Thursday morning I attended Gabriela Nouzeilles's lecture "Out of Place: From Exile to Flexible Citizenship." While her argument was certainly difficult to grasp because of her heavy accent, and the fact that I had to leave before the lecture concluded due to a class conflict (though no fault of my own, the lecture did not start on time due to technical difficulties), the main argument I was able to discern from her presentation is that electronic media is able to break down barriers that would otherwise exist between people of different backgrounds. This was especially apparent in the video that she presented, in which a multitude of different people responded on camera to questions. While the language, social class, and economic background affected their answers (the ones I could understand, at any rate), every person interviewed understood the purpose of the camera as a communication device, and the universal idea of electronic media as a communication tool. Nouzeilles's point is that even though religion, politics, and ethnicity create societal divisions, electronic media as a communication tool is an idea that is universally understood.