Memoir by Rita M. Csapó-Sweet:

Painting, Collage, Photography, Video, Film, Writings and the Internet

"The theory of a free press is that the truth will emerge from free reporting and

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

U.S. journalist, editor, syndicated columnist, Pulitzer Prizes: 1958; 1962

[for exact  references see the Curriculum Vitae]
 

Prior to 1990
 

Over the past twenty-five years, I sustained a single vision artistically and professionally across seven disciplines: painting, collage, photography, video, film, writings, and the Internet.  Characteristic of my scholarly work is examining global interconnectedness and human communication through art / media.  The object of my work is to examine cultural contexts and to expose the multiple layers and shades of meaning that provide texture to our lives and society.  This work examines the gap between conflicting ideologies: East versus West, Communist versus non-communist, left versus right.  I am fascinated by the physical and visual fragments, remnants and residues of cultural artifacts.  They fill my work as a collage artist, shape my interests as a communication scholar, and haunt the images in my documentary films.
 

My paintings and collages were exhibited between 1974 and 1997.  They reflect images of Cold War icons through texture and layering.  In the mid-1970s, I studied in Paris with Lucien Hervé (the photographer for architect Le Corbusier) who taught me about life and art.  An immigrant from Hungary, Hervé had the gift for seeing a culture as an insider and also from the outside.  He suffered from the disease myasthenia gravis, struggling each day to simply stand up and walk.  Yet Hervé’s mind was always engaged and in spite of his physical struggle he showed me how to use the camera as he always had; to see beauty and to define its moments.  Thus by photographing street graffiti in Budapest, Paris, and New York, I “collected” the colors and textures of urban street posters; layers of imagery and non-contextual verbal messages.  Carrying that imagery into the studio, I experimented with translating the subtractive quality of the images (disintegrating or torn layers of old posters and announcements) into the additive medium of paint and mixed media.
 

Since the mid-1970s, I explored the special dimension of these urban images through video.  With a quantizer at the St. Louis Art Museum in 1979, I re-photographed my original street images with a video camera, thus electronically “painting” them.  Film making led to discovering qualities of my images that were elusive when concentrated in a static and fixed medium.  During the 1980s, I took the process a step further by transcending the shallow resolution of video imagery, through the use of 16 mm film.  This medium provided images with greater contrast, color saturation and depth of field.  In 1982, my 16 mm film short titled “No Borders” was broadcast on “Airtime” PBS   and shown at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, MA.
 

My geo-political arena is Eastern Europe based in Hungary.  My projects behind the Iron Curtain began in 1973.  This was long before it became fashionable or safe for American scholars to develop democracy-oriented programs in Eastern Europe.  In the 1970s, my Eastern European collaborators were young Hungarian artists, filmmakers and television producers who today are the leading cultural elite of a new Hungary.  Between the 1970s and the 1990s, my Eastern European colleagues treaded a shifting line between Communism and Western style free-expression.  Each of us sought peace and the elimination of the threat of a nuclear war through mutual understanding and shared experiences.  For most of those two decades, working and even associating with me was for many of my Eastern European collaborators personally and professionally dangerous.
 

The consistent theme of my scholarly work is analysis of political systems and culture in the United States and in Eastern Europe.  In the late 1970s, I began working with films of colleagues in Eastern Europe.  I curated the festival Hungarian Cinema of the 70s at the St. Louis Art Museum  in 1978.  Also, I taught courses in Czech and Hungarian film at Washington University from 1979 to 1981.  Since the height of the Cold War, I was driven by a passion to bridge an understanding between two cultures.  The film series that I curated in the United States, amid considerable public controversy, presented the critical evaluation by Eastern European filmmakers of the tyranny and absurdity of the political and social institutions behind the Iron Curtain.  Most of the controversy attracted by my screening Eastern European films in St. Louis came from groups that condemned anyone daring to publicly exhibit in America’s heartland, films recently produced in Communist countries.  The general public and media critics, however, had only praise for my Eastern European film series.
 

My early research on Sesame Street in Eastern Europe was a logical progression for building bridges between cultures.  Exposure to Eastern European film in the 1970s made it clear to me that a successful American children’s television program could help to develop better understanding between Americans and Eastern Europeans.  By 1980, Sesame Street had overcome earlier skepticism in the United States.  That year, I applied to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University to work with Dr. Gerald Lesser.  He is one of the original creators of the popular children’s television program and responsible for developing it’s theoretical framework.
 

Dr. Lesser is a Board member of the Children’s Television Workshop that produces the series in New York.  I asked him to sponsor my research in Eastern Europe for a doctoral thesis at Harvard University.  He endorsed my independent project, and helped me to arrange for the Children’s Television Workshop to license Sesame Street for broadcast in Hungary.  This provided an opportunity for me to extend my work in mass communication to another aspect of media in Eastern Europe.  At the time, Sesame Street had not been seen in Eastern Europe.  There was no research on Sesame Street in Eastern Europe, and indeed no studies on the effects of the program on second language acquisition anywhere.
 

In 1986, I received a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) for research on children’s film and television programming in Hungary (other funding came from the Soros Foundation, and the Hungarian Ministry of Education).  At the time, I was creating my own animated films and also interested in exploring the inclusion of Hungarian animation in American television programs for children.  Throughout 1986, while working at the Panonia Animation Studio in Budapest and School-TV at Hungarian Television I collaborated with Producer Judit Kopper and Chief of School-TV, Endre Kelemen.  The political situation in Hungary by the mid-1980s was conducive to the exchange of foreign programming, particularly with the United States.  Kelemen and I explored creating a Hungarian version of Sesame Street.
 

In the mid-1980s, Hungary was still seen as a bridge to the West.  It was at the time by far the most open and politically progressive of the Eastern bloc countries.  Discussions and negotiations were underway with the Children’s Television Workshop for a modest co-production of an “Eastern European Sesame Street,” with Hungarian Television, that would later be shown and modified throughout the region.  Unfortunately, in 1987, Hungarian Television suffered severe financial crises and it was no longer feasible to create such a program.  The deteriorating economy in Hungary excluded expensive new Hungarian-American television co-productions at School-TV.  This led me in early 1988 to change the Sesame Street project into a classroom study for answering the question:  Can Hungarian children learning English as a second language acquire new English words by viewing Sesame Street?
 

By November 1988, I completed my studies in Budapest and Debrecen.  Moreover, I did finally get Hungarian Television to nationally broadcast Sesame Street in English for the first time.  Since Hungarian TV also reaches across its bordering countries, the program was by 1989 for the first time seen in parts of:  eastern Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and western U.S.S.R in 1989.  Also in 1989, Eastern European Communism and the Cold War came to an unexpected end (not entirely due to Sesame Street).
 

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After 1990

After joining the faculty of the University of Missouri - St. Louis in 1990, I continued working towards fostering better understanding between Americans and East Europeans;  partly by initiating international student exchange and “sister university” programs.  In 1993, I worked on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project to bring young journalists from the newly democratic countries in Eastern Europe to the U.S. for training in journalism education.  The P.I. for the grant was Dr. Dean Mills, Dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri - Columbia.
 

In 1994, Dr. Joel Glassman, Director of the Center for International Studies at UM - St. Louis and I launched a program for a student exchange program with Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, Hungary.  The Center for International Studies at UM - St. Louis serves as a very important facility for me through which to develop new globally oriented scholarly programs.  The exchange program provided a one year, fully funded exchange for four Hungarian students and four UMSL students, paid for by the United States Information Agency’s Samantha Smith Foundation.  For this project, I built upon the long standing contacts that I had made in Eastern Europe since the 1970’s.
 

Alas, the Samantha Smith grant ended after only one year when funds for student exchange programs were slashed in 1994 by the newly elected United States Congress.  However, I continued to work closely with one of the Hungarian exchange students who spent a year at UM - St. Louis.  Ildiko Kaposi came to our University as a very bright English major.  After taking my course Introduction to Cinema, Ildiko decided communication would be her avocation.  In May 1998, she completed her Masters degree in media studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.  We recently wrote two articles: “David Lynch and Other Strange Bedfellows,” currently under review; and also “Mass Media in Post-Communist Hungary” which is in press for the International Communication Bulletin.
 

My work in the 1990s is a continuation of subjects that I initiated in the 1970s.  Associated with my involvement in the production side of film and video, in the last decade I was a festival judge and curator of scholarly film and video programs.  In 1994, while editing my work at Hungarian Television I met Jeno Hartyandi, the Director of the Mediawave International Film and Visual Arts Festival.  Mediawave is among the most important festivals for independent films in Eastern Europe.  The Festival serves as a crossroads for technically unusual and socially relevant films that are often a barometer of conditions in Eastern Europe.  These films are often overlooked by the increasingly more commercial festivals in both Europe and the United States.  In 1995, I was invited to be a member of the international film jury at Mediawave.  At the same time, I was working with the director and founder of the St. Louis Film Festival to create a bridge between these new venues for emerging independent film.  Since the Fall of 1996, I curated programs of Greek, German, and Hungarian film at the St. Louis Film Festival through the Center for International Studies at the University of Missouri.
 

Also in 1996, I received a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) to conduct a study in Hungary on film and video from Eastern Europe.  My grant, “Independent Cinema in Post Cold War Eastern Europe:  What the Mediawave Archive Reveals,” allowed me to spend a month in Hungary to investigate which material shown over the past five years at the Mediawave Festival would be suitable for a side-bar at the 1997 St. Louis Film Festival .  In the Fall of 1997, I curated and organized a Festival of cutting-edge video from Eastern Europe: The Best of Mediawave Video Festival at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.  The program included work never before screened in the West (produced both for television and independently produced by video artists).  One of the programs featured in the Best of Mediawave Festival, “Experiment of the Cross,” was about a prison for children in Kazakhstan (the same program was featured 6 months later on CBS’s 60 Minutes).  The Best of Mediawave Video Festival was very well received by the public.  For example, a review of Experiment of the Cross in the Riverfront Times described the program as, “a staggering and awe-inspiring experience.”
 

My research revealed that some of the most exciting work, in particular in the documentary field, is being done in video.  Indeed, it would have been literally impossible to have made the Kazakhstan documentary video Experiment of the Cross as a motion picture film because of many practical reasons.  Thus, a program curated in video may in fact represent the freshest, most important trends in present day Eastern European society.  The problem however, is that video while more immediate, affordable, and accessible than film, is of a much more fragile quality, and is not globally standardized.  For a curator these realities create both challenges, and great opportunities.  My recent work with Mediawave and with the St. Louis Film Festival goes to the very heart of what I have been pursuing intellectually and professionally during the past twenty years, since I curated the 1978 Hungarian Film Festival at the St. Louis Art Museum.  Then too, the curated program for St. Louis that I researched in Eastern Europe featured films that months later were shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.  My long standing, on-going contacts and creative collaborations with artists and filmmakers in Eastern Europe gave me entrée to cultural events abroad that I used for creating programs in the U.S. for over two decades
 

After the Berlin Wall came down, the new freedom to travel in former communist countries fostered increasing professional exchanges with Eastern Europe and provided new opportunities for American scholars.  In 1993, I received a grant from the University of Missouri to work with my colleagues at Hungarian Television on a project for cross-culturally examining mass media.  The special perspectives of producer Judit Kopper and director Andras Solyom were necessary for critically examining American news media, and the differences / similarities with the rapidly evolving press in Hungary.  Kopper (with whom I worked at School-TV almost a decade earlier) and I began collaborating on a series of programs about the media.  Coincidentally, our collaboration spanned one of the most difficult periods at Hungarian Television.  When I first wrote the grant for our project, Kopper was chief of the Friz Production unit at Hungarian Television.  This system of autonomous production units was an innovation at Hungarian Television after decades of a state-run bureaucracy.
 

Kopper and Solyom had survived the political and social turmoil after 1989, ushering in privatization of the formerly state run television networks in Hungary.  Kopper worked at School-TV for almost two decades, winning numerous national and international awards for her children’s programs.  By 1990, a new and more democratic Hungarian government dismantled the bureaucratic structure of the former state Hungarian Television and replaced it with small autonomous production units.  For almost three years, Kopper was the head of one of these units as Executive Producer for two regular programs specializing in media analysis: Videoworld, and MediaMix.  Videoworld was an encyclopedic series on contemporary culture in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.  Through Videoworld, Kopper documented and analyzed the social and political changes overtaking Eastern Europe and the role of the “media” as they were happening: the revolution in Romania; the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the political coup in Moscow.  The Hungarian version of our interview with Noam Chomsky was the last program of Kopper’s series Videoworld.  After after that broadcast, Videoworld was canceled as a result of the conservative politics of the new Hungarian government.
 

Kopper’s programs from this period are a time-capsule of the history of revolution in Eastern Europe as well as the modern media globally.  The programs include interviews with prominent Hungarians such as writer George Konrad and philanthropist George Soros, and Western artists Dara Birnbaum and Nam June Piak.  Kopper herself says, her programs began as a forum for “video art” but evolved into programs about the media itself.  History overtook events in Eastern Europe and her investigations concentrated on the interface between media and politics.
 

The evolution of my work was similar to that of my collaborator Judit Kopper.  Our early training in fine arts created an interest about the ways humans communicate visually and verbally.  I too had roots in the cultural world of Eastern Europe in the 1970s.  It was a time when words, visual images and ideas had real power because there were serious consequences for expressing them.  The graphic arts, film and, by the mid-1970s, video were powerful tools in the hands of dissidents.  As the Iron Curtain crumbled throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, privatization and free-market economics replaced communism as the new ideology; collaterally replacing the familiar old icons of the former East bloc.
 

Aggressive advertising by free-market capitalist corporations bear many similarities to the earlier, heavy-handed propaganda style of Eastern European Communist governments.  Thus, Kopper and I were interested in examining the views of those who are among the severest critics of corporate driven American mass media.  Such views were articulately presented by Professor Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  This study was especially intriguing for my Hungarian collaborators Kopper and Solyom.  Like my previous art work that “played” with Communist Eastern European icons, my recent work sometimes uncomfortably touches on latent dogma and absurdity in contemporary American political and social institutions.  Chomsky’s marginalization by mainstream American media experts and scholars parallels the treatment by the Communist media establishment of independent thinkers in Eastern Europe from the 1960s through the 1980s.  The Kopper/Solyom/Csapó-Sweet documentary television programs were presented at national scholarly meetings and broadcast on television in both Hungary and the United States.
 

My more recent articles deal with modern American film, development of mass media in newly democratic Eastern Europe, and the use of the Internet for communicating with the free world by those seeking democracy for former Yugoslavia.  In 1994, I wrote an article for the St. Louis Journalism Review on the work of the Dutch organization Press Now .  This organization supports “independent media” in Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.  Press Now organized links between media organizations in Eastern Europe (not part of any government propaganda apparatus) and like-minded media organizations in Western Europe and the United States.  Media groups in the West could “adopt” a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station and send them whatever they needed to do their work (newsprint, audio or video tape and other vital supplies).  I wrote about this grassroots organization because it was the continuation of a phenomenon I had observed and participated in since the mid-1970s in Eastern Europe.
 

In the former Yugoslavia, independent voices of artists, writers, filmmakers, and other “subversives” were crying out for free expression and democracy in a hostile and sometimes dangerous environment.  By 1992, the stakes suddenly became much higher.  With the outbreak of war in Bosnia, independent media voices became beacons of sanity in a world gone mad.  As state media outlets were commandeered for nationalistic war propaganda campaigns, tiny independent news organizations struggled to survive both literally and figuratively.  This formed the basis of my Balkan projects.
 

In 1994, I interviewed and hosted in St. Louis journalist Mehmed Halilovic, editor of the Sarajevo daily newspaper Oslobodenje.  Mr. Halilovic received the top journalism prize from the University of Missouri on behalf of his newspaper.  The prize recognized that throughout the war in Bosnia, Oslobodenje continued to publish every day, even when their building was shelled by Serbian guns and the top floors were on fire.  Oslobodenje was dedicated to the concept of a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia and employed Jews, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats; before, during, and after the war in Bosnia.
 

Deeply moved by Mehmed Halilovic, I pledged to do whatever I could to assist Press Now and the campaign to strengthen the independent media in the region.  Accordingly, in 1996, as I was working on an article about the independent media in Eastern Europe, I began hearing reports on U.S. radio and television about civil unrest in Belgrade, Serbia.  In November 1996, there were the first municipal elections in Serbia and the Milosevic government lost.  Independent radio stations in Belgrade (Radio B92, and Radio Index) announced the true results of these elections.  But the Milosevic government closed Parliament and took the independent radio stations off the air.  This resulted in spontaneous, massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Belgrade with citizens demanding a free and independent media.  Logging on to the Internet, I discovered that radio station B92 in Belgrade was sending their banned news out in English in RealAudio files over the Internet, together with video clips and color photos of the mass rallies in the streets.
 

Daily demonstrations in the streets of Belgrade swelled to the tens of thousands in December 1996, and a movement took shape calling itself Protest96.  The protesters recognized the power of the Internet to provide both picture and sound information instantaneously; thus facilitating a previously unknown participatory democracy.  As an artist, I was stunned by the clarity and resolution of the color images sent through cyberspace from Belgrade.  Since the advent of the fax machine in the 1980s, I was interested in the concept of simultaneous exhibitions of images by artists on both sides of the “Iron Curtain.”  However, the poor resolution of fax technology made it impossible to use as a conduit for the transmission of graphic images.  Fax can transmit content but not form.  However, downloading the images from  Protest96, I realized that this technology can transmit both the content and also the form from any event; for the first time in history.  I decided to mount a public exhibition both to showcase the phenomenal Internet photography by the Serb students in Belgrade and for St. Louisians to interact directly with the revolution taking place in Serbia.  I named the exhibit, Protest96: Revolution in Cyberspace.
 

Terry Suhre, the director of Gallery 210 at UM - St. Louis was taking down a show, and he offered the gallery to me for mounting an “emergency” exhibition during the Christmas holidays.  Gallery 210 was only available until January 3, 1997, and I was determined to keep Protest96 up somewhere until events in Belgrade reached a resolution.  After Gallery 210, Protest96 moved to the Infomachines [computer] Gallery at the St. Louis Science Center; one of the top five science museums in the United States.  The exhibition remained at the Science Center until mid-February 1997, when a truce was signed in Belgrade between the demonstrators and the Milosevic government.
 

The exhibition of Protest96: Revolution in Cyberspace consisted of six images of the demonstrations, blown up to 3 x 4 feet in black and white, and mounted on the gallery walls.  Dozens of 8 x 10 inch color photos were also downloaded and added to the wall.  In order to keep the exhibit current, these smaller images were downloaded daily and added to the wall.  A computer hard wired to the Internet was in the gallery and visitors in St. Louis communicated directly with the protesters in Belgrade.  A series of artifacts were mounted on free-standing pedestals in front of a communist flag; a television, radio, egg carton, flowers, horns, whistles.  These represented aspects of the Serbian revolution against the backdrop of a decaying communist ideology.  The University exhibit included a wall covered with brown wrapping paper for visitors to send hard-copy messages to the demonstrators in Belgrade.  In all, Protest96: Revolution in Cyberspace was part photography show, part installation, part interactive display and pure revolution.
 

On June 5, 1998, I participated in the discussion, “the Internet in political revolution” on National Public Radio’s Science Friday.  Indonesian students and others opposed to the government of President Suharto had just used the Internet to coordinate their revolution and brought down a powerful government that ruled for over 30 years.  I informed the NPR listeners that this technology was used first in Belgrade during Protest96 and that the St. Louis called exhibition Protest 96: Revolution in Cyberspace documented and allowed St. Louisans to interacted with that historic event.
 

Protest96: Revolution in Cyberspace represents a fusion of the different elements of my professional roles.  As an artist, I was able to recognize the potential of the images sent out of Belgrade, and mount a professional exhibition to display their visual beauty.  A professor of communication, I understood the historic impact of this new tool in information technology, and was able to harness it for as yet an untried application.  In the course of these events a new role emerged for me of “communication artist.”  A visual artist whose work focuses on the communication process itself by creating a forum where “the medium is the message,” quoting media futurist Marshall McLuhan.  In this role the communication artist is the change agent, the activist, not the neutral disinterested observer required of journalists.  There is growing interest in my work associated with what is now called “globalization.”  These developments in information technology and Protest96: Revolution in Cyberspace were reported at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communication.  Similarly, my advanced communication research students are turned on by these areas of futuristic communication and many of them are seeking careers in this emerging field or have already become professionally established in more traditional areas of mass communication.
 

My professional and intellectual development has always been more lateral than linear.  When I graduated from Washington University in 1977, I received a BFA in Painting and also a BA in Eastern European History.  Fine Arts and Arts and Sciences are two separate schools at Washington University.  I was the only student in the School of Fine Arts that year to graduate with a joint degree.  It took six years instead of the usual four to accomplish this.  But then too I had to define myself both as an artist and a humanities scholar.  Similarly, my masters and doctoral degrees at Harvard University were both associated with children's educational television production and empirical classroom experiments.  Upon joining the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in Fall, 1990, I taught courses having to do with film and television production.  I was hired specifically to teach video production and to develop film programs on the UM - St. Louis campus.
 

My background is neither in journalism nor in photojournalism.  I was trained as an artist and an educator.  My professional experience in communication spans the seven areas noted in my introductory paragraph on page 1.  In my program Virtual Objectivity, journalist and former Nieman Fellow, János Horvát says, “news in Europe is much more ideological than it is in the United States.  Broadcasters in Europe do not pretend to be ‘objective.’”  In that sense my work fits much more into the European model.  Some of my video-work may be criticized for not presenting “both” sides.  However, as an artist I believe it is my role to provoke, to challenge the conventional wisdom, to poke holes in sacred cows.  Accordingly, as an educator in an academic environment, it is my duty to expose students to new ideas and approaches that they may never come in contact with in the “real” world.
 

As a scholar and documentary filmmaker, professional recognition in both the humanities / social sciences and the arts required that I develop several separate tracks.  They range from peer reviewed publications; juried and broadcast video programs; and curated film / video festivals.  Part of that process included being invited to be a member of the international jury for the Mediawave Film Festival in 1995, and 1996.  Resulting from this connection with Mediawave, I was recently elected to the Advisory Board of the St. Louis Film Festival (SLFF) and brought the Center for International Studies together with the SLFF's  organizers.
 

During 1996 and 1997, I curated five film programs at the St. Louis Film Festival of Greek, German, and Hungarian films; and also two programs of Hungarian films broadcast on the local PBS station KETC-TV, Channel 9.  These activities are associated with my professional film scholarship and are a continuation of my work curating East European films during the 1970s (St. Louis Art Museum) and as an IREX scholar in the 1980s (The Harvard Film Archive).
 

As we stand at the dawn of a new millennium, university communication departments everywhere rush to catch up with the explosions in communication technologies.  Most recently, mass communication experienced the sudden emergence of tens of millions of private, university, business, and government computers all connected through communication satellites and the world wide Internet.  Suddenly, the Internet is a network system that can transmit images and sounds from anywhere on earth to anywhere else on earth near the speed of light.
 

Within this context, my strength as an artist, scholar, and teacher is an intimate familiarity with how images and sounds communicate and illicit responses in viewers and listeners.  I had the opportunity to observe this process in educational television for American and Eastern European children and also in social and political changes globally.  My immediate and long-term goals are to:  1) continue to build educational partnerships between UM - St. Louis and it’s counterparts in Eastern Europe.  I will be curating an exhibition of Contemporary Hungarian Art, in Gallery 210 in the year 2000;  2) report on the strengthening of independent media and democratic free expression in the United States and overseas.  I am curating a symposium on the “Independent Media in the Former Yugoslavia at UM - St. Louis this Fall (1998).  The event will include a panel discussion and film/video pieces from and about the former Yugoslavia, and is sponsored by the St. Louis Film Festival, the Center for International Studies, and the Humanities Center at UMSL;  3) continue to expand the film / video programs for UM - St. Louis students and the St. Louis Community;  4) produce educational television programs for broadcast in the U.S. and Eastern Europe on subjects ranging from mass communication to the elimination of land mines; and  5) produce a follow-up television program on changes in the Eastern European media.
 

Entering the new millennium, we are confronted by an interconnected globe, inundated by auditory and visual stimuli.  Challenged by questions addressing the survival of democracy and individual liberty, ordinary citizens are obliged to adapt to an environment of increasing “free-market globalization.”  An internationalist with first-hand experience in societal change, I am a communicator who can analyze the potential and broader implications of the new information technologies and an artist who can synthesize and express the ramifications of the other two.  These are qualities, critical to the future of the field of Communication and vital to the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri - St. Louis as it expands to meet the challenges of the coming years.

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