Communication as conquest

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Venue
Virtual Event

About this event

Euro-Americans widely assume that communication is inherently good—the more the better—despite evidence to the contrary. For example, social media were initially imagined as liberatory. Belatedly, their dystopian implications have become obvious. These fantasies about communication, genealogically traceable to Christian ideals of communion, have become normalized and naturalized as a marketable good by telecommunications corporations. A critical examination of theories of communication, interpretation and translation show that the neutral language of communication, semiotic and semantic theory obscures a quite different paradigm. Communication as potent, persuasive, effective or coercive is encapsulated in Foucault’s remark: ‘Discourse is a violence which we do to things’. Insofar as media and communication studies, under the guise of impartial objective scholarship, adopt an ideological Eurocentric model they are more or less unwittingly perpetuating this violence.

Mark Hobart is Emeritus Professor of Critical Media and Cultural Studies at SOAS, University of London. Mark's research interests include philosophical issues in Anthropology, Cultural and Media Studies. He has been working on a project on cultural styles of argument and rhetoric entitled 'How Indonesians Argue', which aims to explore the practices that constitute what we usually call 'culture' or 'society'. Having carried out over eight years of intensive ethnography in Indonesia, his interest is driven by awareness of the unappreciated gulf between academic theorizing and concepts on the one hand and how people act, judge and interpret their own actions.

Zoom Link: https://soas-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97295344029?pwd=NjBiZlBBSlc4cWxmYWkwZ1d1WHZxdz 09

Meeting ID: 972 9534 4029

Passcode: X5jmV95j3n