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or superseded the industrial revolution.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
No comments:
Post a Comment