[PERSPECTIVES]

Hegemony in Contemporary Culture and Media and the Need for a Counter Initiative

Sashi Kumar

Gramscian hegemony, more than overt imperialism, characterises contemporary mass culture and media. A paradigm shift in the way we understand, represent and experience the world subserves a new and aggressive corporate teleology [Abstract] [Full Article]

http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/16887.pdf

PERSPECTIVES

38 December 17, 2011 vol xlvi no 51 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

Hegemony in Contemporary

Culture and Media and the

Need for a Counter Initiative

Sashi Kumar

This essay is based on the presentation made at

the Sahmat symposium "Awaz Do" at New

Delhi on 13 October 2011.

Sashi Kumar (sashi.acj@gmail.com) is at the

Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Gramscian hegemony, more than

overt imperialism, characterises

contemporary mass culture and

media. A paradigm shift in the

way we understand, represent

and experience the world

subserves a new and aggressive

corporate teleology. Technological

convergence and digitisation,

which held an initial promise of

and potential for democratisation,

collapse into vertical integration

and monopolisation. In the

process, cultural sovereignty is

abstracted into a homogenised,

make-believe, global marketplace,

which reduces every individual to

a consumer and excludes the real

and abiding concerns of vast

swathes of humanity. An

intellectual resurgence must

counter the counterfeit revolution

of the information era.

redric Jameson in his 1984 article on

the cultural logic of late capitalism

captures three critical historical

junctures of capitalism and their respective cultural tempers: the market capitalism of the 1840s whose cultural logic was

realism; the monopoly capitalism of the

1890s whose expression was modernism;

and the latest and current phase of multinational capitalism of the 1940s which brings

us into what for many of us may be the

uncomfortable realm of postmodernism.

Scholars like Vivian Sobchack (1994) have

extrapolated on this schema to propose the

dominant cultural instrumentality of each

of these phases: the photographic exemplifying the mood of realism under market

capitalism; the cinematic dominating the

sensibility of modernism under monopoly

capitalism; and the electronic pervading the

contemporary, postmodern phase.

The shift from the cinematic to the

electronic is subsumed in the larger

transition from the analogue to the digital,

which is perhaps the definitive technological change of our times and marks the

essential dynamics of the information

revolution which, we are told, has succeeded

or superseded the industrial revolution. It

is a change with the potential to subvert

the hierarchic ordering of the world as we

know it. The non-linear takes over from the

linear; the margins move into the centre;

the tyranny of the written text is challenged

by visual and acoustic modes of knowledge

furtherance and sense perception. To put it

another way, digital technology draws us

to see, hear and experience our context

first-hand, rather than read about it at one

remove. The new technology is weaving a

sensorium around us, which approximates

our natural cognitive experience.

The electronic, on the rebound, alters

the terms of the cinematic. Digitisation is

taking over both the production and – with

satellite simulcasts – the exhibition of

cinema, rendering film raw stock, processing and printing obsolete. "Digital surround

sound" in the modern cinema, or home

theatre, disperses the myriad components

of the audio track across the room, so that

they come to us from different directions,

spatially matching the visual source of the

voice or sound on the screen. The visual,

meanwhile, strives to be expressed in 3D

and HD, although, with variations in the

aspect ratio, it continues to be confined to

the rectangular screen. The change, perhaps, will be complete when the visual

breaks out of its rectangularity and simulates the panoptic ken of the human eye.

The churning that accompanies the transition into the digital realm has thrown up

a mix of new perceptual and conceptual

elements which seek to challenge the perspectives and values which are the given at

this point. They constitute a cultural newspeak, which requires us to press the reset

button and reconfigure the world.

Flatism is perhaps the more tendentious

of these concepts. In the post-Nietschean

tradition, as Susan Sontag (1966) tells us,

there are no heights or depths, only

various kinds of surface and spectacles.

Roland Barthes (1972) goes further and

rubbishes the idea of depth as a repository

of any concealed meaning. Jean Baudrillard's (1989) mirror metaphor holds up

the idiosyncratic end of the proposition.

Regis Debray (1996) calls the contemporary realm a mediasphere, which privileges

"the letter against the spirit, extension

in space against comprehension, space

against duration, surface against content".

The mediological sensibility, he says, is not

given to going to the bottom of things,

keeping, instead, to "faces, surfaces and

interfaces". The operative jargon of the new

media seems to prop up this new surfaceism: after all we "surf", rather than delve

into, TV channels and the internet. The setting, thus, was ripe for Thomas Friedman

(2005) to script his anecdotal adventure of

flattening the world into a continuum of IT

enclaves – a level playing field, as he saw it,

with easy enough entrance and exit options.

Before Friedman had declared the

world flat, Francis Fukuyama (1993, 1999), PERSPECTIVES

Economic & Political Weekly EPW December 17, 2011 vol xlvi no 51 39

with more scholarly effort, had both

declared history dead and announced a

new order on a clean slate. Endism, however, did not get as much play as flatism

and Fukuyama's The End of History and

The Great Disruption turned out to be

flashes in the pan at the turn of the new

century. But it was unsettling enough that

he could grab intellectual and media

attention, and seize popular imagination,

even if fleetingly, for propositions which

were outlandishly sui generis.

Another set of ideas privileged by the

information age is a version of the futurism

propounded by Marinetti

as far back as

1909, with its celebration of speed: "We

declare that the splendour of the world has

been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty

of speed". Speed in the media morphs, in

Todd Gitlin's (2003) gaze, into a "torrent",

which, combined with the digital parsing

of sensibility, leads to the rhetoric of sound

bytes and a regime of sparse attention

spans. Speed introduces an aesthetics of

blur to photo, video and typography and

incentivises techniques like stop framing,

shutter motion and out of focus shots. The

trend, for Gitlin, is reminiscent of the spirit

of impressionism in painting:

The visual style introduced by the French

impressionists in the 1870s to convey the instant of motion, the instant in motion, recorded as if the artist's hand were in motion,

has now reached typography, the representation of language itself.

The known iconising impulse of the

mass media breaks up, in this digital future, into a realm of flitting attention and

fleeting reputations where, as Andy

Warhol mocked, "every one will be worldfamous for fifteen minutes". Speed and

futurism combine also to pace up the rate

of technological obsolescence in the digitised media. The state of the art is in constant renewal and the new yields quickly

to the newer in gadgetry; more up to the

moment, versatile and affordable than

what went just before.

The explosion of information that marks

the age and the compression of this vast

data through digitisation place a huge

demand on the human capacity for assimilation, making it necessary to resort to

what the French biologist and futurist,

Joel de Rosney,

calls a "dietetics of communication". The need to pick and choose

optimally, nutritionally, from the surfeit

fare on offer out there for our consumption leads to the ratings mindset that rules

mass media and culture. Ratings become

not only the rationale for allocation of

advertising budgets, but also the filter by

which the popularity of cultural products

are hierarchised. The "bestseller" and

"countdown" lists in books and music, for

instance, determine the universe of our

reading and the repertoire of our "heard

melodies". Work outside these shortlists

does not make it to our notice and, for all

practical purposes, does not exist. The

tyranny of the ratings, Pierre Bourdieu

(1998) points out, takes a toll on our intellectual potential because it is so subservient

to popular demand. It circumscribes our

intellectual horizons. Contrast this, he says,

with the fact that well until recently the

greatest accomplishments in literature,

science or mathematics actually went

against the grain of the popular.

Posthumous Rediscovery

It is also a phase when thinkers or clairvoyants who lived in advance of their

times are being posthumously rediscovered for their prescience about the information age that is suddenly upon us. The

oracular aphorisms of Marshall McLuhan

(1994) and Guy Debord (1967) seem to

come into their own in this era. In particular, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, written in the 1970s, bears an uncanny resemblance to what obtains today. "In societies

where modern conditions of production

prevail", wrote Debord, "all of life presents

itself as a immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived

has moved away into representation".

The process of reality being abstracted

by its representation has dogged literature

and philosophy down the ages, even if it

acquires a kind of criticality in the information age. A K Ramanujan (2005) cites

the plight of Dushyanta in Kalidasa's

Shakuntala as his memory plays tricks on

him – "like one who doubts the existence of

an elephant who walks in front of him, but

feels convinced by seeing footprints…"

The elephant in the room goes unrecognised; it takes its footprints, after it has left,

to re-member, to reconstruct, its presence.

Cognition, in the traditional Indian definition, integrates the pratyaksha (that which

is manifest) with what is arrived at through

anumana (or inference), what is remembered through smriti (memory) and what is

reported as aptavakya (eyewitness account

of the one who was present). Representative reality takes over lived reality when

direct, unmediated perception, or the capacity to see the obvious, the manifest – i e, pratyaksha – is supplanted by the secondary

constructs of smriti, anumana or aptavakya.

In 19th century Europe, we have Feuerbach (1989 trans), in a similar vein, lamenting in his Essence of Christianity, that his

era prefers "the image to the thing, the copy

to the original, the representation to reality, appearance to being". The representative ritual of the eucharist, where the faithful partake of the body and the blood of

Christ, acquires a larger than real dimension as it becomes a coded expression of the

hierarchy of the church. In fact, Regis

Debray

argues that representative values

are often ascribed post facto. The French

Revolution, he observes, "invented the

Enlightenment as a meaningful rallying

round a cause; and the Catholic magesterium

invented (one century after Jesus) the New

Testament. The womb comes after the child,

who shapes it in his own measure. The

words of the Prophet are put in his mouth

posthumously, all this according to the law

of the precursor, the one of whom one

knows afterward that he came before".

In his reflective study Media Mani

festos, Debray arrives at a pervasive videosphere as the latest revelation in a palimpsest where a print-and-publishing centric

graphosphere and scripture-dominated

logosphere are the preceding layers, in that

order. Moreover, he recognises that this

sphere is as determined as the biosphere,

noting that "a good politics can no more

prevent a mass medium from functioning

according to its own economy than it can

prevent a severe drought". There may be

consensus about the purpose of the sciences

of life, viz, to prevent illness, increase longevity, mitigate suffering and better the

quality of life; the manipulation of embryos

and "in vitro" fertilisation have to do with

the genetic legacy of the species. There

may not be a similar agreement about the

objective of the sciences of culture because

they are not subject to the equivalent of a

bioethics. But they should be, suggests

Debray, because like the genetic legacy of PERSPECTIVES

40 December 17, 2011 vol xlvi no 51 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

the species, they are the cultural legacy of

communities. (He even raises, inter alia,

the question whether mediology can become

to semiology what ecology is to biosphere.)

But the new visual, sound and sign technologies are geared, instead, to "globalise one

sole political economy of videospheric consciousness which risks fostering harsh conditions for those who deviate from or disturb its status quo". These are technologies

of standardisation rather than difference

and divergence. Their product, says Debray,

is of uniform value, just like power output

whether from sun, water, wind or atom is

all expressed as kilowatt-hour.

If Fordism typifies the industrial revolution at its height, its counterpart in the

information revolution is Murdochism.

Both systems ply standardisation and

homogenisation. Ford intruded into the

family, home and even the body of the

workers to ensure that they were physically and mentally fit to give their best. Their

sexual lives were monitored, their alcohol

intake reined in by prohibition, and their

morality was under constant scrutiny. As

Gramsci (1996 reprint) observes in his

Prison Notebooks, "American industrialists

are concerned to maintain the continuity

of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of the worker. It is in their interest to

have a stable, skilled, labour force, a permanently well adjusted complex , because

the human complex (the collective worker)

of an enterprise is also a machine which

cannot, without considerable loss, be taken

to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts". Gramsci astutely forecasts

both the surveillance state and the intrusive information age when he observes:

The attempts made by Ford with the aid of a

body of inspectors to intervene in the private

lives of his employees and to control how

they spend their wages and how they lived is

an indication of these tendencies...these

tendencies are yet private, but they could

become, at a certain point, state ideology.

And they did, so much so that the citizen,

even in liberal democracies, has been deconstructed, classified and archived in data

bases which serve both the profit agenda of

the market and the security alarmism of the

state. They are, moreover, insinuated into

the practice of contemporary media and

pop culture. The genre of reality TV which

is a rage today is, for the most part, a

showcasing, for the entertainment and

vicarious participation of the viewers, the

private phobias, maladjustments or mismatches in the relationships between

members of a social group or a family. All

that happens behind closed doors and

would normally be considered private is

displayed under the intense unrelenting

scrutiny of cameras for all the public to behold. This is a modern spectacle, a psychological-thriller equivalent of the lion and

the gladiator in the stadium. Pulp psychology rules the roost. The candid camera –

both its jocular and sting variety – does not

respect any limits of privacy. Even the internet, although purportedly a realm of anonymity, seems to end up constructing the

self as a commodity by showcasing it as a

cyber shop window or web page, and publicising the personal through what seems a

process of compulsive social networking.

The Hollywood blockbuster, Independ

ence Day

of 1996 is a pointer to how technology in the garb and gizmo-hood of science fiction sublimates an implicit hegemonic intent into a noble and altruistic

theme – in this case a future unification of

humankind occasioned by the threat from

an extraterrestrial enemy. The plot is about

an alien invasion of the earth. No less than

the president of the United States (US),

who happens to be a fighter pilot, leads the

counter offensive. The forces he commands

are drawn from across all nations of the

world – a unanimous international fighting

force. After much spatial blitzkrieg the

world is saved from being colonised, or

destroyed, or whatever it was those weird

aliens set out to do. The rub comes at the

end. In a state of the world address just

before this historic victory, the president of

the US announces, as if fulfilling a long

nourished aspiration of peoples across the

world, that henceforth the fourth of July

would be celebrated not as American independence day, but as world independence

day. The telling-ness of the title kicks in.

The film was one of the highest grossers

ever until 1996, and significantly, collected

more overseas than within the US. Its success, like its theme, was emphatically global.

The hegemony operative here is what

the scholar on media and cultural studies,

Aida Hozic calls "neo-Gramscian". It is persuasive rather than coercive. The hegemon

presents its "own interests as universal and

objective and thereby create(s) willing

followers of its own vision". Hozic contrasts this with the "neo-realist" hegemony

model of Pax Americana, where the dominant state calls the shots and determines

the shape of interstate relations.

Curious Intersection

Aida Hozic's (1999) study of the curious intersection of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and

the Pentagon ("Uncle Sam Goes to Siliwood:

of Landscapes, Spielberg and Hegemony")

offers useful insights into how technology,

and its fetishisation, bring these unlikely

partners on the same page and subserve a

hegemonic agenda. Computer companies,

like Silcon Graphics in the California belt,

which earlier depended on the US military

establishment for its funding and R&D work,

began to turn, in the 1990s, to Hollywood

for work. Even by the late 1970s, Hollywood was in the process of a makeover,

having stepped out of the producer and

director driven studio system into the more

difficult turf of distributors and merchandisers. The star system and the exorbitant

fees stars commanded prompted a rebel

group including George Lucas and Steven

Spielberg to seek low budget alternatives,

to substitute the star with his virtual-digital

equivalent. Lucas' Star Wars (1977) and

Spielberg's ET (1982) were the first expressions of this dissidence. Stars were replaced

with technology and special effects. Lucas'

Industrial Lights and Magic (ILM) and

Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG also initiated

changes in the mode of production and

distribution, restoring, on the one hand, the

producer as key functionary, and adopting,

on the other, a union-friendly approach.

Spielberg, observes Hozic, was able to

get the best animators to work for him

because he allowed them authorial entitlements and a share of the profits.

From these independent beginnings,

the digital technology driven cinema has

now become a cultural assertion of the US

military-industrial complex. The technology of simulation and image generation

were similar for Pentagon and Hollywood.

The line between video gaming and electronic warfare blurred to such an extent

that the theatre of war became a virtual

theatre of the absurd for Baudrillard

(1995)

when he declared that the Gulf

war never took place – so unilateral,

simulated and hyper real was its conduct. PERSPECTIVES

Economic & Political Weekly EPW December 17, 2011 vol xlvi no 51 41

The Hollywood-Pentagon mix proved

volatile hits on the screen, unleashing

sci-fi monoliths single-handedly redeeming

American humaneness from dystopias.

These digital, special-effects-suffused, filmic

products, with their techno-icons also lent

themselves better to licensing rights and

branding and to a corollary retail chain of

merchandising.

Aida Hozic points out that the dual-use

technology regime under the Clinton

administration intended to promote a

civilian-military industrial base gave a fillip to this nexus and further diffused the

difference between entertainment, surveillance and warfare. "Systems for monitoring

ozone data are used in digital imaging for

special effects…submarine sound detection technology is used in music recording,

image generation technology, which served

in missile rehearsal, has been turned into

a part of computer game software." The

civilian aspect of dual-use technology by

no means extended to the freewheeling

public sphere as we know it; it was showcased in flight simulators or submarines

or virtual reality war games installed in

theme parks and malls or such other

ostensibly public spaces which were enclaves of private profit. This "Disneyfication" and its variation of game/theme

parks were essentially a process of private

property masquerading as public space.

Hozic explains how a digital alliance of

academic institutions in the Silicon Valley

belt, R&D establishments like the Media Lab

of the MIT, and corporate sponsors including Disney, Sony, Philips, Nintendo, Lego,

Sega, Nike, Microsoft, Intel and Viacom

has built on the Silicon Valley-HollywoodPentagon nexus to create diverse cultural

products delivered online and offline.

Globally, Hollywoodisation not only

sealed the wellspring of the French new

wave of the late 1950s to the early 1970s, but

also systematically infiltrated and deracinated the mainstream national cinemas

of the world – so much so that today the

dubbed Hollywood film sits pretty, like

a strange but familiar cultural squatter,

on prime-time television cutting across

national and local languages and cultures,

whether in Europe, Asia or Africa. It is no

longer quaint, let alone anachronistic, to

see and hear American characters on the

screen spout Tamil, or Telugu, or Hindi, as

the Hollywood meta-narrative unspools

in such disparate ethnic settings.

Hollywood adversely affects the local

cinema industry both in terms of the market

and creative expression. Voices of concern

have already been raised in Kerala against

Hollywood products further eroding an

already precarious industry ravaged by high

star-system-driven costs. Given the expatriate extent of this, even if narrow, Malayalam

market, it may not get to the situation in

neighbouring Karnataka where the industry

has imposed a blanket ban on films dubbed

into Kannada from any language. The Tamil

cinema, with its wider film-friendly mass

market base, has shown greater resilience

and added dubbed Hollywood to its indiscriminate, if robust, mix which spans the

countryside with idealised feudal katta pan

chayats (or kangaroo courts), middle and

upper class city-centric milieus and the

hybridisation that globalisation brings to

different segments of society.

Tailing Hollywood

Bollywood, while continuing to leverage

its unique selling proposition of the songand-dance "item" number (as it is called),

has tailed Hollywood into the metropolitan

mindset of consumerism and conspicuous

consumption and readjusted its sights to

make the upper middle class and its NRI

counterpart its principal constituency.

Whereas the original inspiration, in Hollywood, for the hi-tech sci-fi special effects movie was as a counter to the bane of

the star system, in both Bollywood's and

Kollywood's (as Tamil filmdom is called)

imitative version, the star undergoes a

prosthetic transmogrification and becomes

a technological extension of himself. The

robotised Rajnikanth of the Tamil film

Enthiran

and cyborgised Shahrukh Khan of

Ra One

in Hindi mark a self-transcendence

from superstardom to supra-stardom.

There is hardly any rural-ness in the

mainstream Hindi cinema today. The riteof-passage leitmotif of the 1970s and 1980s,

where the village rustic, as he moves into

the city, at once sheds his innocence and becomes socially mobile, is no longer a thematic concern precisely when by all

statistical accounts, urbanisation is at its

acutest in India.

Satellite delivery makes it no longer

necessary to replicate hundreds of release

prints of a film and cart the reels in cans to

the theatres. Digital dissemination should,

ideally, make for a de-massification of the

medium and enable devolved distribution

and reach. What has happened, instead, is

that the traditional multi-tiered exhibition

system – with the A class circuit of theatres

in cities, B class in townships and semiurban areas and C class temporary touring

sheds in the villages – has collapsed and is

being rapidly replaced by a bundling of

screens in the expensive and exclusive

one-stop-shop facility of the multiplex.

The market, including in print and television, has become segmented and stratified so that it is less and less one of "mass"

media. The media themselves have become

more and more class self conscious, with

little going for those below a set purchasing

power threshold. The lower you are in the

social and economic scale, seems the moral

and the model, the less relevant you are to

the media, either as subject or consumer.

The absence of cross media restrictions

in India has paved the way for monopolies

straddling the different sectors like print,

television, radio and cyber media. Profit

maximisation, rather than any commitment to the citizen's right to be informed,

drives the news media. Real and imagined

threats to freedom of the press are conjured

up to keep the media market protected

and yielding huge returns.

Lobbies for both maintaining and dismantling foreign direct investment norms

in the Indian news media are essentially

driven by the profit mantra – the one to

keep their empires protected and competition at bay, and the other to make fresh

market forays with powerful foreign alliances. Both, though, are quick to cite the

principle of the freedom of the press, or

danger thereto, to press their claims. The

ludicrous extent to which the bogey of

press freedom can be invoked strikes home

when the big media houses editorially

deplore the latest wage board recommendations on the salary structure for working

journalists as a threat to the free press.

What takes the cake, however, is the disingenuous attempt by the media baronage, a

few years back, to make heredity and family

the insurance against foreign invasion.

Setting themselves up as the Indian Media

Group, the members of this cartel actually

had the gall to suggest to the government PERSPECTIVES

42 December 17, 2011 vol xlvi no 51 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

that, to prevent foreign infiltration in the

print and broadcast sectors, a mandatory

51% rights "should be vested in one Indian

family or one Indian group".

This is not to suggest that there is no

threat to the Indian media from outside.

With the US and European markets saturated, the transnational heavyweights have

been eyeing the Indian market as the new

frontier. The big ticket acquisitions and

mergers, which marked the US media scene

in the late 1990s, are now happening here.

An investigative audit on Murdoch's diverse

holdings in India, both direct and through

Indian proxies, across sectors of the media,

may well present an alarming picture of

information and cultural control. (Indeed,

a timely exercise for a concerned neutral

body, say, like the Press Council of India,

would be to map the media in the country

to ascertain who owns what, and how.) But

the indigenous big media have been fatuous and self-serving in their response to

the foreign investor at the door.

Skewed TV Growth

The growth of the television industry in

India is peculiarly skewed and distorted

by entry barriers, not in terms of access to

satellite transponder or facility to uplink,

but at the market-ruled distribution end.

The distribution fees charged by the mega

cable TV and Direct to Home (DTH) operators are exorbitant and vary whimsically,

in the absence of any set tariff card, from

channel to channel. As a result small,

even medium sized, ventures do not have

a fighting chance of making it to the

charmed circle of a national DTH or digital

cable served viewership, or even of being

carried in the prime or adjacent bands in

the analogue cable networks.

The situation makes a mockery of the

1995 Supreme Court ruling

that airwaves

are public property. They seem, for all practical purposes, more like private property.

This, in effect, defeats the purpose of

licensing, for what does it benefit a channel

to have the right to telecast without the

means to be seen? In a context where hundreds of channels – over 700 at last count

– are jostling for popular notice, the state

should be building the infrastructure

network, the information super highway,

to handle this traffic equitably and efficiently. Instead, a few big DTH and cable TV

players have set up their own carriageways

with their own tollbooths charging rates that

are prohibitive for the bulk of the traffic.

The government, if anything, has compounded the problem by making the financial profile required of applicants for new

TV channels more demanding. The net

worth qualification of the applicant for a

news channel has been raised steeply from

Rs 3 crore to Rs 20 crore, and for non-news

channels from Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 5 crore.

The new norms, ostensibly to keep nonserious applicants away, weigh heavily in

favour of moneybags and high net worth

entities, rather than professionals in the

field. Not unsurprisingly, the extant industry takes no objection to these changes, its

only quarrel being with the penal clause of

a possible revocation of a channel's licence

if it violates, five times over the 10-year

contractual period, the prescribed programming and advertising codes.

With much of the turf taken, the hope

for independent democratic media turns to

the internet, with its promise of liberated

bandwidths and devices like audio pod

casts and Internet Protocol Television

(IPTV) to provide cross-media versatility.

India, with less than 10% of its population

having access to the net, may yet be on the

wrong side of the digital divide. But the

rate of growth in connectivity here is

among the fastest in the world. According

to a recent industry estimate (KPCB),

the

year on year growth during the period

2007 to 2010 was of the order of 43%. It

may not be far-fetched to imagine a not

too distant future where the plural energy

of Indian culture unleashed on the net

blazes a different and unique trail. But

that hope needs to be tempered by what

we see happening to the net in a country

like the US with near 80% penetration and

a longer experience with the medium.

In a very recent joint study ("The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism"),

John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney (2011) take stock of the role and implications of internet 20 years after it was

made available to the public. Their finding, alarmingly, is that what once held the

promise of an open public sphere is slowly

being taken over by giant monopolies. In

fact digital capitalism, it turns out, is more

vicious than other forms of capitalism

because it creates greater and more acute

market concentration. The KPCB study

cited earlier and released in October 2011,

confirms this trend. The US mega quartet

– Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook –

predominate the internet. Apple's revenue

in 2010 was $76,283 million and its market value in 2011 stood at $373 billion.

Through iTunes, it has 87% of the market

share in digital music downloads and

some 70% of the MP3 player market.

Google is a not so close a second with

revenue in 2010 of $29,321 million and

market value in 2011 of $177 billion. But it

controls 70% of the search engine market

and has a far greater global spread, with at

least 80% of its over 1,000 million monthly

unique visitors in August 2011 coming from

outside the US. The corresponding figures

for Amazon are $34,204 (revenue in 2010)

and $108 billion (market value in 2011).

Facebook's market value in 2011 was $77

billion (the revenue figure is not available)

whereas eBay has a market value of $42 billion the same year and revenue of $9,156 in

2010. Microsoft, Intel and Cisco are among

the other big players with monopoly clout.

The big players create the most visible

and repeat-hit hot properties on the net and

erect barriers to prevent others eroding

their business concentration. What they

have redeemed and fenced off and developed is where consumers aggregate and

transact business most – the rest of the net

seems relative terra incognita. Michael

Wolff of Wired magazine shows how the

concentration grows and accretes and does

not disburse or diffuse over the so-called

long tail that Chris Anderson (the founder

of Wired) enthused about: the top 10 websites accounted for 31% of US page views in

2001, 40% in 2006 and close to 75% in 2010.

Threatening the Net

This array of organised monopolistic power

is contesting the liberative power and

potential of internet as a space which enables and empowers peer to peer activities,

the open source movement, a user driven

knowledge domain like Wikipedia, a browser like Mozilla Firefox, a site with a nose

for anything under wraps like WikiLeaks

(which took the corridors of power across

the world by storm and is struggling to

outmanoeuvre a concerted financial blockade), or the viral power of social sites for

mass mobilisation. PERSPECTIVES

Economic & Political Weekly EPW December 17, 2011 vol xlvi no 51 43

Foster and McChesney call this the

paradox of the internet akin to, they

elaborate, the Lauderdale Paradox in

economics which deals with the conflict of

interest between public wealth and private

riches – public wealth understood as "all

that man desires as useful or delightful for

him", and private riches as "all that man

desires as useful or delightful for him which

exists in a degree of scarcity". Thus it is scarcity that makes the difference, and helps

make private riches out of public wealth. If

what is naturally and plentifully available –

like air, water or food – were rendered

scarce, they would acquire an exchange

value as against their user value. The paradox went through many hands and filters

including Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, and

Marx adapted it to argue – and this became

a key element of his Capital – that the conflict between user value and exchange value

was germane to capitalistic production.

Marx, further, drew on Edward Gibbon

Wakefield's take on the political economy of

colonisation. Wakefield found that the free

availability of land in the new colonies like

America, Canada and New Zealand created

a shortage of wage labour because workers could set themselves up independently

as subsistence farmers. The solution to the

problem was to artificially inflate the price

of land and encourage absentee landlordism, thus keeping land out of the reach of

potential wage labour, or the mass of the

people. Similarly, by creating and developing select enclaves of heavy traffic and

commerce in the internet space, the digital

capitalist seeks to create artificial scarcity

and high exchange value for them. Against

this, the use value of the vast freewheeling realm of the net has to be redeemed

and reinstated.

At another level, these virtual walled

gardens in cyberspace are a throwback to

the enclosure movements in England and

Wales where "open" land that belonged to

the community at large was systematically

taken over and, even without physical

fencing, began to be owned in "severalty"

– a euphemism for the many who cornered

it in what E P Thomson called a "plain

enough case of class robbery". The striking difference, of course, is that the appropriators on the net today are fewer in

number, far more concentrated and far

more totalising in their control.

On the other hand, the net has, with the

Seattle protests against the WTO in 1999 and

up until the current Occupy Wall Street

movement, become the agency par excellence for popular mobilisations against

the big and the powerful. Its viral, virtual

energy can be harnessed to topple absolutist

regimes, as the Egyptian and Tunisian

experiences have shown. The natural champions of such a net-scape should be those in

the vanguard of the knowledge economy –

the organic intellectuals, in the Gramscian

sense, of this era. Not coincidentally, we

find the intellectual as a potential counterhegemon being invoked repeatedly in a succession of works by the intellectuals themselves; almost like a self-awareness of their

manifest responsibility. Foucault, Derrida,

Bourdieu, Said and Chomsky have all dwelt

on the role of the intellectual in reframing

contemporary society. Where they succumb

to the laws of the market (and become, as

Bourdieu puts it, heteronomous), or where

they capitulate to the temptation of the

media, they legitimise and subserve the

prevailing hegemonic forces. But when they

do not lend themselves to be co-opted by the

market and position themselves, consciously

and concertedly, against the current, they

may well trigger the force to reverse it.

Notes

1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his "Futurist

Manifesto" in the French paper La Figaro in February 1909. Primarily a movement in the arts, it

was breathlessly excited about technology and the

future and impatient with intellectuals, museums,

libraries, feminism and "all utilitarian cowardice".

Futurism dovetailed into fascism as Marinetti

himself became an acolyte of Mussolini.

2 French biologist and cyber analyst, Joel de

Rosney revels in neologisms like cybionte, conceived as a global super organism of which we are

all neurons. The internauts themselves organise

the global meta computer realm and its denizens

constitute a pronetaire who, like Marx's proletariat, unite as a productive force of change.

3 Debray's (1967) Revolution in the Revolution? was

an iconic work, inspired by Che, on guerrilla warfare

in Latin America. When he was taken into custody

in Bolivia, Jean Paul Sartre, expressing solidarity

before a mass audience in Paris on 30 May 1967,

said, as reported by Le Monde: "Regis Debray has

been arrested by the Bolivian authorities, not for

having participated in guerrilla activities but for

having written a book". He turned to contemplation

of a different kind in later life, creating the discipline

of "mediology", which sought, in his words, to "view

history by hybridising technology and culture"

(interview to Wired magazine).

4 The film was directed by Roland Emmerich. The

cast included Will Smith as a fighter pilot and Bill

Pullman as President Thomas Whitmore. The

combined gross collection at the box office in the

US and outside was $816,969,000. It won the Oscar for visual effects in 1996.

5 "Siliwood" conveys the mix of Silicon Valley and

Hollywood.

6 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1995. It is

a collection of three essays: "The Gulf War Will Not

Take Place", "The Gulf War Is Not Really Taking

Place", and "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place", all

originally published in the French paper Liberation

and Guardian between January and March 1991.

7 Enthiran, which cost $36 million and was directed by S Shankar, was released on 1 October 2010,

along with its dubbed versions, Robot in Hindi

and Robo in Telugu.

8 Ra One, budgeted at $30.5 million and scripted

and directed by Anubhav Sinha, was released on

26 October 2011.

9 The Supreme Court ruling given on 5 February 1995

by justice P B Sawant and justice S Mohan in the

case between Union of India vs Cricket Association of

Bengal, said that airwaves or frequencies are a public property; their use has to be controlled by a public authority in the interests of the public and to

prevent the invasion of their rights; since the electronic media involves the use of the airwaves, this

factor creates an inbuilt restriction on its use as in

the case of any other public property.

10 The study, "Internet Trends 2011" by the venture

capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers

(KPCB) was released at the Web 2.0 summit in

San Francisco, CA, in October.

References

Barthes, Roland (1972 print): "Myth Today" in Roland

Barthes (ed.), Mythologies (New York: Noonday

Press).

Baudrillard, Jean (1989 print): "The Ecstasy of Communication" in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: