Starr, Chapter One: A Response

When I read in Starr’s acknowledgements that his book can be viewed as a study of "the sources of power in the modern world" (xi), I immediately thought of Foucault. And as I read on into the introduction, I continued to think of Foucault. Starr asserts that today’s media is intrinsically linked to power and that power and politics are intrinsically linked, thereby intrinsically linking the media to politics. Certainly the media today has an almost government-like status, and certainly the question of freedom—how much do we really have?—in connection to our relationship with the media is an important one. Foucault says there cannot be power without freedom, so, if I’m to trust in him (I’m not saying I do), I feel temporarily appeased in knowing that freedom still exists, for the power and influence of politics remains as strong as ever.

My Foucauldian digressions from the text made me think about the kind of media history Starr is in fact presenting—his presentation seems to be filtered through a postmodern lens. I do not necessarily think such a filter to be problematic, though I do think it worthwhile to be cognizant of influencing factors behind Starr’s presentation of material.    

Starr’s writing style is such that it anticipates reactions that readers—at least this reader—will have to his text. He comments that the power of the American model of communications throughout the world raises “uneasy questions about the media’s structure, role, and relation to popular self-government” (3). And sure enough, I felt uneasy when I later read, “Social institutions, including forms of government, are the result not only of forces that create them in the first place, but of forces that affect their survival” (7). The media has prevailed in a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest race, and many of the forms in which it has prevailed reflect how similar our society is to early American society. Indeed, as Starr himself says at the conclusion of his introduction, “Freedom is at stake now in choices about communications as it was at the founding of the republic” (17). My database research focused on criticism in relation to our search terms—novels and criticism, “novel reading” and criticism, and “pernicious books” and criticism—and certainly a popular criticism that arises in the early 1800s is how much smut Americans read when they should be reading “good” literature. Yet when I got to 1830, I found a publication arguing that, since it is obvious that people are going to read their so-called smut, critics should cease and desist trying to convince them to do otherwise. The American people were the force that allowed such fiction to become institutionalized, to survive. The media today is saturated by popular culture—even CNN runs celebrity gossip news on its ticker at the bottom of the screen. Our predilection for so-called smut continues to survive, and it continues to survive because—by flocking to it in droves—we continue to allow it to. What, then, does “fittest” even mean in regards to the media? The best, the most popular, the most persuasive?

Defining “fittest” is far easier in states that censor communication. Take, as example, Cuba. There the government certainly holds power over its media. (To call it “the media” would be to give its media a sense of autonomous power.) In a Cuban newspaper, sure, there are “opinion” sections, but there is never going to be an opinion that does not align with that of the government’s. Want to send an email to someone expressing a supposedly private opinion with which the government would not agree? Go ahead, send it, but your email recipient(s) will find the offensive words blacked out and/or missing from your text. You, like the media, have no higher-level power. But then, to refer back to Foucault, there is no power without freedom. So what is it that Cuba has, then? What do we call it? Is communism, within Foucault’s context, a form of intellectual slavery?

Some of Starr’s most interesting dialogue actually goes on in his endnotes. I have a love/hate relationship with the endnote—I think they can provide a wealth of tangential yet still relevant information to your reader, but they can so easily disrupt the flow of reading. Even if you choose not to refer to an endnote right away, for the sake of first finishing a paragraph or chapter, you see that number, and you think, “To consult the endnote or not to consult?” Certainly reading the book in digital form would solve this problem for me—I could click on or scroll over the note, and there it would be! But just as many writers continued to pass around manuscripts despite the advent of the printing press, I continue to read my scholarly books in their non-digitalized form. And I probably should have put this tangent on endnotes into a footnote.

As I was saying, Starr’s entire debate with Habermas happens behind the scenes, so to speak, although it’s really more of a not-well-defended dismissal of Habermas than a debate. Although I’ve not read Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, I do know it is considered a book that helped to launch media studies into the realm of serious academic discourse. For a book of that much import, Starr dismisses it far too readily for my liking. He faults Habermas for largely ignoring politics, ignoring the government, the very things on which Starr is focusing first and foremost. Habermas finds government control of the press in the early 1700s to be minimal—he sees the press as having more power as an independent unit. In situations such as these, I always question, is there really a right or wrong? Does not the modern day media itself show us how the portrayal of any event can be severely impacted by the spin one puts on it? Are not Habermas and Starr simply using different spins? Of course Starr will champion his own postmodern reading, and, who knows, maybe it is “right.” Or at least more agreeable with modern day palettes.

By footnoting what I take to be an important move for Starr (to decidedly position his text over that of Habermas’s so early in the game), I wonder if Starr is pandering to what he calls “the American culture of information” (17). Maybe most readers aren’t going to be interested in such abstract debates between one academic text and another—they just want the information. Is that, then, what Starr is giving us—just information? Am I gaining knowledge from reading this text? I would like to think so, but then, I’m not afraid of getting lost in the potential utopias of the endnotes. (I’m also not afraid of Virginia Woolf.)

But I’m not reading alone, am I? My brain lit up when I read, “Once a newspaper circulates, for example, no one ever truly reads it alone” (24). Well, books circulate, too. So does knowing that others are reading this book, that others in fact will be blogging about this book, that I will read the blogs written by others about this book, that we will all meet to discuss this book, mean I’m reading in (good) company? And does that impact how I’m reading? Why I’m reading? What I’m reading—“what” in the sense of how I’m taking in and interpreting Starr’s words. And does reading in such company mean there is a horizontal form of information communication going on in what, at a literal level, appears to be a simple vertical transaction (though in my head Starr and I are debating, of course)? Such concepts are fascinating, and I’m thrilled Starr has me thinking about them.

Equally fascinating is Starr’s comment that the rise of the media in late 17^th century Europe gave society more insight into the government, just as the government was getting a clearer vision of its people. Europe, then, saw the creation of modified Panopticon prisons on both sides. But who was at the center of both prisons, who had the power to filter what the other side saw? In this case, it couldn’t be just anyone; it was the collective media, which had clearly garnered, as Habermas asserts, a more than modest amount of legitimate, independent power, more power than Starr grants it. Point Habermas?