Barriers Down by Diana Lemberg

Barriers Down by Diana Lemberg

Author:Diana Lemberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press


UPDATING ARTICLE 19: JEAN D’ARCY AND THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE

Like Richard Hoggart, the French media expert Jean d’Arcy believed that growing cross-border and cross-cultural communication might be shaped through deliberate policy to serve the greater good. Having spent a decade in New York as director of the UN Radio and Visual Services Division (1961–1971), d’Arcy could appreciate the virtues of the more liberalized American audiovisual sector vis-à-vis European public broadcasting monopolies.38 D’Arcy’s initial intervention into international communication debates—the 1969 essay “Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Right to Communicate,” published in the official review of the European Broadcasting Union—took a generally liberal approach to communications technologies. The article charted a dialectic of technological breakthrough and political repression at least as old as the printing press: printing’s revolutionary potential had been largely overlooked by its contemporaries, save the “secular and religious authorities” who sought to control and profit from it. D’Arcy suggested sympathy for the printing-press renegades of centuries past, the “ ‘pirate stations’ where prohibited works could be produced … at that time, too, located across the border.” These he interpreted as an avant la lettre instance of a transnational public exerting pressure on authorities to more fully democratize communications technologies and information flows. D’Arcy believed that the advent of direct-broadcast satellites, which he forecast for roughly the late 1980s, offered a historic opportunity to restructure communications for the wider public benefit—if only it could be seized.39

However, d’Arcy’s proposals were not wholly in line with the increasingly antiregulatory American approach to cross-border broadcasting. “The closest possible intergovernmental cooperation is obviously an essential condition for the full development of direct broadcast satellites,” d’Arcy argued, for only cooperation would enable the international community to strike a balance between technological advances and the prerogatives of nation-states, between freedom and “mutual restraint.” This was where d’Arcy’s “right to communicate” entered the picture. First, he explained, “one should work more towards a pattern of groups of neighbouring countries” exchanging and pooling broadcasting resources “rather than … overreach ourselves by trying to set up from the beginning a world-wide organization or system of agreements in those communications areas where the common culture or traditions of a region or a continent play a predominant part.” The failure of earlier UN efforts to secure a binding international agreement on freedom of information was proof positive in d’Arcy’s mind that it was better to begin gradually, on a regional scale, akin to existing European institutions like the European Economic Community and Eurovision (the latter of which he had helped to create). He presented cultural differences as something that communications planners, if they were to achieve genuine consensus, could not afford to ignore.40

The right to communicate soon began to attract international attention. In a 1972 letter to d’Arcy, communication scholar L. S. Harms of the University of Hawaii at Manoa—located just next door to the East-West Center where Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm were producing their state-of-the-field development-communication anthologies—drew a parallel between Lerner’s and d’Arcy’s work: the “new theory of communication”



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