is going to be commercially viable, and so on. And that closes doors.

Of course, most people don't think about this, ever. Because media, although it's such a great part of everybody's daily life, is not at the center of people's lives as an object that they have to deal with. There is a whole struggle at that level in terms of political education and mobilization, for people to feel that they have a right to say something about this! We saw that with the revolt against Rogers, and the negative billing, and the cable fees. And everybody was so shocked and stunned, what's happening here? All of a sudden, these consumers suddenly began to act as an organized public.

SY: With the launch of CNN, the national network broadcasters reduced their amount of news coverage. Fine, we can see this as part of shifting markets in advertising -- less demand here, increase there -- except when you realize that there is only 60% penetration of cable in the U.S. If you think of news as being essential to public participation -- sure, there are a whole bunch of things we have to accept to make that point -- then only 60% of the population has access to the central news form for their country. And meanwhile, news is going downhill steadily. We get A Current Affair, and so on. What's replacing news on the networks? Here's this 40% of the population that's being excluded, slowly, from our political discourse. Telephone access -- we talk about universal access, how close those numbers come -- 98, 99% in the U.S. Both these numbers come from Vincent Mosco's recent work. In the U.S., 40% of Hispanic and Black communities don't have telephones.

MR: I think there are two issues here. One issue is globalization. You have something like CNN, that type of specialized, highly centralized, widely diffused service. At a certain point you're going to run into the problem that you don't have any kind of access to it. Unless something really spectacular happens in your community, it's never going to be on CNN. So you may get a very interesting, or at some level, global news service, which is giving you a certain view of the three top stories in the world today. Or if happens to be today, it would be the one top story, about a trial in Los Angeles, for example. And it maybe a lot of fun, even informative, to watch it. But you're certainly not going to have any kind of knowledge of what's happening in your community or what's happening next door to you. That's the problem you run into when it no longer becomes economic to provide a local, or a regional, or at some point even a national service. Right? And the other problem is of getting things onto marginal channels rather than mainstream channels. If we're going to continue having generalist channels, like CTV and CBC, and ABC and NBC and so on, they're going to be looking for content. They're going to be looking for product. And I think the suppliers of that product, there's room for horizontal expansion and growth. I think there's room for people to make videos and so on, and try to market them.

Question (Neil Kandalgaonkar): I was just watching the parliamentary channel, and there was this industry conference on communication. Someone from the phone company was talking about how they want to provide television over a phone line, it's technically possible. So his point of view, coming from a telephone company, was why do we have to have centralized production houses to create all this content? His idea was that subscribers would provide the content. You could provide your own block television station if that's what you really wanted, or something that serviced other communities. I mean, he talked about it quite seriously as a way for him to make money, and not as a radical theorist or a democratic reformer of communications.

SY: Clearly, we look at Europe, in the last ten years, I think they've actually been ahead of us in terms of fragmentation of markets as a result of multiplicity of channels. Through print, cable came on late there so it changed the market at the same time that they had DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) come on, and production values went down. All kinds of advertising prices went down, there was this incredible upheaval, and in the process, all kinds of people got access. What would have been alternative programming was being picked up. I think there's going to be all kinds of space, heaps and heaps more, much more so in North America.

But, there's also going to be the traditional media consumer. As one my professors was saying, "I want my gatekeepers!". People are going to maintain the big network-style services, the prepackaged, they want to have it handed to them. At the same time, there's a lot of space being created.

There's an interesting analogy with the Freenet in Ottawa. Are people interested in using it for community communication? Or are they interested in using it to access, as the media would have us believe, porn in Iowa? And both are happening. People are using it to get to the net to do whatever they want, but there is a substantial amount of community discussion. We have a special discussion group around the Ottawa Citizen, we all give him, disparage the Citizen, and the editorial page editor is constantly monitoring it and trying to defend himself. The city council is there, and so for one exclusive group of people that are willing to communicate, it seems to be there to some extent. It certainly facilitated my engaging in the political process, in the CRTC. For example, I met the people I'm involved with through the Freenet, we saw a project, and went to work.

The counterbalancing concern is, how severe will the fragmentation be? It could form around subjects and topics and ideas, ideologies, who knows -- rather than community-based, geographical. It's an exciting time for me to be a communications student, because things are just wide open from a sociological perspective, where things are going.

Question (Jakob Bakan): Isn't there the possibility that to pretty well choose your community provides you with an excellent way to ignore the people around you? I can sit my office, and I can deal with people on some stupid list, all over the world, and not talk to the people I live with, and not pay attention to homeless people, not take any concern with that community. I read this somewhere, something about how community used to be about dealing with the people that you don't want to deal with.

SY: That tension, we celebrate it, because we think about marginalized communities, gay community, or people -- what an empowering thing to suddenly be able to talk to a whole bunch of people who say `yeah, me too, I'm glad you're here'. My response is that my communication forced me out, off the medium into my community.

Question (Jakob Bakan): But that's a rare exception. In the United States particularly, in the inner cities, people actually live with each other and deal with each other -- these inner cities are left as wastelands. While you have these networks of people that communicate by telephone, automobile, fly all over the place, and can criss-cross all these other places and it really doesn't matter that much where they live -- it makes a convenient way in which they can leave what we used to think of as the real public sphere.

BA: That's an interesting feature of what, Professor Raboy, you have talked about,1 this whole globalization of the economy, and we've been talking about the information-rich ever since the MacBride Report2, and they no longer have to deal with their local communities. So not only these so-called communities of interest but also classes of interest.

MR: That's right. The notion of community is changing. That's one of the impacts of technology. We can't bemoan it, that it's changing, we have to look at what, and there are positive and negative aspects to the change. What I think is important that everyone has at least a fair chance to appropriate and make use of the change that suits their needs and desires and so on. In some parts in the world, it's been a real boon for people to come into contact through the Internet with other people in other parts of the world. There are countries where it's easier to get access to a computer than a Xerox machine. So people could never do something like this (pointing to stack of Mediatribes). But they can put their message out to the net. And then there's the whole question of who controls points of access to the machine, is another issue. And it often becomes a very highly politicized issue in a lot of places, and that's something that we have to deal with as well.

Question (Denis Paraskevas): Once again, this is computer technology, not television as we know it today. The Ubi project is going to installed this year, transactional television, so I think that the concept of broadcasting and mass consumption has changed.

MR: With Ubi they've created this vast human laboratory in Chicoutimi where they're giving this thing to 35 000 homes and they say "Tell us what do you want to do with this". The point is that we have all this fantastic technological capacity looking for uses. And part of the issue is who's going to be the first to the post with the use, who is going to be the Bill Gates of the next technological revolution, and to what extent are people going to have access to these things and at what cost. Nobody expected the Internet to take the direction that it did, because if they had expected it, it would have been cut off a lot earlier. So I tend to be a bit skeptical, even cynical about some of these things. We know about technological change after it has arrived, and when people, real actual living breathing human beings, find a use for something that's there. And as far as I know, it's never been the use that we were told at the beginning. And we have a whole wonderful history of this in Canada: Telidon, and Alex, and all kinds of tremendous flops of technologies looking for a social use.

BA: Of course the point is not a social use -- it's not there to give us information, it's not there for a certain social purpose as much as it's there for selling advertising, and making more money.

MR: Ubi is a very interesting case right now because the use that are kind of emerging, that appear to be the most plausible, are not very profit-intensive. For example, distance education: that's not a very profitable area for Videotron -- but they use that, that's important in their policy pitch, that's the purpose. So there are all these uses, but are people really going to want to do their shopping, are they going to buy their theatre tickets, they're going to do their banking, are people going to want to do all these things? That's not so clear because people still do like to go out of the house sometimes, you know.

SY: Somebody already made explicit here, the linkage between mass consumption and mass production. And this whole information highway -- myth, I call it -- is constructed to replace the lost Cold War justification for policy and spending and so forth. Because you've got no use for it. And it's not new, the electronic highway was named in 1971, when Infoworld was produced by the telecommision. Consumers aren't demanding these things, because they haven't even identified the uses. So where's the motivation? You've got somebody over here saying "We need new ways to market stuff! We need new media, we need. . ."

Question (Amir Hassanpour): I think one important thing in connection with access is the counter-access trend of surveillance and censorship. Much conceptualization is necessary here, because with the new technologies, we have global surveillance, something that no government, no superpower could ever think of. I mean, this 17th-18th century notion that the government is the locus of censorship and propaganda is outdated, in media studies. Now the power of the market to censor and form monopolies of knowledge far exceeds that of the government. Although we should always be very much concerned about the government.

BA: And of course we can measure that power they have to collect and survey, just by looking in our mailbox every day, which has become quite full with junk mail, addressed to us.

SY: Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable to collect, collate, and sell a CD-ROM with, I think they're up to 158 million U.S. homes. Individual consumer profiles. And they're heading for every home. The only ones who are not there are the people without credit cards, without bank cards, all the tracking device. Every time you use it, that piece of information goes, that number goes, that piece of information goes.

BA: I want to ask, thought, about the people who do have access, and people who are gaining access right now -- and those are the people that are being trained in communications departments, and who are being trained in and outside communications departments to work for information and database companies and in the various media. What kind of role can they play? Professor Raboy, you talked about media workers sitting down at the table with ICEA. And Shawn, you're in a department where people are learning, and jobs are why I presume most of them are there.

SY: Professor Raboy pointed out that the potential receptivity that's there in media workers. People who share the same set of ideas and principles, but might work within a set of institutional constraints. CRITICAL's actually done a lot of local press, because they try to bring pressure from the outside world to bear on the university. They've had trouble with the mainstream media, but the alternative media's really responded. And if we get a nice, digestible news release, written like a corporate news release, written from our perspective, we can get it to print.

BA: Talk the talk, walk the walk.

MR: The main thing, obviously, is that at some point you come out of a communications department and you're on the job market. Just about anywhere you're likely to work in communications, you're going to have some opportunity to move things forward in some respect. Of course there is a whole communications industry that is very business-oriented, and if that's where your orientation is, then all power to you in that area. But if you're looking towards either the public sector, or the policy sector, or what I call the third sector of non-commercial organizations, there's a whole range of organizations which hire people to do their institutional public relations. The whole area of organizational communication is coming up.

SY: Labor is a big spender in communication.

MR: So try to choose your niche selectively to the extent that you have that leeway, because often you just have to take what is on offer. But, hopefully, when people come out of communication departments, they'll have some opportunity to apply some of the more analytical things they've acquired over the years. And that's what it's all about ultimately.

2 UNESCO International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, Many Voices One World. Commission chairman was Sean MacBride. (London: Kogan Page, 1980)