confused terminology communication

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Confused Terminology In The Field Of Communication, Information And Mass Media: Brillig But Mimsy EARLE BEATTIE, York University ABSTRACT The term "communication" has been misused by scholars, practitioners and laymen so long that definition is badly needed if solid study foundations are to be laid and meaning achieved for public participation. The word "Media" too is often used as a singular noun by laymen. "Mass Communication" is a contradiction in terms .and "the mass. media of communication" an abomination. Pluralizing communication(s) to mean the hardware of "telecommunications" is found untenable as is the word "telecommunications" itself except for telephone. The word "communication" derives from the Latin communico which includes the prefix "co", implying "with", and the morpheme or cognate "commune" with some other forms such as "communion", "communism", "commonwealth" and "company". "Sharing" or "holding in common" are what is meant. Two or more persons are obviously involved in the etymology. The mass media, being one-way do not qualify as communication and the little feedback that occurs through polls, letters or phone-in programs are controlled trickles into the mainstream of media information. To be called communication, media must include operating cybernetic loops with significant exchange between senders and receivers; dialogue must replace the-present monolgue. Commercial media claiming to "communicate" have usurped the term; they do not communicate; they do inform, however, but because of their ex- communication function they may actually alienate people. Scholars usuage over the years is examined including some now beginning to recognize this solecism and to argue against communication's further abuse. Telidon is questioned as to its interactive claims. A paper presented at the Canadian Communciation Conference, at Halifax, May, 1981.

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Confused Terminology In TheField Of Communication, Information

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Page 1: Confused Terminology Communication

Confused Terminology In The Field Of Communication, Information

And Mass Media: Brillig But Mimsy

EARLE BEATTIE, York University

ABSTRACT

The term "communication" has been misused by scholars, practitioners and laymen so long that definition is badly needed if solid study foundations are to be laid and meaning achieved for public participation. The word "Media" too is often used as a singular noun by laymen. "Mass Communication" is a contradiction in terms .and "the mass. media of communication" an abomination. Pluralizing communication(s) to mean the hardware of "telecommunications" is found untenable as is the word "telecommunications" itself except for telephone.

The word "communication" derives from the Latin communico which includes the prefix "co", implying "with", and the morpheme or cognate "commune" with some other forms such as "communion", "communism", "commonwealth" and "company". "Sharing" or "holding in common" are what is meant. Two or more persons are obviously involved in the etymology. The mass media, being one-way do not qualify as communication and the little feedback that occurs through polls, letters or phone-in programs are controlled trickles into the mainstream of media information. To be called communication, media must include operating cybernetic loops with significant exchange between senders and receivers; dialogue must replace the-present monolgue. Commercial media claiming to "communicate" have usurped the term; they do not communicate; they do inform, however, but because of their ex- communication function they may actually alienate people. Scholars usuage over the years is examined including some now beginning to recognize this solecism and to argue against communication's further abuse. Telidon is questioned as to its interactive claims.

A paper presented at the Canadian Communciation Conference, at Halifax, May, 1981.

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As we are examining at this conference the intellectual foundations of communication theory, it would be well to retrace our steps toward a definition of terminology in this field, uninhibited by the ambiguities, confusion and misuse in places, high and low. Either that or we must change the technology from reactive to interactive to fit the terminology.

It is understandable that these words have been so abused by the public and by practitioners, but puzzling that they should have been confused by scholars so long when they might have been producing a more scientific taxonomy. Meanwhile, study and understanding by students may have been arrested. Certainly, illumination has been blocked. Elaborate empirical studies have been built on a semantic quicksand and only commercial interests have benefited. The usurpation of the "warm" word and currently, an "in" word - communication - by those who dispense information or data for a price could not fail to benefit commercialists, even though it may have hindered others.

The greatest misnomer is the central word, "communication" itself. Others are the word "media," and compoundings from the main word, i.e. "mass communication" or the ultimate monstrosity, "mass media of communication." And the word "information" has become distorted or ousted. From time to time we hear of "communication overkill" by which is meant "information overkill". The various media publics seldom if ever suffer communication overkill because they do not have communication at all; they do suffer from the constant and repetitive one-way flow of information, particulary advertising. The word "information" is also treated in two ways: first, in the popular sense of "items of knowledge" and secondly in the technical meaning of "binary" digits or electronic "bits".

Sometimes a difference is drawn between the word "communication" and its plural "communications". The singular is used to mean the software, message or content; the plural is confined to the meaning of "hardware" -that is, system or technology. This, at least, distinguishes communication from information and data,

( but unfortunately it assigns to the letter "s" the impossible task of radically altering the meaning of the other thirteen letters. Pluralization of most words retains the original meaning of that word, not just the sound, even though the plural may not be the letter "s" as in the case of "bureaux" for bureaus. A large semantic space is covered by thirteen letters of the alphabet, dominating the tiny single-letter space of the plural '3". There is confusion in the field because many do not know that such distinction is being drawn by some scholars; it is seldom drawn by laymen. The term "mass communication" is, of course, a contradiction in terms as the media are now structured, because there is no media communication with

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the mass, no matter how the mass or the public is perceived. Should media be re-constructed to include feedback of more than a token kind, the term would be quite tenable.

This is not mere quibble or word-play of no consequence to the real world where communication may be disappearing while non- communicative authoritative messages increase along with their corolloraries, estrangement and violence.

Monologuist mass media have forestalled the development of interactive community media by laying false claims to a communication role even while their development has mitigated against any analysis of information-provision in society.

The vehicles of mass media -print or electronic -are not carriers of "communication" but one-way delivery systems for messages. The often heard phrase used by organization secretaries who pretentiously announce that several people "have communicated with us by mail," is not only pedantry but an incorrect use of the word. "Several people have written to us," yes, or "sent us a letter." Communicated by telephone, yes, for here in the two-way channels of copper wire pairs is an exchange of messages by voice, albeit not face-to-face until picturephone can make its second coming.

Although both Oxford and Webster dictionaries trace the Latin root of "communication" to the concept of sharing, holding intercourse, holding in common and having a common passageway, they also provide the popular meanings: to impart, transmit, give information and convey. If these words in the communication and media fields represented the same thing for the receiver as they do for the sender, all might be well, but the difficulty lies in the fact they do not. They are ambiguous, imprecise, lacking in validity and somewhat subjective.

The word stems from the Latin roots "communico" and "communicare". It produces such words as "commune", "community", "communion", "communism", "commonwealth" and "company." All of these words carry the meaning of "more than one." The prefix "cow is present in each case, being a synonym for "with" (it takes at least two to use "with"). The first morpheme or cognate in most of the words is "commune", where common possession is a basis of human relations. This may be a physical sharing as in communal land or symbolic sharing as in the church's sacrament of "holy communion" where the mystical body of Christ is said to be shared when Christians unite in a ritual partaking of the "host". A thin wafer taken on the tongue is the medium that carries the holy spirit inside the supplicant, or so he believes.

In roughly the same way, Hitler symbolized his anti-Christ dogma of Aryan superiority with the symbol of a crooked cross, the Swastika, and achieved a near-total communion of German people united in idolatry. They congregated in the black mass of the

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infamous Nuremberg Rally and, from all ackounts, their communication was viscera! and emphatic. It was like a spark running through the audience, leaping from person t o to fuse separate identities in a vast homogeneity. Their feedbqck to ~ i ~ l ~ ~ * ~ tocsin was the tumultuous roaring repetition "Seig Heil!- with arms raised in the hubristic Nazi salute like one mammath member in deification of Der Fueher. The object of their worship s ~ o o d u n d e r the huge cross and the Imperial Eagle in that vast amphitbeatre as lights swept over the upraised faces and trumpets blared.

The Rally could be called communication personified dramatized. Perhaps if this version of communicatpon were cited more often, not as something always good, but as a negative version with hypnotic overtones - mass persuasion throhgh perceived blood affinities and stage-managed drama - cornmuhication would take on deeper (and darker) meaning. For Karl Jaspee,, the catholic existentialist, it takes on the meaning of cerebration, t h e opposite of this meaning of celebration. Jaspers held that:

Reason demands boundless communication. It is itself the total will to communicate ... existence comes into its own only with other existence ... the individual cannot become human by himself ... companions in f a t e lovingly find the road to truth.'

Like-minded Nazis, binding themselves together, q i d not find the road to truth in the short run. But the journey into truth, Jaspers says, is to be found only "in time" through commy,icability:

T ru th therefore cannot be s e p a r a t e d f rom communicability. It only appears in time as weality - t h r o u g h communica t ion . A b s t r a c t e d f r o m communication truth hardens into reality. The movement of communication is at one and the same time, the preservation of the search for truth.'

When worshippers are denied this process of sharing by ecclesiastical authority, the severance is called ex-co~munication - a serious punishment in medieval days that cut people offfrom social contacts, rendered them social lepers, and reduce^ them in their isolation to non-persons. Next to death itself, and sometimes more than death, this ostracism has been experienced i b all times and places as a cruel remedy. Man is a political animal, Aristotle remarked, meaning he is a gregarious animal; to curtail, or deny him contact with fellow humans is the penultimate gunishment. modern times, this ex-communication takes the form of alienation which results from subtle social segregation. The mass media as one- way message-makers, failing in communication, may be important elements in that alienation.

In short, the mass media do not communicate. Theg inform. ~ h ~ i ~ role, to date, has been information - and not c,mmunication~

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They are engaged in ongoing monologues and not in the dialogues that communication demands by definition. They can and do inform audiences, sometimes splendidly, sometimes poorly, but as now structured they are one-way conduits of information with little or no feedback or participation by their publics. The meagre feedback that does exist in public media consists of opinion polls, letters to the editor and phone-in programs on radio and television - and these are controlled by the message-maker. Such one-way, vertical transmissions to passively-rendered receivers are a tiny trickle of feedback into the mainstream of information. To quote McLuhan again in a percipient phrase, the role of the public is to "put up and shut up".

In short, communication requires sharing, interaction, participation or feedback of more than a token kind that is not controlled by the sender or the message-maker. It cannot, therefore, be a single reaction to a set piece, as in an opinion poll or a survey, but must be a genuine exchange of messages, a dialogue. In order to create dialogues, of course, the receivers of messages would have to enter two-way processes that link senders and receivers in a reciprocating feedback loop. They must, of necessity, exchange roles as senders and receivers as they do in the interpersonal mode -face- to-face conversation.

The sender must know that the individual receiver has received; he must know that the receiver knows and the receiver cannot be a statistical assumption. Otherwise there may be transmission, but no communication. You, the receiver, can say to yourself or to someone else, "I get the message," but that is still not communication if the sender doesn't know that you know. It is like a note thrust into a bottle and tossed into the sea addressed, as Charles Wright has observed, "to whom it may concern". Response to a message may be in simply indicating that the message has been received or indicating that it has been understoodand to what degree; it may be in modifying the message or in challenging the message fundamentally and framing an entirely new one that is diametrically different. To be called communication, that possibility must be there for message- making for the receiver.

Communication is facilitated when it proceeds horizontally: that is when there is a rough equality of status, whether real or psychological, where people feel they can speak their minds. Vertical "communication" is authoritative and tends to become non- communicative - in one ear and out the other - like words from a boss or a teacher.

Basically, communication is an exchange of energy. The media in interaction are catalytic agents that bring things together but, unlike chemical catalysts, they become involved. They shape the message and it makes a difference what medium is chosen for what message.

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That is the basis of Innis' and McLuhan's theories that media technology is crucial in history (the medium is the message) and suffice it to say here that many scholars have now accepted the once- arcane idea that the two are not inseparable, that the medium changes and even determines the message.

The process of communication is best exemplified in the machine- mediated mode by telephony. Bell-Northern's Gordon Thompson correctly refers to the telephone as a "convivial" instrument with communicative characteristics. It is a term coined by Ivan Illich to express "that property of a tool or social institution that relates to its effectiveness for ordinary people." Illich wrote:

I choose the term conviviality to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.. .

The contrary trend of modern technology, its non-communicative and ex-communication aspects that isolate people or alienate them, is more directly expressed by Thompson in the fall, 1975, issue of In Senrrh:

The mass media tend to isolate us, robbing us of the exhilirating sense of sharing and experience with others. Television may be the modern mass medium par excellence, but it has missed the boat on this important score - it fails to capture the undercurrents of communication that can create a sense of community in an audience in live situation^.^

The idea that mass media robs us of the experience of sharing by isolating us and generalizing us is far different fron the concept that the media bring us all together as expressed sixty years ago by Charles Cooley in Social Organization (1919). He maintained that public consciousness "extends by even steps with that give and take of suggestions that the new intercourse makes possible, until wide nations, and finally the world itself may be included in one lively mental w h ~ l e . " ~ While this is an early statement of the "global village" concept, there was little evidence even then of give-and-take suggestions and "a new intercourse."

The concept of information as a synonym for communication is carried from Cooley's time in the first third of the century to the present by recognized authorities in communication theory. The confusion is evident throughout the literature: beginning with the four "founding fathers of communication research" in the United States, as Wilbur Schramm called them, we have:

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Paul Lazarsfeld, sociologist, in the first line of his "Mass Media and Personal Influence" (The Voice of America Forum Lectures, undated): "the ability of the mass media of communication to reach large audiences and to make an impact on these large audiences became the subject of systematic research in the 1920's."

Harold Lasswell in "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society" writes perceptively of the process but his terminology falls into the old pattern of confusion when he says:

Similarly, most of the messages within any state do not involve the central channels of communication ... A further set of significant equivalencies is related to the circuits of communication, which are predominantly one-way or two-way, depending on the degree of reciprocity between communicators and audience. Or, to express it differently, two-way communication occurs when the sending and the receiving functions are performed with equal frequencies by two or more persons. A conversation is usually assumed to be a pattern of two-way communication (although monologues are hardly unknown). The modern instruments of mass communication give an enormous advantage to the controllers of printing plants, broadcasting equipment, or other forms of fixed and specialized capital. But it should be noted that audiences do "talk back", after some delay: and many controllers of mass media use scientific methods of sampling in order to expedite this closing of the circuit.'

Lasswell here considers media as "central channels of communication" and in referring to them as optionally "one-way" reveals that the reciprocating aspect of message-making is not central to his criteria of communication. The word "information" would have been more exact. Circuits cannot be one-way if they are to be called communication. Audiences do talk back eventually, as he observes, or sometimes do, but the enormous advantage of which he speaks is in fact a virtual monopoly of message-making. The constant outpourings by media professionals are what we receive in print and electronic form. Scientific sampling is statistical in nature and so reductionist that individual identity is lost, except in depth interviewing. The respondents opinion, elicited in selected questions, may be recorded later as Lasswell notes, but he is a profile, not a person and his back-talking is to a set piece. The element of spontaneity is entirely lost and, with it, any opportunity for an input of any significance for the message, or any comment on it, that can have an effect on the audience.

In the preface to their book Communication and Persuasion (1953) Hovland, Janis and Kelley use communication as a noun and pluralize it: "A great deal of descriptive information has

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accumulated concerning persuasive communications ..." and "most of this information comes from studies which focus on practical questions posed by communicators who make use of mass media."g Of course part of the message may be face-to-face and therefore qualify as communication, but the message-makers or senders cannot be called "communicators" if they only use mass media.

In addition to these "founding fathers" a sample of other eminent scholars of the last thirty years shows the same confusion in terminology.

. Klapper in his well-known text: l l e Effects of Mass Communication (1960) writes:

The efficacy of mass communication, either as a contributory agent or as an agent of direct effect is affected by various aspects of the media and communications themselves or of the communication situation.1•‹

Berelson and Steiner: Human Behavior, shorter edition (1964, 1967). Under the heading "The mass media of communication" they declare: "To begin with, people do tend to see and hear communications that are favorable or congenial to their point of view. They are more likely to see and hear such communications then neutral or hostile ones."

Wilbur Schramm: Mass Communication: "Like the first edition this one brings together anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, economists, teachers of mass communication and professional mass communicators ..."I2

Faculties, schools, research institutes, departments, programs and courses also employ the confusing phraseology of "mass communication, mass media of communication."

George Gerbner: "Mass Media and Human Communication Theory" in Human Communication lleory, "The fundamental questions raised by media of communications are usually those of new or different ways of looking at life.""

Our view in this paper has been that media of communication to justify the name must be interpersonal media or machine-to-machine media with participation loops.

Eugene and Ruth Hartley in "The Importance and Nature of Communication" discussing the function of feedback, state: 'A' has no way of knowing what he has conveyed to 'B' unless 'B' responds with a communication of his own...we come now to a point made earlier: communication is interaction. It is usually a two-way process, involving stimulation and response among organisms, and it is both reciprocal and alternating ..."I4

This is partly true but contains contradictions and confusion. The use of words is imprecise, 'A' does have a way of knowing what he has conveyed to 'B' as conveyance or transmission is known. But reception or understanding are not. 'A' knows what he has had

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conveyed - this is his message. But 'A' does not know that 'B' has received the message. This is assuming that 'A' knows 'B' -but if 'B' is unknown to him, merely a demographic digit in a mass, 'A' does know that the message has been conveyed, but not that it has arrived personally. It is still the message in the bottle tossing about in the sea. The Hartleys seem to touch on the true meaning of communication -that of known interaction -and then unaccountably use the word as a noun, i.e. "a communication of his own" which should be a "message" of his own. They lose the concept one line later by saying "It is usually a two-way process" when of course it can only be a two- way process if it is to be truly called communication.

In providing a key chapter for the book, the Hartleys ventilate the issue thoroughly in their way. "The response evoked by one communiqut in turn becomes a stimulus and a communiqut in its own right. In this way, in a series of communications, each may be both response and stimulus.

This statement holds true even for mass communication situations where the audience is not present to answer back. If the communication is at all successful, the audience responds in some way, and its response affects future comm~nica t ion ."~~

But again the authors seem to be confusing face-to-face or small audience communication (where there can be feedback by way of applause, heckling, facial or other gestures and movements) with mass media messages. Is communication a set of symbols or a meaningful exchange of these? It is uniquely defined by Frank E. X. Dance in Human Communication Theory when he says:

If you take a helically coiled spring such as the child's toy that tumbles down staircases by coiling in upon inself, and pull it full out in the vertical position, you can call to your imagination an entirely different kind of communicaiton than that represented by compressing the spring as close as possible upon itself. If you extend the spring half-way and then compress just one side of the helix you can envision a communicative process open in one dimension but closed in another. At any and all times, the helix gives geometric testimony to the concepts that communication while moving forward is at the same moment coming back upon itself and being affected by the curve from which it emerges. Yet, even though slowly, the helix can gradually free itself from its lower- level distortions. The communication process, like the helix, is constantly moving forward and yet to some degree dependent on the past, which informs the present and the future. The helical communication model offers a flexible and useful geometrical image for considering the communication process.16

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Robert E. Park expresses the same ideas in The Crowd And The Public:

C o m m u n i c a t i o n when comple t ed involves a n interpretation by A of the stimulus coming from B, and a reference back to the person whose sentiment or attitude it assumes to be an expression...''

Communication is then a form of interaction that takes place, he says, and cites the way in which two strange dogs approach one another. "This is not mere interstimulation: it is communication. These dugs understand even when they do not speak. So it is with the hen clucking to her chicks. This is not conversation, but it is communication. l8

A very informed approach to the communication act and its definition such as this must be contrasted with the straight "dictionary" definition provided by Emery, Ault and Agee in their text Introduction to Mass Communication (Second Edition, 1965). They state, "Simply defined, communication is the art oftransmitting information, ideas and attitudes from one person to another."I9 The authors describe what they call "communication machinery" as "more and more fantastic" in conquering space as men, hurtling above earth, send back radio reports, and TV cameras provide close- up shots via satellites.

Indeed, global audiences have totalled an estimated one billion persons - about one-quarter of the earth's population. Yet these massive transmissions to vast audiences travelling at the speed of light over tremendous space did not in any way "communicate" as we are beginning to understand the word. They did a superb job of informing mankind, but only to a small degree could they be called communicators. Neil Armstrong's message from the moon in 1969, now known by millions of people around the earth, "That's one small step for man, one great leap for mankind" became two-way only when Mission Control radioed back to him. Talking back and forth to each other, they were then in communication; the masses of viewers and listeners in these nations remained voiceless. (Information like this, of course, can in turn stimulate communication in groups.)

How do Canadian scholars use the key words in this field? Harold Innis in l%e Bias of Communication asserts, "A medium of

communication has an important influence on the dissemination of knowledge over space and time."*O

Marshall McLuhan shows little or no use of the term communication except as interaction.

John Irving in Mass Media In Canada statea tnat --two technologies of communication co-exist in Western civilization today - the typographic and the electronic." (Preface, vii) ... and that between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries a network of

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communications has emerged that links into one national society the vast area stretching from Bonavista to Vancouver Island, from the Great Lakes to the far islands of the arc ti^.^'

Paul Rutherford, The Making of the Canadain Media: "This book explores the history of the communications media in Canada."22

There is little or nothing in the book about communication; it explores the mass or information media of Canada.

William Melody: Culture, Communication and Dependency: "Space-biased communication media have an orientation toward the present and the future ..."23

Dallas Smyth, Dependency Road "The mass media of communication were a systematic invention of monopoly capital i~m."~~

Finally, a brief look at other countries. Ralph Miliband: The State in Capitalist Society: "Even where, as is

often the case for radio and television, agencies of communication are public institutions, or mixed ones, they are not simply the mouthpieces of the government of the day..."25

Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, The Power To Inform: "The only power that has continued to assert its strength and to grow is the power to inform ...p rimarily because information has proved over and over again to be in the line of communication necessary to the functioning of all other power bases."26

We would allow that information can be "in the line of communication" if it does not mean in the nature of, but leading to. The author does not employ confused terminology in the rest of the book which is mostly about the printed press.

Jurgen Habermas, in Communication and Class Struggle: "In a large public body this kind of communication requires specific means for transmitting information and influencing those who receive it."27

Seth Siegelaub, in the same volume, notes that, Even the word 'communication' with its present specialized connotation dictated by our form of society severely limits our comprehension of this ongoing process, for it fails to communicate the great variety of human conditions that give rise to cornm~nica t ion .~~

A reductionist definition of communiction is here evident and the word is used now as a verb, but the writer does note that poor use of the word curtails our thinking.

In the above quotations, communication is being confused with message-formation, with expression or articulation, with the movement of messages and the vehicle or vessel containing them, but seldom or never has the meaning of interaction. The question of validity in terminology is not a simple one. We know that Humpty Dumpty was drolly subjective when he said that a word meant

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exactly-what he wanted it to mean and that Lewis Carroll further posed the dilemma of meaning when he wrote:

was brillig and the slithy toveddid gyre and gimble in the wabe ... All mimsy were the borogroves - And the mome raths outmabe.

John Seeley twenty years ago observed that "the very etymology of the word communication constitutes a standing invitation to misunderstanding and self-deception, an invitation widely accepted because the misunderstanding is in the short run unprofitable and the self-deception, apparently, c o m f ~ r t i n g . ~ ~

However, Seeley adds to the confusion by using the word in two different ways: as information and as non-quality in the media i.e. the "mythology" that Jean Lohisse calls "common contents" in the media or universal human levels, but which to Seeley is strictly reinforcement of old values and "celebration of the usual," of the mundane rather than the new.

Seeley concluded his chapter with "One is tempted to say that the role of the true communicator is that of the professional outlaw: as he thinks of himself as professional outlaw he approaches his distinctive function: as he sees himself again as professional outlaw he retreats from it."'O The last phrase is reminiscent of McLuhan's observation about professionals~

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti- environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society ... the expert is the man who stays put.''

One scholar, Colin Cherry, has provided a statement on the definition of communication which is etymologically-based like the thesis of this paper. He asks,

What, then, is 'human communication'? Strictly, the word communication comes from the Latin communico - meaning share. Share, notice, not 'I send messages'. Communication is essentially a social process. Sharing does not mean simply passing something, some sign, from one person to another; it implies also that this sign is mutually accepted, recognized and held in common ownership or used by each person. Communication always has this dual nature; it is part of each person's own mental make-up, the signs constricting his own thought, and equally it is those persons' union, a union mediated by those signs.32

Although Cherry takes the word back to its roots, he does not seem to realize the implications of his definition, and says later:

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The global spread of communication media such as new agencies, overseas broadcasting, films, television programming and other services available to the public has come about with great speed ... In the writer's opinion, one of the greatest dangers into which these post-war developments of world communication can lead is the delusion that, as the global network expands, so the walls of our mental villages are being pushed back: the delusion that increased powers of communication will bring us closer together into a better understanding and a sense of human compassion. There is no foundation whatsoever for such an emotional belief. For though this fast- expanding network increases our 'knowledge-by- reporting' it adds little or nothing to our knowledge-by- encounter. And there are worlds of difference between sharing experiences with others, of joy and suffering, and reading about them in newspapers; between starving to death and seeing pictures of it on the TV screen; being under bombardment and watching a News Bulletin ... the blame is not on human callousness. It is inherent in the modern long-distance and large-scale world communication media.33

Having defined communication as "sharing", he goes on to speak of "the global spread of communication media" which means the global spread of interactive media. However, it is obvious that he meant "spread of information" when he spoke of technological forms of media. The differences between real-world human experiences and symbolic portrayals in a media world are very great, true enough. The key factor in empathy-producing does lie in the communicative aspect, as he has pointed out. These "technical media of communication" or "mass communication" are ordinarily anything but communication media, a term they have usurped; they are media and they are mass, but television, radio, the newspapers and magazines, as they are now constituted, do not communicate. The professionals who compose, edit, alter, relay and transmit the flow of messages are not "communicators." They are "informers." But as that word has other connotations, they might be called messagers or mediators or simply reporters. "Communicators" is not only pretentious, but it is wrong.

Harvey Cox, the eminent U.S. theologian and author, goes even further than this view of media non-communication and regards the media as positive obstacles to communication. In an article published in Public Telecommunications, he says,

In the light of what Christianity teaches about the essential ingredients of communications, they are not means of 'communication' at all. They are obstacles to

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communication and means, mainly, for social control, propaganda and coerced persuasion ... we must insist that media of so-called communication who structure and content pervert human needs or blunt crucial issues are destructive of man's sanctity. We must also insist that the present technologies of the mass media, because they violate the inherent nature of human communication, isolate man from those close to him. and deeoen his sense of powerlessness ... we must demonstrate the dialogical form of communication with all its risk and promise.34

Cox's reflections were occasioned by an observation that he had made in the city of Recife in the poverty-stricken northeast region of Brazil, After dinner at the home of a friend, the children turned on TV to watch the cartoon series called "The Flintstones" made in the U.S.A. with sound dubbed in Portuguese. He wrote:

As I watched, my stomach sank. The canned laughter used in the show, the banal situations, the cleverly contrived ads, the lack of contact with life in Recife or anywhere else, sickened me ... these Brazilian children devoured North American leftovers so hungrily ... TV obviously reached them very effectively ... surrounded by sickness, hunger and helplessness, the humour seemed obscene, a mortal law of trespa~s. '~

The author advocates "a theolbgy of communication" which would provide time or space for participation of the public and involve people in message-making. He says:

... the technology of the mass media is "one way". It makes us all quiescent customers of their images and values ... mono-directional and therefore a manipulative exercise. The technology of TV has specialized in enlarging the screen, adding color, increasing the broadcast distance. All these developments concentrate more power in the sender but fail completely to enable the receiver to respond. The present technology of TV prevents dialogue and emphasizes one-way communication ...p eople are encouraged to be "listeners" and "watchers," consumers not creators ... the boom in one-way devices comes just as the need for orientation for a new setting is most acute ... the result is doubly alienating.j6

Democratization of the media or participation by the public is treated on an international scale by Media Development, Journal of the World Association for Christian Communication, in an editorial on the UNESCO book, "Many Voices, One World" which states: "There is no other solution to this problem but to create a

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communication order in which all have equal status and equal opportunities, which the present order denies."

Participatory communication, it says, is the solution for the inequality of power between the industrialized nations and the third world. "We have taken for granted for too long that some people are destined to speak and write for the 'masses' while other are destined to read, listen and watch. The MacBride report therefore calls for a democratization of the media, genuine public access and social participation."

The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) has been in the avant garde advocating interactive information for media. Their Newsletter of April, 1980, reported that "Nearly 60 media and communication leaders from 39 countries will seek to go 'beyond monologue' at the WACC Central Committee meeting June 1-8 at ... Kent, England."38 "The theme 'Beyond Monologue' affirms WACC's emphasis on the two-way, participatory mode which encourages dialogue among people. As the 1981 budget was being prepared, WACC decided to channel some US $2.4 million to nearly 120 communications projects in 40 countries.j9

The concept of participatory or interactive media is slowly taking hold in many countries ... and there are many approaches. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried through asix-part series, called "People Talking Back" in February and March, 1979, with the Canadian Association for Adult Education. Its producer went across Canada videotaping messages from hundreds of Canadians. Some 20,000 groups became involved in this collective conversation. Actor-author Gordon Pinsent was host for the first three-hour long program and received what the Toronto Star called "a massive onslaught of telephone calls" which they said that viewers made to a computer bank taping their comments. They came from all regions of the country.

This type of organized use of television, tape recording, telephone and computer, amounting to a democratic spectacular of dramatic nation-building force, does not represent the day-to-day interaction envisioned by the "interactionists" or "media dialogue" advocates, but it is nonetheless an interesting foray. The impossibility of having a whole nation on the line at once or at reasonable intervals was demonstrated in March, 1977, when Jimmy Carter tried to hold a national public conference from the Oval Office at the White House over a special toll-free telephone network. The media reported that forty-two people got through to the U.S. President while an estimated nine million tried and failed. The ratio of sender-receivers in mind-boggling. Obviously, participation ,can't be "feedback" of the lottery kind. Calls from half the States did not get through at all, but two callers from Langham, Maryland, with a population of 2,700 did connect. 40 That sort of response in that $ort of mode does away

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with all ideas of proportional representation or of scientific polling by media or democratization.

Communication may come into its own and information might be truly defined as communication if democratizing efforts develop and if technology takes a line of development that includes significant feedback. Meanwhile the alienation effect that Cox speaks of seems to draw nearer with corporate control and mass mindedness. A recent book by R.L. Stavins carries the ominous title: Television Today: The End of Communication & The Death of Community. The "and" in the title is the commercial &. Writing therein, Marcus G. Raskin speaks of a shift of power in the monopolist direction:

The shift of power to the communicator, A.T.&T., RCA, N.B.C. and the power to the organizer of the bank of communicators, IBM, etc. has not changed the fundamental colonized relationship of the mass media audience to those who control the medium of communication ... the vertical organization structure of the media, television and radio networks, which now own publishing houses (originally for their profit value and ultimately for their value in centrallx-controlling the experiential life of the individual viewer who is reduced to a consumer or a student) set the terms of the content of the individual viewer's fantasy and experience.

Operationally, whether what I see is high or low culture, the media control is predicated on my participating and acceptance of an assigned role as a listening, seeing man who is expected to be passive except in the case of his relationship with the advertisements. When the issue is buying and consuming, the sponsors and advertisers undertake to employ those strategies which will change us from passive viewers to be active consumer~.~'

"The TV medium is an example of how isolated and separated from one another people are," he continues. "At any moment millions may be listening to a specific program, but reinforced by the nature of television itself no one would think that there is any control he can exercise with other on the media itself, or that he had the right to use the media because the media was publicly owned."

TV becomes the pyramidal instrument to give the appearance of understanding, participation and sensual participation so that the dissonance of one's life, which could be activated through personal recognition of one's feelings and related to the dissonance which other people feel as people is destroyed.42

Raskin's thought is summed up in this final thrust: "...while the events of the world may be presented by colonizers to an inert mass as

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if each event is as important as the other to each and every viewer, there is no possibility of making sense out of the meaning of events unless there is participation and relatedness through the media." Finally, the semantic arc of ab absurdum comes full circle in his observation: "Television is a form of communication which eliminates all possibility for communication. Television talks at you, while communication entails feedba~k."~'

Rather than change the "communication" to "information" or some other word such as "message" Stavins sets up a straw man and then knocks it down. Obviously he has two uses of the word in mind and confuses the whole issue with a paradoxical sophism. If he had said, "Television is calledcommunication ..." Nevertheless his phrase brilliantly illustrates the problem of language and meaning.

Stavin contends that "Television cannot form a community but communities can come to discover themselves through television.

Were TV to acknowledge the objective conditions in America today, it would come to realize as we have, that there are several publics contending for the public interest. Were TV to turn over blocks of time to several publics, each would become conscious of itself; every individual member of that particular public would begin to experience his own consciousness through television. He would see himself speaking and acting through the mind and body of another. TV would become a media for other minds to relate to each other.44

TV would become a media? Here we have the misuse of another word in this field that is just about as obtuse as the word "communicator" and by a scholar who writes perceptively. There are many people who don't realize this Latin work "media" is no more than a plural for the word medium. The plural "mediums" could be used just as well.

Despite this error, Stavins makes out a good case for participation or feedback as a sine qua non of communication. He concludes that instead of forging a material consciousness which "fixed man's lodestar to a brand name and cut him adrift from his fellow citizens, TV could fill the horizon with a series of mind-sets, and man once again get on with the arduous task of charting a common course."

We have now seen how Stavins, Raskin, Cherry and others regard the word "communication" as a misnomer and something of afraud that misleads the public and how Cox views mass media as obstacles to communication. Hans Enzenberger similarly criticizes use of the word communication as referring to mass media, but in his critique he sees the communicating media as merely a passing historic phase;

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the media are capable of and slowly being equipped for two-way service. It is Technology to the rescue as latter-day Deus ex Machina, rather than technology as the devil-villain. Enzenberger writes:

For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media ... which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it ... the technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labour into producers and consumers.

He cites transistor radios by nature of their construction as receivers and potential transmitters, acting by circuit reversal, as an example. Another would be citizen's band radio.

The development from a mere distribution medium to a communication medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable reasons ... the new media are egalitarian in structure. Anyone can take part by a single switching process.45

The advent of fibre optics which change electronic media channel scarcity into abundance will advance Enzenberger's media for and by the masses.

Access to the media has long been a catchword of reformers in attempting to gain entry for the public to print and electronic media. Now the emphasis has gone beyond access - which was always a kind of noblesse oblige - to participation. As Media Development expressed it:

The system of mass communication we know and live with has, for the first time in its history, been seriously and fundamentally challenged. It is under a two-pronged attack: the global level from politicians and international civil servants fighting for a new International Information Order; on the local level from an increasing number of peasant and worker organizations (primarily in Latin America) who are opting out of the system by developing their own alternative communication structures ... The term currently used for this type of grass roots communication, is the Spanish expression communicacion popular ... the concept can only be understood against a specific background of domination and suppression of which the established communication system has been part.46

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In the same issue, Robert A. White, as Latin American scholar, says in an article "Communicacion popular: language of Liberation":

However, the mass media, as they are presently constituted, generally do not engage a large part of the population as active formulators of the message - least of all, the lower status of the population. The more general tendency is to turn the audience into passive consumers of entertainment with a minimum of critical reflection. Mass communicacion in spite of attempts at advocacy reporting and op-ed features, is a centralized distribution of information and entertainment controlled by a specialized professional group of writers and producers.47

Jose Martinez Terrero, a Venezuelan writer and teacher, found that some U.S. scholars in communication had progressed along the road to the interactive media concept and democratic communication:

The traditional concept. of communication is uni- directional and seeks to persuade the receiver. That is what Aristotle suggested in his classic treatment of rhetoric. Later Lasswell, Berelson and Steiner, Osgood, Nixon, Shannon and Weaver built upon and applied to communication the insight of Aristotle. But alreay Berlo began to consider communication as interactive and bi- directional in some way, even more so as a process; this was shared by Lerner, Gerbner, Newcomb, Westley- McLean and Schramm. But the scheme was still fundamentally unilinear and mechanical: a transmission of information from active sources to passive receivers. Later on others were in the process of discovering democratic communication: Wright, Mills, Rogers, Lasswell, Moles, Schaeffer and Willian.48

Access or its deeper involvement, participation, is being made increasingly possible by technology. As a two-headed monster, it has potential both for centralizing and democratizing. In addition to fibre optics and more at the practical installation point, is a computer module called Videotex which can be attached to television sets. It has capability of creating communication at a distance. Keri Sweetman writing in Telesis, the bimonthly technical research magazine of Bell-Northern, asserts: "Videotex is to the 1980's what television was to the 30's and the telephone to the 1 8 7 0 ' ~ . ~ ~ Videotex systems are now being tested throughout the world, including the United Kingdom, (Ceefax, Oracle, Prestel), France (Antiope, Teletel), West Germany, the United States, The Netherlands,

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Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and Hong Kong. The British Post Office recently set up 25 videotex centres across the country with computer capacity to serve 100,000 users that are now in use.

The Canadian Department of Communication has developed its own videotex model, called Telidon, since 1978, conducted field trials and begun to market it. Telidon is a word coined from the Greek adverb for "far away" (tele) and "idon" from "horao" meaning "I perceived". The Department claims it is a significant technological advance over other videotex systems with much clearer images and the ability to draw curves, overlay text and color, and produce images faster than other systems. Essentially, videotex (or Telidon) is an information retrieval system. The computer module attaches to an adapted television set on coaxial cable (telephone lines can be used) and the user presses a keypad attachment to call up information from a central computer bank containing the requested data or programmed information. He selects this information, stored in the data bank, from a listing presented to him on the Telidon-TV screen. It may be to find out what movies are showing that night, what houses are for sale, what items available at what price at what shopping centre, what an Encyclopedia says about something, or to take a university course. It may do the user's banking and pay his bills at many places. It can conduct fire and theft surveillance.

In this "wired world" we find the same producer-consumer relationships where information, services and entertainment are being supplied by large corporations. One of them is "Vista," set up by Bell Telephone and another is "Informart" which is a creature of Torstar and the Southam company, already partners in media enterprises.

Very little "interaction" in these operations is required of the user, except that he must scan a list, choose the type of information he wants and then press a button to receive it on ascreen. Yet allthe press releases of the Department refer to Telidon as an "interactive" medium or two-way TV. A recent example is:

April 2, 1981: Chief among the new services to be provided in Telidon Two-.;, ay TV. It will be carried over fibre cable being installed under the first phase of the project (with the Manitoba Telephone System in Elie and St. Eustache, M a n i t ~ b a . ) ~ ~

However, Telidon's more costly versions are being designed by some companies for two-way operation. If and when implemented for general public use it will be the true communication device of our time. The more advanced machines would bring the "age of communication" to a dramatic start. In that respect, it need only fulfill the claims set forth in the Department of Communications publication "Modulation" which stated:

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Videotex will allow you to type a message or draw a picture and send it directly to a friend's terminal - without going through a central data bank. Two people will be able to work on a text or graphic together even though they're hundreds of kilometres apart. The terminals will provide an electronic blackboard of common working space on which both people can see, introduce, change or erase material."

The advanced models come equipped with a "joystick" and a "light pen" which, with the Keypad, can enable the user to carry through the talk-back function, more in the line of graphics than in word messages. ("We don't send the graphic through the system, we just instruct the microprocessor in your TV set to produce it") However, the Department of Communications joined with a news service in 1979 to deliver an electronic newspaper from Canada to an international fair in Geneva. Its press release on this occasion read:

Ottawa, Sept. 20, 1979 - An electronic newspaper is to be delivered on an experimental basis in Canada and across the Atlantic at the same time and faster than ever before. Almost as fast as the news is put on the wire in Montreal and Toronto, viewers in Geneva will be able to read it. The electronic newspaper will be delivered on Telidon, Canada's advanced two-way television t e c h n o l ~ g y . ~ ~

The news bulletins, of course, would be one-way. The "interactive" claim of Telidon is called "two-way hype" in a letter that appeared March 9,1981 in the Globe and Mail, written by Barry Wellman, Director of the University of Toronto's Structural Analysis Program. "The only control users have is to pick which "pages" they want to see. This is just a fancier form of TV channel- changing and as two-way as telling the TV that you would rather watch Love Boat than Taxi," he wrote.53

He also claimed that Telidon was slow and boring, that it had a hierarchial structure and was only worthwhile "if it becomes a useable democratic system in which everyone can send messages to everyone else, just as we do now on the telephone. This is quite feasible, using widely-available computer terminals."

Similarly, a U.S. consultant from Portland, Oregon, Peter Johnson, was quoted in the Globe and Mail of March 24, as saying:

Telidon is a "token two-way system in its present form but has the capability of becoming a truly two-way system.54

Johnson was a user of a continental system called ELIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) which he said was not a televised-based system but a computerized conferencing system with

52

- - - - - - - - - - - - 1

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two-way capabilities and decentralized, unlike Telidon. He was quoted as saying about Telidon:

I doubt that they will make it more two-way because of economic pressures to create a marketing vehicle for large corporations. The provider says it's two-way and it's not a lie, but it is limited. Telidon won't allow you to 'intertext', to see a text message of your own choosing. Users can't generate their own text and sent it to each other.

But Johnson added: "We need more two-way systems. If you think television can mould people's minds, watch Telidon. If it's allowed to become too narrow it will make it more difficult for new forms to evolve."

The Globe and Mail account goes on to quote Peter Bowers of TV Ontario which has been testing Telidon, as saying that either one- way or two-way communication is inherent in Telidon technology and that its hardware allows a user to both create and to retrieve information.

The case for communication rests with these claims, denials and assertions of interaction via the technology of Telidon. It is ironic that the need to reform the language in this field as sketched in this paper may be unnecessary as real communication from messages moving back and forth through media between sender and receiver promises to become an actuality. By the time libraries of literature could be revised, mass media communication might be here.

FOOTNOTES

Jaspers, Karl, "The Perennial Scope of Philosophy", The Modern Tradition, eds. Ellmann and Fiedelson. Oxford U. Press, New York, 1965, p. 864. jaspers, Karl: Reason and Existenz. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955, pp. 79, 80. Ivan Illich, Tools For Conviviality. Harper and Row, New York, 1973 p. 11 Thompson, Gordon, In Search, Dept. of Communications, Ottawa, Fall, 1975, p. 20. Colley, Charles, Social Organization p. 81 Lazarsfeld, Paul, "Mass Media and Personal Influence" The Voice of America. Forum lecture, undated, p. 1. Lasswell, Harold, "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society" Mass Communications, ed. Wilbur Schramm. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1960, p. 121. Hovland, Janis and Kelley, Communication and Persuasion. Yale University Press, 1964, p.V.

10. Klapper, Joseph, The Effects of Mass Communication. Free Press, New York, 1965, p.8.

53

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11.Berelson and Steiner, Human Behaviour. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964, 1967, New York, p. 116.

12.Schramm. Wilbur, Mass Communication. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1960 p.vii.

13.Gerbner, George, "Mass Media and Human Communication Theory" Human Communication Theory, ed. Frank E. Dance. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967, p. 40.

14.Hartley, Eugene and Ruth, "The Importance and Nature of Communica- tion" Mass Media and Communication, ed. Chas. Steinberg. Hastings House, New York, 1966, pp. 22, 23.

15.Zbid. p. 23 16.Dance, Frank E., Human Communication Theory. Holt, Rinehart,

Winston, New York, 1967, p. 295. 17.Park, Robt. E., The CrowdAnd The Public. University of Chicago Press,

1972 p. 100. 18.Zbid 19.Emery, Ault and Agee, Introduction to Mass Communication. Dodd,

Mead and Co. New York, 1965, p. 3. 20.Innis, Harold, The Bias of Communication. University of Toronto Press,

Toronto, 1951, p. 33. 21.Irving, John, "The Development of Communication in Canada" Mass

Media in Canada. Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1962, p. 3. 22.Rutherford, Paul, The Making of the Canadian Media. McGraw-Hill

-Ryerson, Toronto, 1978, p. ix. 23.Melody, William, Culture, Communication and Dependency. Ablex,

Norwood, N.J. p. . 24.Smythe, Dallas, Dependency Road. Ablex, Norwood, N.J., p. xii. 25.Miliband. Ralph, The State In Capitalist Society. Quartet Books,

London, 1973, p. 196. 26.Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Louis, The Power TO Inform. McGraw-Hill,

New York, preface p. x. 27.Habermas, Jurgen, Communication And Class Struggle. International

General, New York, Paris, 1979, p. 198. 28. Seigelaub, Seth, ibid, p. 11. 29. Seeley, John, "Communication, Communications and Community" The

Mass Media in Canada. The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1952, p. 209. 30.Zbid. p. 220. 31 McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium Is The Massage. Bantam Books,

Toronto, 1967, p. 93. 32.Cherry, Colin, World Communication: Threat or Promise. John Wiley &

Sons, London, 1971, p. 2. 33.Zbid. p. 8. 34.Cox, Harvey, Public Telecommunications, October 1973, p. 12. 35.Zbid. p. 8. 36.Zbid. pp. 8, 9. 37.Media Development, Journal of the World Association for Christian

Communication, London, England, No. 4, 1980 Vol. XXVII, editorial, p. 1.

38. WACC Newsletter, "Action" April, 1980, WACC, London, England. 39.Zbid.

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40.Toronto Star, Feb. 3, 1979. 41.Raskin, Marcus, G., "The Dream Colony", Television Today: The End of

Communication & The Death of Community, ed. R.L. Stavins. The Communication Service Corp. Washington, D.C. p. 6.

42.Zbid. p. 10. 43.Stavins, R. L., "Public Interest: Old and New" TheEnd of Communication

& The Death of Community. The Communication Service Corp. Washing- ton, D.C. p. 82.

44.Zbid. Stavins, p. 83. 45.Enzenberger, Hans, "Constituents of a Theory of Media" Sociology of

Mass Communication, ed. Denis McQuail. Penguin, 1972, p. 101. 46.Media Development, op. cit. 3/1980, Vol. XXVII, editorial p. 2. 47.Zbid. p. 3. 48.Terrera, Jose Martinez, "Alternative Media in Latin America," Media

Development 3/1980 Vol. XXVII, p. 22. 49. Sweetman, Keri, Telesis 1980 One, Bell-Northern Research Ltd. Ottawa. 50.Press release Information Services, Dept. of Communication, Canadian

Government, Ottawa, April 2, 1981. 5 1.Modulation No. 18, Department of Communication, Canadian Govern-

ment, Ottawa. 52.Press release, Information Services, Dept. of Communications,

Canadian government, Sept. 20, 1979. 53.Wellman, Barry, Letter to the Editor, Globe and Mail, Toronto, March

9, 1981. 54.Globe and Mail, Toronto, March 24, business section.