The Communication Station

Taylor Bouchard's storage unit for academic quotes pertaining to global media.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

The distinctiveness of symbolic violence lies precisely in the fact that it assumes, of those who submit to it, an attitude which challenges the usual dichotomy of freedom and constraint…a symbolic violence which is not aware of what it is can only be exerted on a person predisposed in his or her habitus to feel it, whereas others will ignore it” (Topper 176-177).

Topper, Keith Lewis. The Disorder of Political Inquiry. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

The term 'glocalisation' is a combination of 'globalisation' and 'localisation'. It refers to the interface of the global and the local, the conflation of cultural homogenisation and heterogenisation and the hybridity of both universalising and particularising trends.While globalisation, in and of itself, emphasises the universality of business or cultural processes globally, glocalisation highlights the importance of particularism of an international product, idea or service (69).

Matusitz, Jonathan, and Pam Payano. “The Bollywood in Indian and American Perceptions A Comparative Analysis.” Research Gate. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

The anonymity proper to crowds make it difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate individuals by precise social categories. Clothing sometimes indicates the social origins of people, but with the exception of beggars, it is difficult to identify class on the basis of looks alone. The sense one gets from moving in and through crowds is of a relentless and indeterminable mixing of social groups. This pervasive sense of social mixing  contrasts sharply with the class-based and linguistic hierarchies that govern political structures and social relations in middle -class homes, schools, churches, and other urban spaces. One becomes part of the crowd only by having one's social identity obscured. Estranged, one becomes like everyone else. Social hierarchy certainly does not disappear on the streets. But like the police who are barely visible, appearing mostly to collect payoffs (tong or lagay) from jeepney drivers and sidewalk vendors, hierarchy feels more arbitrary, its hold loosened by the anonymous sway of the crowd (414). [...] The power of the crowd thus comes across in its capacity to overwhelm the physical constraints of urban planning and to blur social distinctions by provoking a sense of estrangement. Its authority rests on an ability to promote restlessness and movement, thereby undermining pressure from state technocrats, church authorities, and corporate interests to regulate and contain such movements. In this sense, the crowd is a sort of medium, if by that word one means a way of gathering and transforming elements, objects, people, and things. As such, the crowd is also a site for the articulation of fantasies and the circulation of messages. It is in the sense that we might think of the crowd as not merely an effect of  technological devices, but as a kind of technology itself. It calls  incessantly and we find ourselves compelled to respond to it. As a technology, the crowd represents more than a potential instrument of production or an exploitable surplus for the formation for the formation of social order. It also delineates the form and content of a technic of engaging the world. The insistent and recurring proximity of anonymous others creates a current of expectation, of something that might arrive, of events that might happen. As a site of potential happenings, it is a kind of place for the generation of the unknown and the unexpected. Centralized urban planning and technologies of policing seek to routinize the sense of contingency generated by crowding. But in cities where planning chronically fails, the routine sometimes gives way to the epochal. At such moments, the crowd takes on a kind of telecommunicative power, sending messages into the distances while bringing distances up close. Enmeshed in a crowd, one feels the potential for reaching across social, spatial. and temporal divides (415).

Vicent, L. Rafael. “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.” Public Culture 15.3 (2003): 399-425 Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Aside from TV and Radio, another communications medium was given credit for spurring the coup: the cell phone. Nearly all the accounts of People Power II available to us come from middle-class writers or by the way of a middle-class-controlled media with strong nationalist sentiments. And nearly all point to the crucial importance of the cell phone in the rapid mobilization of demonstrators (401). [...] "The phone is our weapon now," we hear from an unemployed construction worker quoted in a newspaper article. A college student in Manila testified that "the power of our cell phones and computers were among the things which lit the fuse which set off the second uprising, or People Power Revolution II." And a newspaper columnist advised "would-be foot-soldiers in any future revolution" that "as long as our cell phone is not on low battery, you are in the groove, in a fighting mood." A technological thing was thus idealized as an agent of change, invested with power to bring forth new forms of sociality (402).

Vicente L. Rafael. "The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines." Public Culture 15.3 (2003): 399-425. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

“We have our French state. And we will age our French country, a country that will carry its soul on its face” (Foran 37). [...] "The cry for reform had begun. The courage of one player had inspired his people" (Foran 38).

Foran, Charles. Maurice Richard. Toronto: Penguin Group (Canada), 2011. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

“We laced our skates like Maurice Richard, we taped our sticks like Maurice Richard. We cut all his pictures out of the papers. Truly, we knew everything about him (78).

Carrier, Roch. “The Hockey Sweater.” Toronto: Anansi, 1979. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

In Northern Nigeria, the instability of everyday life has been sublimated into the quite different melodramatic arena of romantic love. Love is a profoundly individual emotion but unsettling, potentially excessive, overwhelming people's judgement and sometimes involving them in actions against their will. It is the sight of key tensions between individual desire and respect for a social order in which marriages are expected to be arranged, and where individual desire runs up against the ideal of obedience to parents and to the social order (195). [...] But in the case of love, at least in contemporary Northern Nigeria, these imaginative investments produce shifts in gender relations and practices of courtship and marriage. At their heart is real social change, manifest most starkly in the movement away from arranged marriages in urban areas and toward a far greater choice for youths in marriage partners, and a greater reluctance of parents to force their choices onto unwilling partners (208).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Cinema provides a visual experience difficult to reproduce on a video screen and a social space of interaction impossible to recreate in a domestic arena [...] Cinema in Nigeria is an event produced by the encounter of social subjects with specific architecture of film distribution and exhibition in Nigeria and the technological ordering of projector, screen, and seating that occurs there. While the standard structure of cinema in the United States and Europe creates a model that is sometimes explicitly copied (and at other times explicitly avoided), one cannot presume the universality of cinema and must instead interrogate this constant tension between standardization and local difference. Even the audiences attending cinema have a relationship to film as a visual medium and cinema as a social institution that emerges from a long training specific to colonial and post-colonial history of a Muslim society. The immaterial experience of cinema emerges from this encounter (167).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

[erkjhnsn]

What is less discussed (but see Schivelbusch 1986; and Virilio 2003) is how technology influences through its failure as much as its success. The inability of technologies to perform the functions they were assigned must be subject to the same critical scrutiny as their achievements. Breakdown and failure are, of course, inherent in all technologies, but in societies such as Nigeria, where collapse is a common state of technological existence, they take on a far greater material and political presence (see Mbembe and Roitman 1995; Verrips and Meyer 2001; and Koolhaas 2001).      Rather than elide pirate infrastructure by using it as a window into legal questions of intellectual property, I wish to foreground it. If infrastructures represent attempts to order, regulate, and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their operation, or the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures, highlight the failure of that ordering and the recoding that takes its place. When we scrutinize the material operation of piracy and its social consequences, it becomes clear that pirate infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory perception, time, space, and economic networks. … But Virilio (2003) also notes that with the invention of the first train came the derailment, and few thinkers have been as insistent as he that the development of technology is tied to the development of catastrophe. My interest in technological collapse is somewhat different, not in extravagant spectacles like collapsing bridges or exploding space shuttles but in the small, ubiquitous experience of breakdown as a condition of technological existence. For Nigerians, cars, televisions, VCRs, buses, and motorbikes are often out of service. Even when they work electricity supplies are unreliable and prone to surges that damage consumer equipment. NEPA, the Nigerian Electric Power Authority, is famously known as ‘Never Expect Power Always,’ and phone lines are expensive and difficult to obtain. … A cycle of breakdown, repair, and breakdown again is the condition of existence for many technologies in Nigeria. …      The poor condition of infrastructure and the ubiquity of breakdown bright about their corollary: repair as a cultural mode of existence for technology. This is a consequence of both poverty and innovation. Breakdown and repair structure the ability of subjects to use and be used by technologies. The culture of repair rests on the experience of duration in the everyday use of technology. Breakdown creates a temporal experience that has less to do with dizzying, real-time global integration than with waiting for e-mail messages to open, machines to be repaired, or electricity to be restored. In Nigeria, all technologies are variously subject to the constant cycle of breakdown and repair; the promise of technological prosthesis is thwarted by the common experience of technological collapse. Each repair enforces another waiting period, an often frustrating experience of duration brought about by the technology of speed itself. The experience of slowness comes as a consequence of speed-producing technologies, so that speed and acceleration, deceleration and stasis are relative, continually shifting states. … In Nigeria, the infrastructure for media, especially pirate media, is often marked by disrepair and noise. …      The infrastructure of reproduction, like most contemporary infrastructure in Nigeria, is marked by cheapness, faulty operation, and constant repair. 'All data flows,’ the media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1999: 14) reminds us, 'must pass through the bottleneck of the signifier,’ and in doing so they are vulnerable to being 'engulfed by the noise of the real.’ The 'real’ here is precisely the fuzziness of cinematic images or the hissing of tape recorders—the noise produced by the medium of transmission itself as it encodes and disseminates data. … For Nigerians, the costs of consuming and producing world media require operating on the margins of technology. Distortion on an audio tape, dropouts on a video, and a slow connection to the Internet are the material conditions of existence for media. While media infrastructure creates the reality of being ever more connected to a globalized world, it does so by emphasizing Nigerians’ marginalization at the same time. Electricity blackouts, snowy television images, difficulty getting international phone lines, and distorted loudspeakers on cassette players all create a technological veil of semiotic distortion for Nigerians.      Some of this distortion is taken for granted, rendered invisible to people by its ubiquity. It is clear, for instance, that many of the most popular transnational media forms, such as sports (especially wrestling), action films, and Indian films, are highly visual and thus capable of overcoming both linguistic differences and the audio degradation that makes words hard to hear even when languages are well understood. But this degradation is rarely commented on. Instead, what these films evoke is the fantasy of other countries where deficiencies in infrastructure are believed not to exist. For many Northern Nigerians, Saudi Arabia is a place where electricity always flows, where roads have no potholes, and where hospitals are of the highest quality—just as everyone in Europe and America is thought to own televisions and mobile phones. These fantasies represent implicit and sometimes explicit critiques of the failures of the Nigerian state to provide basic infrastructures for everyday life. The breakdown of infrastructure provides a conduit for critiques of the state and of the corruption and ethnic favoritism of political elites (Verrips and Meyer 2001). …      The infrastructure of reproduction created by piracy generates material and sensorial effects on both media and their consumers. Cheap tape recorders, old televisions, videos that are the copy of a copy of a copy, so that the image is permanently blurred, the sound resolutely opaque—these are the material distortions endemic to the reproduction of media goods in situations of poverty and illegality, and they shape the ways these media take on cultural value and act on individuals and groups. The dialectic of technological breakdown and repair imposes its own cultural experience of modernity, an alternate speeding up and stasis, and a world where gaps in space and time are continually being annihilated and reinforced.

Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 219, 234, 235, 235–36, 236, 238–39, 239, 241. (via erkjhnsn)

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Indian films have been key in training the Hausa sexes in how to relate to each other. Novelists like Sani Bashir often argue that they play a key social function  in revealing to parents the negative consequences of arranged marriage. They share the aim of "enlightening the entire youth" Bashir argued, as well as "most of our parents regarding forced marriages and early marriages to make them understand the rights of the youth and the rights of their children. Indeed it could be argued that the shifts in marriage practice away from full parental control to allowing children a right to refuse an arranged spouse have come as a result of the influence of Indian film in Hausa culture (166).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Cinema stands both inside and outside the moral boundaries of Hausa society, a marginal space that transgresses orthodox norms yet strangely becomes a site where these norms can be intensified. It reminds us that Muslim societies like Northern Nigeria are variegated and made up of different interests. The place of cinema in Hausa life, and the practice of going to the cinema that this chapter is concerned with, draws out these contradictions (149). [...] Cinema can only be marked by excess, by ts immoral aura, in comparison with the moral spaces of home and mosque, bureaucratic spaces of work and government, and educational places of school and university. Each of these is invested with its own atmosphere, hosting and producing the sorts of subjects who inhabit those areas (152).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Noise is still communicative, however, as unintelligibility does carry in it a promise. Its very distortion enacts the colonial ideal of progress by suggesting that while the signal is incoherent now, the future of individuals and of society as a whole is comprehension. The RDS signal in this sense is not pure noise; rather it is yet to be understood language, addressing contemporary native subjects as future colonial citizens (53).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Media technologies are more than transmitters of content, they represent cultural ambitions, political machineries, modes of leisure, relations between technology and the body, and, in certain ways, the economy and spirit of an age. Yet at the same time, media such as television, cassettes and cinema provide the infrastructure to facilitate and direct transitional flows of cultural goods and the modes of affect, desire, fantasy, and devotion these goods provoke (2).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

Like the railroad, cinema transports people to places they have not experienced before. Like cinema, the railroad creates new perceptual experiences, the paradox of moving while remaining still. But this takes on a whole new dimension in the colonial context, where the link between cinema and railroad is mediated through the logic of rule (75).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.