We/They

[Doug Millison]

"In 1981, a group of artists, activists, educators, and media producers met in
Willow, New York to draft The Willow Declaration, a treatise in 
support of UNESCO
and the call for a New World Information Order. The following is an 
excerpt from
that document: "We strongly support freedom of the press, but we see 
that in our
own country, this freedom now exists mainly for huge corporations to 
make profits,
to promote socially useless consumption, and to impose corporate ideology and
agendas. As workers who produce, study, and transmit information, we pledge to
change this reality. We will work to preserve and encourage face-to-face
communication: people can speak best for themselves without the intervention of
professionalism or technological mediation. We support that technology which
enhances human power and which is designed and controlled by the communities
which use it."

from:

Many Voices, One World
The Global Struggle for
Information Justice
by Dee Dee Halleck
http://www.media-alliance.org/mediafile/20-1/halleck.html

It might be interesting to discuss the current effort to counter 
corporate- and government-controlled media representations in the 
light of Pynchon's depiction of same in Vineland -- is there 
something inherent in the communication process itself that 
inevitably leads to failure, to co-optation.  Does the sort of 
approach outlined in this Willow Declaration automatically lead to 
failure because it perpetuates the We/They dichotomy, or does it 
suffer deeper flaws? Is the Counterforce necessarily doomed to 
failure? Are there possibilities of escape from Their control games 
if we "preserve and encourage face-to-face communication", bond in 
family or extended family or non-traditional "families" and 
communities as we see in Vineland and M&D?  I haven't been following 
the V. reading too closely, but perhaps something might be said about 
Pynchon's treatment of this issue in that novel -- is the Whole Sick 
Crew a kind of family or a group so thoroughly co-opted and corrupted 
by values imposed from elsewhere as to to be  just a joke.  My 
impression is that P's mellowed somewhat over the years, that his 
later novels, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, offer more depictions of 
human fellowship as a bulwark against Their predation (these moments 
are not absent from his earlier writings, of course), although still 
only tiny lights in a sea of darkness, and with the understanding 
that They is Us to the degree that We play Their game by Their rules.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>