Studying Communication Studies

A couple of weeks ago I was in a company of my friend's acquaintances when they were having a nice intelligent conversation about journalism. By some chance somebody switched TV to the FOXnews channel and the conversation among those highly liberal people became not only much bitter than it was before but also quite emberrassing for me.

"I'm wondering what did they study?" my friend asked pointing to the talking head on the screen  with disgust. "They must have got a degree in something but they don't quite understand anything!"

"I bet they have a degree in Communication," answered somebody.

"No doubt, indeed," everybody else agreed.

Luckily for me, my friend didn't revealed my embarrasment by telling everybody that they had just qualified me to apply for job at FOX.

Unfortunately for me and for everybody else who studies Communication, this opinion is rather a rule than an exception. 

If you search Google for Communication Degree the most popular results you would get would pose or answer the question "What can I do with a degree in Communication?" 

And as I understand it, this question is just another way to express uncertainty about what actually the field is.

Last week the Communication degree was relatively oftern mentioned in the news. A student of communication appeared on Obama's Forth Myers Town Hall Meeting to ask a question. Here is a video you might find amusing:

"I want to be a broadcaster or a disc jokey," he says honestly. And here it is, public understanding and attitude to what communication is and is meant to be.

Although this video makes me laugh every time I watch it, I find it less then funny to feel embarrassed every time I introduce myself as a graduate student in Communication.

According to Wikipedia, Communication Studies is

academic field that deals with processes of communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompasses a wide range of topics; for instance, the transmission of messages from one point to another through some medium of dissemination--such as face-to-face or conversation, television broadcasting, or the reading of records--but also with how institutions like libraries maintain information over time, how audiences interpret information, and the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of related topics.

I think the main difficulty for people to understand what the field actually is, lies in the concept that was of such a big concern for one of the discipline's pillar - Marshal McLuhan. He expressed that concept in the widely known phrase "Media is the message". The essens of this concept is mentioned in the Wikipedia article by the word "processes".

Communication studies processes of human communication but not its products or objects. It studies how different types and technologies of communication change with time and influence our culture.

I remember one of my professors at Fordham University Lance Strate said that communication studies the medium of human life, its culture similar to how biologists study medium and culture of life of microorganisms. This metaphor could give you a good illustration of how the field if actually important. Unless you think that studying bacterial life is more important than studying the life of humans.

The liberal bias of new media isn't working on the Russian soil (with the Russian soul)?

Every time I think about the opportunities new media such as blogs and social networks open for political participation of citizens, for the development of democracy, and how big the role was that they played during the last presidential elections in the United States, I ask myself: 

What is the present and future of this media in Russia? 

Are they able to play any significant role in the change of power there? 

Are they playing any important role in the democratization of the country right now?

The answer is much less then clear. 

Despite all the stories about Russian officals trying to control the Internet, we should confirm

 that Internet in Russia is still pretty free. First of all because Russian authorities and special services don't have any software to control information flow online. And second, because most of the people whose voices contemporary Russian establishment is concerned about during the election periods, don't use Internet or don't trust (by the force of Soviet habit) any information that comes from an "unauthorized" source.

However, most of those who use Internet in Russia don't hesitate to register their own blogs and 

profiles on social networks. According to the 2007 report by Russian web

 search server Yandex, there are 3,1 million of blogs in Russian Internet segment. That means that there is one blog for every 10 Russian speaking users (there are 30 million Internet users in Russia according to the information on the CIA web page). Not bad, taking into account that the same statistics for the whole world is approximately one blog for every 60 people.

Despite this optimistic view, there is no strong aspiration of users in Russia to use their freedom of speech online to solve their political problems. If you try to find a discussion about current political events on Russian Internet, I wouldn't recommend you to go to any popular Russian social networks (Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, or MoyKrug). Non of them has any application that would allow you to easily post a link from an article or express your support of a politician. Non of them has a substential group created by users for political discussion. 

But I wouldn't recommend you to look for any political discussion in Russian blogs either. Especially if you believe in a liberal bias of the new media as much as I still do. I wouldn't recommend you to look there not because there is nothing discussed about politics, but because what is discussed is usually even more regressive in the sense of democratic and liberal discourse than what you can see on Russian television controlled by the state.

I'm wondering if that means that the new media by themselves can't give a big hope for Russian modest democratic movement? Is the question again lying not in what are the media that are used, but who is using the media?

(Images used: 1. Official logo of Livejournal; 2. Picture from a protest action in Moscow against the censure in mass media on January 31, 2009 - by Denis Bochkarev)

Russian Internet in 2008

Russian Internet media "Zagolovki.ru" ("Headlines") - a web source that daily gathers and thematically sorts articles from various Russian newspapers and magazines emphasizing those with especially smart and funny headings, have summarized what the year 2008 meant for Russian Internet. Here is, according to them, a list of remarkable events that happened:

1. The parliament, the Internal Affairs Ministry, and the Public Chamber (an institution that was created by Putin that represents "cultural elite" of Russia - the members are directly and indirectly assigned by Putin but have no real power) announced their plans of legal regulations

 for the Internet. They plan to regulate the Internet through the mass-media law. According to it all media that have more than one thousand consumers should be officially

 registered. The officials say not only news web sites should get registered but also blogs, online diaries, forums, chats, and dating sites.

2. The new Russian president Dmitry Medvedev addressed in one of his speeches the problem of Russian segment of the Internet. He said that it should be cultivated. In the same speech Medvedev noted that government should not interfere in what was going on the Internet unless it violated Russian laws...

3. During a parliamentary discussion on rising crimes against immigrants in Russia, an Internal Affairs Ministry official emphasized that the best way to prevent the crimes was to intensify governmental control over the Internet. During the very session a legislation was presented that would allow closing web sites that would be accused in publishing "extremist content".

4. In a short time after that a web site www.ingushetia.ru that informed about news from a rebellion region of Russia Ingushetia in a way that opposed Ingushetia's official information, was closed. The method of IP-address filtering was used. In three months the owner of the web site Magomed Evloev was "accidentally" shot to death in a police car in which he was put by police officers without any clear reason. 

5. One blogger was determined guilty for criticising militia in his blog comment. Another blogger - a member of an opposition movement - is still on trial.

6.  The Minister of Internal Affairs came out with a legislative initiative to qualify Internet as a mass media.

7. Criminal case was open against Internet users who on the pages of their blogs falsely informed that the president of Tatarstan (region of Russia) died.

8. The registration on the most popular Russian social network odnoklassniki.ru (classmates) became paid.

Russia fights financial crisis... with censure

If you live in America or in Europe and are used to watching television every day, you probably think that nobody in the world now knows for sure how to deal with the current economic crisis. But you would think differently if you lived in Russia.

First of all if you watch television or read mainstream newspapers in Russia, you must know that the economic crisis has affected all countries in the world except for one (guess which one) "because its officials have taken all necessary actions to prevent it".

And second, Russian officials took measures to make sure people believed that.

According to an article on the web page of Russian newspaper "Kommersant" the Russian "General Prosecutor's Office joined the fight against the financial crisis. It issued an instruction for its attorneys in different regions of the country 'to prevent the information attacks on banks'". Inspection of different media outlets started yesterday in different regions of Russia. The attorneys are examining media reports for signs of "fomentation of financial crisis" and "destabilization of the situation in the region".

Web site URA.ru became the first target for the officials after writing about banks. During an interrogation its editor was asked how the web site got its information about banks.

The General Prosecutor Office's spokesman explained that they "don't censor", but just "verify the accuracy of information".

The newspaper mentions that the first person who spoke about "information attacks" that can "destabilize the social situation" was Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

Equal opportunities online

I was currently reading about PEN (Public Electronic System) Project in Santa Monica, CA. It was in 1989. Santa Monica was known for its politically active citizens. The citizens donated to create this system and to built public terminals where various people could access PEN. And their efforts had its fruits. The system was actively used by homeless citizens. They created their own group that could promote their interests in the community. 

As a result of this the group was given a building in the center of the city where they could clean and story their things, learn and look for a job.

Thanks to this system these homeless people were treated equally.

It reminded me on what we were currently discussing in Paul Levinson's class at Fordham. We were talking about what Sarah Pailin said about bloggers. That they were "kids in their pajamas"... Professor Levinson thought it was a remarkable thing to say: Because on the internet no matter who you are, no matter how you are dressed or if you are homeless or not. Everybody is treated equally, everybody has an opportunity to express himself.

Isn't it a big deal for a human society? Isn't it promissing?

Blogging clearance

I was going to post information about another conference about communication today. But then I realized that my blog was getting to boring and incoherent... And now I'm going to clear this up.

I'm still very uncertain about what I want this blog to be. Even now, at the moment when I'm writing this post, I doubt whether this post fits here well or not... I'd like to remove this ambiguity that makes me feel uncomfortable with almost every post I make here.

I started this blog with an intention to gather the information that might be useful for my academic work and to practice my English vocabulary getting myself ready for my future studies.

But after a while I found it much more interesting to write here down my own thoughts and observations, which, though not very often, appear in my head.

So, I created a separate blog to rework all the material I find on the internet. Pretty regularly I post there summaries of all interesting articles about communications and media. In the sidebar "baskets" I also bring together the concepts, organizations, books, journals, persons, and web pages I am interested in.

So be it.

This blog will be my personal diary of opinions about different events pertaining to my field of study in the world and in Russia.
And the blog "Everything useful" will serve as my public notebook of articles, links, organizations, and conferences dedicated to communications and media.

And by the way, here I also have one more blog about the impressions I have of studying in America))

International Association for Development of the Information Society

Here is one more conference to be added to my calender.

The International Association for Development of the Information Society organizes a conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age and on WWW/Internet on October 13th-15th 2008 in Freibug, Germany at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet.

There is a list of all conferences organized by the Association on its web page. Besides, it has a digital library of all IADIS press publications, including conference proceeding and the IADIS Journal publications by 11723 authors with all materials avaliable online in PDF format.

I'll be happy if you find those links somehow useful.
I presonally don't know how to cope with all the information pertaining to my field of interest that I find online every day...