Working on the Margins

But then I realized that it wasn't me who was speaking, it was Sheila Rogers, a CBC announcer. Like a member of an Anglican congregation, I was repeating a creed, along with a voice coming from above. Or was it coming from up in front? Actually, it was coming from the radio. That answer revealed more about my media consumption habits than my ability to analyze the Canadian media.

I'm 38 years old; a year or two older than Douglas Coupland, appropriator of the term "Generation X." Like Coupland, I wrote for Dan Macleod, publisher of the Georgia Straight, during the peak of the first wave of punk rock. I wrote for a sickly offshoot of the Straight called Public Enemy, created by Macleod and a sometimes-nasty English bloke named Tony something-or-other to suck a few more advertising dollars out of a marginal post-boomer advertising market.

And before we go any further, I would like everyone to know that Coupland, like me, was listening to punk/new wave bands at that time (the late 70s, and early 80s) among which was a band called Generation X. Music for our age cohort: the generation that was in college and university when our older brothers and sisters were leveraging the beach front they'd squatted on into time-share condominiums, stock in mutual funds, and other instruments of power, wealth, and status. The generation that couldn't get a job. We (Coupland and I) wandered around the city (not together), idling our minds on trivial pursuits. Working on the margins. Our placement in the demographic profile has informed our understanding of the media. Well, my placement has, at any rate.

In my childhood I produced a newsletter on a Banda machine that I discovered in my family's garage. A few years later, with two classmates, I started a high-school newspaper. It lasted three issues. After high school, I wrote for Public Enemy, and I wrote term papers for friends for $50 a paper, give or take a few dollars.

To me, the most important medium was print. I read obsessively (mostly science fiction from science fiction's golden age). I read the Vancouver Sun, and I listened to CBC radio. Didn't watch much television. I took a few courses in communications from SFU while earning a BA, and I went through a journalism program at Langara College in Vancouver.

Several lifetimes seemed to pass, and I became a reporter. I worked for community newspapers (the Swift Current Sun, The Abbotsford Times, and as a freelancer for The Highland Echo and The South Vancouver Review). I was a writer and computer consultant for BC Bookworld, and a typesetter for Vanguard magazine. When I was unemployed, I called myself a journalist. Once I had a business card that read "photojournalist".

Given all that history, you will perhaps forgive me for having defined "media" as an object comprised of a physical substrate (medium) that carries a representation of the world. The newspaper, like The Vancouver Sun, was a medium, as was the radio. Or television. I worked for the media, and up until now, that meant I produced content for an organization that communicated my product to a readership, using paper and ink. The paper and ink could easily change to mylar and a thin iron paste, but the essential idea remained the same.

When media is defined in that way, I find I presently turn to books, mostly quality trade paperbacks, and CBC radio, and slick American magazines (like Wired), for information and entertainment. I also turn to bits and pieces of paper produced from photocopy machines and small printing presses--these I mostly rip off of bulletin boards, or I find them in the mail--and I turn to the Internet. I use e-mail a lot, and the Web to a lesser extent.

Any well-formed opinion on the current state of the media should probably address the forces that shape the current media environment. And my sense of history tells me these forces are probably the same forces now shaping other industries: greed, fashion, demographics.

Demographics (by which I mean the distribution of population by age, gender, income level, and intelligence) define the boundary within which the forces of greed and fashion may play. Greed, the ever-present drive to accumulate more stuff, and fashion, the ever-changing appetite for this or that, are epiphenomena rising off the substrate of our collective consciousness. Like a constellation of ideas in an individual, they turn back on the system that created them, directing it to modify itself. To squeeze itself, to extract every bit of toothpaste from the toothpaste tube. So to speak.

All of this is a little abstract, so I'll try to be more concrete. The media is extremely self-serving. It is almost never critical of those individuals or organizations who give it money or power. The extent of its obsequiousness is breathtaking. The people who work for the media are as grain to a mill, and they willingly give themselves up to that mill in exchange for a mess of pottage. Like many of us do.

Although I still work in the media--I'm the managing editor of a college newspaper--I feel distant from it, and this feeling grows with the passage of time. I attribute this distance to my media studies course, which is really an opportunity given by me, to myself, to reflect on media with the help of people more intelligent, more widely read, and wiser, than me. The more I reflect, the more distant I become from it. Kind of like reflecting on a bad marriage after a divorce. And the media has caused me a great deal of pain. (I wonder if that's a coincidence?) The distance, the perspective, is welcome.

Of course the coherence of the intertexual Lucan/Lacan difference is closed to the negative capability inherent in Horkheimer's commentary on fin de siecle in the Japanese translation of Habermas' treatise on Modernity. Well, that's what Lentricchia said. But in Foucault, Derrida, Adorno, Marcuse, Greenblatt, and of course MacKinnon (well, maybe not MacKinnon) the soavemente sospirando, which is nothing like a soavemente sospirando, draws upon continually changing paradigms (though not in a Kuhnian sense), undermining the text/intertext subjectivity of epiphenomena.

Ah, academia. How I wish I could really talk like that. But I haven't read enough to do more than make fun of it. I'm a big idea trapped in a small mind. Or am I a small mind trapped in a fish tank of big ideas? Whichever I am, I'm swimming around, trying to figure out what's going on.

One thing I'm proud of: Pattie Maes sent me an e-mail, and arranged for me to have permission to reprint one of her seminal papers on intelligent agents.

Aside from that, my e-mail box is always open. I like to get mail at irobbins@nanaimo.ark.com these days. And if you found my name by using a search engine, please, please, send some e-mail.