MTAkonf entry
2007.01.20: Hungarian Communication Science Society conference at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. "Speakers address the new problems of media research, address the cultural perspectives of communication theory and assess the possible roles of new media." -- says the invitation. Most speakers struggled to find a relevant paradigm for the problem of media regulation, or at least to prove that their particular discipline is most suitable for it. The main conflict escalated between communication theory and media studies.
I cannot comment on the 60 minute opening speech by Aczél Petra ("The Death of Thinking is Science? Possible Challanges for Communication and Media Research") because I was participating in a very interesting sleeping session at the time. However, she was so professional that she distributed a several page print-out of the skeleton of the speech. Because paper documents are difficult to feed back into computers I promptly lost it but if somebody recovers me the document or its URL I will complete this log.
Rákai Orsolya ("Face-to-face -- is it too didactic? The Space and Possibilities of the 'Media Subject'") presented a perfect prologue for the conference: starting with Habermas (where we all did), she gave a review of its criticism, stating at the end that the concept of "public sphere" as a locus ratio has been severely compromised. On one hand, the border is blurred between public and private, the objective of the media machine penetrating into our private parts; while on the other hand additional powers such as the family and the church also wash our brains in their praying mills. Free market is as big a paradox as it ever was, and the Internet provides only the image of presence and the virtuality of action. "Interactivity is realised accoring to the medium's own laws." We are not as smart/rational as we were once (according to Habermas), not the least because we use machines to maintain discourse (according to the speaker).
Concluding, the speaker presented the audience with the dire depiction of the "dynamics of the ego and the agent": we watch television to inform ourselves about what happens and not to act upon the changes in our world. Therefore, the media cannot mobilise people even if the destiny of the Earth is at stake. The revolution will not be televised.
Audio log of the speech by Rákai Orsolya (MP3 64kbps/10.5MB mono):
Gálik Mihály ("The European level regulation of media concentration") gave an anti-law-history speech which detailed how in the last 40 years there has been NO European level regulation of media concentration (anti-trust regulation). The didactically well constructed speech left in the dark the exact names of actors and their proposals -- which will be revealed in the written version of the paper, but at least the audience was able to follow the long and complicated story. The Council of Europe deals with the question since 1976, for example, organising fora, issuing reports and research documents, drafting laws and making a fuss. The European Union is doing likewise, and in numerous cases they almost made a European level regulation. All in all the story is a dramatic one of a "zealous struggle", where politicians had to engage a single yet too powerful enemy: their own incompetence -- and they lost pitifully. The speech ended with the note that just yesterday the European Union declared again that it will make a European level regulation of media concentration -- "but seeing is believing." It was an admirable lecture in ungovernmentability -- my favourite topic! On the other hand, I was quite sorry that the speaker failed to address the structural causes of the impotency of (EU) politicians.
Audio log of the speech by Gálik Mihály (MP3 64kbps/9.6MB mono):
Polyák Gábor ("Regulating the diversity of digital media") was a non-descript research fellow with a non-descript Power Point Presentation. I have long thought that a PPP easily imposes a certain structure to a presentation which makes it overwhelmingly non-descript, and that non-descript people are especially prone to the fallacy. The speaker presented the main tools of regulation and their position in Hungarian law, but even that in a level of detail that reminds one of the secondary school. At the end the basics were set up but no message was articulated, so that the speech stayed an introduction without an argument.
Gagyi Ági ("On regulatedness") argued for a heteogeneous logic in the manner of Gibson: "We have no future because the present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moments's scenarios. Pattern Recognition". What follows from this is that "the very act of selecting a discipline has heuristic value." The objective is not to decide a priori about the relevance of this or that discipline but to find logics that are really there in actual everyday reality. Oftentimes these lgoics cut through the limits of disciplines, and even if we consider media a "subsystem of society" we build on the presupposition that it can be pulled out like a module of a computer and contemplated/manipulated on its own. Obviously the whole audience felt the power of cyberpunk imagery when the speaker explained how wires are hanging out of the sides of such a module, expressing the fact that it does not have a self-contained logic but can only be interpreted in context. Even if regulation requires such clear-cut borders when the wires are removed, science should not falter facing the challange of the wires.
There followed two example stories (called "anecdotical evidence" in social science), forming the middle part of the speech on the hungarian immigration office (as an example of conflict) and the romanian railway (as an example of harmonious operation). Both examples highlighted the primacy of practice over theory and especially local practices and local knowledge as opposed to the universal, reminding me of days past studying cultural anthropology and thinking that the "truth is out there" on the field and sociologists know nothing, but we have to walk out into the unknown armed with all the eclectic intellectual weaponry of science.
The application of these propositions to the specific topic of the conference -- media regulation -- followed: (a.) there is a wide-spread moral conviction in society that the representation of violence is bad; (b.) there is rather sound scientific evidence showing that the representation of violence is NOT bad; (c.) the latter two do not interfere with each other being part of different spheres; (d.) media regulation seeks to follow logic a. unheeding logic b. because of logic c.
Thus, in terms of the debate between communication theory vs. media theory: general conclusions can be but meta-conclusions about the logic of logics, while actual research should determine the most useful theoretical framework on a case-by-case basis. While starting the speech with extreme feebleness ("I will say nothing knew and you already know this anyway...") the speaker could soon grasp the interest of the audience by bringing discourse back down to earth and coming up on the other side with practical conlusions for theoretical work.
Audio log of the speech by Gagyi Ági (MP3 64kbps/6.2MB mono):
György Péter ("Via una: Communication and Media Theory in a Culture Historical Perspective") gave one of his characteristic speeched which bear the mark of a genius and display his self-proclaimed intellectual superiority. He gave an overview of ideas overlayed on the history of the twentieth century to arrive to his vision of "how things are". In the meantime he made all the effort to incorporate all the intellectual trends and buzzwords of the moment, notwithstanding YouTube. He also took as great care as usual to exercise his brand of intellectual fascism by quoting a few authors who were completely unkown to the target audience, just so that everybody knows his or her place. The most astounding feature of the speech was its elegant (post-)Hegelianism.
The turning point in the story was 1989, whereby "the political anthropological conditions of communication theory" collapsed, because "technical globalisation without universalism" triumphed on the planet while the "global communication and mediation technologies"
Audio log of the speech by György Péter (MP3 64kbps/7.3MB mono):
Molnár Csilla ("Time, being, speed in communication technologies") personified the stock-speaker of humanities conferences who seem to read a text produced by a dadaist machine on steroids which was fed the relevant literature. It seems that Big Blue can always win over Kasparov, that is any arena of scientific discourse, even the most prestigious, can be compromised by this code or infiltrated by these droids. Whereas I successfully exercised my low-level pattern recognition capabilities by recognising motives such as the repercussions of Heidegger's Being and Time, the idea of the history of reading and the escalating social impact of successive mediums in history, all along I was unable to cipher the trace of thougth by which any manner of conclusion could have been reached. I recommend performing a Voight-Kampff test.
Zsélyi Ferenc ("Communication or Mediation? The Unconscious Medialisation of the Arbitrarily Communicating Sign") performed a similar mumbo-jumbo, only with some more twists and turns. While the previous speaker conformed to the mainstream vocabulary in order to fit in, this speaker expressed rebel spirit by taking that conformity to the extreme. Therefore the audience could observe the sharp and fast contrast between unintentional naive dadaism and reflective cynical satire. Stylistically this speech could have been a deconstructionist one with all the pleasure of the text coupled with a deep-rooting destabilising argument, but it was not. Parody of the language of the discourse worked pretty well, sending the audience laughing every now and then, but only at a superficial level. Unfortunately there was a plain conclusion cloaked in the sophisticated garments of jest(ure): "communication theory is the meta-language of media theory".
By-and-larges, the speaker appeared to be a research monk -- using technicus termini (that is dead terms) as seriously as anybody in the middle ages -- who, outraged by the current state of affairs (cf. György's fresco of the apocalypse nows), could only give its minority report in the majority language dressed as court clown.
Blaskó Ágnes ("Universal Subculture -- Analysis of a Communicational Situation from a Media Theory Perspective") begun with the assertion that she is not willing to take sides in the battle between media and communication theory. Her speech focused on the "role of science in university which has changed function". The speech begun with an apocalyptic vision of science loosing its mainstream status and falling back to become a mere subculture. The very worst nightmare of the professor, but a sight which could be contemplated at a conference from the safety of the armchairs of the National Academy of Sciences, as Aristotle would assert. The teacher at a seminar is faced with an audience which is not (yet) part of the scientific subculture. As a ritual of initation they have to be taught the code and also convinced of its legitimity. However, that's merely possible. Reformist solutions as dropping the code in favour of an everyday language, or reproducing legitimity by using the code to manipulate hyped/cool topics give up an essential element of the scientific subculture and therefore fail to reproduce it. Therefore, in the final analysis the teacher comes across as "a pathetic looser (hackers would say lamer) fighting for its group (hackers would say crew)".
The speaker had this air of agressive masculine pragmatism with a twist of stylish-trendy feminimity which was almost shocking. As Gagyi Ági, she spoke of what she saw in her own life (as a university teacher) and drew the theoretical conclusions. The best of the new generation come to the conference room as action heroes, with the dirt of hands-on experience on their trousers (or skirts) and the streetwise of local practices in their heads. We have to cast the elders out of their shady ivory towers of theory to meet the bright light of reality.
(The speeches are in Order Of Appearance. Observation: luckily, it was no name dropping contest.)
