Martin HenryWHEN THE Gleaner went on-line and the e-mails started coming in from the four corners of the earth, I was forced to realise that as a columnist I was engaged in a different ball game. I was speaking to the world, not just Jamaica. And a highly informed, critical world was speaking back with unprecedented rapidity.
As I write, the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication's (CARIMAC) 25th anniversary symposium on "Interests, Values and Identity: Caribbean Community in the Digital Era" is under way (October 17 & 18). The Institute, in the face of the changing forms and functions of media, has changed its name from Caribbean Institute of Mass Communications and has introduced new courses on digital, computer-based communication.
First day deliberations of the symposium returned to old themes long debated by CARIMAC and regional media without resolution but brought some fresh insights to the table.
CARIMAC and the UWI at large have always spoken of their roles in terms of the development of the region. Principal of Mona, Kenneth Hall, spoke of the presence of CARIMAC graduates in every media organisation around the region. Graduates in the media, Dr. Hall asserted, provide a daily evaluation of the Institute. My naughty question is: if the UWI and its various sub-agencies claim such vital developmental roles, what are their responsibilities for the glaring areas of under-development of the region which everyone agrees is not realising its full potential? Is under-development purely in spite of, or partly because of? Don't shoot! Just asking.
A revamped Radio Mona is going commercial, backed by an initial $6 million of UWI funding, the Principal announced. The renewed station has big objectives to reach "underserved audiences" with developmental, quality programming. Can I hope that the station will become a forum for reflection on and analysis of the kinds of "foolish" (but important) questions that renegades like me are asking about Caribbean culture and development, Caribbean media and development, and the ideological and institutional impediments in the way.
Commercial media is notoriously non-introspective. Introspection may indeed be detrimental to viability in an environment of ratings war and stiff competition for advertising dollars which are the lifeblood of media. One panellist, to the general amusement of people in the business, is proposing to set up an NGO community radio station not beholden to the interests of sponsors!
The German Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation, which has been financially assisting CARIMAC from the inception of the Institute in 1974, says its objective is to support independent media for freedom and pluralism in the Caribbean. The matter of how much pluralism a society can stand while remaining cohesive, self-reproducing and productive stands in need of urgent examination, and is one of my personal concerns about the destination of information-driven globalisation. Surely there is a distinct possibility that the literal digitisation of culture and society may just as well lead to fragmentation and insularity as to a single global village.
Long-serving Director of CARIMAC, Prof. Aggrey Brown, wants to involve graduates in the work of the Institute "at the intellectual level". Prof. is calling for suggestions. I have a few: The guest lecturer from professional experience is one option. Regular public lectures on media issues by graduates hosted by CARIMAC and packaged for the whole region is another. Action research papers published in a new CARIMAC journal for the purpose is yet another possibility.
Maintaining an active network of graduates for mutual support and exchange is a useful function that CARIMAC could perform as broker. The new Radio Mona provides a channel for first ideas and issues broadcasts by graduates which could then possibly be syndicated to other media outlets around the region.
The Caribbean is everlastingly proud of its diasporic sons and daughters: Colin Powell, Derek Walcott, John Barnes -- and Stuart Hall, one of the world's leading scholars of Culture and Media to whose work an entire issue of a media journal was dedicated in 1986 with over 100 selected works listed. Professor Stuart Hall was keynote speaker.
From a wide-ranging address which grew in intensity, I pick up only a few points:
The deterritorialisation of culture and the growing significance of the virtual world in cyberspace.
IT as the nervous system of the new world.
The porous boundaries of nation-states and their reduced significance under the pressures of globalisation.
The three attitudes towards globalisation: the Hyperglobalisers who feel that globalisation is unstoppable fate; the Traditionalists who feel that modern globalisation is the continuation of a trend running over centuries; and the Transformationalist (of whom Stuart Hall is one) who can't predict what outcomes will be from a "deeply contradictory phenomenon for which there is no map in hand".
The incomplete nationalist projects of Caribbean States are now largely irrelevant, but Caribbean Governments are largely illiterate about globalisation. Another useful theme for UWI, CARIMAC, Radio Mona, and the regional TV station which Ken Gordon, the T&T media magnate, proposed.
Globalisation allows access in but also access out, putting, for example, Bob Marley's Trench Town on the world map. There is a fragmentation of the public sphere and a fracturing of consensus on a national agenda.
Some sharp, but inconclusive, discussion followed on the public interest and its defence by the media between Government and Big Business. The historically multi-cultured, multi-lingual Caribbean must be craftier and smarter and indigenise inflowing cultural material, Hall concluded. My own view is that the Caribbean is one of those few major cosmopolitan cross-roads in the history of the world, like the ancient Middle East linking Asia, Europe and Africa; and Caribbean culture, whatever it is, can only properly be understood in these terms.
The violent, King Canute-like opposition to "cultural imperialism" of the 70's, which still survives in subtler forms today, belies the historical economic and cultural engagement of the region with North and South America and with the continents of the Old World. In particular, the English-speaking, Protestant Caribbean shares a soul-kinship with the United States which is as long and as deep as anything within the Caribbean itself and is not nearly as lopsided to US advantage as so widely proposed.
We have long forgotten, for example, that one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence was Nevis-born and coloured, and that the Jamaican Assembly supported the Revolution, warning Britain that Jamaica too would rebel if her grievances were not addressed by the colonial authorities.
First-day panel discussions ran on "Interests" and "Values" in Caribbean media. To do justice to them requires another column.
Martin Henry is a
communications consultant.
