Category FAQs Search : Sustainable Community
Question: Sustainable Community Media: The Challenge of Upholding the Public Trust
Answer: ‘We mortals,’ argues John Durham Peters (2000: 271), ‘really love only personally, and yet not to love all people is unjust’. Peters is grappling with the constraints (and nature) of ‘authentic’ communication across time and space, the impossible demands we make of communication to
foster communion, empathy, and dialogue. Similarly, Freire (2004) notes a paradox in the quest for liberatory pedagogy, that ‘whereas faith in humankind is an a priori requirement for dialogue, trust is established in dialogue’ (91) and argues that humanism must be grounded in ‘the concrete, existential, present situation of real people’ (93). That call – for humanism, for materiality, for the particular – is one that runs against the dominant neoliberal capitalist impulse, which tends rather to fragment and abstract, as publics are turned into audiences, and thence to consumers and (in Smythe’s (1977) formulation) audience commodities. That tension between the particular and the general undergirds a recurrent preoccupation of political economists of media, that of the subsumption of human communication to the demands of capitalism. James Carey (1997: 73) goes so far as to claim that ‘the entire history of modern communications is the turning of the resources not only of information but of meaning itself into a phenomenon of the market.’
(Source: Pustaka Negeri Sarawak, 12 Jun 2021)
Source Link: http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/33154/1/1177-4434-1-PB.pdf