03.07.2010 - 05.07.2010

Local Knowledge and Global Practices in Communication Studies: Looking East, Going South

National Chung Cheng University
168, University Road, Min-Hsiung
62102 Chia-Yi, Taiwan
Phone: +886 5 272 0411
Fax: +886 5 272 1186
Email: telcom@ccu.edu.tw

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Media & Communication

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National Chung Cheng University
168, University Road, Min-Hsiung
62102 Chia-Yi, Taiwan

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‘Change' has become the catch-all term in the study of communication. Yet what spells out change is not only the unremitting advances brought about by the global distribution of the integrated digital technologies, but also the corresponding diversification and capriciousness of the local living practices. When the European and American internet users were drawn to facebook, the internet user in Taiwan have “plurk,” a facebook counterpart created by a Taiwanese in a transnational effort of collaboration. Despite the fact that Google outgrows the other services to become the most popular ISP of the world, “Yahoo! kimo” is still Taiwanese's most favorite. Rupert Murdoch's ambition might have made Fox News the primal political opponent of President Obama, it was dwarfed by China 's swift market and policy change despite Murdoch's meticulous setup of fifteen years. Apple's i-Phone is being challenged by its knockoff version “Shan-zhai” in Asia . And when the August 8 Flood ravaged the central and southern Taiwan , reform-minded internet ‘geeks' established their own on-line relief system with speed and efficiency that made the government seem dispensable in times of urgency.

Looking east, going south—the change of intellectual course is to dispense the east and the south with the image of an intellectual ‘data mine' in the eyes of the west and the north. Eastward looking explores Eastern phenomena symptomatically and reflexively. South-bound exploration unearths new epistemology rooted in the South. Both salvage the intellectual worldview from essentializing the North and West as the only intellectual paradigm. Both call for a return to the value of local knowledge.

When communication is full of changes, as well as a multiplicity of living practices, what does the future hold for media studies? Post-colonial research and alternative social sciences have propagated for de-European, de-metropolitan, and de-centered research inquiries: African post-colonial scholars look East, to the Indian Ocean, to South and Eastern Asias, to the Islamic world, and to ‘the islands'; North American social studies go South, conceiving a Southern theory by incorporating an emerging Latin American autonomy consciousness and vowing to become a “worldly social science.” When the sense of geographical liberation fermented the study of the humanities, how does the study of communication situate itself?

All this intellectual soul searching is to counterbalance the dominant world views of economic neo-liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and developmentalism that have defined main-stream social thoughts in the last decades. These strains of thoughts encourage competition and growth, yet they have also created a world of exploitative division along the lines of geography, class and ethnicity. Materially or symbolically, to redress the problems is not merely a matter of policy overhaul, it demands alternative perspectives—perspectives other than the ones we were designated to have.

Prof. Yuezhi Zhao, School of communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada; Prof. Andrew Calabrese, School of Journalism and
Mass Communication, University of Colorado, USA; Josh Silver, Executive Director of Free Press，USA.