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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

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. 
F
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or superseded the industrial revolution.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
1
 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,
2
 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
3
 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
4
 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")
5
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)
6
 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
7
 and cyborgised Shahrukh Khan of 
Ra One
8
 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
9
 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),
10
 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: 
Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University 
Press).
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998): On Television and Journalism
(Pluto Press).
Debray, Regis (1967):  Revolution in the Revolution? 
(Penguin).
– (1996):  Media Manifestos, (trans) Eric Rauth 
(London/New York: Verso).
Debord, Guy Ernest (1967): "La Societie du Spectacle" 
(Paris: Buchet Chastel (trans)) in Donald 
Nicholson-Smith,  The Society of the  Spectacle
(New York: Zone Books).
Feuerbach, Ludwig (1989): The Essence of Christianity
(trans) (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books).
Foster, John Bellamy and Robert W McChesney 
(2011): "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism", Monthly Review, Vol 62, Issue 10, March.
Friedman, Thomas (2005): The World Is Flat: A Brief 
History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century
(London: Penguin/Allen Lane).
Fukuyama, Francis (1993): The End of History and the 
Last Man (New York: Avon Books). 
– (1999): The Great Disruption: Human Nature and 
the Reconstruction of Social Order (New York: The 
Free Press (a division of Simon & Schuster Inc)).
Gitlin, Todd (2003): Media Unlimited: How the Torrent 
of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives
(New York: A Metropolitan/Owl Book (Henry 
Holt & Co)).
Gramsci, Antonio (1996):  Selections from the Prison 

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