Summer-Fall 2001

The Wolfe Chronicles: Power & the Media

by Mary Shafer

Relaxing on the back deck of his Roseville home on a sunny July morning, Thomas Wolfe is the picture of contentment--and with good reason, he says. As one of the faculty members recruited in the history department's "mega search" in 1999, Wolfe says he's "overjoyed" to be in Minnesota, where he's "learning new stuff incredibly fast" in a collegial and dynamic department.

With a 1997 doctorate in history and anthropology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the soft-spoken Wolfe is a scholar of European history, particularly that of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

It's where this geographic bent intersects with his interests in anthropology, sociology, and media, however, that Wolfe finds his academic calling. His doctoral work, for example, explored journalism in the Soviet Union. He's interested in how people are shaped by--and resist--power, as well as in how the media influence these processes. He teaches media history as well as a graduate seminar on socialism.

A thoughtful critic of media technology's political, cultural, and social impact, Wolfe is not without worry about what he sees. In the Internet era, he says, "Everything is immediate, shortened. Students need to know how to use the Web and the computer. These are good tools--but they are not substitutes for thinking, for making sense slowly.

"The most important thing about teaching is getting students confused and puzzled," he laughs. "They must be encouraged to go over layers of meaning, to grow into a critical language and sensibility. You don't learn that rapidly."

Wolfe's perspective reflects both his role as an academician and his particular understanding of how media shaped and reshaped the former Soviet Union.

"Communism was born in an era of a certain kind of discourse," he says. That discourse was through print--and it was vital to the Communist revolution.

"Lenin's message in 1917--'The czar has to go'--was given through newspapers," Wolfe says. "All assumptions were around print. Society was saturated with print; newspapers were read religiously, passed around, and consumed avidly.

"The microchip revolution happened during the Cold War. Seventy-four years after the Russian Revolution--in 1991--we had the Internet. Print had marked the Soviet Union; now Communism had moved into the electronic era. Print had proclaimed liberty, freedom, and individuality. At the end, there was this bizarre, unpredictable, visual medium--an incredibly different scene."

Nationalism takes on a whole new meaning in this new age, Wolfe says, and the force of the seat of power at the government's geographic and political center is attenuated by the diffused virtual reality of the Internet, which redefines the concept of space and place.

"How could you adapt a rigidly controlled country to the new reality?" Wolfe asks. "Government is about place, order in a place. The Internet makes it harder to imagine the connection to a place. How do you govern a terrain when the people aren't even there?"

It's a question of political leadership that hasn't been answered well in Russia, says Wolfe. The U.S. answer, he believes, has been to perfect the art of image making.

"Political leaders craft an image for their sources of power--for Texas oil sources, Silicon Valley sources, Hollywood sources," says Wolfe.

"All political leaders today must have some theoretical attitude toward controlling and presenting information. They're really leaders of their own communication teams. Leaders are caught up in contradictions all the time because they craft different images for different power sources."

Wolfe's concern is that people may not worry enough about those contradictions. Faced with a surfeit of information and visual clutter, we learn to accommodate the contradictions, simply filtering out what doesn't concern us or doesn't square with our world view. We turn on the white noise and turn inward.

A liberal arts education, Wolfe believes, can awaken our critical awareness and keep us intellectually tuned in to the world.

"The Internet has the potential to raise awareness," he says. "The answer lies in young people learning about the history behind democracy. What does it mean to participate in a democracy?

"It's crucial that people preserve and heighten their sensitivities. The big question is how to get people to approach the Web as a library and not as a distraction in an age when distraction is encouraged."

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