Tuesday 3 November 2020

Caribbean Media Discourses. Various Voices - Conflicting Agendas

UWI, November 2, 2020

Introduction

Now that you have an idea of who I am. I think it would be important to understand who I am not. I am not an academic. My lifetime of reading and exploring has never explicitly focused on cultural linguistics as a discrete discipline to apply to the Caribbean or West Indian condition.

Even as a media practitioner – and I am first and foremost a journalist, a reporter – I have spent little time purporting to study in any depth, media linguistics and dynamics as being culturally significant.

Instead, as a reporter of some vintage, I am offering some questions in the hope they  elicit responses and answers that, point at least minimally in the direction of likely outcomes and resolutions.

This evening has however not found me in completely unfamiliar terrain. For I have always been concerned with the notion of media effects and impacts, especially when it comes to journalistic content – to the extent that journalism occupies much (but not all) of mass media content.

Yet, I would not say I am a media researcher – someone whose job it is to apply science and reason to the increasingly amorphous world of mass communication. Indeed, I would suggest that in this region, there is much too much official and even industry decision and policymaking based on conjecture and jaundiced intuition than on scientific enquiry.

All I can therefore offer is the perspective of someone interested in the Caribbean cultural aesthetic and the establishment of a framework guided by conditions that conduce toward more rather than less free expression. Someone who is concerned that finding our way in the world, with all our pre-existing conditions, is as much interested in understanding the world that resides within us.

The late, great Prof. Rex Nettleford also advised us eleven and a half years ago, that “self-empowerment”, (if we are to consider it the injunction of our time as elegantly described recently by PM Mia Mottley of Barbados) “comes with the capability to make definitions about self on one’s own terms and to be able to proceed to action on the basis of such definitions.”

I would add that such definitions are increasingly being expressed in languages and modes of expression other than what we consider to be our own. I also cannot offer much hope by way of research methods or methodologies for analysing postmodern texts and discourse.

So, be clear. What is being presented is more of a personal narrative on the questions posed for exploration today, with some concerns and suggestions of my own.

Answering the Questions, Raising Others

The framing of today’s given subject impels us to come to terms with some important preoccupations. The first has to do with the assertion of “media discourses” being the subject of some kind of ethnogeographic capture, especially within the problematic context of a modern communication environment now characterised by essential timelessness, spacelessness and borderlessness.

Another has to do with the unchallenged assertion of a diversity of voices describing a shared reality, within which space discrete aspirations for attention and power are being contested and are capable of being expressed as “conflicting agendas”.

This is not to signal the invalidity of the terms, but simply to point to the intractable nature of the challenge before us. For me, it has always been a problematic area to engage the linear nature or causal impact of so-called “media discourses” and its accompanying languages on the distribution and/or mediating of conflict and power.

Such a suggestion evokes highly-contestable imperatives dictated by a notion of the agenda-setting capabilities of traditional mass media – an environment now subject to pervasive, new, digital realities.

Indeed, since Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw presented such a proposition to the world of communication theory 48 years ago, it has been widely embraced as offering an understanding of how mass communication is capable of not necessarily influencing what people think about the things around them, but what, in the first place, people think about – to quote Bernard Cohen who predated these two researchers by another 10 years.

I have read and encountered enough to suggest that the digital era seriously challenges the already highly contestable assertions of McCombs and Shaw, and all who came before – offering instead a case for the examination of multi-dimensional impacts of relatively uninterrupted, but technologically mediated sources of expression-based causation and correlation.

Of course I face the possibility of a charge of gross oversimplification, but so do the numerous public policy interventions, based on such assumptions, many of which have led to derogations of free expression and the formulation of what is rather casually described as media and cultural policy. In instances when I hear the language of such policy there is a mistaken sense that official intervention is somehow required to rescue facets of expression, through the suppression of others. In other words, that censorship is somehow perversely capable of facilitating freedom of indigenous expression.

This comes to the fore each time I hear the hue and cry for legislated content quotas on broadcasts, comprising both a restraint on trade and outright censorship through coerced omission.

There is also the realisation, at least by some of us, that Caribbean people need no prompting from other interests to acknowledge the non-binary nature of our cultural habits and behaviours. This in turn challenges the belief in a single community characterised by binaristic values. This leads to discomfort with everything from Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter, the latter signifying recognition of a cohesive, yet exclusionary political stream of its own.

Some of this greatly challenges but helps us understand the dissonances occasioned by efforts to develop the idea of an integrated single market and single economy within the Caribbean Community – as distinct from confederal trade and economic alliances. Who or what is this “single” anything?

The Report of the West Indian Commission of 1994 contended with the issue in some depth by locating what it described as the region’s “genesis, development and general character … determined by common cultural responses to a variety of shared experiences.”

Such experiences included “aboriginal decimation”, the “institution of slavery”, “the crucible of plantation life” and “colonialism which deepened the sense of economic and political powerlessness even while it reinforced the inheritance of struggle against injustice and the yearning after self-determination.” But is it really that simple? Are there indeed ‘common cultural responses’? Won’t that depend on who is the “we” in our investigation?

The Current Challenges

I would suggest that an exercise of the West Indian Commission variety in 2020 would require an almost complete reassembling of the framework for revisiting the cultural dimensions of Caribbean development. It would render these signposts virtually invisible in the face of a new universe.

Who is this “we” to begin with? Successive work on the subject, including the consultations of the West Indian Commission raised the issue of “which Caribbean”. Who is being referred to when it comes to a cohesive rescue mission for the space we (that problematic word again) occupy? This suggests that what I am hinting at is not new in its origins, neither has it gone unrecognised.

The emergence of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), for example, signified an attempt to engage the challenge through recognition of countries “washed by the Caribbean Sea” – despite the Atlantic embrace of countries such as Suriname and Guyana, together with El Salvador which has a single coastline washed by the Pacific Ocean.

Only Friday, The UWI and ACS signed an MoU, described by Vice-Chancellor Prof. Hilary Beckles as reflective of the manner in which the university is “resolute in its agenda to decolonise the structures inherited from history.”

“Only the integration of our Caribbean world can fully unleash the potential of our people. It is our mutual intention to advance the process of regional cooperation and consciousness.”

This, together with other developing scenarios linked to an ages-old desire to deepen further South-South economic relations, come together to both challenge and in a sense help re-define a notion of “identity” – as if capturing a picture of “identity” can serve as some kind of easy transit to a so-called “common agenda”, as the theme for this discussion proposes.

I believe we have moved beyond CLR James’s binary formulation which had been based on the suggestion that the Commonwealth Caribbean, expressed as the West Indies, together with Haiti and the insular Spanish-speaking countries, is somehow adequately framed as a single socio-cultural space, through ethnic configuration, colonial history, and other such antecedents.

Yes, I believe we ought now to dare contest the philosophical basis upon which the regional cohesion that gave rise to the construction of longstanding institutional structures has sat for many years. It may well be that they ought to endure but with an aspiration to better take into account the condition of the constituents whose identities, even so, are yet to be precisely recognised.

There is also yet cause to challenge Stuart Hall’s decades’ old conclusions that follow what he describes in his famous essay on “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” as “an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and representation.”

Even he conceded that “the ‘I’ who writes here (meaning him) must also be thought of as, itself, ‘enunciated’. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’ and ‘positioned.’

“If the paper (Cultural Identity and Diaspora) seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement,” Prof. Hall conceded, “it is worth remembering that all discourse is ‘placed’, and the heart has its reasons.”

In yet another context, through St-Hilaire’s “state of (linguistic) flux” owing to Saint Lucia’s attainment of national sovereignty and the forces of globalisation, there are objective and subjective conditions that qualify conclusions related to what he describes as the ‘I’ and the ‘We’.

A lot more is now correspondingly known about how mass media and the language of media, within the traditional meaning of the value of legacy platforms, have adapted in accordance with changing situational and cultural contexts both at the meso and macro levels.

What roles do our various creoles (French and English based) play in the public media arena? How accepted are they?

I am not certain to what degree this is being studied and discussed in our region, because it lies at the heart of understanding what is emerging as discourse generated by mass media output in the Caribbean. St-Hilaire is useful in this respect, but we need perhaps to go further and deeper.

Even traditional legacy media are confused; crisscrossing form and content between and among digital platforms in contestation with informal and formal sources trading in a mass of fact, opinion, creative output, information, disinformation and outright trash.

In finding research methodologies to better understand all these phenomena, there might well be measurable attributes to be found in the code-mixing and code switching of modern cross and intra-cultural communication especially when you consider it to be mediated by technology platforms that are not by themselves neutral to the messaging process.

There is now quite some focus on the global GAFAM operators – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft – with respect to their roles both as commercial enterprises and as purveyors of mass communication signals and messages descriptive and prescriptive of realities we have not had the chance to contemplate as countries outside of the dominant cultural fold.

As I’ve suggested, all of this is concerned with matters of form and content, products and processes. Additionally, and to an increasing degree, communicative practices - as elaborately discussed by Martin Luginbuhl in his recent paper on ‘Mediality and Culturality’ - are not only blurring the lines between individual and mass communication but in a sense challenging definitions of what indeed constitutes the “medium.”

At a functional level, media regulators and professional communicators have been similarly challenged by this dynamic. Who or what is the “publisher” in an age of convergent media where the tools are critical to the processing of communicative signs and signals?

The question is thus being asked in some quarters among people concerned with researching and understanding such matters: what indeed is the medium? Is it, asks Luginbuhl, “the technical apparatus that gives material shape to the transmitted signs (such as a printing press or a TV camera)?”

“Is it the sign carrier (such as the printed newspaper) or the receiver device (the television set or tablet or phone)? Or do we refer to an institution when talking about the newspaper or television – and therefore to a social group producing the texts with certain routines, within a certain society and for a certain media market?”

“The research questions that need to be formulated depend greatly on how we answer these questions,” Luginbuhl proposes.

My Evolving Views

Now that I have tried to focus on some, not all, key issues and questions. I am going to turn to my own evolving views on mass media practice and its contribution to socio-cultural expression. It is clear that while there is quite a lot to understand, the role of traditional media practitioners is neither neutral nor unimportant. It is not popular to assert that they will endure, but I believe they will.

For one, there are the implicit developmental impacts to be derived when attention is paid to ‘who’ and ‘what’ constitute the distinct elements of a Caribbean ethos – bearing in mind the ground rule of determining the needs of ‘which’ Caribbean is being attended to.

The Caricom project, for example, has tended to direct socio-cultural attention largely to the cricket-playing Commonwealth Caribbean – though in Belize, The Bahamas, Haiti and Suriname, the sport is not as highly-considered as elsewhere and are irrelevant as a developmental signpost.

As an aside, I can imagine the discomfort of the leaders of these countries whenever regional resources are being set aside to attend to the needs of a sport that is fast losing its once favourable place in the narrative of West Indian development.

But let’s say for the moment we are focused on the countries of Caricom. Is there a recognisable aesthetic to be captured? Are there grounds for orienting our focus as mass media to the cultural assets and liabilities of this geographic space in such as manner as to implant a greater sense of collective and communal self?

It is not that in the past we, in media and wider society, have been completely oblivious to such an injunction. Our experiments with the Caribbean News Agency and Caribbean Broadcasting Union have followed the University of the West Indies, the Caribbean Examinations Council, the Caribbean Community Secretariat and West Indies cricket as attempts to harness a hint of coherence. There have been offerings of success and of failure.

Again, CLR James provided both guidance and obfuscation through his embrace of a panoramic landscape including by necessity Cuba and Haiti and the French overseas territories of the Caribbean.

But he did so even as he embraced distinctive West Indian virtues through the struggle of Afro-descendants emerging from the scourge of colonialism and the exploitation of the plantation economy.

In defining a common cultural core of the West Indian concentric circle, he introduced a paradigm that linked the game of cricket to nationhood – a process observed in 2007 by Prof. Hilary Beckles as being “fractured and retreating, gradually being replaced by something less understood and arguably less desired.”

In my view, there are grounds for contesting the latter assertion if only because the game of cricket has always persisted within the confines of limited terms of reference with little importance to the wider paradigm of Caribbean social and cultural development which, in any event, finds far greater cohesive and creative resonance through music, literature, drama and art. CARIFESTA persists as tangible evidence of this.

In the modern era, both the extra and intra-regional cultural dichotomies are also disappearing at an unprecedented and rapid rate. Our cultural products are increasingly reflective of the global environment in which they compete for attention on platforms occupied by everyone else.

Our music, to cite one platform, made the passage across the Atlantic and back again and now the distinctions between what is presented everywhere are difficult to establish. There is a marketplace of creative output far more disposed to open access than has ever existed.

It is not the time for parochial protectionism or jingoistic false pride. Much of what I have heard as proposed cultural policy in our space willfully dismisses such a reality.

Where, within the context of “local content” do we, for instance, place Bob Marley, or Sean Paul or David Rudder or Heather Headley or Rihanna? Is there a residency requirement? Does Burna Boy’s dancehall or Timaya’s soca make the cut? Is there a birthright issue?

I would contend that the belief that we can be in the world and not of it betrays a deficient sense of self-worth. Here, as in other important areas is where Mia Mottley’s “cultural self-confidence” enters the picture. The fact is West Indians understood and defined the global system long before almost everyone else. Our past was founded on the principle of a global marketplace. We participated both as subjects and as objects of the process.

There are few lessons of globalisation we can be taught but yet so little we seem to understand.

Our approach to tourism as a viable source of income and a generator of economic activity suffers from the same malaise. There is no way we can reasonably address questions of service in the sector without understanding the psychology of entrenched servitude. Indeed, if you want to talk about branding and selling you have indeed come to the right place! The double entendre is absolutely intended.

This is why, for example, the dissonance between indigenous food production and tourism in most of our countries. There is no sense that the activities of the past can so intrinsically contribute to imperatives of the present and future.

Instead, we continue to display a far more remarkable ability to feast our visitors than to feed ourselves. The tourists bring the foreign exchange in and our food import bills take it out. In the language of the Trinidadian school child of my generation, we are spinning top in mud.

The vision must first turn inward to see what we can see of ourselves. This is not to suggest that we repudiate the vast contributions of those who have sped along the highway of development, but that we now also look at the footprints we leave in the wake of the steps we take on our own narrow, dusty path with far more confidence than we have in the past.

Our mass media and our own faltering, uncertain and sometimes maddening steps also provide cause for concern for some of the same reasons. Cable television, at one time, satellite broadcasts, and now 5G and the Internet have helped defy attempts by our societies to impose regimes to control and regulate what we see, read and listen to.

The new technologies have, happily in my view, made nonsense of attempts at regulated cultural protectionism, censorship and other forms of official control.

So concerned have we been with imposing new and higher levels of regulation and control that we as societies have abandoned the injunction to seek the creation of better societies – people equipped with the skills to distinguish between trash and treasure. This is in fact a key objective of the global push for greater media and information literacy. Some describe this alongside the need for wider digital literacy.

The way I see it, Caribbean media and cultural expressions embrace all that there is in the world, because we are in the world and the world is in us.

The discourses and concerns that greet us in our daily lives are as global in nature as is the current pandemic. We would be to naïve to assume the absence of what the title of this paper describes as “conflicting agendas.”

I want to close with a quote from my 25-year-old son, Mikhail Gibbings, who was interviewed in the press recently as a young musician and filmmaker. We need to pay closer attention to his views and the views of his peers. In this case, he is speaking about the country of his birth. 

“I don’t even know if I can define what Trinidad and Tobago means to me– and that’s why it’s the best place in the world to me. It’s the most amazing and terrifying thing.

“Trinidad hasn’t been around long enough, as a country, to even really figure out what direction we’re going in. That means we can make it absolutely anything we like. It’s not even a choice we have to make. We are, by our very nature, the road less travelled. And I like it that way.”

 

 

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING:

 

1.       The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media

Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw

The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1972), pp. 176-187 (12 pages)

Published By: Oxford University Press

 

2.       The Caribbean, Cricket And C.L.R James - NACLA Report on the Americas, Hilary Beckles (2004)

 

3.       The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media

Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw

The Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1972), pp. 176-187 (12 pages)

Published By: Oxford University Press

 

4.       Cultural Identity and Diaspora

Stuart Hall, Essay (Framework, 1966)

 

5.       Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (2004), by Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

 

6.       From Frequency to Sequence: How Quantitative Methods Can Inform Qualitative Analysis of Digital Media Discourse (Journal Article + Infographic) - Mark Dang-Anh and Jan Oliver Rüdiger (2015)

 

 

 

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