How to criticize media; or be critical to the mass media or mediation

Is it really your politics?

It is nowadays a common non-phenomenal circumstance to make a ground on the other side of the popular mass media or mediated contents. Although people have to be grounding for their individual social positioning in contrast to the power exertion and socialization process of mass media, the individual audience in most of the time takes the lesson of social positioning from the mainstream media. It is therefore a must-do job for an individual audience to get accustomed with the mediated content on the one side and to criticize on the other hand in contrast to his/her own temporal positioning in the public sphere.

What do mass media do? In between media and audience

It is not a simple question as it looks like for many aspects of its manifestation or what people usually accord in common understanding with it. The first approach toward its non-simplicity is that audience-people in any common cultural understanding or plane largely appear to be media-expert, media-friendly, media-observant, counter opinion maker and many such identities what comes suitable at any moment. In other side of such arbitrary identities media people at the back a typically capitalist corporate establishment often commonly manifest protectionist approach within organization and outright opinion maker in the operating society. So the question ‘what do media do?’ appears to be highly monolithic in nature at least to set public agenda and policy agenda in any point of time and space. So the audience in this condition hardly gets any space to criticize media content in general.

Media in this conditional space perpetrate certain jobs for its own hypercommercial purpose:

(i) locate and identify the targeted people;

(ii) form the audience;

(iii) prepare suitable programme contents [news, soaps and any other entertainment material];

(iv) influence the audience [viewing process];

(v) stimulate audience action [in short run];

(vi) change audience behaviour [in the ling run];

Media therefore gradually use the so called democratic space not just trivially to perpetrate ideal duties [to inform, to entertain, to educate, to…all other responsible duties] but to sustain its commercial corporate existence, earn maximized business in terms of turn-over and reach. Media here also played its nationalist role altogether in the post world war global perspective. In India the union government once used mass media extensively to disseminate public agenda along with policy agenda in three four decades since independence. People at that time were not in a position to at least open the lips. Gone are however those days as nationalist media largely being replaced by the hypercommercial media have lost its existence. 

What then do people do to its media?

If it at all appears to be a question accepted in any social format, people do not possess any form of statutory right to do anything substantial for media but to pose a responsible citizen as media-audience following democratic norm. Many will not agree with such harsh and passive looking condition for a growing belief that what media do is just for public perusal. Just for public consumption media produce contents. Mass audience have become gradually more and more active as individuals get enough amount of space to interact with media.

Whatever commonly spoken or uttered hovers close to bankruptcy of such concepts when audience recognizes interaction with the media in contrast to his/her shrunken space in public sphere. The growth of hyperreal mediation not only fictionalizes the reality with many fabricated counter-real arguments but also redefines all social spaces like political, economic, cultural etc. Thus an election oriented talk-show often fabricates the show in a set of a ‘boxing ring’. Such a presentation nevertheless proposes audience activism to make the programme successful outside the media in public sphere. Audience on the other side often transports the content in various lanes public sphere, like discussions in tea shops, lanes and rocks etc.

What is hypercommerciality?

The commerciality of media or consumption of media contents by the audience are often loosely derived as a choice-customization of an individual by Transnational Industrial Corporations (TNC) in any region-state thus defines the hypercommerciality of media. The hypercommeriality therefore moves beyond the once traditional corporate commerciality that only defined the institutional perpetuity. Hypercommerciality appears to be a ‘combined effect syndrome’ of large scale mediation and heavy viewing of media. Huge and incessant mediation greatly influence audience behaviour with a massive homogeneous behavioural effect that causes lowering of reactive space in an individual mind. Hypercommerciality thus dissolves all barriers between fiction and reality even in a finer space that goes beyond audience psyche. So the audience has no option but to consume the mediation.

The hypercommerciality of media thus appears to be a post ‘active audience’ analysis what Joseph Klapper, Denis McQuail et.al. proposed in 1960s in contrast to the dominant media paradigm phase with a clear notion that audience is equally active while they watch media; they usually choose the programme content what they want to view or read. This activism toward using media to gratify individual needs becomes a highly monolithic syndrome extensively used by the media conglomerates in post-eighties period. Thus far beyond the activism of just switching the channels over and surfing the channels, this individual mechanism of media viewing was the USP of media houses throughout the world.

Hypercommerciality thus proposes an outright consumption of media contents and substantial use of such contents in suitable places. As aircrafts need a runway or an airport to operate, such media contents also need a hyperreal space where the consumption can take place. Audience is just supposed to attend such mediated place to hang out and rediscover all mediated symbolic contents; so are they very active audience!!!

Media vs. Ideology? Progressive use of the Mediation?

In such a situation people nevertheless feel there is much space left for launching a huge protest against such mediation and criticize mediated contents. It is almost a counter use of the same media space for progressive and people’s purpose. The progressive use of mediation thus can be traced out:

(i) producing progressive contents using same mediation technology;

(ii) producing a content for a specific causal factor; may be a political issue;

(iii) producing for the making of an ideology; may be a mass political ideology;

(iv) producing for a specific targeted mass for a specific time and space;

(v) revival of ‘to inform-to educate’ syndrome;

(vi) producing benevolent contents for the mass;

(vii) redefining social awareness more than the popular use of mediation;

(viii) more and more participation in popular mediation programmes;

Audience on the other hand needs also to be classified for the underscored progressive use of mediation: 

(i) audience mostly in traditional middle class public spheres;

(ii) audience in an upper social-class formats;

(iii) audience in hyperreal spaces; shopping malls, water parks, viewing newer channels etc.

(iv) audience regularly migrating from traditional residing places to newly transformed hypercommercial office places.

(v) audience promoting democratic norms;

(vi) audience as opinion leaders;

(vii) audience promoting individual ideology; ideology of a rock band etc.

(viii) audience vanguards of a mass political ideology;

(ix) audience ‘partial’ vanguards of political ideology; i.e. representatives of mass organizations; more socially promoted; earlier Marxian social identities.

(x) audience of rural, urban identity specifications;

The progressive use of mediation is thus a competitive replication of popular mediation guided by a socially upgraded ideology that covers maximum benefit of the common mass in contrast to the unlimited entertainment mediation of media conglomerates. So in such cases progressive mediation following the same path of popular mediation promotes somewhere a different mode of ideological dealing.

Criticizing in such a huge gap between mediation and audience-ship

It now though not difficult to undertake an opinion-building process, often comes out very difficult to criticize the popular mediation being in traditional public spheres. Such a huge gap between progressive mediation, audience-ship and popular mediation creates a huge space-jolt for the mass audience to consolidate a non-bourgeois political ideology; or the Left ideology precisely. Mass audience nevertheless criticize media contents, launch debates in public spheres, democratic spaces often play a crucial role to become real vanguards of ideology somewhere more than the mass leaders and political offices. The common oppositions here in such cases are the nationalist bourgeoisie; right political opportunist forces, and newly emerged postcolonial violent extremist forces.

Understanding Myth and the Popular Meaning of Communication and Mediation

Noted French theorist Rolland Barthes defined myth as a statement what is encoded by its supporter or according to John Fiske its believer. The modern commercial outlook often disseminates some laboratory-made myths to the consumers or subscribers. A ‘T-shirt’ is marked with an interesting note “I was born intelligent but the EDUCATION system ruined me”. This is just a myth used commercially. Barthes defined myth as a story by which a culture explains or some aspects of reality or nature [Fiske, 2003]. So a myth is a cultural fall-out of something to be conceptualized or understood. In this discourse there is unlimited flow of myths reigning in every society, like,

“women are more matured than men”;

“all that glitters is not gold”;

“peace lives somewhere else”;

“the government is of, for and by the people”;

“long live revolution”;

“women are more caring than men”;

“if you teach a woman you teach the whole generation” etc.

Thus if connotation is the second order signification producing the meaning of the ‘signifier’, myth is the second order signification of the signified.

The structure and organization of myth:

Famous Communication analyst John Fiske analyzed extensively how myths work in broadcasting news.

“the jubillant supporters are shown...” or

“public representatives should be an example...”

or the roaring river...” etc.

Enormous myths are being used in news, advertisements nowadays which discursively work as stimulant to lead the readership to the rest of the stories or the event. So considering the role of myths it is necessary to know in detail about the structure of myth which can reveal the inside stories of structural uses of myths in extensive variety of social dimensions, specially how mass media work ! We have already iterated Barthesian definition of ‘myth’. Another noted Social Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss defined myth as a ‘story that is a specific and local transformation of a deep structure of binarily opposed concepts that are important to the culture within which the myth circulates’[Fiske, 2003].

So myth resides in both ‘pro’ and ‘anti-establishment’ concepts rather cultural contexts that lead to opposite outcomes or fall outs of social activities. Myths often help living in an imaginative manner that provides enough comfort to its creator to combat the reality. If an Indian comments, “I am an apolitical person”, that gives him a little comfort to be away from either the ‘pain of political struggle’ or ‘from illicit political activities’. Fiske in this context argues interestingly that Levi Strauss’s concept is greatly influenced by Freudean theorization. In his language, “... from Freud he develops the idea that the analysis of myth is the cultural equivalent of the analysis of the dreams of an individual. A dreamer will know that he or she is dreaming, but will know only the dream’s (often absurd) surface meaning: its deeper, real meaning is available only to the analyst...” So from the above two analyses there is no doubt about the encoder of a myth knows only the superficial or external meaning. Fiske continues arguing, “myths arise from the repressed anxieties and unresolved contradictions hidden in the tribal or cultural subconscious.

Myth and class inequality:

On the other hand Rolland Barthes has emphasized on the dominating character of myth that is used by the dominant class to dominate oppressed class. However he goes on arguing that myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion (Barthes, 1972, Julian). “Myth is a system of communication... it is a message... myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form... Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way it utters this message... there are formal limits to myth but no substantial ones... Everything then, can be a myth? Yes... every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, whichforbids talking about things... mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication” (Rolland Barthes, 1972). So myth is not at all dependent on its narrative or syntagmatic arrangement but on paradigmatic juxtaposition of metaphorical order, thus dominates the text and its decoder. Finally myth is a powerful instrument of the privileged class to dominate others and a fancid way-out to the common people. But in religious activities myths are often found moving beyond class identities of people and homogenizing cultural outlooks and differences.

Structure of Myth:

According to Levi Strauss, all myths have similar structure and similar socio-cultural function in a determinate social format. Myth is commonly used ‘to make the world explicable’ through a story-telling manner to resolve various problems and contradictions [Storey, 2001]. Myth itself appears to be the logic-model and deals with the conflicting issues. If we agree with the myth that “Sachin Tendulkar is the best Batsman, India have ever produced” no contradiction would then come into the scene at least in a determinate social format, but society must stand for a consensus in that period of time. But at the same time it is also true that myth then would become an undeniable part of the dominant social institutions and appear as ‘culture’ banishing all possible deviant voices and contradictions. Owing mostly to Freud, Levi Strauss’ notion of myth stresses upon the ‘dream’ structure of an individual that passes through very close to the ‘reality’ or the ‘analysis’. The myths like ‘Mega Star’ or ‘Big B’ thus structurally belongs to Amitabh Bachchan and for Shahrukh Khan ‘King Khan’ or ‘Bolywood Badshah’ rules the market and society. But both these myths mostly appear to be quite binarily opposed in nature thus leaving off the conflict of interest or releasing the anxiety toward making a King of the kings.

Rolland Barthes, on the other hand, as it has been already argued in the first chapter, defines myth as a story by which a culture gets the magical touch of reality or what Fiske argues, some aspects of reality or nature. As he categorises myth as a fall out of the second order signification, so culture basically shapes the myth as a chain of related concepts. Barthes categorises second order conceptualization into two segments: ‘connotation’ and ‘myth’. Connotation when it becomes the second order meaning or conceptualization of the ‘signifier’ and ‘myth’ is constituted as a second order conceptualization of the ‘signified’. But unlike Levi Strauss, Barthes has observed the commissioned existence of dominant myths in every social format and in this way dominant myths represent dominant social class and so the dominant history. Fiske argues that myths, as Barthes accords, basically naturalize the dominant history because every myth carries a history with them but present it as natural not historical or social. Because of dominant myth, we know about masculinity, femininity and other subsequent categories, like, women are more caring than of course male beings; women are lovemaker looking after their husbands and children, males are breadwinner etc. Fiske also argues that myths usually disguise their historical origin but present meaning for contemporary use.

But such mythic structuration also has its end with the natural evolution of mankind and social formats, newer myths are coming into the scene day by day. Myths, once very dominant and looking quite natural, are facing severe challenge from the newer age, newer reasons, newer aspirations, newer hopes and of course from newer myths. Also counter myths, once defeated, may earn new space to live in. As Barthes accords, change of myths is ‘evolutionary but not revolutionary’, where newer myths do not reject older myths entirely but outcast some of their traditional aspects. Therefore, Fiske argues, ‘no myths are universal in a culture, nor eternally dominant, there are counter myths, newer myths to banish them and set new time for future, as in science, counter myths always appear to be very strong, often deny dominant myths’. In everyday soap operas, news bulletins, political speeches, lots of dominant myths are being telecast, rendered but counter myths also exist in common psyche which often have the power to outcast those so called dominant myths. Gerbner in his Cultivation research has shown massive portrayal of violence in American television specially supernatural [mythic] violence, psycho-fanatic violence, cruelty, murder, social outlaws etc. which outrage the image of civil law and social relationships.

However Barthes’ claim was that myths are being produced at the second order signification or connotation for consumption and in practice myths often become ideology to solve out socio-cultural jolts. Myths in a social format, according to Barthes, promote values and interests of the dominant groups or institutions and defend them. As myths elevate dominant interests of the society, polysemic approaches of signs would then achieve hardly any space in that limited format. Barthes accords that, ‘myth has...a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes on us’[Mythologies: Barthes]. However Fiske argues that the ‘final meaning of the myth, lies not in its narrative or its syntagmatic structure, for the events of the expedition and actual hunt are comparatively superficial decorations and do not need retelling. The final meaning is to be found in the paradigmatic relationship of the [binary] opposed concepts which is a conceptual way of structuring and thus of making sense of the real problem’.

Finally Levi Strauss’ notion of myth comes out completely antipodal to what Barthes talks of it about. For Levi Strauss, myth is a narrative which is constantly being used by the people even beyond its actual negotiable meaning. But for Barthes on the other hand, myth is a chain of concepts [Fiske, 2001, 03], people though aware of its meaning but may be unaware about its mythic character. So Barthes’ myth is totally class oriented or class specific where dominant class use myths while dominating weaker class. But Levi Strauss has distinguished myth and its operation fully open ended. Levi Strauss used myths of tribal societies, whereas Barthes was more concerned with contemporary global societies. However Fiske argues that apart from culture specificity and class orientation, society is also heavily distinguished by the gender bias that creates power blocs in the society. As Barthes points out that dominant class and their institutions, owning sources of production alongwith, also control and regulate myths to ensure subordination of people, but Fiske points out that capitalist societies are very much patriarchally programmed where class bias and gender bias both sculpt power blocs in society.

Structural repitition or parallel structures:

Fiske argues that as because structures are fundamental in making sense of the whole world, structuralism often demonstrates or is evident in some parallel structures that defines the difference of cultural praxis in a synonymous way. Fiske exemplifies beautifully that a space is being treated as house, farm, wilderness etc. Animals can be treated into parallel categories, such as, domestic animals, wild animals, pets etc. Human being also are being categorized into different parallel structures, like, family, neighbours, businessman, tribal, criminal etc. These parallel structures or structural repititions denote cultural differences and at the same time organize those anomalies in a synonymous structure. Such repititive structures are widely seen in both Bengali and Indian societal boundaries. Often these repetitive structures form convention and are being forcibly tried out as analogous or anomalous structures by the limited social authorities. Thus Fiske argues that, ‘structuralism teaches us to look for the deep structures that underlie all cultural and communication systems. It also enables us to demonstrate that the various social and cultural systems that we use to organize and make sense of our lives are not random or disconnected, but are analogous to each other’. Therefore myths are closely associated with the existing deep structures or langue in which both class, cultural and gender bias control the society and various paroles.

Meaning and Culture:

As Claude Levi Strauss has distinguished language into paroles within its deep structure i.e. langue. Thus meaning lies in the paroles and langue acts as a base [deep] structure of it. In mass mediated society a deep structure or langue can generate infinite number of paroles as episodes that would definitely influence or affect the concept of binary structuration of meaning. Therefore front page of a particular newspaper generates number of headlines [Fiske, 2001, 03], even a particular story-structure also can generate number of headlines and pictures. Ultimately this deep structure [langue] sets about the culture with structured oppositions.

Nature and culture:

As it has been argued in detail that the structuralist approach enquires an open-ended analysis where sense making is the crucial factor, generated from nature or the reality and the culture or the structured sense. Claude Levi Strauss has analyzed this derivation between nature and culture in his book “The Raw and the Cooked” (1969) which justifies fooding and cooking as cultural procedures are both generated from the nature. According to Levi Strauss, food is a very powerful anomalous category and acts between nature and culture. This food and cooking culture can be extended to a wider range of cultural transformations [Fiske, 2001, 03] that even affect the age-old determinacy of a traditional culture. Raw food, according to Levi Strauss, is well extended to ceremonial cooking, occasional cooking, commercial cooking, official cooking and other various cultural praxis. Fiske argues that ‘...this process starts conceptually before any instrumental transformation, for all cultures divide nature into the edible and non-edible, though all...place different natural objects in each category...’. Though human body can accept or digest almost the whole nature, such delicate division between edible and non-edible brings out the cultural specification of human beings. In addition to that such distinction becomes a discriminating process where what a society considers edible may be inedible in other society. Chinese people are very much traditionally knwon as cockroach eaters, some of eastern Indian aboriginals eat dogs.

At the same time in terms of edibility or non-edibility, wide cooking range also is an identity of a society and is an instrumental to the social transformations. Specially in Bengali linguistic society such categorization still acts as a social identity. Even in West Bengal long after the partition [1947], Hilsa and Prawn are still known as iconic-symbols of the two prime Indian Football Clubs, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. This transformation of nature into culture is also identical with ‘Ghati’ [West Bengalees] who are fondly symbolized with Prawn and ‘Bangals’ [migrated from today’s Bangladesh as refugee] are fondly known as ‘Hilsa’ eaters. Moreover these categorizations become more anomalous or analogous when by different preparations of ‘Daal’ we can identify the cook as, may be, traditionally ‘Bangal’ or ‘Gahti’ or ‘Oriya’. Nonetheless there are even various cooking methodologies that signify the person, which region he/she is coming from. Refugees from Barishal are traditionally known for excellent cooking, whereas for some special preparations or the cooking systems of various vegetables Ghati people are well acclaimed. Bangals [traditional East Bengalees] cook all lunch dishes specially ‘Daal’[pulse], vegetables, using sweetner [chiefly sugar] along with other salty ingredients more than what ‘Ghati’s do. More so, Kolkata is still known by its Rasogolla, as Delhi by Laddu [the famous categorization: Jo Khaya O Pachhtaya, Jo Nahin Khaya O Bhi Pachhtaya] etc.

Not only cooking and food systems, such distinction between nature and culture and cultural tranformation is widely seen in rural Bengal areas in worshiping gods. People of Purulia and Bankura worship ‘Tusu’ [goddess Lakshmi, the god of wealth] to observe harvesting and collecting of crops [chiefly Paddy] from fields. These are all quite substantial examples of structural methodologies as Levi Strauss thought of it extensively. We all know that Chinese food is such a cooking system that opens an image of the Chinese cultural discourse, but in India, what is available in the name of Chinese recipe in common restaurants and road-side kiosks is far from what a Chinese person desires to have. But common Indian food scenario is binarilly distinguished between Chinese cuisine and Indian cuisine. This is also a structural transformation that comes from the nature reaches to a binary opposed culture.

All the examples given above are of structural prototypes that appear in mutually binary oppositional categories:

Chinsese food : Non-Chinese food [because in such Indian cuisines, some are inevitably having Pakistan and middle eastern roots];

Bangal [taken refuge in India after partition] : Ghati [traditionally West Bengal dwellers];

Hilsa : Prawn;

North Indian : South Indian;

But the degree of transformation has gradually become wider with more and more consumerization of such traditional categories [broad and binarily opposed], while paradigmatic options needed to be expanded more to cater the growing consumerization. But still empowerment of structures is very much evident in different categories of lives and mediation, as for example, still majority of Mumbai films can well be categorized into binary structures, like: Good : Evil; Hero : Villain; Law & Order : Anarchy; Old : New; Religious : Secular; Conventional : Revolutionary; Society : Underworld; Elite : Antisocial etc. Let us interpret some films:

Connotation # 1: Amar Akbar Anthony:

This particular blockbuster of 1970s, portrayed two special religious binary identities under one mainstream religious plane [here Hinduism on which the whole society was portrayed]: The whole text possessed three identities: two religious categories, Christianity and Islam and a Police Officer [predominantly Hindu or mainstream on which most of the Mumbai films are made]. However all categories were sufficiently projected in different societal forms. Anthony in Christian [Church oriented] society and Akbar in Muslim [Bazar oriented] society. Rest of the film followed the same narrative fictional line-up: Initial narrative - Mounting - Climax [chiefly happy marriage]. The meanings of categories are:

Mainstream Religion [as perspective] [Educated Police Officer] : Others;

Chritianity [Bohemianism (individuality), pub-culture] : Muslim [workers, rituals]

Law & Order [Civil responsibility] : Villains [Smugglers]

Masculinity : Femininity

Connotation # 2: Vaastav:

This is another Mumbai blockbuster initially started with a binary composition of elite and non-elite societal category. Then it moves to another binary composition: society and the underworld [where the hero (starring Sanjay Dutt) once ousted from the society gets refuge to ‘Vitthal bhai’] refuting elite-non elite boundaries. It also projects another binary character, hero’s brother (Manish Behl), who happens to be a graduate, management staff, looking for a well-bred life, keeps himself away from his ‘Don’ brother. In between these three prime binary-opposed categories lots of murders, encounters, underworld planning have been propelled in this film. The binary opposed categories are:

Elite : Non-elite;

Social Praxis : Anti-social Activities;

Decent Life [education] : Underworld lifestyle;

Law & Order : Anarchy;

Hero [not villains, because hero himself is a traditional villain] : Villain [the Society];

Humanity [Hero] : Cruelty [Education, social institutions];

Masculinity : Femininity

Anomalous or continuing or mediating category: Hero / Anti-Hero.

Connotation # 3: Political Bandhs:

Often Bandhs or Strikes have been called by different political parties, non-political institutions, social [civil] groups and various other categories of a region. Today a bandh is not only a widely-dealt issue but a quite popular category for mass-mediation. Media institutions often have become politically polarized while giving coverages. In case of opposition-called bandhs, media houses, supporting ruling sects, frantically look for even small groupings in roads. They cover number of government buses and other vehicles running on the road. But in opposite cases, they cover stranded people in different places, like, Railway stations, Airports and other places. Uncrowded road is here the strongest metonym of a strike. Clash between police administration and strike supporters is a common metonym of state domination, even if the supporters launch violent attack on public property or administrative personnels. Political oppositions always have the same allegation that the bandh is ‘politically motivated’ [instead of adding ‘ill’ as prefix], thus ultimately appears to be almost anti-social, anti-progress, anti-development, anti-industrialization, anti-people and even anti-political iconic-symbol. This is a massive transformation because Bandh once was treated as the last weapon of movement against the establishment]. Finally whatever be the outcome strike-callers greet people for making it a success and the opposition also greet people for making it failure or unsuccessful. The binary categories are:

Support : Dissupport or opposition;

Rulling political groups : Political oppositions;

Issue : Politics;

Individuality : Organizations;

Success : Failure;

Anomalous or Continuing or mediating category: Bandh.

Fiske at this juncture points out that all such structural categorizations depend on various myth categories [second order signified], and upon our knowledge about other available myths in a particular genre. He further divides the structure into three ‘groups of values’:

Actual elements- the narrative;

Values [determinate] specific to the genre, say, [Mumbai films or Indian films] : Other films; or our culture : their culture;

Universal value system - Good : Evil; Hero : Anti Hero;

Structuralism innately prescribes these three central value systems starting from the reality element-system to the universal value system i.e. universally accepted axiomatic value statements by which all binary opposed categories are being made. He accords that the third group i.e. universal value system are finally culture specific but always have been given the ‘natural’ status, thus ‘appear to be a part of nature rather than culture. So the myths always have been very powerful and act as natural.

Political text and mass culture:

Both in traditional and contemporary social boundaries, political texts are often found highly structured [regimented], continuous and communicated to the targeted mass to achieve immediate [short-term] stimulated results. In this course, political vanguardism always becomes an invariable factor to motivate or modulate required expectation of results or outcome of communication. This is very much plausible when political texts are made of various stimulant elements to re-legitimizing political goals. Such elementary stimulant factors are often being misconceptualized with ‘ideology’ and ‘ideological struggle’, as ideology is frequently been made up by the vanguards of different vertically framed strata within the political party. Such formulation of ideology practicing materials result in a utopianism or utopian shell wherein people organize their livelihood and revolutionary praxis as well. Even in the contemporary world different political or semi-political platforms, despite not having regimented structures, often try to regimental-ize their message-texts to their audience. But in such cases, in most of the developing countries, audience do not always come out with complementary vanguard-ist approach, because of being deprieved to get food, clothing and other elementary factors to organize their livelihood. Here educated middle class people, for many reasons, are the best receiver of such regimented message to become vanguards and lead the struggle against such deprivation.

But as the political texts often appear to be quite binarily opposed to each other [situational in terms of political continuity], create mass culture in different pockets of interest. Unlike autocratic dictation, political vanguardism may also produce mass culture specially for middle class people because they are the best receiver [opinion leaders also] of political texts as well as most vulnerable section of a community. In other words, may be, the political mass culture is necessary for them because of their vacilant attitude that they should remain vanguard but not freelance opinion leaders. This is a utopia but the most perpetrated social communication process.

However each political text has its own identity and requires a time-certainty to be an issue of vanguardism but basically such text is timeless and remains beyond any semiotic explanation. Let us take an example, ‘US-imperialism and industrialization in developing nations’-- ideally may come out as two binarily opposed text-codes but the reality is something else. Nowadays US-imperialism and corporate conglomeration or transnationalization of industrial coporations are synonymous or identical, to be very precise, unlike some earlier generic genres [cases] of direct militarization to some oil-producing countries. Borrowing Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, it can be easily determined that US imperialist terror has three genres: Constructive - when US launch direct military attack to any nation; Benign - when US promote its imperialist motif indirectly; and Nefarious - which goes against the interest of US strategies. For many developing countries, like India, such imperialist motif is benign in character which brings home massive corporate-concentration and neo-imperialism where corporate militarization is being ruthlessly imposed on such countries.

But on the contrary, developing nations also aggressively looking for sharp industrial growth so as to retain balanced economic growth. This is again a generic problem of all developing countries. On the one hand to get hold of indusrialization political parties need to be quite liberal in nature, be more cultural-oriented than traditional class-responsive, because with the natural developmental growth all-round trans-classification of older class identities occurs inevitably. With the growing disguised unemployment in agricultural sector land proportion per unit [a person, or a family unit] has become sharply negative compared to the earlier situation. Furthermore education development quotient along with other cultural factors [outlook, aspiration, and other modes of individuality] have also been quite edged down over [beyond] the developmental discourse. So a natural de-class-ment is inevitably an outcome where new industrialization may supplement the requirement. But this is the juncture we have been talking about nowadays. In this era of corporate conglomeration US neo-imperialist force have progressed so far that almost all the corporations of Asia and Europe remain under their domination. Both in media and industrial conglomeration US remains the only state power [except China] that every corporation depends upon. Therefore all anti-imperialist forces of developing countries have to face a double-edged text, a side of which is, either to accept industrialization with transnational corporate investment to generate internal industrial set up for the growth of employment, or to remain clerical toward older monolithic concept of imperialism otherwise.

Thus political vanguardism gradually losing its earlier control over such conceptual monoliths freeing out such texts to develop naturally and independently. So the question of mass culture itself is feebled out to liberal pluralist in nature which accepts multiple textual interpretation and multicultural identities. It is really difficult to, however, enrich or feed vanguardism with regular political agenda and a hardcore sense of struggle. But still political opinion leaders and leadership put forward such sense-making statements to keep the audience charged and committed. It is, therefore, a two-fold struggle for the political vanguards to make all incoming texts revolutionary, on the one hand, and retain audience under the banner, on the other. But movement specially the political movements would continue, even if not structured, to find out the best alternative to however neo-imperialism hits the common lives.

Media power and women: In quest of identities from social to postsocial conditions

Abir Chattopadhyay

abmo2020@yahoo.co.in

abir.communication@gmail.com

Introduction:

Media and Women: A missed articulation altogether in Indian modernity

As in India the notions of both ‘media’ and ‘feminist’ stance (that often further be reduced to somewhere women, female etc.) after having been spelt in millions of moments are still being articulated as one of the most churned out issues that transform the existing social surface a lot. Both categories evoked much debate since their birth as a ‘category’ in the Indian subcontinent. As other two supra-social categories like ‘power’ and ‘subordination’ being often binarily installed respectively over media and feminism always remained under the supreme hold of colonization, such articulations, at most, missed the widest exposure in Indian perspective compared to other European modernities. Colonization in its fullest categorical extent, here, had therefore formulated the media operation in native categories and also established control over the dimensions of socio-cultural movements that included women movements on various subcultural issues of that time. As said earlier, the two above supra-social categories ‘power and subordination’, were often signified in a quite reductionist terms and exposure so far available to the native population because the urban privileged natives largely declined to recognize any revolutionary Indian mass uprising, women education, free media etc except some iconic figures of nineteenth century. It had culminated in the first war of Indian independence where urban Bengal intelligentsia quite deliberately missed the articulation of various truly revolutionary struggles of the common Indian mass ever since Sanyashi movement. Bengal intelligentsia in those days behaved always quite reactionary until the sudden rise of middle class as an inventory leadership of social struggle in the post ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ era and that pronounced an indubitable rise of Indian bourgeoisie in all movements later. But as commonly perceived, the growth of media and women movement got a new momentum where many important events occurred that certainly ensured the growth of these two categories etc., Indian subcontinent nevertheless saw some stray events, though very important, mostly in media and literary works in all subsequent episodes of freedom struggle.

The prime symbolic events of British Indian modernity like media, women movements including women education movement, literacy movement, anti-superstition movement, western education movement were developed quite logocentrically on the debris of long-ignored class and ethnic movements like Sanyashi movement, Wahabi movement, Chuad movement, Santhal movement etc. The logocentric approaches of Indian history however have drawn out an anomalous continuity of such stray movements creating high elite social format that successfully christened and led a general stream of liberal constellation of movements that included movements on the basis of era i.e. Sepoy Mutiny era, Bengal Partition movement era, non-cooperation movement era, civil disobedience era etc. The last three decades of freedom struggle were thus by and large signified by three unfinished movements of Gandhi. Indian mainstream history thus in the pre-independence period hardly recognized class uprisings such as workers’ strike, violent uproars, peasant uprising, consolidation of women on ‘class’ identity basis beyond mere symbolic structural iconicity of a period, an era, an individual, idealistic nomenclature of a time-frame etc. So the dominant structural identity of a pervasive ‘identity politics’ always ruled the colonial era where public spheres also were brutally reduced by its own history.

Media and women issues therefore have had hardly any option but to be developed by some iconic efforts often collaborated jointly by foreign initiatives. Here also some noble icons like James Silk Buckingham, Norman Bethune, Charles Metcalfe, and David Hare who really gave required patronage to Indian media precisely newspapers and women issues in particular. The above statement for any reason does not undermine the historic efforts of Raja Rammohan Roy, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Iswar Chandra Gupta, Harish Mukherjee, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Rev. Krishnamohan Banerjee, Kristo Das Pal, Dwarakanath Vidyabhusan, Gnanadanandini Debi, Akshay Kumar Dutta and many others who worked as individual categories beyond their contemporarities. But we are talking about the dialectical gap between these two categories being ruthlessly abridged by the dominant colonial structure which had thrown out the third revolutionary category: the ‘class uprising’ which the Indian history witnessed in Indigo revolutionary struggle. So quite resultantly in post indigo movement the dialectical gap was neither mitigated nor widened because the dominant abridging factor was surprisingly shared by both imperialist colony and Indian bourgeoisie alongside. British Indian League, British Indian Association, Indian Association and finally Indian National Congress were primarily established to spread a general liberal view toward both colonial settlements and the common mass.

Readers may be suspicious about my root-point of contention as because this type of articulation often appears to have an elite middle-class orientation, I am also imbibed by or with, that often symbolizes and exerts power in making of every such category in their literary and journalistic works. But I don’t have also any elitist hiccup with some extremely (elitist) critical notions; where ‘Rammohan, often fatuously argued, could have tried to organize rural forces’ like statements work in the name of obsessed class-ruled analysis. This extremely critical notion, I strongly believe would merge into liberal functionalist approaches further that denounce any form of individuality both in ‘social’ and ‘cultural’. I don’t however need to rewrite or reprove the history of colonial India. My stance would first critically deal with only the mainstream historiography created for the two above categories within a strict and dominant nationalist frame, which treated ‘women’ as a ‘stagnant’ category that covers an easily ‘determinable’ social space by virtue of its mere physical existence and media as only an organ of Indian bourgeoisie in the colonial period and secondly the gradual mutation/dissolution of these two sign-categories with the time. Redears however may find Urvashi Butalia’s argument interesting here in this context that will also help them understanding the basic theoretical jolt: During the 18 years that India had a woman as Prime Minister the country also saw increasing incidents of violence and discrimination against women. This is no different from any other time: a casual visitor to any Indian city – for example Mumbai – will see hundreds of women, young and old, working in all kinds of professions: doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists... and yet newspapers in India are full of stories of violent incidents against women, of rape, sexual harassment, sometimes even murder. But to have a woman in the highest office of the State and to simultaneously have extreme violence against women are merely the two ends of the scale. As always, a more complex reality lies in between (1).

Howsoever from colonial era there were myriad of efforts from the native end overruling the colonial and imperialist repressions, many of that could have been transformed into a revolutionary struggle. But the so called dominant liberal view of organizing a symbolic movement got always a major recognition in the history of urban symbolic reform movements compared to the ‘swadeshi’ violent incidents and organized class struggle. For mainstream media also, it was a concomitant pathway throughout the colonial period to go along with the growth of elite Indian bourgeoisie and all symbolic movements led by them.

So to say something about the tradition of colonial history of this subcontinent, major recognition was quite naturally attributed to the symbolic and unequal development of Indian bourgeoisie mostly ‘banias’, second generation landlords migrated from earlier rural settlements, and their peti-bourgeois accompanists, educated elite social-class along with the foreigners’ settlements. Therefore confronting a severe oppositional binarity notions of class and other socio-cultural identities like peasantry, women, media, and other working class nowhere achieved even a subsistent recognition as an independent category both in the history, so far written by non-Marxist historians, and in reality too. Both media and women remained predominantly the same isomorphic category until the age of the unforgettable novel ‘Gora’ (where Rabindranath rediscovered the dialectics of subcultural identities of Indian social modernity like, history of peasantry, subaltern religious groups, elite religious identities, natural fragmentations in human identities, and finally caveat of the supreme category; mother or woman or country far beyond even dominant ‘Bharatmata’ or Mother India’) that not only to be developed but also to be equally subordinated as well. From ‘widow’ rituals to matrimonial advertisements of today’s newspapers the tradition is however still persistent in the Indian nationalist frame beyond any age boundary.

As I am concerned with only the social development of these two categories it is needless to say that Indian leadership from its colonial identities to the contemporary age is still finding out the developmental quotients partly through the colonial spill or foreign conceptual assistance and partly through some occasional way-outs whichever is available at any point of time. Theory of both categories is still being instilled after that given path. From socio-religious orthodoxy to the contemporary liberal postmodern feminism both development and fragmentation were largely carried out either by the dominant pockets or groups of an operating society or by the governance itself. This is a typical Indian ‘leadership’ outfit that once being associated with any dominant structure always merges into its dominant identity. Left politics however right from its foundation in Indian socio-political scenario recognized women and media as independent organizational categories having its own archaeology to organize their selves.

A. From perspective to post-perspective: Beyond ‘history as framed’ modernity

As our journey begins with the genealogy of these two categories, the perspectives as media and as women or ‘feminist’ are still ruthlessly categorized by the dominant systems of every society but as a post-perspective condition it is also equally dominated by the western cosmetic liberal feminist and mediation formulations. As a result especially both Indian women and feminist movements have largely been driven either by nationalist forces or conservative forces or by liberal-pluralist (chiefly Americanized) forces down toward particularly the contemporary postglobalization age. Indian history was predominantly written from early twentieth century in a reproachably compartmentalized into some iconic era, popularly known Gandhian era, post-Gandhian era, freedom (despite transfer of power at midnight), Nehruvian era, Indira Gandhi, Naxal movement and internal emergency era, satellite communication era, Indira Gandhi’s brutal assassination, Rajiv Gandhi era, commercial development of Indian nationalist media, Manmohan Singh’s liberalization policy era etc. Post perspective mount of both categories started from and after the liberalization or globalization efforts were initiated. This is typically a global postmodern formulation (deviation in particular) of churning out the notion of fragmentation from traditional dominant structures into a new world order where along with the liberal-pluralist (functionalist) view of life everything was defined according to the growing means of communication media technologies and subsequent new orders of conceptions largely derived from American lifestyle categories. A list of new structures of governance (that includes governments also) and counter-governance has been set-up by liberal feminists to justify the binarily alternative fragmented ‘conditions’ beyond the political consent of the mass [This can also be derogatorily symbolized as ‘NGO Syndrome’: a typical functionalist approach that fragments/extends ‘objectives’ into further conditions in the name of research, as follows J. F. Lyotard’s postmodern philosophy “I shop therefore I am” (2)]. So amidst all such new postmodern conditions the instrumental elements are largely that of old socials like, matrimonial columns of different newspapers, websites; family dramas as being shown in almost all mega soap operas, religious festivals as being mediated or projected in news programmes; advertisements of perfumes, watches, shaving blades or razors, bags etc. that not only detach or alienate common mass-identities from the system but also enslave them under newer elite conditions. Moreover these socials are working as conditions for mediation beyond any possibility of social revolution or any revolutionary ideology confirming as if revolution is to only technology and condition is to others/lives. Is it a fragmentation of structure or a postcommercial way-out of traditional domination of perspectives?

Many Indian liberal progressive thoughts more or less in an average line up have drawn out both categories from emergence as a metanarrative in the colonial period and successively as product (which is doubtlessly negative) in the post colonial period up to the contemporary era of globalization. This is an extremely powerful thought not only of making such a category but also of signifying the role of icons or iconoclasts, who sometimes led social reform movement, initiated other progressive developmental measures, organized mass for freedom movement etc. In this manner they also make a history of colonial India, or women or media whatever when requires. This line-up popularly termed ‘history’ always remains a key factor in India and its historiography. This is how Vernacular Press Act has eternally regarded as an era, far beyond the Act itself, as when compared to the first ever newspaper (weekly) “anathini” (orphan in feminist sense) edited by a widow Thakomoni Dasi from Dhulian Murshidabad. This is not a history but a mere issue amidst huge compilations of events that also includes contributions of Sister Nivedita, Swarnakumari Debi, Sarala Roy, Sabitri Roy, Sulekha Sanyal, Basanti Debi, Begum Rokeya and many others.

Basically Indian perspective from its colonial and early post colonial phases saw media and women counterparts of society as predominantly structurated by some metanarratives: British colonial settlements, British Indian government, lives of many unforgettable iconoclasts, era of tyrant policies, classification of movements, failure of movements, independence, colossal emergence of a new ‘independent’ but anew era of empowered bourgeois governance etc. Amidst such empowered emergence of the above metanarratives, the growth of press though to some extent proceeded with the development of the metanarratives ‘nationality’ and ‘independence’; historiographic growth of women were scarcely concentrated in some stray developments of women in otherwise the deserted history of the category, like from first woman graduate, first woman to cross English channel to the first woman pilot, first woman to climb Mt. Everest, first woman IPS, to the first woman Lok Sabha Speaker or first woman President of India etc. This scarcity not only reduces/weakens the historiography of women but has achieved with the time very scattered and aberrant growth of narratives; sometimes developed in terms of class identities, somewhere fiercely westernized liberal feminist outlooks, and somewhere takes a meta-independent look but all heavily dependent upon postcommercial fragmentation, all, in contrast to the growth and programming of patriarchy. One must not equalize or homogenize with it the uproar of even the patriarchy for making above such incidents as a metanarrative of development.

Meanwhile in the whole of the first half of the twentieth century some events had shaken Indian history that moved beyond both colonial and patriarchal Indian modernity. Anti-Fascist movement during Second World War, Bengal Famine of 1943 and finally partition in 1947 not only fragmented Indian modernity as a whole but forced Indian habitation reveal their ‘political’ pluralities surrounding these events beyond capabilities of elite historians.

So, quite naturally from colonial to the early post-independence period both women and media were bitterly being separated into elitist custody where no such mainstream history is still available or successfully written in India that included people’s participation in above movements and also mass destruction of human lives and identities in Bengal famine.

(B) Importation of technology, rise of liberal and cosmetic feminism in India

But suddenly with the commercial growth of media technology and upgradation of mediation process in post 1960s ‘women’ the category became gradually very popular primarily as two consequently new categories of ‘produced’ and ‘resonated’ viewers of media had been evolved. A new cultivated identity politics had begun operating in India right from this very development of mediation. The traditional structuration of both women and of course media had virtually ended with the development of mediation and mediated contents. People started believing and getting new placements of ‘women’ binarily opposite to ‘men’ and ‘male’. Heroines were being made in popular cinemas as inevitable partner of the male counterpart to complete the romantic ‘cycle’ and were also being inevitably projected as more ‘open’ vamps or prostitutes. But very soon this trend was also severely criticized with an allegation that whatever the trend of projection is, women are constantly being made a ‘commodity’ to be used only to mitigate the heterosexual romantic ‘gap’ or ‘need’, instead of making the category socially ‘independent’. This connotation gave a substantial iconic rise of liberal feminist ideology out of the ‘cinema world’ largely being imported from western nations. But the above dialectics did nowhere affect the stream of commercial modern cinema on the one hand and had ultimately supplemented the development of television and televisual contents to safeguard the elite stance of at least the conceptualization on the other. Indian television otherwise followed the same commerciality of the above mainstream cinematic trend. So liberal functionalist feminist movement could not materialize that extent out to combat the leading commercial trend except some superficial transformation of characters in terms of costumes, dialogic development, placement in location etc.

Therefore a cosmetic development of feminist outlook had been developed in India since last four decades which neither looked after (though often defined as metanarrative) the basic livelihood or struggle of women nor any sort of individual political development that could challenge the patriarchy largely. One must remember here that the emergence of ‘Indira Gandhi’ was not at all an exception that could challenge the patriarchal programming anyway. She was popularly signified more of an icon of the nation and descendant of a colossus like ‘Nehru’, than an individual representative of the category ‘women’. Same was signified for Sarojini Naidu (though she was crusader woman to participate in Salt movement against Gandhi’s earlier decision of not to engage women folks in that movement), Lok Sabha Speaker Mira Kumar or President of India Pratibha Devi Singh Patil also. So the political leadership of women had never imbibed any representational value that could have given Indian women the ‘never achieved’ independence or changed the patriarchal programming. One may easily identify in this context the fate of this particular category even with the rising debate on Women Reservation Bill. This too has become a prey of patriarchal programming where the issue has been reduced to be signified by a political majority jinx in the Parliament. Reader, think about the situation outside the Parliament in geo-social peripheries of the country where millions of the categories live their individual lives!!

(C) Growth of media fragments feminist ideology: confusion results in between conditions and liberalization of women

With the time the above analyses were subsequently termed as ‘totalitarian’ and the cosmetic development of women was being rejustified and rediscovered through further development of mediation rather popular mediation techniques that includes media technology also. This is to be defined as global postmodern turn as was resurfaced in USA in post situationist period (post Barkley movement era). So along with such compromise with upgraded mediational techniques and consequent fragmentations Indian educated middle class including liberal (postsocial) feminists also had compromised with the growth of such mediational developments often beyond professional limits. They might also have been hopeful about the imminent change of outlook along with such growth of mediated contents compared to the traditional structurated mediation processes. But they were largely proven wrong as such postcommercial developments never ushered in at least last two decades or more any substantial development in any revolutionary outlook that could have transformed the situation. The urban Indian population including women have largely compromised with the popular mediated often ‘inferior’ contents as ‘resonated’ viewers that have already pronounced Indian media houses a huge amount of profit with their produced mega soap operas. So a tsunamic wave of mega soap operas has been a major occurrence in Indian media since last two decades of official liberalization and globalization of media initiatives taken by the government.

Most interestingly the contents of soap operas in this period along have supplemented the Bombay-centric mainstream cinematic trend by siphoning out the family melodrama, modernist hero-heroine binarity, romantic sequences along with songs, villain-ish conspiracy in a much larger hyperreal (postperspectival) space that not only throws that mainstream cinematic trend out of fashion but fictionalize also its audience lot more than any other medium. As said earlier that liberal feminist trend could only achieve some elementary changes in it instead of the trend itself. Thus a mother while crying for her deceased baby does not forget traditional or modern wearing and make-up or a young lady is often seen very conscious about the commerciality of tradition equally along with revealing low neckline cleavage as justified by liberal functionalist feminism or cosmetic feminism beyond the same traditional limits.

Therefore in between these two categories of consciousness common middle and lower middle class/identities lives find themselves severely alienated from the category but fictionalized too at the same time. This is a real mutation of multiple categories/identities being operational in contemporary popular mediation where the opposite is not ‘quite obsolescent’ traditional conservatism or any ‘looking back’ initiative. One can’t (even if he or she is a liberal functionalist feminist) draw structural binarity between them because these are all multifactorial ‘conditions’ that remain juxtaposed as fragmented on any operational plane without producing any totalitarian meaning. Noted French researcher Jean Baudrillard termed such functionalist fragmentation as mutation of sign dimensions which devouring all contemporary spaces and identities produces a fake sensibility of consumption that becomes human identity and of course the social order. Thus a mobile phone even appears as an ‘identity of life’, may be, of a model…of a consumer…or of an individual audience quite dominantly programmed by the contemporary media as an independence quotient.

(D) Theory of Consumption: The Cultural Logic of Hyperreal Mediation

Looking, however, at the situationist (radical) movement in France in late sixties, which declared that modern societies ceased to produce any meaning and became passive reducing structural social [conventional, ritual, ethnographic, other socio-cultural matrices] language into consumption of sign or sign of consumerism, Jean Baudrillard proposed something unique in his theory of consumption. He distinguished the era of media commerciality as the inevitable phase of outright consumption beyond Marxist notion of capitalist commodification and even postmodernist consumerist fetishism, would now be the basis of social order in the coming time syntax. Though later felt the situationalist movement wrong, with a counter belief that capitalism, despite massive exploitation, does not still intercept participation but encourages it for further exploitation devaluating the dignity of labour at the same time. He analyzed it carefully with the notion that, ‘the capitalist law is to be abolished in the name of a de-alienated hyperproductivity, a productive hyperspace. Capital develops the productive forces but also retrains them: they must be liberated. The exchange of signifieds has always hidden the labour of the signifier: let us liberate the signifier and the textual production of meaning!...’. The problem, he located that people nowadays participate with [marketed] signs and sign networks and not with each other. Our interactions with one another are suppressed and displaced by external dominance of media commercialism. Here he transcended the traditional Marxist proposition of collective consumption approach [which was earlier derived solely in terms of production] and situationalists as well, saying that "Consumption [in a social periphery] even in the contemporary globe is sufficiently an active form of relationship, a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system".

‘Buying into a category of the market increase consumption, yet also begin to define the nature of the individual choice’. But the problem mounts in the contemporary globalist market expansion when choice, behind every consumption process, becomes the ideology of consumption which is often imposed on us, as given, like all other belief systems or ideologies and often appears very much dominant beyond all earlier fetishes of consumption. ‘Fetish’ in his opinion is to belong to the postmodern consumer society. People however nowadays follow the choice given to them. In all facets of neo-capitalist development, i.e. growth in service sector, insurance boom, growing volatility in the stock market, substantial reduction in planned investment and saving, boom in jingoistic cinemas, dangling of all-round spectacle, mass people face unprecedented quantum of choice beyond all individuated spaces and senses of emancipation.

In this course media would doubtlessly be the social formulator. While mirroring the McLuhan’s proposition of Global Village, where explosion of technology is related to the implosion of understanding, into his theory of consumption Baudrillard has proposed that consumption [implosion] mirrors the explosion of information. In his words, it is true that we consume more products because of information, but it is more important to realize that we consume information. Consuming mere information creates an even greater illusion of technological explosion. However, when we consume information alone, we are consuming less and less meaning.

The above connotation grossly signifies the transformation of socio-political, socio-cultural orders into a hyperreal space [domain] where information rules over the basic information category of the product, ‘market’ and ‘self’, along with solitary but supreme identity, as ‘consumer’, that leads to generate a cognizant space for implosion [more about the information than buying product outright]. ‘Shopping malls’, ‘departmental stores’, amusement parks, water resorts, FM radios, ‘Best-Seller’ books and other new media mirror the explosion of technology and information and create a huge but hyperreal space for the self to implode something larger than the reality. In his words discussing Europe’s largest shopping mall PARLY-2, Jean Baudrillard expressed, "…here we are at the heart of consumption as the total organization of everyday life, as a complete homogenization". In this process people become gradually engrossed into the information-mediation process where explosion of information neutralizes information and implosion of meaning starts immediately, therefore reveals 3rd - 4th…the infinite order of signification beyond classical social orders and all earlier state-oriented statistical denotivity of consumption and utility patterns.

The prime instrumental or driving langue pattern, here, what Baudrillard prefers, is ‘packaging’ because more information of the dominated information-order destroys ‘communication’ and ‘social’ as a ‘system’ and ceases producing meaning i.e. in Baudrillard’s version ‘staging of communication’. Thus packaging has become importantly the only morphology of the ‘produced’. Packaging naturally corrupts all earlier meaning making processes [communication] of information and meaningful mediation of sign dimension, thus leads to a complete destruction of meaning i.e. sign dimension, as he defines it, ‘catastrophe of meaning’. Such destruction leaves over only individual ‘fascination of choice’ [resulted from the neutralization of meaning] that reduces everything into some statements towards titillation, obscenity and pornography.

Thus as packaging of information explodes along with the explosion of media, it devours the traditional space of systemic derivation of meaning, and resultantly destroys public sphere and finally social structures. Media explode thus only packaging of the ‘produced’ that has a powerful branded [image making] effect on the individual consumer. Baudrillard while entitling it as ‘media invasion’ affirms that such media invasion would completely decompose both public and private spheres of life and produce something more real than the existing real e.g. fictions like, soap operas, reality shows, gambling programmes, even some of interviews etc. that let every individual simulate infinitely. Artlessness, worthlessness of such media contents hardly matter to any individual as he/she shows least interest to derive a systemic meaning while they watch them. Hyperreality dissolves the older oppositional [dialectical] systems of meaning. Fictions become more real to the individual privatized consumer and ‘real’ becomes fictitious. In this way the ‘mass’ in terms of mediation, as Baudrillard considers, makes no sense of culture; they get it from media to only become stimulated by it.

The most dangerous outcome of such hyperreal mediation, what Baudrillard considers, is that these consumers are not to be considered anyway the ‘victim’ of [classical Marxist notion of] commodification. Masses get a hyperreal meaningless image from media and it works immediately on the behavioural development but ultimately it again [further] frees the mass from being systemic in behaviour i.e. right-wrong-obscene, good-bad-evil-notorious etc. Therefore hyperreal mediation devours the classical distinction between every two class identities and a sense of class struggle.

So we live in a world, in which, prime relational aspect stands between mediated contents [advertisements, propagations] and individual self. We consume ad-meanings to ‘philosophize’ life; make social order, try to achieve optimum freedom of self beyond traditional social-democratic pattern or order and finally reject that mediated information for further information. Only job remains, is to get more and more information and less and less meaning. No freedom lies therefore beyond this act. We have become proletariatized regardless of our class existence and identity.

Conclusion: In search of power within postcommercial conditions of power in India

Structure creates power; structure concentrates power; structure exerts power; so in India from colonial to the contemporary postcommercial mediation age different phasic structures have ruled Indian habitation time and again. Structures, be it a colonial, family independence or anything, have created media as a revolutionary tool of control and domination. Having recognized all such efforts and movements to liberalize women and media and all such counter progressive structures that protested against women oppression in different time phases in India, both women and media, in particular, have bitterly been fragmented and mutated where a general identity, as compared to male or masculinity, that may suit all class and cultural identities, is a practical impossibility. Both media and women have become a mediational symbol of progress and consumption leaving millions of real-life identities starving, being oppressed, and away from the spectacles of spotlight. It is in no time and nowhere a given course of development that shows what it is like. It is not be an empirical practice of collecting mere information that may indicate natural development of women. For media also, TRP does not establish media’s development and independence. The situation is more complicated when these two categories dissolve into each other. Lots of empirical research (surveys) works have already been accomplished on the use of women in media. But it is almost an impossibility to rediscover the iconic use of women in mediated fictions; in advertisements, soap operas, and various reality shows because the sign-category dimensions of women projection have been dissolved into the fiction thus moving beyond traditional oppositional binarity like good or bad, scene or obscene, social or unsocial both in terms of its viewership and functionalist approaches. It even transcends the conceptual barrier of ‘what women should do in contrast to its male counterpart’; ‘how would they manage their households, kitchen, children, sexual practice, up to how to motivate her partner or partners for better sex-performance. Almost all women and entertainment magazines frequently cover such issues. Empirical research can hardly move into such extremely anomalous subcultural bonds or groupings because such categories are often being dissolved into popular mediation by a supra-social ‘political-economy’ of media governance. Such governance is nowadays coming from media conglomerates largely being empowered by US combined powers. So media not only project issues but also define what is ‘important’ in a package[d] manner that basically devours the truth or meaning as Baudrillard calls it as catastrophe of meaning.

But life is still there beyond such dissolution or catastrophe of mediational ‘meaning’ in different ‘socials’ and subcultural identities so far uncovered and rejected by media. This is highly evident when Airhostesses organized an open rally on the busy road of Mumbai on being retrenched by two private Airline companies this year or when a regional company organizes ‘dharna’ before a government office for not being selected for a particular tender. A mother still protects her adult child from being harassed or threatened by a fellow passenger on a local train far from media spectacle. Myriads of subcultural identities are there brutally suppressed by all pervasive media in terms of its agenda of postcommerciality of being newsworthy or makeworthy. But the same identities appear to be very vital when being treated as audience specially mass audience of the media spectacle.

Beyond Globalization: A Cultural Study

[A New CMIE Matrix]


By Abir Chattopadhyay
abmo2020@yahoo.co.in

Introduction:
The world is both spectacularly rich and distressingly impoverished. There is unprecedented opulence in contemporary living and the massive command over resources, knowledge and technology that we now take for granted would have been hard for our ancestors to imagine. But ours is also a world of dreadful poverty and appalling deprivation. An astounding number of children are ill-fed, ill-treated, and also illiterate and needlessly ill…Depending on where they born, children can have the means and facilities for great prosperity or face the likelihood of desperately deprived lives: Amartya Sen: Identity & Violence [Penguin Books]



In the contemporary transcorporate market and media literacy era, people, across national boundaries, are trying very hard to simulate the market-environment, grasping transnational mediation of newer cultural codes [parameters] to re-define…refresh…own individual cultural identity. With the massive growth of hyperreal [largely mediated] market determinants [advertising, sales formulae, newer marketing and managerial principles, retail outlets, other stimulant infrastructure etc.] in some specified centers of global neo-capitalist matrix, beyond national coasts, people gradually find themselves very close to the global market signification, get an impending touch of a band of newer structural codes amidst myriad of brands and commercial establishments. Such upswing substantially affects socio-cultural response of the audience of the developing world. What do people do with such a market uprising? This prime signifier needs to be appropriately understood in developing contexts beyond western capitalist signification. In the western hi-capitalist societies, the growth of industry and market was more or less an immediate post-war (World War II) phenomenon with newer symbolic alignments in the power structure toward formation of G-7 (nowadays G-8) groupings. The whole of western (especially European) societies had no other option but to be swayed away, to combat the devastation of Second World War, along with the development of its market orientation both in immediate and long-term dimensions. Besides that, a new alignment of power-nexus in the aegis of United States over most of the former imperialists and warmongers, like Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy etc., overshadowed the [determinate] space of traditional western social culture that led common people gradually alienated from the society to an individualistic generalized pattern of marketed-livelihood. So from those days the growth of market wherever it came into force in the globe, had always been liable to such contextual changes [toward the signpost of culture industry] both in the developed and the developing world.
India in the last frigid 60 years had been contending with itself on whether to rally with the power blocs seeking their support en route to boosting up the internal economic growth and upgrade infrastructure to justify the developing nation reality. So it tried out keeping euphoric relations with the socialist bloc as well as with the capitalist power bloc and notably was least caring about the neighbours specially China and other states [in spite of being a leader of non-aligned platform]. So a relational crisis in the whole South-East Asia perturbed the total political and cultural scenario throughout the cold war period until the collapse of the socialist superpower bloc.
However India and the south-east Asian countries, from late eighties and 1990 onwards, extended massive internal market space along with some of the common low-level equilibratory features like, huge amount of under-prepared consumers, abundant source of raw materials, cheap labour force, unsaturated social formats in terms of consumption of mediated cultural elements, a hardcore value-based culture, territorial sensibilities, and individuality suffering from colonial hang-over. Our intelligentsia may seem to be unhappy with such a formulation but today’s corporate globalization agenda have found probably the safest place in these countries for their finance-capital to sit [on]. Noted corporate strategist and former senior partner, McKinsey & Co. Kenichi Ohmae made a useful comment, “…The western firms now moving, say, into the parts of China and India are there because that is where their future lies, not because the host government has suddenly dangled a carrot in front of their nose…” (1). But for noted analyst David C. Korten (1998) the terminal two three decades of the last century was driven by global dreams of vast corporate empires, compliant governments, a globalized consumer mono-culture and a universal ideological commitment to corporate libertarianism(2). However despite all round underdevelopment in socio-economic sector, these developing countries [excepting Communist China] did not even keep their fingers crossed to open themselves before the corporate conglomerates.
But could really this part of the world have been a corporate destination from the beginning? Plausibly ‘No’, despite having the above features and other modes of consumerist simulation quite accessible in such countries, western corporations and state powers never urged to transfer the finance-capital in any of the developing region. The early days of these countries immediate after the colonial jolt was over, were stuffed with severe food crisis, massive unemployment, unleashing poverty and a very old traditional [chiefly religious] cultural heritage. Developing countries, therefore, desperately needed an estimated balanced internal economic growth between agriculture and industry. So they started industrializing, sometimes collaborating with richer capitalist countries or otherwise the socialist bloc. Nevertheless the whole developmental paradigm remained quite ‘national’ in its outfit though international cooperation was often politically signified as the notion of ‘intervention’ [if sensitive readers intend to use it in symbolic power terms, because government of India in its third, fourth and fifth five-year plans abortively tried to produce alternative sustainable policy and eliminate external assistance in terms of foreign-aid]. Moreover since late fifties Asian and Latin American countries, especially, were time and again pitched by the US-led militarization, which culminated to the massive killing in Indonesia, Mexico, Venezuela and many other nations.

Toward a Global [corporate] Culture?

However there was always a clear-cut option, since late eighties, for the developing nations to transform itself in an open economic and cultural format. But they could not manipulate the situation, as usual, in favour to become a third [alternative] force compared to the power blocs. The whole South East Asia and Latin American nations were severely subjected to move independently by US militarization and rejuvenated supra-national organizations like GATT. India [the contemporary political and cultural opinion leaders] on the other hand, chose the cheapest option to open up economic and cultural borders inviting foreign corporations to takeover the whole charge of the country. Here a quote from Chitra Subramaniam, the noted Journalist, can make the scene more sensible, “…When you read you begin with A, B, C, when you GATT about India you begin with T, T, and A— Trips, Textiles and Almonds. Or H&N for Haldi (Turmeric) and Neem. Don’t let New Delhi fool you into believing that the haldi and neem patents granted to America have come as a surprise. The whistle was blown as early as 1989 but then there was no one to listen. In 1989 our politicians had elections to win and the last thing they had time for was a detail like GATT…”(3).
Thus from the initial phase of economic and cultural globalization an assurance toward commodification of socio-cultural elements was given to Indian habitation in contrast to the post-colonial nationalist principles of sustainable economic development. Kenichi Ohmae has stated quite convincingly, “as corporations move, of course, they bring with them working capital. Perhaps more important, they transfer technology and managerial know-how. These are not concessions to host governments; they are the essential raw materials these companies need to do their work…”(4). Naturally traditional social structures started facing a new challenge of ideational fragmentation of socio-cultural [institutional, technological, intellectual, managerial, territorial and of course mediational] factors of development.
Readers should convince themselves about the rush to such a deterministic outcome note of the contemporary de-structured praxis-codes, which transcends the traditional [nationalist] socio-cultural boundaries setting a newer commercial cultural trend with an empowered corporate backup. One may recall noted British Sociologist Raymond Williams once (1962) defined ‘culture’ as, “a particular way of life, shaped by values, traditions, beliefs, material objects and own territory. Culture is a complex and dynamic ecology of people, things, world views, activities, and settings that fundamentally endures but is also changed in routine communication and social interaction.”(5). Later on, many definitions of culture and global culture were made justifying the contemporary situational context. Another British Sociologist Anthony D. Smith came out with a new definition in the 1990s, “If by culture is meant a collective mode of life, or a repertoire of beliefs, styles, values, and symbols, then we can only speak of cultures, never just culture; for a collective mode of life or a repertoires of beliefs etc., presupposes different modes and repertoires in a universe of modes and repertoires. Hence the idea of a global culture is a practical impossibility…”(6).
But the corporate agenda of media conglomerates flow beyond the natural plurality of our lives and judged by the means of commoditization, where elements of every cultural format are being so empowered to knock-out the traditional boundaries of ‘modernity’, as west symbolizes them, to promote such ‘commercially globalist or homogenized’ cultural praxis. Noted Sociologist Arjun Appadurai in his ‘Scape’ [dimensions of culture](7) theories though has argued about various impossibilities of such generalization as ‘globalization’ of cultural forms, but the commercial homogenization lends outright a different outcome within the developing nation territories. They can’t dictate such a degree of corporate homogeneity that encroach their traditional social boundaries. However the corporate hegemony coupled with the US-led neo-imperialist terrorizing measures, especially in the post cold war period, had been enforced to industrialize the developing nations and also dominate them.

Manifold Crises: A cultural jolt?

The crisis before the third world post-colonial nations is double folded. The first one is a need for industrialization to achieve a balanced economic and social growth for which they strive after new industrial boom chiefly in manufacturing sector that can absorb both skilled and unskilled labour force primarily from surplus in the agricultural sector and to mitigate educated jobless problem by creating considerable employment opportunities. The second problem is to generate service-providing industrial opportunities for the urban educated youths. To resolve the first problem a country should commit a better industrial infrastructure to the investors [both internal and foreign] which most of the developing nations reach far short from the desired extent. So only option remains to commit the bare land and optimum possible facilities they can provide along with. On the other side of the globe large industrial corporations and the [host] mother nations [mostly members of G-7] in the last two-three decades have been facing another form of crisis of having huge amount of vulnerable excess and unutilized money in their money markets specially in pension funds and insurance programmes. One can here recall Marxian propositions about the terminal or culminating crisis of state capitalist structures. But the scape of such crisis was so perturbing that even when their internal economies and institutional structures steadily approaching close to bankruptcy there was huge money accumulated in insurance sectors [Kenichi Ohmae, 1996]. Naturally they had have come out with a sheer neo-imperialist [neo-liberal] notion to formulate harmonization of global economy and business anyway beyond national limit to ensure transnational investment. So both hunters and preys came forward to convince each other letting the question of domination quite obvious and a one-sided affair in favour of the dominant nations. The whole world is nowadays heading toward such an aberrant harmonization where the ‘need for development’ has to comply with the ‘bankruptcy’. And this harmonization often becomes so vulnerable that such capital, once realized in money market for further investment in various global regions, in anytime sweeps out of the stock market, as nowadays noted as global financial crisis [9/13 crisis], ‘and went into government-backed bank accounts where they remain, pooled up and inert. These bank accounts are the equivalent of hiding money in one’s mattress’(7A).

Transcorporatization & Emergence of Newer Cultural Establishments:

With the opening up of internal economies, a series of neo-liberal economic & cultural strategies were imposed on the developing countries, in the name of 1st and 2nd generation economic structural reforms, toward liberalizing the economy in terms of privatizing large public sector industries and disinvesting other public holdings. The long awaited notion of the growth of manufacturing sector was replaced, in the late eighties, by the huge quantum of emerging service-providing [chiefly insurance firms and retail companies] corporations set out for competing with the indigenous industries. Native corporations had no other option but either to close down or to go for a forceful collaboration with foreign companies to share room and achievement in the market. Moreover majority of the incumbent corporations were reported sick institutions of west, coming to refresh their future in India. The major flush was observed in insurance sector, retail consumer products sector; specially computer products, spare parts for industrial goods, outlets of foreign clothing brands, fast food sector, and of course in the entertainment & media sector above all. Especially foreign insurance and financial institutions are nowadays rushing in India to re-circulate the long-dumped pension funds. Kenichi continues arguing, “…capital markets in most developed countries are flush with excess cash for investment. Japan for example, has the equivalent of US$10 trillion stored away. Even where a country hovers close to bankruptcy, there is often a huge accumulation of money in pension funds and life insurance programmes. The problem is that suitable and suitably large — investment opportunities are not often available in the same geographies where this money sits. As a result the capital markets have developed a wide variety of mechanisms to transfer it across national borders. Today nearly 10 percent of US pension funds is invested in Asia. Ten years ago, that degree of participation in Asian markets would have been unthinkable.(8) So India also is experiencing a huge influx of foreign institutions setting up their establishments.
This influx has been causing some serious outcomes that can be theoretically categorized into three sectoral responses, i.e. ‘Institutional response’, ‘Individual response’ and ‘Social response’. Institutional response reflects the transformation of economic behaviour of the country toward so far absolute financial transcendency. Other two categories sternly represent changes in cultural signification of the demographic mappings & cognitive factors of earlier social peripheries. Traditional growth of market in the last three or four decades after world war II had always influenced the dynamics of nationalist sovereign culture and its structural factors, so an integrated cultural psyche of the third world nations. The culture of the developing nations is always found dynamic and naturally heterogeneous and above all quite tolerant to even absorb any newer format of the time. Therefore the crux of underdeveloped identity, which remained largely a creation of colonization and western dominance, has subsequently been merged into the cultural and political struggle of the common people in sixties and seventies. The basic note of ‘underdevelopment’ is therefore plausibly a well-defined nationalist code, largely related to the struggle for life. It would be wrong to conclude the issue in terms of any metanarrative, like ‘the underdeveloped nations need western assistance and industrial support to sustain’ as it pertains nothing other than the assertion of unhindered western structural domination and corporate hegemony over the sovereignty of such developing states. However the third world nations still desperately need a means sustainable balanced development.
Meanwhile struggling through a massive deadlock in investment in their own economic regions, western economists started indoctrinating [Re-Friedman-ianizing] transnational free trade liberalism [through some of the supra-national institutions, like, primarily through the GATT and then from mid nineties it was WTO formulations] that might be a way-out from the crisis. The primary steps premised were to let developing states deregulate all state enterprises; privatize them, curbing tariff barriers down to the minimum possible limit to zero, open internal trade structures, and above all, set an ideoscape to be more industry friendly, investment friendly and corporate friendly [until faced with a new crisis when their (advanced economies) governments lend them ‘new’ money and chief banks of developing nations release money into the internal markets creating more and more economic imbalance]. Within a few years in the late eighties and early nineties this conception incited transnational corporations to step into cross-border expansion [McChesney] toward so called globalization. In his words, one of the foremost free-trade formulators, Kenichi Ohmae asserted this neo-liberal proceedings as, ‘growth depends on inviting the global economy in, not keeping it out. It depends on creating and leveraging value-adding economic linkages that ignore political borders, not on ruthlessly stamping them out in the name of national interest as an insult to the prerogatives of sovereignty. A closed-country model makes cities and regions rivals to each other…the nation state solution assumes a zero-sum game for limited resources. The region state model, open to the global economy, is plus-sum as prosperity is brought in from without’ (9).
Thus a notional alternative was routed through to the developing nations at the cost of their own sovereignty, internationalism, political ideologies, often described by the corporate formulators as - the last refuge of the scoundrel – economically dispossessed – declining cottage industry etc. etc. Added more to this the installation of transnational corporate note in developing economies, since late eighties, became synchronized with that of nationalist bourgeoisie [as observed in India] to pursue the nationhood beyond the class struggle away from social configuration. They have been perpetrating it quite efficiently till date even up to the accomplishment of Indo-US Nuke Deal.
As the economic reforms gradually ascend in India civil society [[combined bourgeoisie, billboard[ed] both sides with traditional aristocrats and peti-bourgeois]] have soon emerged information elites acting as facilitators to social change, thus setting a newer form of hierarchy which appears in as alternative to the state governance. The notion of balanced development has been shifted from its ideological [political] base - in terms of public responsibility - to a transcorporate domination that, according to new individualists, might bring up the development. Small countries of South-East Asia and West Asia nowadays have almost lost their economic and political sovereignty within this newer CMIE [Corporate-Military-Information-Elitism] matrix. In India though the situation seems different having no such direct military oppression so far, but, with the signing of Indo-US nuke deal the economic and political sell-out process would definitely be accomplished.

Globalization - Americanization: TNC-ization and Media-ization

However from the last two decades down the line, global corporations have established adequate control over more than half of the world’s top economies. In almost every sector of our ‘life’ and ‘socialization’ TNCs have established their reach and control setting a new brand-control. Out of world’s most commercially valuable brands top ten are mostly from United States [Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, G.E., Nokia, Intel, Disney, Ford, AT&T, McDonald’s Source: Kavaljit Singh, PIRC]. Out of top 100 TNCs 37 come directly from US and 55 from its G-8 allies, only 3 come from China [PIRC] (10). Most Surprisingly out of world’s top 100 economies 54 are transnational corporations and 46 are nations. Out of total Fortune-500, nearing 200 are US corporations; more than 100 are Japanese corporations. 90% of patent covering latest technologies owned by TNCs [PIRC-2000]. Ten to thirteen media conglomerates own the total global media operation, technologies, and sky-space.
From the above statistical figuration one can realize the extent of contemporary globalization process but experience least about the aftermath. But we can nucleate the Indian experience graduated since last two decades into some distinctive [institutionalizing] features:
(i) weakening public sphere;
(ii) Advertisers’ signification rules the market;
(iii) Outright depoliticization: emerging new bourgeois-elitism : Outbreak of fundamentalist politics;
(iv) Unleashing mediation of violence, sexual obscenity; Children become sterile to violence and obscenity;
(v) Commerciality in education, social praxis etc: Total Commodification;
(vi) Paradigmatic shift in social responsibility: state governance to corporate governance;
(vii) Toward global monolithic corporate culture [!!]: beyond regional plurality;
(viii) Neo-capitalist industrial centres: beyond nationalist geography;
(ix) Social places transformed into commercial hyperreal places;
(x) Branded life: beyond social control;
(xi) Mediated consumerized hyperreal outlook;
(xii) Predigested commercial journalism to achieve early response from the audience and advertisers;
(xiii) News against advertisements, no longer socially responsible;
(xiv) Emergence of branded racism and anew ethnic concentration;

Proponents of globalization often denounce the popular saying ‘Americanization’ or American domination as they consider globalization is a transnational affair beyond any particular nationalist control. They even propose that America no longer invokes its control over the nations and transnational corporations. Prof. John B. Thompson, while taking on Herbert Schiller’s thesis on Cultural Imperialism, accounted that with the expanding reach of transnational corporations, United States, like other colonizing nations, also have become a recipient nation [like others] of the transnational corporate agenda. However surprisingly they still believe that critics of globalization can’t even recognize the transcorporate domination and the compliant US hegemony even after what Henry Paulson [US Treasury Secretary during his speech on need for an open economy and society, Shanghai Futures Exchange] said recently “An open, competitive, liberalized, financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than government intervention”. But probably even US do not know the nearest exit from the recent financial crisis. One may think about the future of India and its common, vastly impoverished people when such financial liberalization programme would be accomplished within a few years down the line. The crisis has however already affected Indian middle class severely and the near future of the economy causing inflation and all round volatility in every sector.
Whatsoever the question or uncertainty regarding the issue of transnationalization of economies still remains, has no match with what we have experienced in terms of ruthless militarization over nations in the last two decades during and after the fall of Soviet Union. Continual attack on Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Cuba and the collapse of Soviet Union reached a new height when US-led allied force flapped over Iraq in the first Gulf War. CNN, the prime icon brand of Time Warner Company, the world’s largest ever media conglomerate, played a complete statist & propagandist role while they covered and forcefully broadcasted the war to the people of the world. All nations, specially the Asian governments were advised to transmit the war footage. According to McChesney and Herman, ‘…the commercial media were distressed by the fact that war scenes and reports were not providing a suitable advertising environment, and they tried to manufacture one with their enthusiasm and portrayal of the war as an exciting, aesthetically and technically attractive game’ (11). Cited from noted researcher Douglas Kellner, ‘‘‘…throughout American history, vengeance for rape – especially the rape of white women by people of colour – has been used to legitimate political and military action against coloured people. Captivity drama narratives of white women captured and raped by Native Americans were a standard genre of colonial literature’…‘Bush not only used rape as a justification for war against Iraq, but also…cited the sexual assault of an American Officer’s wife by a Panamanian soldier as a reason for invading that country, and…” (11A). The most chanting story behind the first gulf war routed through a satellite image that, according to Pentagon, indicated Iraqi amass of 100,000 soldiers on the Kuwait [Saudi] border, which was communicated by all large media houses. However finally it was disclosed that the satellite photos [taken on 8th August and 13th September] showed sand covers on the roads which was signified by the Bush administration a mass of Iraqi soldiers [Kellner, Media Culture, p205, Routledge]. US textile and media institutions globally vended ‘Anti Arab racism’ through Hollywood films, millions of T-Shirts picturing the ‘Gulf War’ and US as liberator. Some of these were: <“A disk jockey in Toledo, Ohio solicited funds from listeners to buy a ticket to Iraq for an Iraqi-American Professor who was critical to war”> etc. (12)
After 9/11, the attack on Afghanistan, and the second Gulf War [Liberation of Iraq] to dismantle Iraq again had shaken the Asian region. The telecast of Saddam Hussein’s death sentence and further planning to attack Iran, People’s Republic of Korea, Syria and sanction threat to India – of course nowadays subject to the accomplishment of Indo-US Nuke Deal continue to derange and terrorize the socio-cultural identity of this continent.
Prof. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, while connoting this category as ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ altogether, have analyzed it in three semantic categories from US extent: Constructive, Benign and Nefarious. According to them such ‘classification based strictly on the utility of the terrorism to US interests as perceived by the ruling political elite’ (13).

Cleansing Ethnicity: US route toward Globalization:

As Herman and Chomsky have argued that the terrorizing pursuit when is considered by the US officials and media, advantageous to US interests, has always been considered as positive development and ‘constructive’. This typification can be observed in Indonesia massacre in mid sixties. US force directly promoted imperialist President Suharto to wipe out the Communist base and to open up Indonesian [and far east countries along with] economic border for foreign direct investment by refreshing the foreign policy in favour of the western industrialized nations. ‘In this instance not only was there no moral indignation expressed at the murder of many hundreds, thousands of civilians it was treated as a dividend from the policy of military aid to the Indonesian Army [Robert McNamara] and a gleam of light in Asia’ (14).
The second category what US strategists do not consider as ‘positive development’ but cognize that might help its allies, is carried out by killing large number of civilians with no moral indignation, as the theorists duo accord, is ‘benign’. It was observed in Indonesian invasion to Timor where one-third of the East Timorese population was killed, which was protected, promoted and aided both diplomatically and financially by the US. This is similar to how the extremist movements in India are funded and promoted extensively by various institutions of west.
The third category of the cleansing terrorism perpetrated by any designated enemy [of US], what Pol Pot did in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq [killing Kurds], can be categorized ‘Nefarious’.
For the first two kinds of terror corporate media are reliably [H & C] silent but in nefarious cases media coverage is intense with having massive liberal pluralist vigour that includes many personal stories, sufferings, and elicits great indignation [H & C] (15).
Thus US terrorism and ethnic cleansing operations routed TNCs and finance capital through to the developing nations. In this ordained course deviant [and sovereign] nations were transformed into a place for global financial investment. Moreover compliant [bourgeois rightist] political forces of these nations propagate [mediate] a story of having huge foreign exchange within their peripheries to make its people feel ‘good’ about their future. As in India the NDA government announced before 2004 general election, ‘India is shining’, when fiscal deficit, as estimated, might have crossed the limit of a billion dollar mark. This kind of treachery and mistrust are always given primacy toward the corporate globalization effort. What Manmohan Singh started through liberalizing in 1991, has been culminated to the unprecedented vulnerability and volatility that reign Indian economy.
This is how the neo-liberal globalization strategies have been constituted and fed by both transcorporatization and incessant militarization cleansing ethnicity and socio-political identity of human being. The outcome of such globalization was and is the formulation of packaging of the produced and the creation of ‘consumer and only consumer’ to encompass socialization in terms of consumption.
For western nations this has emerged as a debacle of high capitalist [modernist] configuration, debauches all earlier theories of consumption formulae and demand for money, creating safe portfolios for future consumption (which has been stored in pension, insurance funds)] and above all strong public control etc. But for developing nations, where public control is still being assessed for the subsistence of huge distressed mass, neo-liberal approaches for them become really invasive and obtrusive to the development. As mentioned earlier that development specially industrial development has always been the need of the hour in these nations for many generative reasons: boosting up employment opportunities [both in production and service sectors], balanced economic growth to mitigate impoverishment and deprivation, to meet huge fiscal and monetary deficit, development of infrastructure etc. Such deprivation and distressed lives in these nations thus remain penalties of both neo-liberal globalization and failure of earlier structures [systems].

Political Economy of Media: Conglomeration and Decline of Democracy

Be it a natural outcome of emergence of media industries or to hegemonize proactive audience toward monolithic consumerist cultural content, trans-corporatization or conglomeration of media, as formulated in the west, transcended national limits to intercept ideological polarity or plurality at first, and to catch hold of internal [developing] economies further. This notion may resemble with Fukuyama’s no-historic statement after the collapse of Soviet Union that ‘we had reached the end of history…now that the bitter confrontation sparked by the century’s collision of ‘ism’s has ended’ (15A). For third world context it yet reveals a different connotation altogether. Here corporatization [privatization] of media, unlike other parts of the globe, initially necessitated development of media in terms of socializing more audience even in remote areas to get them aware of latest developments and programmes. As seen in India, along with Akash Bani & Doordarshan, private owned print media also played utmost a nationalist role upholding traditional culture and accumulating diverse regional sentiments triumphant to the social integration process. But at the same time both private and public media endeavoured a half-hearted effort putting participatory role of media in front. Naturally the question of state domination over media could not be obliterated in India in the initial [post independent] phases of media-modernity. However both private media owners and public media played statist role before ‘trans-nationalization of media’ phase came into the scene.
Nevertheless the transnationalization of media was nowhere consequential to the failure of ‘nationalist’ frame of corporatization of media in terms of only ‘development’ agenda. For the third world nations this phase, often termed globalization of media, came as prime commercial imperative as the industrially developed nations and large transnational corporations gave primacy to champion the media-market as chief promoter and solitary causal factor of globalization. Quoting Anthony Smith about globalization of media that reflects ‘concentration into large international companies of previously more locally owned information and entertainment businesses...a form of concentration has been under way, at national levels, for a century, the number of news agencies around the world began to shrink into a tiny group, dominated by French, German, British, and American firms that divided the world according to the spheres of influence of their respective governments...’ (15B). But India, despite having no such past imperialist record like the above imperialist ‘gang of four’, had to comply with every transnational progress right from giving ‘autonomy to public media houses’ to opening the sky to generate a global mediating space conforming neo-imperialist media-globalization agenda. In India, like global route toward media autonomy, commercialization of media contents also came into force to attract advertisers. It started with compilation of Hindi film songs, talk shows, soap operas until private media houses had shown the total sell-out of mediated space.
The immediate corollary of it was the huge influx of transnational media houses [chiefly News Corporation] and a cumulative growth of newer internal media industries through large-scale merger & acquisitions, joint ventures. An all-round consumerization of media resulted in a monolithic consumer culture with a diverse range of consumer products including mediated contents [media productions] soon became the solitary feature of these countries. Synchronistically, as Kenichi affirmed, other western packaged firms, including, insurance companies, financial institutions, large-scale retailers, real estate firms, etc. inundated Indian market. Korten here beautifully substantiates such paradigmatic shift of economies from ‘social economy of household and community to monetized economy’ in an account that, ‘…business became skilled in using colours, glass, and light to create exciting images of a this-world paradise conveyed by elegant models and fashion shows. Museums offered displays depicting the excitement of the new culture. Gradually the individual was surrounded by messages reinforcing the culture of desire. Advertisements, department stores, show windows, electric signs, fashion shows, the sumptuous environments of the leading hotels, and billboards all conveyed artfully crafted images of the good life. Credit programmes made it seem effortless to buy that life…’ (16).
The massive shift in economic structures attributed to the influx of chiefly financial institutions and retailing companies subsequently, determined primacy to the transformation of older nationalist economic structures to become more and more information and culturally dominated. Therefore a shift in traditional cultural and mediational structures also became imperative to capitalize the above changes that ought to supersede the nationalist economic or political sovereignty. This had a serious devouring impact on older or classical conceptualization of political-economy of media or the media-ownership structures. It resulted in two-fold manifestation. If the first one is the ideational transformation of mediational genres from nationalist formulation [to a geo-politically located mass] to global or transnational [beyond enmassification of any kind] imperative, the second manifestation is a massive transformation in media-ownership toward conglomeration and vertical integration [concentration] through chain ownership of media, cross ownership between media and acquisition of media by ordinary industrial concerns.
Consequent to such paradigmatic shift toward transcorporatization of so called nationalist institutions almost everything comes within the close vicinity of direct mediation and becomes itself a medium. Amusement parks, water resorts, ayurvedic resorts [vedic resorts, spa resorts], eco-friendly tourist places, ice-rinks, musical arena, shopping malls, video games, softwares, etc. have come vertically under media conglomeration. This denotes the neo-liberal definition of globalization of media, emasculating so called ‘nationalist media sovereignty’ that disseminates newer symbolic power and neo-hierarchy to the weaker regions.
Moreover as the transcorporatization of earlier nationalist economic affairs and globalization of mediation well appear as resultant to each other, a strangulation of dual agenda dominates individual audience up over any regional specificity. Thus industrial conglomeration and media conglomeration becomes synonymous and highly monolithic to the individual audience and has been manifested in terms of market before them. Nevertheless, for people of any western nation, this might come in as corporate concentration and convergence of media & communication technologies, but for people of third world nations it ended up as neo-liberal domination.
So whenever people of these nations still depend largely upon governments and nationalist initiatives toward settling itineraries of their lives, they largely extend an erring look at these developments in terms of ‘collateral expansion’ of the earlier set up that [specially media] would definitely correspond the same developmental role. Naturally globally mediated mono-commercial contents make them simulate another world of hyperreality alternative to shabby, hardcore truths of their lives. The most crucial outcome of such simulation, in our developing nations, is that people consider pro-nationalist institutions [including media], still as prime facilitator for life and globalization of mediation as unknown but essential and non-alternatively public institutions. They expect same degree of social-responsibility form media conglomerates. So the content codes, like soap operas, reality shows, lucky draws, musical competition and even advertisements easily become iconic codes to them which they strive to get entirely accustomed with. But unfortunately things are not going to happen in reality likewise. The transcorporatization of media comes about at the cost of all democratic initiatives. Commercial media houses also have readily come forward to produce such iconic representational codes for these audiences. For them media thus have become reality and reality is media. Noted analyst-duo Robert McChesney and Edward S. Herman have pointed out that, ‘…a crucial factor in the decline of democracy has been weakening of labour, invariably a cornerstone in political movements for social democracy. This, too, is a direct result of globalization. TNC-investment…can often be explained in terms competitive (anti competitive) strategies and by a desire for proximity to markets and resources, but labour costs have been a very large consideration – arguably the most important consideration – in cross-border investment, and clearly the most important in terms of social and economic impact…investment and operations can be gradually shifted from areas where wages, benefits and taxes are high, and regulations of working and environmental conditions are costly, to places where the climate of investment is more business-friendly’ (17).
Thus from the audience end, media conglomeration and transcorporatization of industrial bodies convey [gradually] the complete withdrawal of nationalist set-ups, nevertheless, giving a new responsibility to those governments to emerge only as investment-friendly, industry friendly, information-technology friendly, and finally individual consumers friendly. Of late in India, this four ‘I’-friendly political wings get majority of people’s support in elections. This preconceived outcome has already favoured a huge space, in most of the developing countries, for TNCs, media conglomerates and their finance capital to sit on.
Following this notion, developing countries, like India, since the gulf war ended and Soviet Union collapsed, started formulating new policies specially in industrial sector, infrastructure, social sector, media development etc. to transform [not reform] their internal economic adjustment mechanism. At the same time they all had been taught to appear before the prospective investors with loudest possible make-over to become more and more [Four ‘I’] attractive. With the time this imperative has been propagated to be the only solution to perennial underdevelopment. Nationalist or traditional media notionally were believed not at all competent to cover such cultural transformation. So transcorporatization of media became preemptive outcome to ensure globalization of media.
It would be too simplistic, if readers now think much that such above globalist formulation are quite independently sorted out by the developing nations. It has already been noted that the bi-polar [cold war] crisis resulting in ‘bankruptcy of internal economic sectors’ of industrially developed nations and ‘eternal underdevelopment’ of the third world nations have made the situation so compulsive that anyone may think about it as a global crisis. But the question of domination and neo-imperialism here has been considered by many critics as being most sorted way-out formulated by US-led group of countries and their TNCs.
However globalization of media has come into force through dominant concentration of media ownership and corporate convergence over media & communication technologies. Since early nineties of the last century it has reached its initial saturation point. Robert McChesney and Edward S. Herman have accomplished research on corporate convergence over media quite convincingly. In terms of sales figuration, as they accord, five macroscopic firms that rule the world media business [specially television production, film, etc.] are, AOL-Time Warner, Walt Disney Corporation, Viacom, Bertelsmann, News Corporation. But along with them there are four more firms in the ‘first-tier’ [McChesney & Herman]. These are, General Electric, Sony, Polygram, Seagram.
The second tier media firms are mainly the leaders of regional and niche markets of the first world countries, like US, Canada etc. These firms have newspaper industries, cable broadcasting system & networks etc. collaborating often with first tier media giants. Some of these are, Dow Jones, AT&T, DirecTV, Brazilian Globo, Mexican Televisa, German Axel Springer, French Canal Plus and other regional or former nationalist media firms. According to the above theorist-duo, ‘the global media market is dominated by ten or so vertically integrated media conglomerates, most of which are based in the United States. Another thirty or forty significant supporting firms round out the meaningful positions in the system. These firms operate in oligopolistic markets with substantial barriers to entry. They compete vigorously on a non-price basis but their competition is softened not only by common interests as oligopolists, but also by a vast array of joint ventures, strategic alliances, and cross-ownership among the leading firms’ (18). Among all possible content-genres like, music videos, game videos, news, sports, and shopping, commercial entertainment vigour is the solitary output that is common to all global media firms.
However still a lot of space is left for more mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures to occur in the years to come. US command over global media market has already been beyond any doubt that regulates media-oligopoly and digital revolution throughout the globe withering natural plurality and native heterogeneities.

Mediation and Consumption: Third Phase of Modernity

Some years back noted poststructuralist Jean Baudrillard has distinguished the era of media globalization [conglomeration] as the phase of outright consumption beyond commodification [en route: classical bourgeoisie - social ruling under public institutions - liberalizing [corporatization through privatization] public institutions – transcorporatization and commodification of social elements – consumers’ choice as replicating social order] where he accords that consumption, which once he defined, "The truth about consumption is that it is a function of production and not a function of pleasure, and therefore, like material production, is not an individual function but one that is directly and totally collective" [The System of Objects- 1968, 1996], would now be the basis of social order in the coming time syntax. ‘Buying into a category of the market increase consumption, yet also begin to define the nature of the individual’(19). In this course media would be the social formulator. While mirroring the McLuhun’s proposition of Global Village, where explosion of technology is related to the implosion of understanding, into his theory of consumption Baudrillard has proposed that consumption [implosion] mirrors the explosion of information. In his words, it is true that we consume more products because of information, but it is more important to realize that we consume information. Consuming mere information creates an even greater illusion of technological explosion. However, when we consume information alone, we are consuming less and less meaning (20).
The above connotation grossly signifies the transformation of socio-political, socio-cultural orders into a hyperreal space [domain] where information rules over the information of ‘market and self’, providing with solitary but supreme identity, as consumers, that leads to generate a cognizant space for implosion [more about the product than buying it outright]. The ‘Shopping Malls’, ‘departmental stores’, amusement parks, water resorts and other new media mirror the explosion of technology and information and create a huge space for the self to implode something larger than the reality. In his words discussing Europe’s largest shopping mall PARLY-2, "Here we are at the heart of consumption as the total organization of everyday life, as a complete homogenization" (20A). In this process people become gradually engrossed into the information-mediation process where explosion of information neutralizes information and implosion of meaning starts, therefore reveals 3rd - 4th…the infinite order signification beyond classical social orders and statistical denotivity of consumption and utility pattern.
The prime instrumental or driving langue pattern, if at all, here is, according to Baudrillard, ‘packaging’ because more information of information-order destroys ‘communication’ and ‘social’ as a ‘system’ and ceases producing meaning. Thus packaging has become importantly the only morphology of the ‘produced’. Packaging naturally corrupts all earlier meaning making processes [communication] of information and meaningful mediation, thus leads to a complete destruction of meaning, as he defines it, ‘catastrophe of meaning’(21). Such destruction leaves over only individual ‘fascination’ [resulted from the neutralization of meaning] that reduces everything into some statements towards titillation, obscenity and pornography.
Thus as packaging of information explodes along with the explosion of media, it devours the traditional space of systemic derivation of meaning, and resultantly destroys public sphere and finally social structures. Media explode thus only packaging of the ‘produced’ that has a powerful branded [image making] effect on the individual consumer. Baudrillard while entitling it as ‘media invasion’ affirms that such media invasion would completely decompose both public and private spheres of life and produce something more real than the existing real e.g. fictions like, soap operas, reality shows etc. that let every individual simulate infinitely. Artlessness, worthlessness of such media contents hardly matter to any individual as he/she shows least interest to derive a systemic meaning while they watch them. Hyperreality dissolves the older oppositional [dialectical] systems of meaning. Fictions become more real to the individual privatized consumer and ‘real’ becomes fictitious. In this way the ‘mass’ in terms of mediation, as Baudrillard considers, makes no sense of culture; they get it from media to only become stimulated by it (22).
The most dangerous outcome of such hyperreal mediation, what Baudrillard considers, is that these consumers are not to be considered anyway the ‘victim’ of commodification. Masses get a hyperreal meaningless image from media and it works immediately on the behavioural development but ultimately it again [further] frees the mass from being systemic in behaviour i.e. right or wrong, good or bad etc. Therefore hyperreal mediation devours the classical distinction between every two class identities and a sense of class struggle.
So we live in a world, in which, prime relational aspect stands between mediated contents [advertisements, propagations] and individual self. We consume ad-meanings to ‘philosophize’ life; make social order to achieve optimum freedom of self beyond traditional social-democratic pattern or order and finally reject that mediated information. Only job remains, is to get more and more information and less and less meaning. No freedom lies there beyond this act. We have become proletariatized regardless of class existence.

Centres and Peripheries: The Gap is widening

Masses of Indian metropolis are facing such hyperreal transformation of life-codes which bumps up severe crisis between hyperreal mediated modernity [consumerist cultural homogeneity] and traditional social modernity. Majority [mostly rural, semi-urban and political] of people’s expectation toward transcorporatization and media conglomeration falls out very much restricted and reduced to the traditional conception of sustainable development. But the unpleasant truth still remaining is the ‘gap’ between communitarian people and the prospective consumers [yuppified in spectacular industrial centres] gradually widening. Moreover as the above two assemblages are not watertight in their structures, people from both centres and peripheries often remain in classical relational [mostly exploitative in terms of holding more symbolic power] terms with each other. Mumbai consumers [information elites] do never want ‘Dharabi’ to be washed out, and people of Salt Lake [Kolkata] would never protest to wipe out ‘Duttabad’ colony for various reasons despite having sufficient superiority discontents with them. On the other hand people from traditional assemblage [once identified as class or society] would also act accordingly to become impending consumers, thus destroying traditional boundaries of socialization. The distinction between these two demographic categories up to the outright consumption of mediated contents becomes negligible toward an apparent ‘classless’ environment. Class is being increasingly perceived in terms of mediated-cultural rather than classical socio-economic considerations.
It would yet be wrong enough if, now anyone tries to rule out the notion of domination or exploitation from the above homogenized mediated space. If the class struggle looks even blurring in the above hyperreal mediated space, the struggle between cultural identities [hence political also] would yet definitely continue because weaker consumers face more exploitation [in terms of more and more surplus labour] from the ‘information elites’ [officially guarded by other mediated factors, ranging from shopping malls, discs, night clubs, pubs, amusement parks, electronic gadgets, better educational space and above all unlimited exposure to life up to sophisticated timer-traffic signals] but this at the same time can hardly be measured binarily or traditionally. The theoretical distinction between weaker consumer and information elite is very common to measure but for the ‘mass’ highly viscid [specially when television is considered as the most powerful mass medium].
Nevertheless lots of differences still remain that finally occludes common mass to become information elites and these are the classical Marxian notions of class inequalities, say, educational, economic, conventional, bureaucratic etc. So a bitter confrontation between cultural homogenization and classical inequalities seem nowadays to be ruling the whole world. A new phase of struggle has thus become imminent between symbolic [synonymously neo-capitalists that own mediated symbolic power] domination and working class. But in the contemporary age of globalization neo-capitalism has gathered much more symbolic power, by owning media-production than ever before and working class looks, on the other hand, often swayed away and dispossessed with the hyperreality of newer symbolic parameters. But putting no ‘end’ to class-struggle, Ralph Milliband claims that ‘the working class not only still exists, but that the term should be expanded to include all white collar employees since they too produce surplus value for the capitalist’ (22A). This is very much evident in the recent retrenchment and salary contraction of Indian Airlines employees [Jet Airlines, Kingfisher Airlines and Air India], where all white collar employees at least for some days [until the authority paid back their employment] have no option but preferred to react as working ‘class’ and participate in ‘organized political demonstrations’. But in spite of all said and done things would not be simple to resolute anything favourably determinate as these neo-capitalists hold so much of symbolic power to overcome such demonstration than earlier days.
However toward accomplishment of the primary development agenda, people of India and the working class in many countries have already started uniting, as argued earlier, together because they need employment and better life first. Corporate conglomerates on the other hand hardly accept this view in comparison with their prime interest to let finance capital confluence beyond any nationalist or social hindrance. This is to be remembered carefully that the developmental agenda of such developing nations does have no match with the transnational objective to the consumerist mediation and must not transcend own territorial identities. But much before that most of the governments complying with US-led transnational agenda have sold their nations out to the global conglomerates. This is neo-imperialist domination.

Deprivation Vs Development? An aberrant polarization:

This binary oppositional category has been instated in all developing nations with the neo-liberal convergence of global social and market systems into a followed-up transcorporate, homogenized cultural format with western vigour. Though all reformist economic theories & propositions confirm the impending growth resultant to such transnationalization of economies, the initial phases of transformation of economic and cultural imperatives have widened the disunion between industrial centres and distant peripheries. The promise of cascading effect of newer developmental strategies from cntres to distant peripheries, as committed by both compliant nationalist governments and transnational institutions [WTO in consecutive Seattle-Genoa-Doha rounds], seems to be quite dim in these nations. But it has been argued earlier that for developing nations the primary notion is to industrialize their nations anyway, so they need to either promote indigenous industrial sector or open their economies in front of neo-imperialist domination. One third option is also there: to accept [US led] allied military invasion. However most of them, including India, have chosen the second option and deviants, like, People’s Republic of Korea, Iran, Venezuela and many other nations preparing themselves to combat allied [US-led] military attack.
Now the question remains whether contemporary Indian experience of ‘development and reforms’ would promote such destruction of its cultural territories? Whatever be the suited answer, as the developing nations like India have steadily come forward to set its own withdrawal [disappearance] from the nationhood complying with transcorporatization [agenda] of economy through rapid socio-economic structural reforms, such development route can never be sustainable in terms of internal economic and cultural security. If such analysis does not seem to have enough elements of maturity, let us consider that even after two decades of proceeding with globalist agenda, unemployment, impoverishment, malnutrition, and retrenchment disturb still two-third of the total population of this country. The situation becomes more vulnerable when an unprecedented volatility appears in organized job market, money market, labour market, that resultantly squeezing education, civic amenities, better infrastructure for majority people. The inevitable outcome, beyond much of hyperreal propositions, is a binary contradiction of statements: Mass Deprivation Vs. Development of Industrial & Cultural archipelago.
Noted Economist Prof. Samir Amin has broken this globalization juggernaut to its core: ‘…existing globalization is like an archipelago bathed in the ocean. The density of distribution of the islands of that archipelago varies: it is higher in the central areas where transnationals are concentrated, average in the peripheries…and very low in the peripheries of the Fourth World. It cannot be denied that the state powers are undergoing a double erosion, both from above and from below, through the emergence of local powers capable of acting as autonomous agents in the globalization process…’ (23). The emergence of new centres [overshadowing traditional centres of bourgeoisie and rural peripheries] of capital concentration has marginalized grossly the third world nations excepting those states having huge market expansion possibilities. India is situating in this exception.
Thus globalization reveals a two-fold outcome in developing nations. First one is the outright commodification of multifactorial elements of life and the second one is a post-commodified simulation of mediated elements. Prof. Samir Amin categorized commodification aspects of globalization into seven non-systemic items:
Commodification and privatization of health;
Commodification and privatization of education;
Commodification and privatization of pension funds;
Commodification and privatization of scientific research;
Commodification and privatization of intellectual, industrial, cultural and artistic properties;
Commodification and privatization of natural resources;
Commodification and privatization in general: false competition, oligopolistic competition; (24)

With this one can get hold of the degree of yuppifying concentration of global centres of finance capital in developing regions which leads to a severe polarization of ‘social’ in these regions brutally marginalizing the habitation of traditional places. In Samir Amin’s version, ‘…we have now reached a stage of advanced polarization, to the point where the majority of the world population has become superfluous to the needs of capital…the disintegration of rural world under the effect of market, together with…transcorporatization…that cannot absorb the villagers that have been made paupers…’ (25), because sponsored NGOs need these paupers not as clientele but commodities that let sell-out their innovative conceptions along with. However the turnover includes one more hyper-activated element, Religious Fanaticism or Communal Fascism.

Deterritorialization of Culture:

Therefore an involuntary culture-mix is going to be imminent in these nations. Unlike western regions where such culture mix has created a freakish monolithic cultural category [which has destroyed their social base on the one hand, and contrarily made a niche-individuality that fits the market], has seriously affected and devoured the ‘social’ of these nations that includes political struggle, people’s democracy, struggle against religious fundamentalism, ideological struggle, land reform strategies, struggle against partial-feudalism and religious fascism, dream of a balanced economic growth etc. People [common mass] have become brutally marginalized and atomized before unleashing mediated contents. Indian [mediation] experience reveals a massive influx of religious fictions, reality gambling, violence and terror, open projection of bloodshed and burning etc. that gradually have been deterritorializing common mass not only from their ‘social’ attachment but also from the mediated spectacles of development!! ‘Not without media’ as it is commonly argued, basically without such fictions and other entertaining contents it is going to be difficult nowadays to define the common atomized mass. Religious festivals, rituals, age-old conventions are being constantly projected in all media outlets to let them feel the ‘religiosity’ as prime social identity of Indian people beyond the ‘political’. Common mass, living below and just above the subsistence, have gradually become deterritorialized in twos from their social connection and spectacles. So we get everything about ‘what do media do with its audience’ in India, but do we really have any idea about ‘what do people do with their media’ in Indian context [uses & gratifications]? Just to remember here, in this juncture, the words of Jean Baudrillard that masses do not produce or make sense of culture, they are stimulated by it as shown in media. Culture is taken out of the hands of masses. How then can theorists measure ‘uses and gratifications’ that people achieve through mediation? It has become a complete ‘made of’ verdict imposed on common mass beyond their class and cultural identities. They live a very limited argumentative [quarrelsome] life-pattern that works in some aberrant binary categories [or syndromes], that grossly look like, no-media-phobia, no-mobile-phobia, between miking of Namaz and Pujas, dual sexual affairs [most powerful symbolic ‘deconstruct’ as new elite intelligentsia grooves upon in films, and other creative genres], extent of political criminalization in political parties, and many other indigenous subcultural syndromes.

Failure of the Structure?

There is no doubt about the whole process of transcorporatization, in the name of so called industrial development, being organized at the cost of long awaited notion of balanced economic growth in India and other developing nations, reveals, therefore, a sharp decline of democratic structure and selling out of the sovereignty as a whole. It would be implausible drawing a special Indian or the third world nations’ cases if we try to set a bottom line from the aftermath of the ended binary ideological debate between ‘Soviet System’ and ‘American System’. Even in the long frigid fifty years of cold war between these two superpowers the whole third world remained eternal victim of direct US oppression. So the Indian case, in the post-cold war, in particular, not only reflects ‘failure’ or frigidity of the internal system but represents also the neo-capitalist expansion or neo-imperialist invasion externally. What the neo-capitalist force led by US performs in their own lands rests on the notion of liberal-plurality, and perfectly ‘neo-liberal’ hegemonic when the same category is applied in other regions. The situation therefore justifies Chomsky’s version that US believes in high protectionism in its own internal economic format and forcibly propagates and disseminates the pluralist cultural message to other regions of the world (26). The motif behind such neo-liberal economic and cultural strategies behind the jacket of globalization has thus been as destructive for the developing nations as it works on the debris of systemic failure and severe deprivation.
Over and above the Indo-US Nuke deal claims an accomplishing permutation toward transnational reforms of the structure and interdependencies between each other. Whatever be its dimension, the basic tenets of this deal, so far come up, contempt the sovereign national structure probably for the last time in the history of mankind. Other than political prerequisites and diplomatic presumptions India would permanently settle herself as eternal recipient of impending need for infrastructure development. This would put an end to all critical theorization with the selling out of its core of infrastructure [specially power] that still needs indeed to cross miles to achieve sustainability. But remaining far short of that Indian bourgeoisie has vended all its internal potentialities to the western transcorporate agenda. It is not the question whether Uranium-235 is available in this region, but the issue of indigenous power-development research [and the whole infrastructure development] stands now on the verge of extinction.
However notwithstanding the dominant notion of transcorporatization overshadowing weaker nations, for India and many others alike, the query remains on ‘whether these [developing] nations always behaved as a real alternative to such invasive influx of transnational identities’? Basically the colonial hang-over, ever shortage of food, infrastructure deficiency, lack of industrial modernization, ever underdeveloped social sector [mass education, sanitation, civic amenities, rural infrastructure, endangered folk identities, etc.] have always perturbed the [territorial] nationalist identities of these nations. China by socializing its identity and nationalizing all properties could manage the crisis though the ‘emancipation of individuality’ question always disturbed the Chinese Communist Party until Deng Xiaoping freed the country from such political orthodoxy [chiefly from ‘cultural revolution’ jolt] giving a complete newer shape to Socialism altogether. But Indian identity being oppressed by colonization over centuries and subsequently ruled by ‘independent bourgeoisie’ and above all ‘religious fundamentalism’ in all facets of life neither appeared as an effective accumulator nor had it been proactive to initiate socialist effort to enhance mass production. After colonial repression Indian millions experienced massive ‘bourgeois ruling’ outbreak under a new polity of ‘family monarchism’. Despite many developmental items having written in consecutive seven five-year plans, each of them could hardly generate a sustained notion of development. From the first five-year plan to the liberalization policy taken in 1991, issues respectively were like,
· Mitigating food crisis: to enhance the agricultural production indigenously – result not at all satisfactory;
· Employment Generation: making giant public sector industries – partial success achieved but far short from moderate achievement; every budget still guarantees more employment opportunities both in urban and rural sectors. Lots of rural employment schemes have already been announced so far.
· Massive deceleration in industrial production – again severe crisis; economic imbalance;
· Political crisis: no five year plan for three four years;
· Green Revolution for the resurrection of agriculture – US cooperation – partial [regional] success achieved – popularly known ‘wheat revolution’; balanced growth between agriculture and industry yet to be achieved;
· Green Revolution did not lead to Labour displacement from agriculture to industry;
· Economic benefits went to better-of farmers and better endowed regions;
· Upper class consumption enhanced;
· ‘Garibi Hatao’ [poverty alleviation programmes] announced but later diluted;
· Lots of instrumental poverty alleviation measures announced: rural employment programmes, self employment programmes [for marginal farmers and rural artisans]: political [regional] polarization: far off sustainability (27);
· Promises [somewhere self contradictory] like, curbing inflation, employment generation, enhance food production and industrial production, about self reliance [increasing export and reducing import and aid, in economic terms] written, planned and communicated to the mass in every five year plan but balanced growth in socio-economic sector remains still a dream to achieve.
· With such bourgeois planning mechanisms, achievements were, first of all, one sided in favour of bourgeois societies, having strong political alignment in the Parliament.
Thus, since independence, a strong bourgeois hierarchical order largely dominated Indian notion of development until it was further diverged [the gap between privileged class and common underemployed, undereducated and underprivileged mass] since the liberalization programmes of ‘Indian economy and social sector’ undertaken by the government that let the whole nation-state identity become unfeasible to the western thinkers. The back-title of the famous book ‘The End of the Nation States’ writes: Nation states [like India] are dinosaurs waiting to die…not only have they lost their ability to control exchange rates and protect their currencies, but they no longer generate real economic activity. While governments cling to jingoistic celebrations of nationhood, within their borders a revolution has been born…’(28). But this so called anti-nationhood revolution falls in transcorporate hegemony and direct US oppression.

A new definition of culture and social peripheries?

However in the post WTO phase all earlier academic suppositions toward nation-state affairs are therefore gradually becoming obsolescent. Finance capital and financial institutions are coming into those areas whichever they consider more suitable for their capital to be invested. Nowadays nations remain no longer proactive to exploit structural resources for development but refreshing the ‘identity’ before foreign investors and convey the divine message “please favour us and our region”. So the structural [cultural] response has gradually been transformed in the last two decades. Indian opinion-leaders are nowadays trying to refresh their assertion with new prejudgements: ‘outlook’ of the state [country] system, and a ‘corporate-friendly environment’. People from upper middle class and rich may ultimately have common supportive opinion about such transformation so that they can breathe in such spectacular cultural outfits [and new market parameters] and seem to forgive the federal state and political structure for doing justice after a long last since independence. Middle class of Mumbai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bangalore are staunchly fascinated with such mono-cultural elements: spectacular nightlife, easy-moving money, unlimited entertainment facilities, and most interestingly ‘good jobs for efficient people’ and ‘no vacancy for average fellows anyway’ thus re-justifying the Darwinian notion of habitation ‘survival of the fittest’. Trying hard to keep pace with these fast moving categories, they find no other option but paying full to get hold of the spectacular life. Thus an unusual convergence of generalized corporate cultural propositions dominates the Indian socio-cultural contexts.
Such cultural convergence has caused a further fragmentation and reorientation of natural pluralities of Indian society. It can be classified into some evident cultural categories, like,
(a) Re-territorialization of re-orientation of upper-middle class and rich around newly emerged neo-capitalist centres;
(b) Deterritorialization of marginal population [chiefly lower-middle class, poor, rural and subaltern] from the mainstream transcorporate culture and also from the traditional cultural bondages toward absolute marginalization;
(c) A more dissonant and binary oscillation in middle class population between the polar domain of reterritorial cultural centres [hubs] and traditional cultural format;
(d) Commercialization of political format and global media set people’s new identity as ‘consumers’.
(e) Outright consumption is the social order that signifies a hyperreality which destroys any kind of social connotation.
(f) Mediated categories for consumption debar people think about any sort of exploitation and their class identities slinging them in a mediated hyperreal world [Magaj Dholai].
Therefore a definite re-alignment of newer cultural praxis has become resolutely inevitable for survival. It becomes far more problematic and complicated to the people of other post-colonial nations like Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. where such wide-ranging categorizations converge into the existing binary opposition between superrich [including invalidated middle class] and marginally poor. The marginality of common people, in these nations, remains the only criterion beyond the privileged identity and that is also measured in high religious stance. Prof. James Lull raises a question, “How can people find their way in a world where the stabilizing influence of culture as a communal project is being transformed into a far more symbolic, personalized panorama of images and dreams, fantasies and illusions, journeys and retreats?”(29) In his account he has plausibly projected communication technology, as pivotal to such transformation. Prof. Lull has however made an empirical definition of this reterritorialization or reorientation as “Superculture”, which as he accords, ‘transcends traditional categories of culture and cultural analysis’.(30) But the real account, projected so far in this paper, tells a different story of transcorporate domination altogether .
However I will end up this paper with this new categorization of culture which emits lots of indeterminate cultural lemmas out of which, it is difficult [to mention all] to resolute any ‘one’ in particular, the outcome of globalization. The entrance of newer parameters leads to a newer definition of culture, which would undoubtedly take a far more complicated shape and so far is yet to be measured. The concept of superculture is a post-industrial phenomenon and largely sets a neo-hierarchy in underprepared social formats. The contemporary Indian cultural formats experience lots of such post-commodified lemmas [often anomalously continual: Levi Strauss], like a ‘beautiful Hindu lady who is a graduate student, loves to get peace with Bible hymns, used to move around shopping malls with like-minded folks, believes in free-mixing and relaxed dress codes, desires to marry a Hindu-moderate-meritorious-sound careered boy, fascinated with but still fears to be open at night-life, finally proactive to the religious rituals. Statistical research methodologies cannot reach to this sort of factorization, though it is a clear example of postcommodified consumption decoding.
In his definition of Superculture Prof. James Lull has mentioned about a specific ‘cultural matrix’ that individuals create for themselves in a world where access to “distant” cultural resources has expanded enormously. At the same time, however, the superculture embodies traditional or “close” cultural resources too - the values and social practices characteristic of ‘local’ cultures as they are learned and reproduced by individual and groups (31).
Here the traditional “close” cultural form, according to Lull, implies the structural oppression which compels people follow a certain guided way. The prime agents of the structure or the power groups are ‘religion’ and ‘State’. Furthermore the matrix of superculture reflects an individual cultural perspective beyond social structuration, is very much discursive in contrast to the social bondage, he has accorded.
But oriental societies usually don’t comply with such cultural agenda. This is suitably a dual problem for them. Here the structure is as ruthless as that of west. But the superculture [toward transcorporatization] firmly connotes a newer form of structure to the corporate recolonization. For the privileged people, myriad of mediated symbols and images creates an ideation of ‘freedom from the structural domination’ but the hardcore reality is that they try to dissociate from others in an archipelago of their own choice. So not only they yuppify themselves in luxury but let other people remain marginalized also in terms of economic and cultural discriminations. This notion comes alive when mothers of Manipur stripping them off, shout at Indian Army, “Please Rape us…Spare our Children” (32). Still vast population of India lacks development for subsistence: food, shelter, education, clothing, proper medication and a cultural format where they can justify themselves as Indian.
So now if the state repudiates its responsibility saying that it remains people’s responsibility to formulate their own cultural accommodations, it would certainly be a deadly attack on them. On the other hand if corporate-structure says that it remains consumers’ responsibility to accept [use] mediated and marketed cultural parameters to gratify their needs, it would cause same disastrous effect to millions of marginal and middle class. Every Indian citizen would agree with the fact that corporate superculture eclipses traditional notion of cultural praxis, struggle and of course independence of identity.

Conclusion?

Is there any alternative? If not socialist revolution, what next comes suitably? Financial autocracy? Convergence of global capital market which often leads down to a severe crash? Unleashing inflation? Hallucinatory marginal increase of wage? Perpetual pauperism? Dual consumption: postcommodified simulation and consumerist explosion? Consumerist social order? Dreadful poverty and deprivation? How common audience would then survive?
Some critics [Walden Bello et al. (32A)] prefer to formulate alternative globalization where state systems would have the right to formulate their destiny. No country would propose any degree of hegemony over any state. Nation states would exist in a de-globalized world format but participate actively in international economic and cultural cooperation. But still the question remains on whether a counter economic reassurance can resolve the crisis within the system and the ‘global’. On the other hand transnational financial crises nowadays lead to a severe recession in global market operation. Transcorporate homogenization of cultural praxis leads to the destruction of all other statewide pluralist formats. But the transcorporatization and transnationalization of corporate, financial, socio-cultural institutions [beyond their own nationalist identities] have already initiated a massive transformation of older structures to [re]minting accumulated capital unhindered destroying economic and cultural identities of the nation-states. More so in all above situations only common factor is the dominant US linkage which causes a range of unacknowledged [before] outcomes but all featuring absolute liquidation of divergent human identities. So ‘De-globalization’ may appear quite a utopia at this moment at least in contrast to the ‘transcorporatization of earlier structures’ and ongoing outright US plunging operation.
Furthermore global conglomeration of media industries is fanning the transcorporatization process and investment-liberalization in developing countries like India. The problem becomes more viscid and complicated whenever any resistance [in India sometimes leftist resistance to globalization agenda] has taken place. But often such movements [specially rightist movements] have become reduced to the anti-investment movement. But number of multinational companies has been operating in India over the years with optimum integrity though again some of them created lot of controversy. The first such resistance was observed in India to the US-TNC KFC controversy. Western media conglomerates overhauled on India beyond all ethical notes. The Chicago Tribune storied when KFC was banned in New Delhi for allegedly selling food contained harmful and possibly carcinogenic ingredients (33), ‘…In a country where sanitation is so poor that people routinely die of diarrhea and outbreaks of plague still occur, reports now chronicle with considerable license the potential health hazards presented by western fast food’ (34). The story reveals a double-sided landing, one side of which states the controversy; but the other side reveals the western hi-modernist conventional hierarchy or superiority that nevertheless rules the whole transcorporatization and liberalized monetarism process. New York Times reported that ‘politicians bait KFC but consumers are not chicken…customers did not seem to care about criticism’ (35). A ‘Time’ headline also followed the same ethnic concentration, ‘American Firms Face an Anti-foreign Backlash’. Los Angeles Times reported at that time [KFC banning period], ‘in recent years other large US companies including Cargill Inc., Du Pont Co., Enron Corp., and Coca Cola Co. have been targets of protests and opposition’ (36). However quoting Amiya Kumar Bagchi quite suitably, multinationals may enter into any place where they want to sit or stay but if they are unwanted or not needed, people can choose to oppose them (37).
However besides whatever the extent of such protests had been launched, media conglomerates had dealt with the whole issue through a darken-ethnic fundamentalist eye [here western ethnicity, not communitarian at all] and not in terms of any simple intrusion [what it should have been, if free trade matters to them at all] occurred in free trade liberalism route. Modernist colonizing outlook still therefore has been very influential covering every sector of development in western nations. While they [chiefly US media conglomerates] are screaming for ‘freedom of the marketplace to let US multinationals do the business’, want developing nations to open their socio-economic defense, thus play a complete statist role within western territories.
But things do not move always into the way, as it is intended. It has been argued earlier that for all developing nations ‘industrialization’ becomes synonymous to their survival. On the other hand conglomeration [through merger and acquisitions, joint ventures] of institutions under few ‘Big’ transcorporate names hovers very close to the initial saturation mark devouring nationalist state controlled [administered] market structures [image beyond concrete], earlier relation[al]s between society and market, contemporary socio-cultural codes, human consumption patterns [principles] & state’s responsibilities, state-sponsored development modules, determinate diffusion of communication [its class-cultural orientation]. The role of top state financial institutions [i.e. RBI in India] has been drastically reduced to maintain only the follow-up on the boom and crash of global capital market but completely failed to curb down the swelling inflation and subsequent price hike of essential commodities.
In social sector the crisis is even more viscid to realize. The transcorporatization of media leads to a complete disintegration of earlier dominant social orders quite horizontally, so that [religious & traditional] conventions, despite being fragmented, can subsist on mediated consumerist signification; that also promote critical elitism and civil society’s domination. Naturally such significations immediately denounce organized political [ideological] struggle, impending class movement, and any form of revolutionary socialist progress but promote on the other hand any stray disturbance, fundamentalist [chiefly religious] outbreaks, corporate rivalry, judicial over-activism beyond democratic norms etc. It results even the threatening of traditional industrial development procedure, as observed recently in West Bengal, the withdrawal of ‘Tata Motors’ from Singur [West Bengal] because of such alien and separatist disturbances.
Media conglomeration and globalization of mediation are often being considered, in the west, as a postmodern [deconstruction of…] text, opposed to the traditional modernist hierarchy and metanarrative determinism. But in reality such postmodernist methodologies are all bizarrely [and aberrantly] situated in a common binary oppositional context between ‘state regulation’ and ‘withdrawal of state’ in reference to western superiority that is only applicable to the developing perspective. Few critics dare to establish that every state, including United States, holds optimum power to delimitate its people and possesses an inherent imperialist character. Their delimitation only confutes the third world nation-states. Therefore the transcorporatization of media and other nationalist institutions reflects no less than a newer phase of imperialist [third phase of modernity] modernity. But they all dare never to ignore the power bias. Furthermore vertical integration in media operation and transcorporate manipulation brutally destroys state mechanisms that naturally results in a massive deprivation within and across national territories. More and more mediation of contents leads to an enforced harmonization of privileged community. The market drives the formulators of mediated contents toward producing repetitive codes, deafening the ‘mass production’ [Baudrillard: on consumption (38)] to make them popular. ‘Popularizing’ codes become synonymous to ‘repeating’ codes to produce stereotypical categories. It deafens the [economically] privilege class gradually to get hold of [or realize] the social change and marginalize others to the perpetual social-darkness. Virtually the vast population of developing nations gradually becomes ruthlessly marginalized, [the situation] causing severe social unrest, civil disorder, insurgency, individual bankruptcy and promote outright depoliticization among privileged individuals.
However despite all modes of transcorporate hyperrealist vogue people’s movements across nations also have achieved sufficient momentum but far short of the mark to provide leadership toward any alternative. They denounce: US hegemony, transcorporatization of public institutions, media invasion, consumerist social order etc. But also to be remembered here, at the same time, that a sustainable political alternative is requisite to denounce all earlier statist metanarratives also, that produced criminalization in politics, thoroughfare of massive deprivation, large scale impoverishment, religious fundamentalist outbreaks, severe ethnic concentration etc. Therefore what would be the plausible ‘alternative pluralist’ resolution, if it is not socialist or ‘people’s democratic’!!!


References:

(1) Kenichi Ohmae: The End of the Nation Sates: The Rise of Regional Economies, Harper Collins (1996).
(2) David C. Korten: When Corporations Rule the World; Other India Press.
(3) Chitra Subramaniam: India is For Sale, UBS Publishers’ Distributors Ltd (1997).
(4) Kenichi Ohmae: The End of the Nation Sates: The Rise of Regional Economies, Harper Collins (1996).
(5) Raymond Williams: The Long Revolution, New York (1962), Columbia University Press.
(6) Anthony Smith: Towards a Global Culture? In M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (1990). London, Sage.
(7) Arjun Appadurai: Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (1990). London, Sage.
(7A) Vijay Prasad: The Collapse; Cover Story: Frontline, November 7, 2008.
(8) Kenichi Ohmae: The End of the Nation Sates: The Rise of Regional Economies, Harper Collins (1996).
(9) Ibid.
(10) Kavaljit Singh: Global Corporate Power: Emerging Trends and Issues [Asia Europe Dialogue Project; Public Interest Research Centre].
(11) Robert McCheseney & Edward S. Herman: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, Madhyam Books.
(11A) Douglas Kellner: Media Culture: Routledge.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman: Ethnic Cleansing: Constructive, Benign and Nefarious [Kafka Era Studies-1], Z-Net, August, 2006.
(14) Ibid.
(15) Ibid.
(15A) Francis Fukyama: The End of History: cited from Kenichi Ohmae — The End of the Nation Sates: The Rise of Regional Economies, Harper Collins (1996).
(15B) Anthony Smith: Towards a Global Culture? In M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (1990). London, Sage.
(16) David C. Korten: When Corporations Rule the World;
(17) Robert McCheseney & Edward S. Herman: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, Madhyam Books.
(18) Robert McCheseney & Edward S. Herman: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, Madhyam Books. Also Columbia Journalism Review.
(19) Jean Baudrillard: The system of Objects, London, Verso;
(20) Jean Baudrillard: The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press.
(21) The Consumer Society. Paris: Gallimard. 1998 [1970]
(22) Ibid.
(22A) Cited from Gary Day: Class; Routledge.
(23) Samir Amin: The Globalization of Resistance, Forum for Third World Alternative.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Ibid.
(26) Noam Chomsky: Class Warfare; interviewed by David Barsamian; Oxford.
(27) Sukhomoy Chakraborty: Development Planning; Oxford.
(28) Kenichi Ohmae: The End of the Nation Sates: The Rise of Regional Economies, Harper Collins (1996).
(29) James Lull: Media, Communication and Culture: A Global Approach, Polity Press, 1995, 1999.
(30) James Lull: ‘Superculture in the Communication Age’ and In Media, Communication and Culture: A Global Approach, Polity Press, 1995.
(31) Ibid.
(32) A Letter to My Daughter: A Documentary Film by Soumitra Dastidar, 2005.
(32A) Walden Bello — Deglobalization, Madhyam Books.
(33) Melisa Wall: KFC in India: Critical Issues in Media Commercialism; Oxford.
(34) Ibid.
(35) Ibid.
(36) Ibid.
(37) Amiya Kumar Bagchi: Globalizing India: The Fantasy and the Reality; Social Scientist, 22/7-8.
(38) Jean Baudrillard: The System of Objects; London, Verso.