Abstract
This short and small-format book, devoid of citations and empirical investigations, and with a minimum of references, meets the (new) specific rules of the genre according to which brevity is meant to encourage reading, and not only among students. It could be considered a manifesto, as it sums up topics and analyses that were previously raised (though not only), and with a concern to better establish them, even in a global way, and even more, to reinforce the author’s power of conviction in many different areas. He isn’t only addressing students and academics specializing in information and communication, in the sociology of media, in political science; he aims more generally at the professionals and specialists from a number of disciplines (whether the human and social sciences or physics and biology) that have been concerned more or less recently with the questions raised; he addresses decision-makers, particularly those with responsibilities related to scientific politics; and he does not limit himself to French territory (hence his insistent reminders of ‘globalization’).
The reason why Dominique Wolton has given himself such a task (at least, that’s what it plausibly looks like), is that, already the author of approximately 20 books (some in collaboration, and not all focused on the topic here, nor always academic), he occupies a key position as a well-known specialist in media communication and political communication, as well as being a personality regularly invited to speak on air by established television media; as the long-standing director of a renowned academic review (Hermès); and as the director of the Institute for Sciences of Communication and Cognition (ISCC) recently established under the auspices of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He accumulates positions that aren’t always easy to reconcile, especially since he’s taken responsibility for the development and animation of this institute within the CNRS with a transversal vocation that attempts to jostle certain disciplinary boundaries, as well as some of the universities’ responsibilities and achievements. I should add that with the title alone, this book contrasts with the author’s previous preoccupations, as it is more concerned with communication than information, and particularly more concerned with the science of communication rather than that of information (only recently has he shown an interest in the science of information and communication, an inter-academic field that has in fact been developing in French universities for the three, even four, past decades).
Remembering the context is essential in understanding this book, outside France especially. Furthermore, it is a necessity because the book, although short, proceeds both with a series of successive accumulations with regard to his arguments and loops back on itself. The author repeats himself, consciously, as if the repetition allowed him to better outline the central elements of his argumentation; as if the reader could thus be better convinced. It is not until page 136, after a series of outlines, that he presents his project: ‘Communication is thus never something of a natural practice, but rather the result of a fragile process of negotiation. That’s why informing isn’t sufficient for communicating, and it’s also why, most of the time, except in rare moments of life and history, communicating is about living together. This is already a fine accomplishment in an open world such as ours, where nobody wants to give up what they believe in or think . . . nothing is worse than to try and distinguish good information from bad communication, as if everybody, journalists included, didn’t intend to communicate, share, seduce or convince, or all three at the same time, when producing or delivering information. To think of a theory of communication, is first to de-technicize the question of communication, to reintroduce history, politics, cultures . . . to rediscover the importance of societies behind the technical systems’ (p. 136).
Three elements stand out in his definition of what is central in his book:
Communication (meaning communication actions and strategies) is a fundamental process in contemporary societies, as it allows human beings to live together. Dominique Wolton reaffirms what he had already developed with conviction in at least two of his best-known books: in Eloge du grand public – une théorie critique de la television (Flammarion, 1st edn, 1990) and especially in Penser la communication (Flammarion, 1st edn, 1997).
Information should not be considered as opposed to communication; it is not a valuable sphere to be considered side by side with communication, and is often qualified as the sphere of manipulation, seduction and ‘non-values’. Many other authors have argued this before Wolton, in more detail, and not only by taking into account journalistic information, but also considering professional and even ‘cybernetic’ information. It’s a fact though: Wolton distinguishes himself from the debates that are in part specious and that sometimes take place among the journalistic professions, and particularly in relation to schools of journalism.
Lastly, a renewed theory of communication (he doesn’t go to the extent of considering a theory of information–communication) needs to be differentiated from an approach with a technical essence. Thus, Wolton raises theories from his earlier book Internet et après? Une théorie critique des nouveaux medias (Flammarion, 1st edn, 2000), and clearly maintains a good distance from the discourses that bestow on the new media a revolutionary role.
Communication, according to Wolton, ‘is learning how to cohabit in a world of information in which the question of otherness is central’ (p. 134). Thus aiming to organize pacific cohabitation, it is a deep emancipator, humanist even; and it participates in a political project. It is about ‘sharing what we have in common as much as it is about pacifically managing what separates us’ (pp. 134–135; emphasis in the original). Hence the following theoretical scheme, expressed in five sentences: ‘[There is] no individual or collective life without communication. To live is to communicate. Individuals communicate, either to share, or to seduce or convince. Most of the time, for the purpose of all three of those at once, in proportions that vary according to time and space. They vigorously butt against incommunication. The other, the receptor, doesn’t appear to be present, or doesn’t agree. If the partners agree to manage the incommunication that has been established, there then starts a phase of negotiation between the opposing points of view. If this negotiation, which often happens on a permanent basis, ends well, then cohabitation is established’ (p. 135). Somehow Wolton reuses, and in relation to the era of globalization, tries to renew the schemes of cybernetic communication, and especially that of functionalist communication from the middle of the 20th century; and that is why he insists on the active and increasing role of the receptors (de facto in Elihu Katz’s tradition): ‘the receptors negotiate, filter, prioritize, refuse, accept the innumerable messages that they receive, and that we receive daily. The receptor who has never been passive, is increasingly active to resist the fluxes of information that are addressed to him. We should incidentally speak of receptor-actor to underline the symbolic dimension required by that function’ (p. 22). And: ‘the receptor (who is also the internet user, the blogger, the actor, the one who is going to interact) is the new central actor. He has always existed, of course, but he empowers himself and criticizes as his emancipation proceeds and the amount of information he is bombarded with increases’ (p. 82).
That is how the construction of new communication establishes itself, all the more as one must resist the imperium of technologies, on the one hand, and the exploitation and drift of information, on the other hand, both sources of incommunication; particularly as it seems that access to and availability of information and communication technologies are in no way guaranteed.
Highly critical of the ideology of technology, Wolton finds little to commend in the new communication tools, and particularly those of the internet. ‘The techniques of communication are [with the benefits that are credited to them] communication without incommunication. . . . They draw from an ideology of transmission, merging the tools’ rapidity and performance with the complexity and uncertainty of human communication. To rethink the relations between information and communication is firstly to “de-technicize” communication, and remind ourselves that if technologies undoubtedly facilitate human communication, all one needs to do is to look back a century, but that isn’t sufficient evidence anymore. Medialization, transmission, interaction are not necessarily synonyms of communication [emphasis in original]. Certainly, technologies have progressed considerably, allowing improvement in social communication. But they will never suffice in resolving the existential aporia of human communication, or else we’re making our way towards “interactive solitudes” ’ (pp. 41–42). And he emphatically points to what he considers the addictions, the perversions even (according to him regulation is necessary), the submission to the tools, the aporia of interactivity, the reign of speed, the resignation of thought, the risks of traceability, the false utopia.
Regarding information, Dominique Wolton celebrates both its accomplishments and its drifts (it’s the title of his third chapter). ‘Information’, he writes, ‘is the real victory of the twentieth century, having three dimensions: the press in relation to politics, services [meaning specialized information, see later] related to economy, knowledge related to the industries of the same name. This not forgetting relational communication at the heart of human communication. . . . In short, information in all its understandings, and with all its imaginable ambiguities, is one of the central values of our open societies, of which [values] it encompasses the whole spectrum, from the noblest and most normative, to the most common and functional’ (p. 71). But beyond these victories that are apprehended in their general form, Wolton counts no fewer than 10 categories of drifts, related to the primacy of the logic of supply over the logic of demand: there is no diversity anymore; there are too many conventional ideas and stereotypes; too much oversimplification or going straight to the point; the ideology of the scoop; a race to outdo competition; the pernicious temptation to give away for free; a globalization that doesn’t favour pluralism; the increase of rumours and secrets; the tendency of the media to go around in circles; the contradiction between the progress of technologies and the slow pace of the time it takes to produce information. Relating to all of these ideas, one recognizes some propositions that have already been made by Wolton in his previous work (L’Information demain – de la presse écrite aux nouveaux medias, in collaboration, La Documentation Française, 1979; War Game – L’Information et la guerre, Flammarion, 1999). It is noticeable that though the author justly attempts to go further than information as ‘news’ (essentially produced and delivered by the organs of the press), the progression he advocates in the direction of specialized professional information (curiously qualified as service information!) and towards knowledge information is not convincing and hardly developed; and he neglects the promotional information of companies and organizations, although it is ubiquitous on the web.
Having presented the author’s theses through his own words and attempted to unveil the main elements (that are often repeated) of the analysis, I now turn to a critical evaluation of Wolton’s book. My critique will successively appraise the characterization of the approach; the methodology; the conceptualization of what is regarded as universally constituting communication; and finally I shall touch on the normativity of the propositions.
How can Dominique Wolton’s approach in this book be evaluated in relation to communicational and informational phenomena? After thinking about it, it appears to me that what characterizes the work is precisely a generality of the propositions and of the argumentation, and that it often owes more to the author’s personal intuitions than to scientifically based facts. Of course, Wolton might retort that he expressly intended to be brief and general, and that he didn’t want to burden the work with a plethora of quotations and data in order to be better understood and to be able to get straight to the point. In so doing, he puts forward an argumentation for which the foundations and empirical examples remain hidden to the reader. Moreover, this argumentation frequently stays at a level of generality that induces the reader to simply agree or disagree, as the author never expresses any doubt or adds any details. This approach applies to major phenomena (news information, professional and specialized information, incommunication, the pernicious character of traceability, the submission and even addiction to tools, the tyranny of speed and time, etc.) that according to Wolton, evolve – everywhere – in a well-delineated direction, and are generally opposed to his own humanist vision of the world. No, or few subtleties and counter-tendencies are acknowledged, and furthermore the observation of changes rarely takes into account the diversity of situations, practices, and thus of the effects he points out. To give some examples: first, with regard to cultural diversity he comments: ‘The Western world [How can it be defined?] isn’t alone anymore. Constantly criticized and suspected, it now needs to negotiate with other values, without abandoning its own. A cultural diversity that relies on the question of inequalities facing information’ (p. 83). Yes, without doubt, but what are these inequalities? What are the communication groups’ strategies that are developed nowadays in various regions of the planet? And how can they be reconciled with projects carried out by international organizations such as cultural diversity? The receptors are described as ‘impossible to ignore, impossible to satisfy. . . . The receptor is both at one and the same time the best ally of freedom of information, as well as its most important enemy’ (p. 82). It is as if the receptors’ reactions were univocal and didn’t answer to a variety of determinations, a variety that can a priori be noted. Interactivity he offers as the substitute for human communication: but more than 15 years after the Net was made available to the public at large, is such a global assessment acceptable when the multiplicity of research on the issue shows both the plurality of the formation processes of uses and the diversity of communicational, informational and cultural practices? Finally, on the subject of music, he states ‘for the time being . . . [music] plays in favour of a certain opening-up and solidarity in the world. Music is a factor both of integration and cohabitation’ (p. 105): presumably this is so, but it has yet to be considered as ‘possibly the only real global language’.
The author’s approach isn’t, of course, unrelated to the methodology he uses. As already mentioned, he doesn’t rely on research findings or propositions established by detailed protocols and research methods that could produce conclusions, even if only provisional. He is particularly critical of the ideology of technology that has taken hold among the scientific circles concerned with information and communication technologies, an ideology that allows these academics to deliver a good number of aporia, prophecies or banalities regarding social topics that exceed their own competences (he notes their ‘blind conformity to be modern’ and ‘a particular responsibility on the academics’ part who should have been the first to state that the king was naked, but for once, just wanted to be modern as well’ [p. 59]). But meanwhile he doesn’t realize that he himself is responding to them with a discourse that is too general, too global, without even taking into account the main findings of research in information and communication; yet these, for the past quarter of a century or so, have never stopped asserting and reinforcing themselves (in disciplinary or interdisciplinary frames) as a consequence of staying partial or by being concerned with subjects that are limited (in appearance only). In fact, Wolton pursues the reasoning that was that of the founding currents of the theories of information and communication in the middle of the 20th century (functionalists, cybernetics, and, in his case very few, structuralists or critical thinking); but it doesn’t reach the height of being able to explain the ongoing mutations, nor is it representative of the scientific work that is already available.
In an attempt to summarize, Dominique Wolton ends up proposing a theory of communication that gives a central position to the model of ‘cohabitation’ that ‘tries, on every level, to invent something else, between the universal hierarchically organized level and the plain juxtaposition of interests and visions of the world. To cohabit, whether in communication, in models of political organization, on the planet, in sustainable development, in the cultural and communication industries, is always to respect the plurality of points of view relating to the world and [emphasis in the original] the necessity of a common principle. The model of cohabitation thus goes further than the relation between information and communication; it relates to one of the major normative challenges of the internal organization of contemporary societies and the cohabitation of these inside the nation’ (pp. 101–102). Thus, he makes the observation that was made by others before him, such as Manuel Castells, of the formation on a global scale of an individualistic mass society, but he associates it with a new normative model, that is more political than it is sociological, founded on cohabitation, a model that can be considered as having ‘limited effects’. Indeed, the aim is not really one of a philosophical kind (as it is in the ‘living together’ of Hannah Arendt), it is closer to a metaphorically shaped version of a methodological individualism that converts social action into a series of small, local compromises, as if there were no social logics, notably social logics of communication.
Finally, Wolton’s readers are left with no alternative than to question for themselves the reality of this new society and the common frame that it may be forming, and the necessity to appoint to it a new normative (universal) model. Anyway, Wolton, whose theorizing of communication has always been marked as normative, is on the lookout for new norms; his approach, one must conclude, is not naturally to favour the elaboration of a theoretical proposition, or the establishment of scientific results, that would be better related to the mutations of contemporary societies, in all their broad diversity.