Is the media ready for an open debate? (1992)
Is the media ready for an open
debate?
by Dilip Simeon
The Pioneer; April 6, 1992
NB: I wrote this article during the communal crisis of 1990-92. The media played as significant a role then as it does now. The passage of time, however, has seen technology become more sophisticated & the political will to silence criticism and manipulate public awareness more brutal - DS
Can we imagine a
situation where cassette recorders, cameras and video-cameras turn up in
factories, educational institutions, bureaucratic offices, police stations,
editorial conferences, and other such places where social conflict is expressed
on a daily basis? Why has it taken so many years for our legislators to open a
small (and duly theatricised) segment of their deliberation to their voters?
After all, they are not normally known for their shyness.
Could we ever hope for
a really open debate in the newspapers, involving their owners, staffs and
readership, about how ‘news’ is created? How about a televised debate with the
owners and editors of the Hindi press is UP and MP on their coverage of the
so-called ‘kar-sewa’? Would cameras be permitted in torture cells, to show us
some of the means by which the “unity and integrity of the nation” is
maintained? Or in the offices of ministers, when contracts are discussed? Why
is it an inconceivable proposition that a newspaper be edited and distributed
by its readership through a democratic co-operative? Or video-systems be put at
the disposal of political groups?
We know the answers to
these questions. The functional and technical structure of the media are in
toto, reflexes of their social form. In this form, as organs of the monologue
of mediatised, theatrified and sanitised images and information, it cannot ever
permit the use and alteration of their technologies for real communication, for
speech with response, and for a genuine discourse of social reality. One
consequence of the emergence of societies based upon mass production has been
the birth of the ‘consciousness Industry’. Such societies carry two outstanding
features: One demographic, the other political.
The first is the
development of mass urban conglomerates, with their educational structure
‘disciplining’ the proletarian underclass to suit the needs of modern
manufacture. The second includes the disestablishment of God as the legitimator
of power (the end of Divine Right), and the arrival of the ideal of popular
rule, ‘self-determination,’ and so on. The conflict over the definition of
conflict over the definition of ‘people’ created the need for propaganda. At
the same time, the very notion of popular rule has carried subversion
potential, with the underprivileged often dreaming of the socialisation of
democracy, the substantive realisation of liberty.
It is the tension
between the promise and the reality of democracy, the potential liberation from
drudgery that technology promises, and the actual life experience of drudgery,
conflict and technologically produced disaster, that provides the space for the
intervention of what we call the media. The media are no more a basically
neutral form for the dissemination of ideas and culture than was MIC gas a
basically neutral form of insecticide. They perform a specific function in the
kind of mass society we have talked of, the function of monologuous
communication, of speech without reply, of mass production of sentiments,
symbols, and the manipulation of the human mind in a manner suitable to the
needs of capitalism.
The media is the
collective advertisement of this contradictory social reality, in a word,
simultaneously, the instrument and the form of the industrialisation of the
mind. The media carries with the aura of ‘truth’ – (how much truth did Pravda really
purvey?). The myth about the printed word being the last word, and the
assumption that seeing is believing, etc., are the axioms upon TV functioning.
Depending upon how the subjects - producers of the images, words, messages and
symbols - assess the level of intelligence of the objects – the sheep-like
audiences who ‘consume’ these products and whose responses are either
negligible or preordained—the media can even extend what film criticism calls
the “suspension of disbelief” into ‘real life’. Thus as political beings,
voters were expected to actually exercise a choice for say, NTR or Dipika,
suspending their knowledge that these were not deities, but mere humans. So the
media can create a situation of complicity among subject and audience where
political decisions are sought to be based upon pure fabrication.
Just as the theatre of
the electro-magnetic waves has stepped out of the idiot box to mingle with the
idiots, so also has the ‘reality’ of politics receded into the realm of
theatre. ‘Spectacle’ is the word Henri Lefebvre proposed, to fit the present
form of mass consumption, where news, images, packaging, architecture,
ambiences and glitter, star lives and ‘beautiful living’, all come
together in a festival, a permanent theatre, celebrating consumption.
It is the spectacle
which makes it possible for a system based upon artificial scarcity to promise
the pseudo-utopia of ‘plenty’, and for the daily life of drudgery to hope for
the promise of ‘open spaces’ and ‘free time’.
What we get therefore,
is not what we might want to know, but what is deemed fit for our knowledge and
sentiment. Indeed, sentiment is interspersed with ‘fact’ at every step, even in
the mode of the ‘headline’: thus, a survey of the opinions of less than 300
persons in some parts of Delhi becomes converted to a general truth about the ‘opinion
of Delhi-ites’. It is not truth, thus, that the media manufactures, but the new
ideological product known as ‘credibility’. This is the lasting contribution of
the advertising industry. Not for nothing do power seekers hire advertisers who
specialise in the art of seduction and repulsion.
One of the essential
preconditions of the mind industry is the intellectual impact of the
Enlightenment, that is, the advent of the notion of the ‘independent mind’.
(Ironically, this is the precondition for the new hegemony). Democracy created
the need for persuasion. And the emergence of a basic industrial infrastructure
and electronics made it both possible and necessary to reach millions of minds.
It is an interesting reflection that for those to whom it is directed,
political and commercial propaganda are virtually free.
The mind industry’s
main business is not to sell its product, it is to sell the existing order, to
train consciousness, to domesticate and benumb, to co-opt opposition and
imagination, to tame the ghost of real speech and of social (as opposed to
formal) democracy. “Material exploitation must camouflage itself in order to
survive, immaterial exploitation has become its necessary corollary” (Enzenzberger).
The modern industrial system has now begun the expropriation of the brain, and,
contrary to its claims, what is being abolished is not exploitation, but our
awareness of exploitation.
But the mind industry
has its own pitfalls for the system. The intellect must be developed before it
can be exploited. Consciousness can be reproduced and manipulated by industrial
means, but never produced except by creative minds whose very nature lies in
innovation, the invention of alternatives. No administration can trust the
media workers all the way, since they are potential troublemakers, and require
handling, by means of blacklists, blackmail, over-exposure, stardom etc. As it
proliferates consciousness, the media spawns its own contradictions.
But for the media
workers who try to incorporate moments of genuine reciprocity in what is
otherwise the monologue of the mighty and the dialogue of the deaf, there is
more at stake in their effort than their own future.
see also
Jacques Camatte: The Wandering of Humanity
some other material
US-Russian surveillance wars
Posts about Kafka: https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.
