One World, One Network‽

Noshir Contractor 0:01
ICA presents.

The noise you just heard is the sound of the interbang. A non standard punctuation mark, the interrobang is as powerful as it is unique and obscure. Its appearance is its explanation: an exclamation mark superimposed directly on a question mark. A sentence using an interrobang is equally inquisitive as it is rhetorical. It demands the attention of an exclamation while accepting its own infallibility. It's a question not seeking a full answer, and an answer designed to lead to more questions. Unlike other punctuation marks, the interrobang is a recent phenomenon. It was invented by an ad executive in the spring of 1962 for clearer communication in print advertisements. 60 years later, the interrobang finds new resurgence at the International Communication Association's 72nd Annual Conference anchored in Paris with regional hubs around the world from the 26th of May to the 30th of May 2022. I am Noshir Contractor, the president elect of the International Communication Association and a faculty member at Northwestern University in the United States. The theme I selected for the 2022 conference – One World, One Network‽ – ends with an interrobang. Our inclusion of the symbol shows our underlining connectedness and disconnects as a global community. This podcast series will showcase reflections by the six co-chairs of the conference theme. Those individuals are: Brooke Foucault Welles from Northeastern University; Ingrid Bachmann from the Católica University in Santiago, Chile; Shakuntala Banaji from the London School of Economics; Deen Freelon from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Jack Qui from the National University of Singapore; and Herman Wasserman from the University of Capetown, South Africa. In this introductory episode, he will hear briefly from each of the co chairs about their own perspective on the conference theme, something that they will get to expand upon in upcoming episodes that each of them will host. We look to simultaneously celebrate, and problematize the oneness in the modern age of global communication.

Brooke Foucault Welles 2:42
My name is Brooke Foucault Wells. I'm an associate professor and the interim department chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. So I've been studying online communication since the late 1990s, back when used to get the internet in the mail. I started out as a little undergrad who was really interested in questions about the the newest media of the time: online communication. I have sort of followed along the way, looking at how people form social relationships on the internet.

Ingrid Bachmann 3:15
So yes, I'm Ingrid Bachmann. I'm an associate professor in the School of Communication in Chile. Usually my scholarship has to do with journalism studies, feminist studies, and political communication. I actually used to be a journalist, a reporter. At one point, I decided that I wanted to answer questions instead of just asking them. So I decided that I needed to go back to academia, get a degree and starting asking how people make sense of the world. That's how I got into it.

Shakuntala Banaji 3:45
I'm Shakuntala Banaji. I'm a professor of Media Communication, media, culture and social change at the London School of Economics. And I've been teaching now nearly 30 years. I started off from an education background teaching in high schools making videos about things that were meaningful to 15-to-18 year olds and looking at local neighborhoods and seeing how they were represented on the news. I am interested in the relationship between the world and representation, and between representation and politics. And so this has led to recent work on disinformation online: through WhatsApp, and through other social media. And I'm currently looking at hate of all forms in various different countries through social media.

Jack Qiu 4:31
Hi, everyone. I'm Jack Qiu. I'm a professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore. One line that I always use is "analyzing media and communication along the lines of social class differentiation" – especially given China, or Southeast Asia, or Asia as a whole as a continent going through rapid industrialization, urbanization. I started my career texture in Media and Communication Studies when I was an undergraduate students in Beijing when China just started to have his internet. I was going around someone's home area interviewing the first generation of internet entrepreneurs in China, and then decided that's something I want to study for the rest of my life. So digitization actually goes alongside this epic of historical processes of remaking societies. My work since then have been in the following the trajectory going through the communities, you know, talking to you the working people focusing on class, and both higher class, lower class, and especially in the context of digital labor. That's how I ended up being in Singapore and doing this thing that I feel very excited about.

Deen Freelon 5:51
My name is Deen Freelon. I'm an Associate Professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and a principal researcher at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life. When you're somebody who's a minority, I think we're in the context of communication generally. And I say specifically, there's a kind of duality to your identity. I'm speaking as someone who's a minority who is engaged in communication research, traditionally, white dominated field as most of the social sciences are, on the one hand, you want to be connected to the areas of your professional interest, you want to be networked and you go to the sessions that are that pertains to the specific areas that you're interested in. On the other hand, I think you want to be seen for who you are, you want to understand that there's space for your identity. You know, I think that the ability to sort of move back and forth between sort of an identity centric to a part that is more focused on the professional aspects will be really critical in terms of carving out space for people who have traditionally been underrepresented both in the field and in the professional organizations.

Herman Wasserman 7:00
My name is Herman Wasserman. I'm a professor of Media Studies here at University of Cape Town. Well, I started as a journalist, I worked as a journalist. But my formal schooling was mostly in literature, so my PhD was actually in literature. And in my dissertation, I looked at I use post colonial theory to look at representations of identity, post apartheid. And some of that, I think has shaped my way of thinking also in terms of narrative, discourse, and power relations, which I think has subsequently also shaped my work in media studies. My main areas of work in media and journalism studies have lately been more in comparative work and geopolitics. At the moment, I'm looking at the area of disinformation, I think many of us are really interested in that moment. Again, looking at what that means in an African context, and more broadly in the global south context. We see disinformation actually has been a very real impact in societies in the global south. So it has, I think it has very real world consequences for us here in the global south as well.

Unknown Speaker 8:11
So I took a much more personal view. The theme – One World, One Network‽ – and thought a lot about the experience of the past 18 months or so, particularly for those of us with caregiving responsibilities. We sort of simultaneously lost the infrastructure of caregiving and the infrastructure associated with supporting caregivers, at the same time that we lost our mobility. And there's a lot of ways the academic life is privileged when it comes to coping with these sorts of things. So we have flexible schedules, we can largely work at home and so on, we kind of go where the jobs are, and then we tend to become pretty detached from our communities of origin, and the kinds of support structures one might traditionally rely on in order to cope with caregiving challenges. And, you know, I think that really came to a head this year, when a lot of us found ourselves in the rather unfortunate position of being isolated from family being isolated from the support networks that we had managed to build up in whatever community we found ourselves landed in and saddled with the responsibility to do the caregiving for our children for our elderly or sick relatives, many of whom didn't live close by, as well as for our students. And you know, ever the optimist, I will share a kind of optimistic take that one of the things that happened this year, is that caregivers, academic caregivers, in particular, we found one another online, right. And I think it became this moment of action, that we realized that there is a common experience here to articulate and a common set of hardships, and particularly that we need more support from our institutions. And so from our universities, not only did the caregivers you know, find each other but we're starting to see some infrastructure built around sustain Getting that network moving forward. So I'm excited to see what develops in the years to come.

Unknown Speaker 10:05
When I think about networks, actually, the first thing that I think of is the concept of intimate publics. And that is a concept from Lauren Berlant, and it means the effect of feeling political together. And I love that concept because it actually means people, sharing experiences and rallying together around that experience. When you remember the victim, the feminist dictum that the personal is political, it matters is not just this individual experiences is people connecting. And it's quite important when you consider that this intimacies that people are sharing are not really that intimate in the sense that they are not affecting just one individual, they are actually attracting attention, that connectedness is very important. At the same time, it is not perfect. I mean, a hashtag on itself does not fix problems, it calls attention to problems, but it doesn't fix anything, when you think about it. But I think that is meaningful when you supplement that sense of connectedness of collectivity, with attention to broader principles and the politics behind that experience about that.

Unknown Speaker 11:22
So when I first heard the the conference theme, or read the conference theme – One World, One Network‽ – I have to say honestly that I couldn't help a sigh of sort of depression. Taking me all the way back to teaching Marshall McLuhan's Global Village, and I sighed. Because for some people, it always has been one world. And as far as they're concerned, their network is the network, how Ingrid conceptualizes the networks of sort of intimacy, an intimate publicness in politics is also true, we can retain a sense of, of real complexity going beyond the celebration of the One World one network idea. It's both misleading, and it's also dangerous in some ways. So in 2018, for instance, there were upwards of 50 people lynched across India, because of WhatsApp forwards. And these 50 people who were lynched were lynched to death in the most terrifying and horrific ways, and their lynchings were videoed and circulated on WhatsApp and on YouTube until they were taken down on Facebook and sometimes even on Twitter. And the perpetrators were sometimes celebrated by those intimate knowing publics because the people who'd been killed belonged to categories who had been uttered, either historically or very quickly by the representations in the WhatsApp forwards. So all the while continuing along with the idea from Lauren Berlant, that Ingrid brought up so beautifully, these effective publics in my view, are being swayed to greater and greater degrees towards sort of a right wing radicalization, that leaves very little breathing room for what one had celebrated about the 1960s and 1970s, you know, the opening up of ideas and thought, sort of a free society where people are able to interact with each other and use media to imagine new worlds. I'm going to leave it there, because I think there's loads of interesting things that my colleagues will also have to say about this.

Unknown Speaker 13:28
So when I heard the conference team – One World, One Network‽ – it immediately reminded me of Beijing Olympic 2008, when the official slogan was "One World, One Dream." Don't forget about the network of the voiceless, or the working class are oftentimes too busy to talk. But they have their ways of communicating, including through digital media in their own stratosphere, far away from our ivory tower is essential task for scholars working in the global south, but also working with working class populations, to you know, readjust our listening post so that we can hear the voice of the voiceless and see the network of the power is, on one hand, we need to have the pessimism of the intellect to see the empirical world as problematic as it is, there still has to be the optimism of the will, when we consider networks. Networks are not only static, okay, networks are also transhistorical as a scholar, engaging in long standing discussions about communication about media and social problems, and also media as well as to create sustainable development conditions. I think that is particularly important in dark moments like this.

Unknown Speaker 14:58
I'm thinking about people who were presenting these ideas being the ideal of media connectivity of having these shared experiences, and I realizing that a lot of the people who were coming up with these ideas, not all of them were white men, but they were people at the very top of the socio economic political hierarchy. So they are sort of defining the terms of this normative good for everybody else, you know, of which they constitute something of a minority. There's also the idea that's very corporate funded. So it's very, pretty friendly to capitalism. So who is providing, you know, the infrastructure for this, whether it's the hardware, or the social media, the software, the networks, that people have to pay into, or they end up having to volunteer their personal information as a form of payment to get access to these kinds of networks, that is sort of, I think, the normative reality that we are kind of heirs to, now in 2021, moving from the normative to the descriptive, I'm looking around, never I see division, I see people who are divided by race, by ideology, by gender. And it's very hard for me, to be honest, to see too much evidence empirically of one world and one network, obviously, we share the planet. But the very ways in which we view what is going on, in our homes, in our communities, and around the world is completely different. So we are at a point that think, where our shared perceptions of the world, our subjective beliefs, that we are, in fact, in one world when network have been really been shattered. And it's really hard to figure out how to put that right. But then, again, wondering whether that's really good thing to do in the first place, do we really want to go back to that vision of the One World, One Network‽, and I sort of see this idea of one world, one network as something that, you know, I'll have to wait for the data. But I have to admit, I'm not really seeing that much of it. In terms of what I'm studying.

Herman Wasserman 16:55
I'm very glad that we decided to put a question mark, at least partial question mark behind the conference theme, because I do think we need to question this. For me, maybe the central question is, to and to what, and also for whom are we connected? What inequalities remain hidden behind that notion of oneness and connectivity? And I think, again, here, I think the pandemic has shown us very clearly that, you know, we have to ask those questions. There's that saying that we're all in the same storm, but we're not in the same boat. What for me is interesting here is the way that there's almost a very myopic view of what connectivity and mobility means. And that that notion of connectivity is often invoked with a very particular political purpose. And that political purpose is not always explicit, either. We also have to think about this global connectivity as a very particular global collectivity, which is often the globalization of neoliberalism. If we look at the conference next year, who are the people that will be able to attend in person, and I'm even talking about economics and being able to buy a plane ticket, I'm talking about vaccinations, for instance, vaccine passports, the lack of mobility or the limitation of mobility that scholars in the north are experienced in the past year, to be honest, it resonates with scholars in the South that I've been struggling with mobility issues for many, many years for other reasons. And so we have to ask, for whom is this one world working? How is this working? Who are the winners and the losers of this networking? These globalized networks might in fact, just map on to much older networks of colonial discourse, the notion of communication scholarship many of these patterns are also repeated. Despite all the best efforts, all our best efforts to try and rectify this, we have to ask the question, I think very explicitly International Communication Association for whom.

Noshir Contractor 18:59
One World, One Network‽ is sponsored by the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at both the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. This podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association as part of the lead up to the 2022 ICA Conference, which will take place from May 26 through May 30 2022. In the next episode, we will continue exploring the conferences theme, one world one network from the perspectives of the conferences' six co-chairs. Our producers are Max Lubers and Nick Song. Additional production support was provided by Elizabeth Gaspard. For more information about our participants on this episode – as well as our sponsor – as well as the history behind the interrobang, be sure to check the show notes in the episode description.