Editorial
Some readers might wonder how a paper about the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery finds its way into a Communications journal. But the fit of Carol Corbin's "Silences and Lies: How the Industrial Fishery Constrained Voices of Ecological Conservation" is a good one - as forecast slightly by the keywords in the title: silences, lies, constrained voices.
As Corbin points out in her introduction, we have a good sense in retrospect concerning the facts of the matter: the Atlantic cod fishery was closed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in 1992 due to the depletion of the stocks from overfishing on a scale that resulted in massive unemployment and social cost to those individuals and families who drew their livelihood from this industry. That much is clear and uncontested. There is also a fair degree of consensus in the political-economic literature on why this came to pass. First, the steady expansion of the fishery from the 1950s forward in terms of larger boats, more sophisticated navigation and fish-finding technologies, and concentration of ownership within the hands of a few large firms (for example, National Sea Products) placed greater and greater demands on the limited natural resource. Second, rather than acknowledge overfishing and related wastage as the main reasons for the decline of the stocks (a point clearly recognized by the fishery workers and some scientists), the DFO, in a cozy relationship with the large firms, continued to mandate studies looking for environmental factors and implemented counterproductive quota schemes. This much we know.
What we don't know is how these matters actually came to be - or were negotiated in social practice. Toward this end, Corbin applies a social constructivist point of view to the problem, one closely related to the kind of actor-network case studies that Michel Callon and others have carried out. She tells us that there were four main social groups involved in this process: fishery workers, corporate firms, scientists, and the DFO. Each of these groups operated with its own set of background assumptions (reminiscent of Schutz) and its own way of talking (reminiscent of Hymes). Corbin suggests that an account of the limited cross talk between these four discursive realms - combined with the power politics involved - can help us understand why the disastrous practice of overfishing went on as long as it did.
In the larger view, Corbin suggests that her paper is something more than an ethnographic example of discourse analysis - it is about the risks we wage when we short-circuit the public sphere (Habermas). Corbin insists that her narrative about the collapse of the Atlantic fishery - and the social and economic costs involved - should stand as a warning for any government bureau of the risks it incurs if it tries to force a policy agenda without permitting real input into the process by all stakeholders, and indeed the public at large.
In her essay "Film Policy under MERCOSUR: The Case of Uruguay," Tamara Falicov explores how the film industry in Uruguay has fared within the context of the MERCOSUR free trade pact. She might have more aptly titled her paper "Film Policy in Uruguay Despite MERCOSUR," for as we learn, the agreement has had little measurable impact on the development of film in Uruguay. Falicov notes that while the creation of this regional free trade zone has been largely successful as a vehicle for developing the economies of the four nations involved (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay), it has not played a significant role in developing cultural industries, specifically film. Why?
Falicov tells us that the development of the film industries within the four countries has been uneven. Consistently, the larger and richer nations, Brazil and Argentina, have fared better than the smaller and poorer ones, Uruguay and Paraguay. Discussing Uruguay in particular, she provides a list of structural barriers: (1) the domestic market is too small for a producer to gain a return on any medium or large production; (2) there are no state subsidies or incentives; (3) the system of exhibition and distribution does not favour domestic productions; and (4) there is an absence of political will on the part of policymakers. All of this sounds very reminiscent of the problems the film industry in Canada faced prior to the establishment of Telefilm and the National Film and Video Policy in the 1980s.
She reports that the state of underdevelopment of the film industry in Uruguay cannot be explained simply with reference to the power of Hollywood exports, or to the scale of advantages enjoyed by the industries in Brazil and Argentina. Admittedly, these are consequential factors, but there are others of significance. Over the past decade various scholars have observed that we are no longer living in a global cultural system that has just one centre - but many. More recently, Arjun Appadurai has suggested that this "multiple centres" hypothesis is itself too simple. The flows of cultural products and services do not move in a linear fashion outwards from regional centres to their respective peripheries; rather, the situation of cultural flows (or mediascapes) needs to be examined within the contextual specificities of each nation and locale.
Falicov notes that the national government in Uruguay has generally played a symbolic role in the film industry, whereas the municipalities, particularly Montevideo, have enacted some very positive measures for securing resources for domestic film production. Likewise, while the MERCOSUR pact itself has not provided any tangible benefit to the cultural industries in either Uruguay or Paraguay, some funding has become available to support co-productions from the Ibermedia cultural industries fund.
In summary, Falicov argues that it is essential the cultural industries in any nation should be developed for both economic and cultural reasons. In the complex global environment in which cultural industries operate, there are no longer any ready-made solutions for building alliances and affecting change.
Gary McCarron's article, "Moralizing Uncertainty: Suspicion and Faith in Hitchcock's Suspicion," examines the nature of suspicion through the vehicle of Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 film Suspicion. McCarron is captivated by the aspect of self-referentiality in the film - one of Hitchcock's own signatures and one of the hallmarks of the structuralist and poststructuralist projects.
Discussing the nature of signification, McCarron draws on Ricoeur's observations about the polysemic nature of signs: they never signify just one thing, but neither do they signify their full potential in any particular context. A sign may have any number of possible connotations, yet when it is implemented by a speaker/author in a particular context, its intended scope is vastly reduced. While we may not always interpret such a sign exactly as its author intended, our range of possible interpretations will nonetheless be limited - or filtered - by our understanding of the context in which it is used. McCarron's observation on the polysemous nature of signs leads him to draw our attention to the process of interpretation itself - vis-à-vis the hermeneutical circle. His examination of suspicion as an occasionally revelatory state also makes reference to its polar opposite, faith, and uses the complex interplay of both in the context of Suspicion to explore the concept of "moralizing uncertainty." He argues that "suspicion can be conceptualized as an interpretive framework whose principal function is to bring order to circumstances that otherwise would remain confounded by uncertainty."
He recounts how the character of Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) progressively constructs a sinister picture of her husband Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) based on a pattern of clues. Here "suspicion" not only denotes Lina's state of mind, it also names the pattern of interpretation she follows, interpretations that prove ultimately erroneous because based on false assumptions. McCarron writes: "Suspicion is an interpretive scheme conditioned by feelings of powerlessness, disenfranchisement, and disconnection."
Ultimately, McCarron suggests that suspicion can be thought of as just one way of moralizing uncertainty. Faced with uncertainty as actors or interpreters, we must decide to embrace further uncertainty through suspicion - or to transcend uncertainty through faith. This seems a fair characterization of the choices available to us as symbol-using and symbol-misusing animals (Burke), but does it also cover the process of interpretation itself? Some readers may respond that the process of textual hermeneutics - associated with the metaphor of the hermeneutical circle - is only alive so long as we remain suspicious of the meaning of a text. Faith is not part of the interpretive process - it signals the suspension of disbelief on which hermeneutics resides.
Rowland Lorimer's paper, "Mass Communication: Some Redefinitional Notes," is not so much an article as a discussion piece, written, he says, "in an attempt to engage others in the discussion and consideration of the evolution of our communication system and how we might best conceptualize it."
He begins by voicing his dissatisfaction with the way the Internet and related technologies have been positioned vis-à-vis traditional terms such as mass communication or mass media. In an earlier publication, Lorimer & Gasher had dealt with this definitional challenge by suggesting that the Internet was an example of publicly accessible worldwide communication - or public communication for short. In this sense it could be identified with the postal, telephone, and telecommunications systems - in contrast to, say, mass media (print, sound, film, etc.) and broadcasting. This kind of a dichotomy worked OK as a stopgap measure, but upon further reflection Lorimer feels that this too is unsatisfactory.
He suggests that the entire gamut of terms in this area call out for critical deconstruction - prior to any move forward. For example, the term mass communication is fraught with ambiguity. Mass could mean simply many (as in many persons), but in the context of social theory (i.e., mass society) in which it first emerged, it carried a universe of generally negative connotations. Mass media of communication or mass communication for short connoted centralized production and distribution of media artifacts for an essentially homogenous (and unthinking) audience. More specifically, this could be associated with the technologies of broadcasting and the audience that emerged particularly with the advent of television in the 1950s. But we can appreciate that this kind of point-to-mass analytical framework can hardly suffice to cover the other forms of mass media of communication (e.g., novels, films, etc.) that are produced and distributed by different means for well-targeted audiences. What does connect both of these types of mass media is that they are not publicly accessible.
In contrast to the above class of mass communication, Lorimer distinguishes all forms of media that are publicly accessible. The latter include such technologies-of-use as the telephone, fax, telecommunications - and, more recently, the Internet. The Internet, as we know, bridges the first class of point-to-point public communication, of which the telephone is the ideal type, with the second class of point-to-mass public communication, which we associate with two-way radio and some forms of telecommunications.
Finally, Lorimer lays out three classes of mass communication: (1) centralized mass (information & entertainment) communication; (2) decentralized, publicly accessible (information & entertainment) communication; and, (3) public mass communication. We can understand the first class (1) to cover both varieties of large-scale, centralized cultural industries mentioned above. But where do we place the Internet and Web phenomena? Certainly they can be associated with both classes (2) and (3) - but what about class (1) as well? Despite the fact that statistical studies report users choosing e-mail as their main Internet application, the use of applications for information and entertainment purposes grows steadily. And, notwithstanding the recent dot.com collapse, we can already appreciate today that as the business models firm up for Internet information and entertainment services, it becomes safe to assume that class (1) centralized mass communication interests will soon be looking for advantage in this realm - a point that was conspicuously absent from the CRTC's New Media Report.