Techno-Politics, New Technologies, and the New Public Spheres

The category of the intellectual, like everything else these days, is highly contested and up for grabs. Zygmunt Bauman contrasts intellectuals as legislators who wish to legislate universal values, usually in the service of state institutions, with intellectuals as interpreters, who merely interpret texts, public events, and other artifacts, deploying their specialized knowledge to explain or interpret things for publics (1987; 1992). He claims that there is a shift from modern intellectuals as legislators of universal values who legitimated the new modern social order to postmodern intellectuals as interpreters of social meanings, and thus theorizes a depoliticalization of the role of intellectuals in social life.

In contrast, I want to distinguish between "functional intellectuals", who serve to reproduce and legitimate the values of existing societies, contrasted to "critical-oppositional public intellectuals" who oppose the existing order and militate for progressive social change. Functional intellectuals were earlier the classical ideologues, whereas today they tend to be functionaries of parties or interest groups, or mere technicians who devise more efficient means to obtain certain ends. Technical-functional intellectuals apply their skills to increase technical knowledge in various specialized domains (medicine, physics, history, etc.) without questioning the ends, goals, or values that they are serving, or the social utility or disutility of their activities, while functional ideologues construct discourses to legitimate existing social relations, institutions, and practices.

Today, in an expanding global information economy, intellectuals are more important than ever in every aspect of human life. The concept of the intellectual traditionally involved workers in the sphere of mental labor, who produced ideas, wrote texts, and developed and transmitted intellectual abilities, as opposed to manual workers who produced goods and worked with their hands in the realms of manufacture, heavy industry, agriculture, and other fields that primarily depended on manual labor. The distinction between intellectual and manual labor was always an ideal type, was never absolute, and was itself subject to change and historical mutation. It is my argument that today the concept of the intellectual is undergoing significant mutations and must be rethought in relationship to new technologies and the new global economy and culture.

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Communications vs. Cultural Studies:

The boundaries of the field of communications have been unclear from the beginnings. Somewhere between the liberal arts/humanities and the social sciences, communications exists in a contested space where advocates of different methods and positions have attempted to define the field and police intruders and trespassers. Despite several decades of attempts to define and institutionalize the field of communications, there seems to be no general agreement concerning its subject-matter, method, or institutional home. In different universities, communications is sometimes placed in humanities departments, sometimes in the social sciences, and generally in schools of communications. But the boundaries of the various departments within schools of communications are drawn differently, with the study of mass-mediated communications and culture{0} sometimes housed in Departments of Communication, Radio/Television/Film, Speech Communication, Theater Arts, or Journalism departments. Many of these departments combine study of mass-mediated communication and culture with courses in production, thus further bifurcating the field between academic study and professional training, between theory and practice.


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Kegelisahan dan Kritisisme seorang Dedy Nur Hidayat atas Media

Teori media yang berkembang sekarang menjadikan media tidak lagi menjadi fokus yang utama. Kita tidak bisa mempelajari media sebagai suatu fenomena terisolir dalam konteks sosial budaya. Teori tentang media harus menjadi bagian teori yang lebih besar. Media merupakan salah satu elemen dari konfigurasi yang lebih besar. Media ada dalam triangulasi hubungan antara negara, pasar, dan civil society. Media menjadi komponen yang menjembatani hubungan segitiga itu, tapi media harus juga dilihat ujud kepentingan sendiri.

Hubungan triangulasi bisa juga diterapkan pada masa sebelumnya, tapi pada masa reformasi perimbangannya sudah berubah. Dulu hubungan itu sangat didominasi oleh negara, sekarang pasar yang lebih dominan. Civil society sekalipun sudah menonjol perannya, tapi masih belum cukup "dewasa" dan masih banyak diintervensi dan dapat dengan mudah dimanfaatkan. Banyak kelompok swadaya masyarakat hanyalah perpanjangan tangan kepentingan sosial politik atau kekuasaan. Contoh paling gamblang, ada demonstran yang dibayar. Kalau orang tidak tahu, itu dianggap sebagai penguatan civil society, padahal tidak.

Kebebasan pers tidak bisa dilihat terpisah dari kebebasan publik untuk menyampaikan pendapat. Kebebasan pers bukan hanya kebebasan orang pers untuk menyampaikan pendapat. Dominasi modal dalam industri pers merugikan publik yang tidak punya akses sebagaimana yang seharusnya dimiliki. Juga jurnalis akan dirugikan, lama- kelamaan mereka lebih banyak menempatkan diri sebagai buruh media—sekalipun tidak banyak jurnalis yang disebut sebagai buruh media.

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Toward A Critical Theory of Advertising

Since the emergence of "critical" media studies in the 1970's, a substantial literature has developed that examines and questions the role of mass communications and advertising within the institutional structures of contemporary capitalist societies. In contrast to "administrative" media studies that focus on how to use mass communications within the given political economic order to influence audiences, sell products, and promote politicians, critical research has addressed the social and cultural effects of mass communications and their role in perpetuating an unjust social order. One facet of critical analyses of advertising -exemplified by Goffman's Gender Advertisements, Williamson's Decoding Advertisements, and Andren, et. al.'s Rhetoric and Ideology in Advertising -- has examined the content and structure of advertisements for their distorted communications and ideological impact. Employing semiotics and/or content analysis, numerous critical studies working at the micro level have examined how advertising's mass communications "persuade" or "manipulate" consumers.

By contrast, works such as Schiller's Mass Communications and American Empire, Ewen's Captains of Consciousness, and Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly present broader historical analyses which locate advertising and mass communications within the history of contemporary capitalism and examine their impact on the larger social and political economic structure. Studies such as these have probed how advertising and mass media have contributed to the development and reproduction of an undemocratic social order by concentrating enormous economic and cultural power in the hands of a few corporations and individuals.

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Media dan Pencerahan pada Perempuan

SELALU ia suka membaca, tapi kini kecintaannya pada pustaka telah menjadi candu. Segera setelah pekerjaan yang ditugaskan kepadanya selesai, tangannya pun menggapai buku, atau koran.

(Sebuah surat Kartini sebagaimana dikutip Pramoedya Ananta Toer dalam Panggil Aku Kartini Saja, 2000: 52)

SURAT yang ditulis Kartini itu menyiratkan makna bahwa Kartini merupakan sosok perempuan yang pada zamannya sedemikian haus pengetahuan. Ketika Kartini dipingit dan diasingkan dari kehidupan luar, yang berarti tidak diperbolehkan masuk dalam kehidupan publik seperti bersekolah, maka yang dilakukannya adalah mencari informasi secara mandiri. Media menjadi "guru" terbaik baginya karena mengajarkan berbagai pengetahuan. Kekuatan media massa sebagai salah satu penggerak modernisasi mendorong terciptanya kematangan rasionalitas.

Namun, apakah media massa selalu membawa semangat pencerahan? Tanpa disadari kaum perempuan sendiri media juga membawa implikasi yang justru melestarikan penindasan. Hanya saja kekuatan represif media bukan dengan cara kekerasan dalam bentuk dominasi-fisik, melainkan dalam formula yang lebih halus serta hegemonik. Penguasaan media melalui mekanisme kepemimpinan moral-intelektual inilah yang tanpa disadari menyudutkan perempuan.

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Media Criticism: Hate Becomes a Commodity

One of the plagues of human history has been the belief that there are certain people or groups of people who don't share the same moral status as everyone else, when it comes to the kind of treatment they receive. These individuals and groups are society's scapegoats. Traditionally, they have been subjected to symbolic violence, in which they have been depicted in words and images and other forms of expression in degraded ways. Beyond that, they were often subjected to physical violence, as well, depending on the society and the scapegoats in question.

The list of individuals and scapegoats who have been forced into these roles is legion. They are the innocent and the guilty; the mad and the sane. They are Jews, blacks, Christians, pagans, heretics of all sorts, political critics and criminals, saints and scientists, et al.

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Cara Berpikir Kritis ala seorang Jurnalis

The Demons of David Horowitz
Since David Horowitz switched his political allegiance from the radical left to the authoritarian right, he has engaged in one embarassingly paranoid crusade after another. Each one is designed to stifle a liberal conspiracy which exists only in the hollow canyons of his own mind, and each one fizzles out in a mist of his own petulant frustration. Each time, insidious liberal influence is to blame for his own failures.

For a man with no job title or actual occupation, Horowitz does curiously well. Over the last three decades, crotchety right-wing donors like John Olin and Richard Mellon-Scaife have stuffed the coffers of his shell organizations, funded his crank conferences, and bulk-bought his semi-fictional autobiographies as insulation for the walls of their hermetically-sealed mansions. In turn, Horowitz has leveraged his millions into a full-frontal assault on academia.

His "Academic Bill of Rights," which I will discuss later on, and his latest piece of Regnery pulp, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," mark the crescendo of Horowitz's crusade to make campus as safe and sterile as Green Acres. For Horowitz, seizing control of universities from their liberal hegemons is no different from smoking Al-Qaeda henchmen out of their hillside caves. As he told an audience of College Republicans last summer, "Universities are a base of the left. Universities are a base for terrorism."