Chapter 2
On Communication
Complex communication of ideas and desires, needs and passions, offerings and orders is one of the primary processes that not only makes us human but also makes us civilised. The original work on a theory of communication was done by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949. They proposed that communication operated on three levels: the technical, the semantic, and its effectiveness. [1] However communication is a two-way street. Supposing that the technical level is functioning and the message is actually getting down the telephone line (in their particular analysis), then one expresses something and another listens, hears and understands what has been expressed (the semantic level) and may (or may not) make a verbal response, or take some action or have some effect in the world. The listener will tend to adapt their response [feedback] according to some combination of the sender's communication and their own intentions. Thus that response can then continue the communication, broaden it or perhaps stop it in its tracks. Assuming any further response does not shut the interaction down, the communication will gain an internal stability and continue. These are the processes that make up conversation, and are a major factor in what it is that renders humans self-organizing. [2]
It may also be the case that the to-and-fro sequential nature of conversation is opened out over time so that one side of a discussion can be recorded with the other side subsequently listening to it in playback, recording its own responses in turn, and then making that recording available to the initiating side of the loop. Thus the mediation, that is the means by which conversation is carried between people, may be through directly speaking to another and hearing them speak to us (thus requiring proximity) or indirectly, speaking and listening through a telephone or (the) radio or television.
Of course the problem with some non-proximal media, viz., radio and television, is that it is only when there is a two-way connection that they entail the possibility of a conversation. If the connection is not two-way then they really amount to little more then one person putting their point across while the listener has no capacity to return with any comments, ideas or critique. This is the natural extension of Grierson's critique of the media. It was this critique in the wider societal sense subsequently developed in Paulo Freire's sociology [3] or Ivan Illich's critique of schooling [4] that led media researchers and activists in the late 1960s to attempt to develop two-way communication using (portable) videotape recording and playback within small, local, groups of people.
Thus, for that particular type of conversation, viz., political interaction, in which people are able to air grievances, develop local policy, deal with bureaucracies and similar activities, there must be a two-way process: with each contributor to, or agent in, the conversation being willing and able to allow modification of their thinking and position in the ongoing to-and-fro of thoughts (that is, on the fly).
Ultimately, conversation is a feedback process and is singularly important in maintaining human groupings: families, friends, and societies, as functional operating processes. How you respond to what I say has an effect on what I might say next and by extension, the way in which what you say affects me will itself effect changes in what I and then you might say next. [Fig.1] Conversation is usually made through sound with the support of vision for reading gesture and for developing empathy, (although for some it may be restricted to one of these perceptual modalities only, e.g. with deaf sign language).
Fig.1: Conversation is an interactive feedback process.
The maintenance of the conversation is determined by what
one says to another and how they respond to that.
There are multiple forms of mediation that can be carriers for communication. These vary in their degree of interaction, from the non-proximal one-way media such as newspapers, broadcast radio and television, through to the fully two-way feedback-integrating media of direct proximal conversation and other non-proximal forms such as the telephone. The one-way media are what our governors, politicians, overseers, bosses, and any other individuals of varying importance to us use in various ways, e.g., to get us to vote for them and to do what they want us to do once a decision has been made (in this situation: without our consultation). In a democratic society the conversation as consultation (particularly between the people and the bureaucrats) is of great importance in developing the cases for and against when a decision is to be made.
The carriers for conversation may be sound, writing or (moving) image-making and, in that larger grouping known as 'society', the carrier is generally 'the media', be that electronic or print or carved sticks. It is image-making that I will discuss in this work, in particular video-making as well as certain types of film-making. However film-making as we are used to it these days is not a conversational tool or medium but a medium of entertainment (or mass distraction).
Video has become somewhat similar (especially if we only think of it as television), but in its earlier stages it was at least proposed that it could have an important role in developing two-way conversation between members of and sections of society, say, between the people and their politicians or local council members or similar individuals with similar roles in various organised structures.
Communication through the media
It is in attempts to facilitate 'conversation' (in the politico/sociological rather than simply the everyday social sense) between the different strata of society that this kind of interaction became one of the earliest uses of video in Australia and elsewhere. At the end of the 1960s, it had been recognised among the socio-politically active (i.e., the left wing ) and the idealistic, in several places (Canada, London, New York and Australia) that the one-way medium of television could potentially become two-way, initially with the use of portable video recorders. This first occurred in Canada (1968) through the Challenge For Change (CFC) project, which attempted to improve communication between the people (particularly those in economically depressed sectors of Montreal and in widely dispersed rural localities) and their local councillors, or representatives of various State and Federal government bodies.
The CFC project was originally film-based however it was quick to take up the promise and apparent simplicity of video production [5] and became a primary model for independent video makers in other locations (usually as variations of the basic model). The transmission of the model beyond Canada began with the Challenge for Change Newsletter (no.1 Spring 1968, no.14, Spring 1975) [6], and continued with Dorothy Todd Henaut and Bonnie Klein's 1970 article “In the Hands of Citizens: A Video Report on the VTR St Jacques Project” in Vol.1, No.1 of Radical Software, published by the Raindance Corporation in New York [7]. It was then remodeled in London in 1969 by a group of squatters (led by John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins) in the Camden district of London, who formed TVX, a collective which at times took particularly political roles in video making [TVX is described in Chapter 5].
TVX then re-transmitted the model with the publication of Video in Community Development a report commissioned in 1972 for the British Home Office Community Development Project in London. [8] The CFC model then reached Australia through the importation of Radical Software via radical bookshops in Melbourne and Sydney. It was available at the Source Bookshop in Melbourne by at least 1971, and it also became available through Bob Gould's bookshop in Sydney a little later.
In Australia (from about 1971) there began to be a good deal of independent use of portable video, partly through a few experimental film-makers involved in the Melbourne and Sydney Film-makers Co-ops (including Fred Harden, the Cantrills, Robin Laurie, Bert Deling and John Hughes in Melbourne and David Perry, Albie Thoms and, a bit later, Tom Zubrycki, Warwick Robbins, Megan McMurchy and Jeune Pritchard, in Sydney and otherwise through independent community activists. Several activists sought to apply the CFC approach to communities in low-income and poorly serviced urban areas which were (and still are) regularly over-run by large developers and city and state politicians wanting to increase their influence, e.g., through 'slum clearance' or highway building. [9]
Some of this community activist activity led to the establishment of a 'video communication centre' at the Nimbin Aquarius Festival of May 1973. Many of the group of people who assembled around that project later became the Bush Video collective. Meanwhile lobbying for government support of independent and activist video led to the Video Access Centres.
Subsequently projects like community television and community radio, which were at least semi-two-way, became a further proposed (but, in Australia, ultimately unsuccessful) means of expanding the communicative role of the media. I shall detail much of this activist approach, and the video access project in Australia, in what follows.
Endnotes
1 See Jackie Hatfield, Artists' Video in the 70s & 80s, interview for Rewind with John Hopkins and Sue Hall (of the British video activist group Fantasy Factory). p.2.
The original source of this notion of three levels is Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication”, in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, The University of Illinois Press, 1949, p.96.
2 Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics, London, Hutchinson Science Library, 1961.
3 Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1996, London, Penguin.
4 Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society, 1971, Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin.
5 I say “apparent simplicity” because with video it was not necessary to wait for film processing to see the results of the day's recording, in fact it could be seen live, as it was being recorded. However there was a real problem with the quality of its editing which, initially, was incredibly difficult.
6 Loren R. Lerner, (1997) Canadian film and video: a bibliography and guide to the literature, Volume 2 University of Toronto Press.
7 Dorothy Todd Henaut and Bonnie Klein, “In the Hands of Citizens: A Video Report”
Radical Software, Vol.1, No.1, Spring 1970. Raindance Corporation, New York, [You will have to zoom into the document to be able to read it.]
8 John Hopkins, Cliff Evans, Steve Herman, John Kirk, Video In Community Development , JCATS, vol.1, no.1. 1973. 2nd edition, revised, November 1972, Ovum Limited. It was originally written as a research report for a Home Office Community Development Project commissioned by Southampton University (1972). It includes Dorothy Todd Henaut's article “Powerful Catalyst” which describes various Challenge for Change projects, see pp.17-22.
9 From the Preface to Part 4 of Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, Ezra Winton, Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2010 McGill-Queen's Press MQUP.
Contemporary incarnations of Challenge for Change's aspiration to embed media in marginalized communities have both been inspired by the NFB s innovative fostering of community media and been carried out with a more developed critical acumen (see Miller, chapter 37, this volume). Challenge for Change needs to be situated within an archaeology of the media radicalism of the 1960s, which includes the solipsistic process-oriented films of Andy Warhol alongside the McLuhanesque visions of media democracy found at Expo 67 the multi-screen architecture of the NFB's In the Labyrinth project, which Colin Low had conceptualized in the early 1960s, is perhaps the ultimate expression of this optimism. From this perspective, we can see that Challenge for Change s experiments with media democracy and social justice activism are important precursors to the diy {do it yourself) aesthetic and the networked cultures of digital media around the world. Such networks are grounded in localized circuits of communication and action that in turn have a global effect. In the context of networked, locative, and distributed media, we can appreciate the importance of the feedback loop that was the basis of the Challenge for Change methodology. Although the critique of liberal ideology found in this chapter continues to be a vital one, the very logic of the feedback loop encompasses a conceptualization of production as always already intrinsically tied to consumption and circulation. That is, as Walter Benjamin put it in 1934, the use of the apparatus in this manner proposes the author as producer , which is then the challenge for change.
Once the dispossessed and powerless have access to the means of information they can no longer be misled by Establishment bullshit. And that is in itself a revolution. - Patrick Watson 1970.
This was retrieved from Google Books. so only some of the book will be available and its direct referencing will be unreliable, but that it is in Part 4 of the above book is undoubted.