Corporate Media: Spectacles Of Banalities
By Prabhat Sharan
29 March, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Contemporary corporate establishment media is plasma in a flux. Constantly, transforming, restructuring not just itself, it even seeks to permeate social realities and reconfigure the existential environs and conditions by projecting an illusion of reality in the mental theatre of the masses where it enacts itself out.
The contemporary media straps the reader/viewer and fetishizes the shadows of reality through representations of experiences etched out as a commodity, carving out a Debordian world of spectacles.
Noted French thinker and filmmaker, Guy-Ernest Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, remarked, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
And as for the role of mass media, Debord observed “The spectacle as the concrete inversion of life is the autonomous movement of non-living….and the specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image where the liar has lied to himself.”
A simple case in point was the swine flu hysteria. Nobody denies that there was a modicum of truth about possible latent danger of a virus which had more grey areas than that of tuberculosis or cholera which has always been not only more rampant but has been devouring scores of people.
But the representation of fear through amplification of dangers of the virus was flashed across the screens and newspapers headlines 24/7. And a hyper-reality of panic was generated through hyper-visibility. And then panic was reported.
It is precisely this simulacrum of media that made anthropologist Erig Higgs express concern wherein the “boundary between artificiality and reality becomes so thin that artificial becomes the centre of moral value.”
Swine flu is not just an isolated case, where mass media is used as a tool by political or economic forces to reinforce the experience into a spectacle. The cases are innumerable and the list is endless. Spectacles are churned out every day, every hour by the media. They saturate and “dominate all social institutions and social realities: war (“shock and awe”), politics (photo opportunities, televised conventions and debates, and TV commercials), culture (tabloid journalism, “breaking news”), sports (“extreme” competitions), consumerism (“spectacular” sales and events), art (body-centered “performance” art,) architecture (especially of the “post-modern” type) and, of course, entire cities.”
The simulacrum projected by the media even though superficial in its description of these phenomena, is a manipulated, manufactured reality. It becomes “the primary vehicle through which popular discourse and opinion are channeled,” (Fran Shor: Bush-League Spectacles: empire, politics, and culture in Bushwhacked America.)
The result is, “the totalitarian dictatorship of the fragment,” (Basic Banalities-Raou Vaneigem) where, “a new regime of the spectacle in which screen culture and visual politics create spectacular events just as much as they record them.” It is this phenomenon that made French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, compare television news as a mirror, reinforcing the surface-spectacle dimension of the media and caution the people that “objects in this mirror maybe closer than they appear.”
Studies of Debord and Baudrillard like spectres cast away in obscurity for obvious reasons by the establishment media are now finding echoes in the pixellated media environs where realities are glossed over, trivialized and turned into a surface-level entertainment.
The digital-driven media has transmogrified the experience of what used to be experienced into a ‘seamless flow across channels.’ “Attention spans,” media sociologist, Sashi Kumar, says,” have dwindled to ridiculous lows and the turnover of media-generated celebrities seems to keep pace with the rapid rate of obsolescence of the technology itself.”
But equally alarming than the dwindling of the attention span is the generation of the Marcusian one-dimensional man. Creation of fake people is the norm of the day wherein “viral marketing,” induces consumers to voluntarily spread propaganda amongst themselves under the spell of superficial press releases issued by media under the veneer of journalistic practice.
Media has gone away far from journalistic practices, and even though clothing itself with the veneer of crusading social mirror, it is a world where breadth has replaced depth to promote and encourage financial interests of corporates.
Ben Bagdikian in The Media Monopoly has shown how the contemporary media market is controlled by American multinational corporations for creating an illusion or reality and conspicuous consumption to use Thornstein Veblen’s term, wherein, advertising, packaging, display, fashion, “emancipated” sexuality, mass media and culture, and the proliferation of commodities, “multiplied the quantity of signs and spectacles, and produced a proliferation of sign-value. (Baudrillard)”
Prestige, identity and status in the system are acquired through display of commodities like houses, cars, clothes, in Baudrillardian thesis become “real sign value,” defining the standing in the social hierarchy.
And the State along with the ruling class uses spectacles and sign-values to gain control over the masses. The electrode through which this perspective is drilled into the minds of the masses is the mass media. Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann in their classic study Manufacturing Consent brilliantly defined as to what constitutes a ‘propaganda model,’ and how American media tends to create a consensus amongst the masses when it comes to the interests of MNCs.
And the strategies, for controlling the mind of the masses are the same in India—“control the media and you control the minds of people,” in words of cult rock singer Jim Morrison. It is precisely for this reason that post orthodox economic structural adjustments initiated in early nineties unlike pre-1947 India, saw a surge of not just newspapers and magazines but even television broadcasters who strangely are more of narrowcaster rather than what they call themselves.
The corporate establishment media today has nothing to do with the voices of the masses. It is a propagandistic tool to carve out a mindset where critical analysis is deliberately dulled through a subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle manipulation of language and visuals through a glut of low-quality information and disinformation by packaging a twisted reality through a series of lies in the form of impartial and objective news reports.
Thus glorification of a fake reality is amplified and stark issues are buried under the debris of trivialities reflecting or mirroring a reality of a sub-conscious desire of the Indian ruling class desperation to gain acceptance and serve, neo-imperialists nation.
A case in point is the conferring of an Oscar award to the film Slumdog Millionaire. The Indian corporate media went overboard in gushing over a film which ironically was far from the tragic truth of tales of people living in the hovels, fighting against all odds chucked at them by an exploitative system. But the Western neo-colonialist controlled Indian corporate media desperately wanted to infuse the superiority and the cultural hegemony arising out of the neo-liberal economics of USA.
In America mass media subtly controls the minds of the masses through news media and features films and manipulates thoughts, desires and opinions from politics to physical beauty. After all, monies are involved and for corporates people are just commodity from whom profits have to be extracted.
Neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci in his study on Mussolini’s fascism said that the ruling class likes to control the cultural symbols through which they control people by making them accept an exploitative system as a part of their lives. The ruling class uses the cultural symbols or lives of the masses and then accord them legitimacy only to infuse feelings of inferiority into the minds of the masses by presenting its own cultural symbols as a superior form.
Thus consent for hegemony is manufactured. And so you have justifications for covering the reality, legitimization of the commodification of tales of starving bodies, trivialization of the most humane emotions and glorifying the ‘greed-for-capital,’ and drilling of a cynical, ‘taken-for-granted-desensitised-attitude,’ into the minds of the masses.
A desperate attempt is being made to quell the spark of rebel in embryonic stage; and thus such gushing of self-praise over the condescending conferring of accolades.
At the turn of the century, the Indian corporate media was gushing in a similar manner over the winning of Miss Universe and Miss World. Reams and reams of news print and photographs and time spaces in television news bytes, were churned out with superlatives eulogizing the emerging womanhood and beauty of Indian females.
The cosmetic industry was keen to establish their foothold in the sub-continent and change the very aesthetics of beauty in the minds of Indian masses. Moreover, since Indian ruling class was envisaging of making some of the centres in the sub-continent as trading hubs-like Shanghai, Singapore or Los Angeles- the rates of Indian flesh also needed to be hiked up. The flesh pots were being hyped up and the exploitation of bodies were being eulogized as ‘hostess and escorts and theme parties.’
Ironically, nobody in the Indian corporate media is answering as to how suddenly, now, not a single Indian female even manages to reach the runner-up position in these contests. Ironically, these contests if analysed, are nothing but an insult to a woman, since it reduces the concept of beauty not just to a set of physical attributes but also to a chalked out concept of physical beauty which is totally alien and relative in different geo-social structures. It was apparent that the move to crown some Indian females was carried out at the behest of multi-national cosmetic industry which was hell-bent on finishing off the local concepts of beauty and indigenous cosmetic industry through cultural hegemony.
And this is what the task of corporate media is: Kill reality every morning and every hour. And carve out a fake reality every morning and every hour through spectacles of banalities.
Prabhat Sharan is a Senior Journalist with interest in social, human interest, working class, wild-life conservation, philosophical and literary studies. He can be contacted at [email protected]
