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Signals from the skies
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Is television a medium of expression or communication or a public utility? SASHI KUMAR ponders over this question in the light of emerging trends in the second of his three-part article.
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IN much the same manner, Murdochism, in a generic sense, sets the agenda and the menu for television today. There is a make-believe of choice in the fare purveyed while the reality is that asset of stereotypes, which emphasises cosmetic "commonalities" of a virtual class of global television viewers and ignores or wishes away the ground reality of "differences" in cultural context and experience, is perpetuated. This homogenising thrust is reinforced by the ongoing "convergence" of the three broad sectors of (a) broadcasting and the movie industry, (b) newspaper and the publishing industry and (c) computer and cyberspace, all of which could, in the not-too-distant future, be delivered to the consumer on a single screen. There is then the rather intimidating prospect of a supervening leviathan-like information structure and encompasses people across the world irrespective of national boundaries and regional, cultural, or social differences.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and much of the erstwhile eastern bloc was hastened as much by the DBS TV signals from the skies as by the contradictions on the ground. Satellite signals and footprints did not respect geo-political boundaries and it was no longer possible to limit the medium or its message to the confines of the nation state. The American serial "Dallas" and its received image in the former German Democratic Republic is a case in point. The good-life-in-the-West projected by the serial, a life of runaway conspicuous consumption, became a critical reference for viewers in East Germany (where it was beamed from West Germany and widely viewed) about the American way of life. As early as 1982 the French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, was calling "Dallas" cultural imperialism. And even as Marxists saw in the excesses of "Dallas" a critique of capitalism, the average East German contrasted it with his own system, where the basic necessities were provided by the State, but where he felt he was denied the leisure-bound, luxurious life his western counterpart enjoyed. The revolution of rising expectations that brought the Berlin wall crumbling down soon yielded to the harsh reality of East Germans becoming virtual refugees in a new unified Germany.
However different the social and cultural context in South Asia, the fragility of a system that denies basic necessities to the vast majority of the population even as consumerism on television further alienates its miniscule beneficiaries from the vast silent mass cannot be overstated. The sheer increase in the number of satellite TV channels over the last decade has not meant any real pluralism in content, democratisation in terms of access or empowerment, or any real advance in enabling an Indian identity of diversity. What we get as we switch channels is more and more of the same, so that, to wit, by the law of diminishing returns, more becomes less. John Tusa, former Managing Director of the BBC, sees this new television experience as a series of paradoxes: "more choice but less diversity; more information, but less knowledge; more action but less news; more gratification but less satisfaction: more viewers but fewer audiences; more entertainment but less engagement; more immediacy but less depth; more in the present, less in the past; more unto the minute, but less tradition; more on demand, less to wait for". If this trend continues, Tusa goes on, "then television and radio would have largely ceased to be media of expression and communication as we have come to know them, and would instead have become more like any other public utility. TV and radio on tap; programmes on demand; running hot and cold information, entertainment and education ... .. gas, water, electricity, the media — all will be just a question of guaranteeing a safe, reliable and massively increasing supply at ever-decreasing cost".
There is growing confusion about whether television, even as a news medium, is an agency of representation, or a consumable in the market. It seems to be both. The wall-to-wall, wrap around presence of the medium today makes it more and more difficult to draw a distinction between a reality out there and its representation in the TV box. It is, rather, all about a composite representative reality that is the given and that is all inclusive and all consuming. There are echoes here of Feurbach in the 19th Century when (in his preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity) he says that the present age prefers the "sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence" and concludes that "illusion only is sacred, truth profane". "Nay sacredness", Feurbach elaborates, "is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness". Heidegger later observed that a distinctive attribute of the 20th Century is that it sees the world in terms of representations. It is relevant here, by way of elaboration, to invoke Roland Barthes' concept of "meaning" — even Eiffel Tower being described by him as a "pure, virtually empty, sign that means everything". Barthes makes a case for meaning in its own right; he is opposed to the idea of depth hiding any significant or unravelled meaning and declares "myth hides nothing". Depth and height become irrelevant, the surface reality is all that matters. As Susan Son tag put it, "In the post Nietzchean tradition there are neither depths nor heights, there are only various kinds of surface, of spectacle". Barthes privileges the spectacle as "the universal category through whose forms the world is seen".
The spectacle as the driving force of modern society was the obsessive and singular theme of Guy Debord, one of the best minds of the Situations International movement of the late 1960s. Debord's Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967, has since remained a relatively obscure piece of work. It is, however, being resituated now as a prescient forecast of a TV-driven society, even being called the "Capital of the new generation". Debord's central proposition is that "in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an accumulation of spectacles". He further notes "everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation".
The accumulation of spectacles Debar talks about is there for all to see. There is increasing awareness of what this visual clutter — the complete space it occupies and the frenetic pace it dictates — is doing to our lives and our sensibilities. In a refreshing new study, Media Unlimited, Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University, points out how the United States is caught in the maelstrom of this image torrent and how the American images and sounds become omnipresent as American imperialism.
The disjuncture between the lived reality and the represented (or mediated) reality is also a function of the way the medium works, its rules of the game and the peculiar way in which peer and market pressures operate on it. When, for example, we observe in the course of a daily editorial review in a TV or newspaper organisation that we have "missed" a story, what we mean is not there was a news development which all of us failed to identify or report. Indeed, we pursue our profession in the unerring faith that if none of us saw it or reported it, it did not exist - reminiscent of the Sumerian idea as far back as 2000 B.C. that what is not recorded does not exist (`Quod non est. acts, no est in memdo'). What we therefore mean when we refer to a "missed' story is that another channel or newspaper had a story which we did not. That this is a rare eventuality is itself a tribute to the consensus, cross-checking and mutual agreement that informs much of the news that makes its way to the news desk. The press club syndrome plays its own role in ensuring that the bulk of the news is the same across channels and newspapers and that barring the occasional exclusives and scoops, there are no surprises. Increase in the numbers of newspapers or channels makes little difference to the way this game is played and does not necessarily mean any significant increase in the volume or variety of news output. It does not widen our news horizons. On the contrary, as the distinguished French sociologist Pierre Bordieu, points out in his incisive study On Television and Journalism, it becomes a game of mirrors with every channel or newspaper making sure that it has what the rest have. As a result, says Bordieu, there is only "circular circulation of information" which leads to a "formidable effect of mental closure". Dealing with such standardised fare, moreover, journalists often tend to pride themselves over the small differences in he detail or treatment of the same story — differences which may have escaped the viewer's attention altogether. Peer pressure thus homogenises, rather than differentiates, news content.
(To be continued)
The writer is the Chairman, Media Development Foundation, Chennai.
The first part appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine, issue dated May 18, 2003.
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