CITY CITY BANG BANG
Televisionisation of our country……….Santosh Desai
That television is the most powerful engine of change in India is an assertion that is unlikely to be challenged by most. But what may not get the same acceptance is to argue that what is powerful about television is not so much its content but its form. To put it differently, television by virtue of the particular combination of extension, intensification and amplification that it offers by way of technology, creates a set of far-reaching effects.
Television is set in relentless continuous time. It makes the world a whirl of ceaseless events that move with alarming speed. The television news screen is a hive of crawlers, information worms slithering along the surface of time, oozing newness. The tone is urgent, the pitch dramatic. News is designed to create impact rather than memory. Did the cash-for-votes scandal really happen not too long ago? And whatever happened to the infamous Doctor death who traded in human organs? Does Nithari ring a bell? Is it a vast conspiracy of amnesia on part of all channels acting in concert or is it in the nature of television to wipe its disk clean every so often?
The much lamented absence of depth on television too has its roots here. There is no rewind button on television, no way to flip back to an earlier page for a more leisurely read. There are no past issues to thumb through, no archives to reference unless some kind soul has uploaded what we want to see on Youtube. Television cannot support reflection in the way that print can. Of course, some channels will still carry more depth than others, but taken as a whole television struggles with introspection.
By virtue of being set in continuous time, it tends to narrativise reality into stories. Like a film which takes stills and turns them into an illusion of fluid time, television news converts individual bits of facts into narratives. What does not fit into these neat stories becomes difficult to deal with. So it matters little if the story changes very frequently, but the world must come to us in little capsules of digestible stories.
By far, the most powerful influence of television is its legitimisation of individual desire. The impatient individual armed with the remote is increasingly an apt metaphor for the way we, as a people, are beginning to consume our world. Television places the consumer at the centre of its universe. It is obsessively concerned with the popular as manifest in its ratings, and this is what people want becomes an absolute argument that can brook no opposition. It is a democracy of desire, where the individual believes that his desire is a priori, legitimate. Television promotes those instincts that cultures work hard to suppress.
At one level, this is vastly liberating for large parts of India, where most of us grew up repressed to some extent or the other. It takes away the pressure of behaving like one should and allows one to act as one feels. In doing so, it also allows those hidden, too-impolitic-too-state urges to come out into the open and get catered to. Crime shows, salacious up-the-skirt shots of cheerleaders, tales of misfortune told with ghoulish glee all become on a par for the course.
More fundamentally, ideas like secularism, tolerance, and temperate balance start looking like impositions. One can argue that the recent surge in intolerance that one sees from a large section of society is in some way a product of a televisionised India, free from the need to pretend to be politically correct. The pent up feelings of resentment and entitlement have rushed out and get both tacit and explicit support from television. In a certain sense, television has made Indian democracy more real in that, we are today dealing with issues that come from how people, when not pretending to be someone else, and when not subject to editorial admonitions, really feel about things. The prejudices are out in the open, be they those with a communal tinge or elements of class hatred (will Mayawati really become Prime Minister?).
Television shapes its content by its form. The same media house, which in its print avatar can be a model of balanced reporting, becomes a rabid purveyor of half-truth set to a dramatic soundtrack. On television itself, a channels English version strives for relative accuracy, but has no qualms in letting its Hindi counterpart run riot with the truth. It is as if the media owners themselves are not able to exercise full control over the content they put out; they are compelled to follow the implicit code of television.
In Marshall McLuhans words, We become what we behold. We shape our tools which in turn, shape us. The content, he goes on to argue in his characteristically extreme way, is the the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind and it has about as much importance as the stencilling on the casing of an atomic bomb. The televisionization of India goes way beyond television. We are increasingly what we watch.