Role of Media as an agent of Social Change

Prof. Swapna Mukherjee Memorial Lecture

Women’s College, Kolkata

29th November, 2011

The subject, assigned to me, deliberately affirms the contemporary media operation toward a definite social change. The referent or external area of the subject i.e. ‘social’ or precisely ‘social change’ assures multi-dimensional emergence of facets in our ‘social’ lives caused chiefly by the media operation or at least defined in such a manner. If we watch the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt and other neighbouring West Asian nations, a very popular note still reigns in popular psyche almost a ruling that the Facebook posts of someone Asma Mahfooz initiated the upsurge. Whatever the actual base would be, this very popular notion hits the global attention quite easily through popular mediation. So what we see here that the notion mediated becomes more catchy attractive and reduced than the actual upsurge and many such parallel reasons or connotations. And this very catchy, attractive and reduced notion becomes a slogan in popular media, which beyond proper reasoning have made it a ‘public opinion’. It now makes you believe that the Facebook posts by Lady Mahfooz created the upsurge that ended the 30 years of tyranny and dictatorship in Egypt. It appears like a headline of a news story which often in most cases comes down to be arbitrarily produced by the journalists according to his/her house policy than readers’ choice. Here my point is by any means not to establish the absurd ‘readers’ choice’, but the journalists’ policy that is not also one of readers’ very own. So making of social or social change happens and you expect me to tell you the story of how assuredly media do this change. I will tell you the story accordingly.

Before moving into details of the stories let me ask you a very old and unpopular question; what do media do to its people? Denis McQuail has quite interestingly identified some categories of functioning that media perpetrate for its audience. These are:

(i) media exert power and inequality;

(ii) national integration;

(iii) social change;

(iv) controlling mass;

You can now safely remove the tag of ‘national integration’ from all global media houses operating in India. Gone are those days of public service broadcasting with Akashbani and Doordarshan and ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’. Media at that time at least for a decade until 1990 never worked as an ‘agent’ but its being was well acclaimed as a developmental tool for Indian people.

Media as an agent…

Do we really have an idea of our media to be acting as an agent? What does an agent do specially to its society or social? Does this ‘agent identity of media’ mean everything but responsibility? Commonly a human or an institutional agent looks after everything professionally without having any emotional, ideological, or cultural attachment to the society or institution. Cultural Anthropology defines ‘agent’ as a concept related mostly to the power…deployed between individual and social structures…act for power. 

Did we mean such a functioning of media? Your subject then clearly suggests that mass media perpetrates the social change as just an agent not as a pillar of democracy or your very own and old friend as fourth estate or watch dog. Why the media is to be treated as a confirmed agent of social change…for its affirmed freedom? 

As and when we try to build an appropriate understanding with media in terms of its operation in our region or national territory, it always becomes our sacred duty to affirm the freedom of media, educating value of media, as an instrument of making public opinion, our agenda-setter, and our cultivator. Do we have any space remaining to accept media in other way as our very own? Do we nevertheless see media from public sphere? 

We do always better to portray our past relationship with media which commonly describes a very social relationship with our own mass media, sometimes as a family member. But difficulty arises when it comes to the contemporary media operation. If media acts as an agent, we have a functional relationship with it, may be a needful relationship. Now for a needful and empowered media it is subsequently very easy to organize any form of social change as it anyway appears to be more powerful, authoritative, and maker of popular opinion. Objectivity of news is now an index of not just mere social credibility but a commercial credential of every media house for simply to sustain as a corporate identity to its political and corporate authority. 

It is however very difficult to judge whether media or popular media act as a social agent although a mass consent would affirm every media house as an empowered corporate body that produces news story and other contents for its targeted audience or consumers to earn and maximize profit. Some quotes may however endorse my point:

(i) We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.

— Michael Eisner, CEO, The Walt Disney Co., (Internal Memo). Quoted from Mickey Mouse Monopoly-Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power

(ii) We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre.

— the C.E.O. of Westinghouse(CBS), Advertising Age, February 3, 97

I can also recall a very interesting quote a media representative on a television channel during 2006 Cricket World Cup: We don’t serve people; we only have a professional relationship with the advertisers to run the programme for revenue.

You may safely differ and rule out my opinion. You may even conform to the notion that media do much to us as an agent and we do not expect media doing something more than this. This is the way to initiate critical media studies and debate on operational philosophy of the contemporary media.

Social Change…

Now what do we mean by social change? Is it something related to the social transformation? In media and cultural studies, we have two types of social change:

(i) major or macro social change that often appears to be revolutionary, as earlier seen in socialist revolutions; but recently in 

(a) Egypt and other West Asian nations including newly born South Sudan;

(b) Obama’s win over many traditional rifts and questions within US territory;

(c) significant socio-political change in many Latin American countries, like, Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay;

(d) demolition of Iraq and Afghanistan in the name and tag-line of liberation; and 

(e) live telecast of Gulf War;

(f) massive religious upsurge;

(g) ethnic and subaltern political outbursts as seen in UP and many other Indian states etc. 

(h) information revolution through social networking sites and media; complete dissolution of information, its institutional base, and the notion of public opinion; as we can count people voting on an opinion and hardly sustain.

(ii) minor or micro social change that appears to be quite subtle but can exert enough power to change the existing social order. Minor social changes often deal with ethnicity, individuality, social and cultural categories like, languages, emotions, conventions, rituals, hierarchies, deliberate praxis, exterior and interior behavioural expressions, milestones, traffic signals and all possible mundane exercises that affect life.

Mass media through programmes like mega soap operas, reality shows, news bulletins put a control over the above minor but significant categories that subtly cause a social change. Media were however also directly involved in disclosure of Watergate scam in late 70s, Jessica Lall murder case some years back and many such issues of investigation.

How do media perpetrate social change…

It is now quite interesting to watch that media mostly deal with all minor categories of social change to influence its audience except in some regional cases where media are seen quite polarized to a specific political stance. 

In all repetitive contents, like, news bulletins, mega soap operas, newer reality shows media while reiterating selective social categories cultivate its audience to change the behaviour in the long run. Noted communication theorist George Gerbner stated that “television acts as a ‘socializing agent’ that educates viewers on a separate version of reality. The concrete base behind the cultivation theory states that viewers tend to have more faith in the television version of reality the more they watch television. ‘Television world dramatically overemphasizes the prevalence of law enforcement jobs in the real world (Chandler).

So if now the cultivation power of media is instrumental to how media perpetrate social change, it involves certain procedural aspects or features media usually perform. It should also be noted at the same time that now we are not talking about the traditional developing agenda of mass media as a state machinery or organ. We are now in a situation where media conglomerates control the global media operation from phone tapping to providing necessary political backing. In such a situation all pervasive media operation leaves a very scant space for people’s participation in public sphere.

From the initial phase of global media operation with the collapse of Soviet Union people had an opportunity to observe the live media operation in the first Gulf War in 1990. Noted media theorist Douglas Kellner rediscovered the whole story behind the war declaration. US’s foremost official channel CNN publicizing two satellite photographs claimed that an ‘amass of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers gathered at the Qatar border. President George Bush in no further delay declared the deadliest war against Iraq. Later within two months it was further discovered that the yellow stretch was actually a line of sand bags and other materials delimitating the Iraq-Qatar border. An unprecedented social change comprising not only the destruction of a nation and huge public property but an afresh reach of global media through it also.

Media however, as analyzed so far, perform certain chronologically structured functions for every genre of its contents or programmes. US media theorists though found media audience very much willing to accept all media operations, have nevertheless restructured all aspects of media effect toward both major and minor social change. These are: 

(i) Priming: propagating before context;

(ii) Framing: how to prepare the message capsule;

(iii) Agenda Setting: short term media effect on both individual and mass audience; media set people’s agenda;

(iv) Media Cultivate: media in the long run change audience’s behaviour and ideology;

And in this manner media perform its duty to change the socio-political or socio-economic order.

Media spectacle and package…

But things are gradually becoming very complicated in the contemporary global mediation. With the growth of mediation and the globalization of media mass consumption of media contents is becoming the social order that has outlined the traditional notion of development. Today’s world and region receive mediational development much before territorial development. They receive advertisement of a product much before the produced one. Most of our population even does not have that opportunity to see the product for buying although they have enough exposure through popular media. But all industrial attentions converge to the centre of capital accumulation thus marginalizing peripheries and thus creating a havoc social change in favour of affordability and affluent exposure.

Media contents, i.e. advertisements, news, reality shows, mega soaps have gradually become distinct packages that broadcast everything but the truth of the product-message. A massive fictionalization of all above contents moves beyond the common head and judgements. Noted French theorist Jean Baudrillard comments interestingly: media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is the real world; television is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is realized and the real becomes fiction…no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle.

Media effect and cultural studies: From Culture Industry to Global Postmodern

With the coming out of the notion of culture industry, in mid forties, under ultra-nationalist and high-capitalist control, media evolved a massive mass culture for the atomized subordinated audience producing mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the nationalist context of industrial production [Kellner, 1997]. So the produced and mediated commodities manifested identical features as the other ‘produced’ of mass production did. These were: commodification of the produced, standardization or homogenization and enmassification of the produced. The culture-industry, as Kellner accords, had the specific function of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into the framework of the capitalist system. Thus culture industry, in Frankfurt discourse of study, produces a consumer society that stabilizes the contemporary capitalist system, formulates new strategies for political change, political emancipation that becomes social norms imposed on common working class. This development thus however transcends the traditional or classical Marxist notion of existence of working class as prime instrument of future revolution. 

So a direct effect of mass media on the common individual and working class existed all through the development of mass mediation communication technology in the last century. Herbert Marcuse [1941] in his article “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” argued that technology posits a “mode of organizing and perpetuating social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behaviour patterns, an instrument for control and domination.”

The notion behind such argumentation of media dominance by the Frankfurt cultural theorists was based on some on-hand life time experiences. In Nazi Germany they experienced absolutist collaboration of centralized media and vertical dominance of the state machinery toward controlling media and mediation promoting monolithic mass cultural instruments to produce a homogenized Fascist culture. On the other hand while in exile in the United States they started believing that the so called American ‘popular culture’ in the name of ‘liberal-pluralism’ was also very much motivated toward the interest of the state capitalist jingoism and governed by the transnational industrial corporations.

The governmentality of such popular culture reflects another scale of mass production and ensures mass consumption through certain commercial value-systems, belief-system that serves American Capitalism as a whole. Individuated space in both systems [in German Mass Society and American Popular Society], what they called ‘Fordism’ [mass production-mass consumption to ensure homogeneity of capital, i.e. mass desire, mass taste, mass behaviour (Kellner, 1997)], were never allowed to blossom beyond overshadow of the techno-capitalist system. Individual thought and desire were brutally suppressed in the Fordist consumer society.

What however was thought of Fordist mass production and mass consumption trap by the Frankfurt theorists was criticized by later theorists like Walter Benjamin et. al. and theorists of British cultural Studies only in terms of the hypothesis of taking the ‘mass’ quite atomized and crippled. Emerging in the Post-Fordist era [roughly the post second world war period] they thought on the one hand, that culture industry also could articulate important roles of individuals and on the other hand ‘atomized mass’ as working class could also be believed as an instrument of social and political metamorphosis against the onslaught of mass culture of the culture industry.

In this course of development of cultural studies ‘Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ of Birmingham University started working on class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and media culture while exploring revitalizing elements in the ‘working class’ through extensive study on effects of television, radio, newspapers, film, advertisements on individual audience in terms of cultural texts and they also emphasized on plurality of individual audience and politics of ideology and signification of the text. Thus in this regard the notion of British Cultural Studies appeared highly political and they could reach the core of mass-cultural domination and the core of consumer society. Theorists like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall opposed in this context the mass cultural theoretical notions of configuring media effect that takes individual audience as ‘heavy viewers’ and ‘active audience’ beyond its natural plurality and spontaneity, believing that such preconception or predomination certainly devours the individuated space in public spheres. So they started theorizing social mediation praxis and processes.

But notwithstanding all oppositions regarding the revival question of working class in the growing consumer society, both schools of thought were unanimous on the notion of integration of the working class beyond its individual class-cultural identity and the decline of its revolutionary consciousness in the capitalist consumer society. Birmingham theorists, specially Stuart Hall here formulated the notion of the ‘politics of signification’ where they recognized any form of alternative voices against the massive institutionalization of thought and hegemony of the dominant cultural ideology. In this way of rediscovering the working class ideology cultural theorists [French, British and German] resurfaced the capitalist integrated consumerist media politics and created an alternative space for common audience to combat monolithic media effect on them. Noted theorist Douglas Kellner supplemented beautifully the Frankfurt notion of cultural studies, in his words, that ‘...mass culture and communication were instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behaviour appropriate to a highly organized and massified social order...mass consumption and culture were indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for the mass produced and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood jingoistic films, national magazines and other mass-produced cultural artifacts’.

Basically ‘media effect’ analysis is highly a political discourse in terms of its theoretical binarity between capitalist mass culture toward an integration or homogeneity of consumer society and the notion of individuality in pluralist cultural possibilities. Media effect in consumerist societal configuration takes individuals as mass and considers them quite proactive toward mediated contents, i.e. heavy viewers of media and prone to the consumerist effect of mediation. This notion of understanding media effect devours the individuated space i.e. political space that let individuals be the natural victim of mass culture, ends up with the mass consumption of obscenity, titillation, pornography and violence. Thus through consumerist media effect analysis one can only consummate to the extent of consumption of mediated content.

Politics of the Active Audience Research:

Following the cultural nuances about the effect of mass cultural domination over the mass among two theoretical schools [Frankfurt and early British Cultural Studies] were almost of a unanimous opinion of domination of mass culture which makes audience atomized. But on the other hand, as argued above, Benjamin, Hall (et.al.) thought of rejuvenating the audience psyche by counter generation of media use.

But other than such political and cultural research groups [Frankfurt and Birmingham groups] some communication theorists propounded a new theoretical discourse to judge media effect with statistical figuration. Communication researchers J.G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch have classified the above two discourses of media effect research in a temporal order like Marxist media research and political communication research. While discarding the Marxist notion on the one hand, they have made certain further time-spatial subcultural grouping of the media effect research discourse. ‘Research into political communication effects has undergone at least two major shifts of direction since its inception. In an initial phase, which lasted from approximately the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, the mass media were attributed with considerable power to shape opinion and belief. In the second period, from...the 1940s to the early 1960s, they were believed to be largely impotent to initiate opinion and attitude change, although they could relay certain forms of information and reinforce existing beliefs...’ (Blumler & Gurevitch, The Political Effects of Mass Communication; Culture, Society and Media, pp240).

There was, however, a third category of researchers like, McQuail, P. Lazarsfeld, H. Gaudet et. al. who found the ‘audience’ very much proactive to any media content to gratify their temporal needs. According to James Lull, instead of asking “What media do to its audience” this ‘uses and gratifications group’ pounded upon the notion “what do people do with the media”. This notion however according to them signifies the active audience.

This brand of argument as ‘media effect’ has resulted in a natural political polarization not only in media research but also in ideological discourse around the world. The active audience notion virtually tried to move away from the political media research discourse and gave the ‘transcorporate commercial mediation’ a global space to operate. Moreover the active audience research stands against all earlier quantitative ‘effect research’ with a notion that statistical figurations can hardly establish human behavioural pattern or metamorphosis. James Lull asks in this context, ‘how can we determine the particular impact of mass media compared to other environmental influences when analyzing human consciousness and behaviour?’

Extending however Blumler’s notion, Joseph Klapper (1960) meanwhile has derived that media can reinforce human behaviour than changing it, putting Wilbur Schramm’s notion of uncertain media effect forward that media can influence some of its audience, in some time about some things (Lull 1995). Transcending all earlier empirical media effect notions that focused only on negative outcomes, active audience researchers considered audience members are not at all passive receivers of media content or victims of media (Lull, 1995). They have explained that individual audience play always active role to use their media to gratify their individual needs. But uses & gratifications researchers too set on empirical statistical figurations to measure the extent of gratification. James Lull in his analysis concerns, ‘what’s more uses & gratifications researchers - like the effects researchers before them - theorize audience activity in behaviourist terms. Adapting quantitatively based methodologies and theories from psychology and sociology, ultimately these researchers also regard audience members essentially as rats in a maze or beans in a jar. Human emotion, cognition and behaviour are once again reduced to statistical data’ [Lull, 1995].

Therefore it can well be accomplished that as a whole of the discourse of mass communication research, the politics remains in older binary opposition between Marxist tradition of communication research on the one side and the techno-capitalist empirical research of human behavioural order on the other, along with an internal debate over the legitimacy of statistical figuration to measure human behavioural order. So the politics of active audience research reaches out to a highly ideological morphology that seeks out emancipation of the audience.

Changing discourse in social outcomes of mediation:

Effect theorists have time and again identified social transformation through various case studies that show the pivotal role of media in the metamorphosis. But they all seem to have stopped their rediscovery journey while reaching in so called globalization era. They have all confined themselves in a binary oppositional lane where state power and awaiting new media development live in a sufficiently coexistent space. Therefore globalizing change in media and society, for them, has become an awaited destination. This is nowhere difficult to identify how state powers intercept freedom of media, from Fascist governments to the ex-colonial national governments of the third world nations etc. But it also seems to be sufficiently pertinent to identify or rediscover the postmodern transcorporate media domination over fragmented subcultural groups of audience. Basically institutions ranging from the central state power to global corporate power manifest an isomorphic outcome to create a mass society either centrally or in some social pockets, even if Lull’s conceptual generalization of diversity is taken into account.

From mission and revolution to outright consumption:

On the other hand cultural studies which earlier had considered media culture as a critical element to the techno-capitalist culture industry and prescribed setting an alternative goal toward revolutionizing people, from mid seventies to the present, transformed from its socialist revolutionary outlook to a postcommercial postmodernist trend of identity and gradually became less and less critical to capitalist media culture and the contemporary postcommodified culture. Like uses & gratifications approach the ball has been thrown to audience’s court in terms of reception of mediated content, consumption and satisfaction or gratification, thus turning around from earlier notions like how media texts are being produced in media industries. Kellner argues in this context, ‘from this perspective the proliferating media culture, postmodern architecture, shopping malls, and the culture of the postmodern spectacle became the promoters and palaces of a new stage of technocapitalism, the latest stage capital, encompassing a postmodern image and consumer culture...’

Therefore as Kellner rightly argues that the new rise of global technocapitalism and finance-capitalism promotes the new turn of postmodern cultural studies. This ideological shift is a new revisionism (McGuigan, 1992, Kellner, The Farnkfurt School and British Cultural Studies: A Missed Articulation) in cultural studies which even ignores the Derridean space of intercontextuality or the protest against space domination. This does not produce or generate individuated cultural space but set a new cultural populism which alternately produces the same but oppositional degree of mass culture for mass production, treats audience an individual creature. Although this turn in cultural studies seems to devour the space of any grand narrative of domination, historical teleology, pseudo-liberation (both capitalist and socialist) but at the same time confronts with the Marxist derivatives by which the notion of capitalist domination over an individual and social audience could have been identified. This would then be the political articulation of struggle of an individual and a society to organize a revolution.

Politics of margin in global postmodern:

As argued earlier, the nuances between British cultural studies and other forms of western cultural studies were largely going beyond any modernist historical narratives toward either a political revolutionary narrative of struggle or a multicultural consumerist fragmentation of narratives. Although both thoughts arguing the same reduction of narratives from any social time and space, the latter multiculturalist fragmentation realizes new control of over determined capital and new order of technologies that offers audience the sense of a new ordained space for receiving mediated texts. So a new margin beyond the traditional political space is drawn to over-determine the human exposure and use of media. This new margin beyond the traditional social margins attempts to restore the cannon of western civilization, as Kellner exemplifies as Thatcher and Reagan eras, Bush (Junior) to Barack Obama era of rejuvenation of American nationality etc. But for the rest of the world it involves pluralizing of culture (Kellner 1997), opening of traditional political margins, what Hall supposed that to be away from western cultural domination, but nowadays totally controlled, regulated by transnational corporations and media conglomerates, the new cultural arbitrators, new missionaries of techno-cultural capitalism reduced to a newer trend or grandnarrative of the new world order. Thus culture industries in the global postmodern era has reached its culminating point while a handful number of media conglomerates through ruthless merger and acquisitions controls the information order and entertainment industries of the world. Kellner argues that ‘...the globalization of media culture is an imposition of the lowest denominator homogeneity of global culture on a national and local culture, in which CNN, BBC, NBC, the Murdock channels and so on impose the most banal uniformity and homogeneity on media culture throughout the world...’. So a new order of monocultural margin controlled by the media conglomerates has been imposed on the political struggles of various subcultural and political groupings.

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.

Establishment vs. Opposition Platforms: In search of ideology among common mass

Abir Chattopadhyay

Does this headline stink too much specially in West Bengal? or enough cliché anyway? Whatever it smells people of this state, otherwise, have to sit with this debate for at least coming one and half year, even if anyone ignores imminent 2012 debacle as accorded by some demanding astrologers!!! If it still looks enough viscid please let me introduce that categories like ‘political’, ‘commercial’, ‘social’ are going to be permeated within next one or two years into a complete mutation of the individual meaning of them. Through the postcommercial development of mass media toward becoming a ‘package’ ahead of a ‘message’ all categories of ‘individual and mass’ life are going to hover close to the end of existence. But the most interesting issue is that people of India including this state also largely are quite unaware of such mutation of all earlier meanings and categories as they by the reason of severe economic inequalities, cultural hierarchies, and bourgeois political domination face lots of struggle while in their mundane life. So mass media can easily maneuver such packages of understanding beyond common, traditional understandings of life which are mostly binary oppositional, staying between good or bad, yes or no, we or they, hero or villain etc. etc. The headline represents such a binary oppositional topic of discussion of the hour that often reduces natural plurality of political, social, cultural issues and leads to a simple ‘uneven’ concentration of power specially political and economic power in some bourgeois hierarchical strata. That not only baffles the common mass away from the mainstream political notions but makes them eternal consumer of mediated political packages.

Binarity between two prime categories

In between the above two categories ‘Establishment’ and ‘Opposition’ the leading debate exists between the mediated package and the traditional binary notions of life. Mass media everyday perpetrate an absolute detailing of establishment and opposition as well, as they create every moment of that and people are always eager to reduce the same into any friendly category of life, say government, local politics, village politics, market price,  2009, 2011, alliance, CPM, Trinamool, Congress etc. Therefore in this equation bourgeois media naturally have a tendency to maneuver such reductionist issues toward making of a mass understanding of it by creating pseudo often fabricated public opinion, as suited commercially. Media try thus to realign its audience reorienting their notions into a homogeneous one like ‘this time Mamata’ from 2001 since the birth of Trinamool congress, and Now 2011 etc.

What establishment and what opposition? An oversimplification altogether

Nevertheless people of West Bengal have to participate in this debate between mediated package and common opinion toward identifying establishment and the opposition. So let us better clarify what is establishment? And what indeed the opposition is? Common understanding often says ‘establishment’ is the government that rules, if further reduced, CPM government and opposition is ‘Mamata’ in any sensibility whatever or ‘no’. But extending such ordinary notion we will find various other categories that also rule common psyche and many such deviant or defiant voices on the other hand that do not rule but oppose ruling. Government ruling is often presupposedly taken as absorbing common individuated and oppositional desires. Common sense of ‘opposition’ therefore often comes out to be simply opposing such ruling. But beyond such oversimplified and near obsessive sense there are many other forms of establishment that also participate in ruling the common mass or psyche. 

Opposition dissolves: emergence of new ruling

After Singur and Nandigram fiasco the emergence of new individuals in the name of civil society have taken a self proclaimed ruling stance staunchly standing by the political opposition and have left no stone unturned to rule the mass. These people not disclosing membership of any particular political wing have created a new ruling over the common mass and public opinion straightway to the Trinamool Congress. Being hugely fed by bourgeois mass media the new ruling-power groups have been unceasingly rewarded in every kind possible. The sacred role of the common mass is, if at all needed, to just switch their TV set on or newspaper open and be an unimposing consumer. The unimposing consumer even media disseminate the fabricated death figure of 1500 people on 14th March, 2007 in Nandigram. If bourgeois media even compete among them on the fabrication of the number of death. Media thus create another establishment creating regular newer talk-shows with people who often try to be the opinion leaders of the common mass. The so called opposition platforms have consequently taken the safe shelter behind these opinions of newer individuals. A new binarity is at the same time been created. Opinion leaders on the other hand are to be shown politically independent and saviour of the bourgeois political parties which operate behind them. Binarity is the ‘others’ who are marked by their political identities. So ‘opportunism’ precisely ‘political opportunism’ is another ‘establishment’ that rules common psyche in the guise of so called marked opposition. Please note that this newer establishment is too costly as the members are to be heavily financially fed by another establishment, here it called the ‘Ministry of Railways’ which largely feeds the bourgeoisie with huge public money simply in the name of another establishment called ‘heritage’. Therefore ‘opposition’ here is mutated to become a form of more powerful counter establishment leaving mass distress of poverty, hunger, political killing, price hike, food inflation away from the spotlight. This is also a spectacle that evades ideological plurality.

32 years of left front government: still ‘establishment (!!!) in making’

Another inconsistent and anomalous (category) presupposition is the 32 years of left front ruling which is another ‘establishment in making’ beyond natural plurality of democracy. If democratic naturalism is the frequent change of the government, as often accorded by many social theorists, how then left front have won seven consecutive assembly elections since 1977. Is it beyond democracy!!! Wisely ‘no’. Here natural plurality supports the left front coalition that has ruled the state beyond ruling. This is important. It is not a package because capitalist democracy can’t generate that possibility in its procedural format. Opposition parties since 1982 have been trying to organize people against the left front. They were not totally unsuccessful in this process as they have also earned democratic space among people. But since 2001, opposition again was dissolved and oppositional content had been reduced to a mediated homogeneous ruling “This time or never”. Public however rejected this ultimatum. Same result spilled over in 2006, public again rejected such ‘ruling’. After winning considerably in Parliament election in 2009 and some municipal elections opposition parties have completely forgotten their agenda. The slogan is even further reduced to “Now 2011”. Gone is the oppositional identity, a new ruling emerges not as alternative but a mere consolidation that only desires power against proclaimed “32 years” of establishment. Dear reader, this is a pre-election scenario!!! Naturally opposition here is only the emergence of newer power bloc or consolidation.

Public reaction: backlash or vandalism

Recently a Kolkata based hospital was quite brutally ransacked by a violent mob alleging the hospital for not admitting some accident patients. But the attack was so planned and organized that vandals turned the hospital into a heap of rubble within hours. Is this a notion of opposition? Let us not confine our discussion within the Advertisements given by the hospital authority in almost all newspapers of the very next day that ‘this is a blow to the whole of hospital industry’. The state government has announced a departmental inquiry. But still the binarity remains in between the performance of hospital industry on the one side and the organized vandalism on the other. The deceased members of our society and the rubble of our property mutually symbolize the dissolution of both establishment and opposition toward making of a more powerful establishment structure that only exploits common people. Most importantly the remaining is the uneven power concentration in both sides of the coin where neither government nor any people’s ‘ideology’ have a legitimate entry. These concentrations not only provide a new ruling but destroy all kinds of welfare approaches of common life. State inquiry may throw a new light on it, but will then be anyone there to recognize what has happened really? This is suitably a question that hardly allows even the victims and their families.

People of not only this state but of the country have earlier seen many such incidents in the name of ‘public reaction’ or backlash etc. We have seen the demolition of Babri Mosque, Gujarat genocide, Maoist extremism, ransacking West Bengal state legislative Assembly by handful members of the state opposition and the list is endless. On the other side we have seen 2/3rd of total population of the state for seven consecutive times have supported a political coalition. Is it too non-commercial or chimera? Isn’t it a public reaction and at least better than killing common innocent mass?

In Nandigram since 2007 amongst all categories of events occurred during the year long massacre, the only neglected and impoverished category what have had a least amount of public attention was of those four thousand people being thrown away from their land. These people remained always ousted not only from their land but from the spectacle also. The whole of East Midnapore gradually came under a family ruling. Isn’t it an establishment that gathers only power to engulf the mass in an encircled impasse? Let us still not accept any binarity that declares the earlier regime in East Midnapore innocent. They have accepted public penance in exchange of every wrong stepping.

2011

This four digit combination nowadays acts beyond all its traditional meaning and gradually becomes a symbol many false connotations that somewhere scares people, gives a message of something historic beyond all democratic norms where people only have to perform and make a history of their own what they have done since last three decades. Therefore this was never a continuous process where they had chosen seven distinctly separate governments in West Bengal. 2011 is exactly like 2006, 2001, 1996, 1991, 1987, 1982, 1977 and even 1972 where people used to express their individual grievance, ideology, struggle, gratification, discontent, anger, deprivation. This individuality and a sense of independence keep them united which often wrongly defined as ‘polarization’. The other side of this stream is sheer domination which transcends even governmental ruling toward an emergence of unholy power over the common mass.