Extremely happy to introduce our new guest writer Sunalini Kumar. Sunalini will be writing here on the issues of media and politics. She is presently a lecturer in the Political Science department at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University.
i’ve been receiving dire threats from meenu reminding me of my overambitious promise made about a week ago, to write something for sacredmediacow. since then i have developed severely cold feet, wondering (like any sane human being would), if i had anything to say at all, and if not, why waste print, even of a virtual kind. but something happened just now that has brought the old fire back into the crusty veins. or is it the crusty fire back into the old veins? doesn’t matter. the point i wanted to make is, the utter bankruptcy (sorry if i sound like a veteran parliamentarian with that word) of 24 hour news is something that has been apparent to all for a while now. but the sweet irony of NDTV becoming according to many (including itself) the sole voice of reason in this anything-goes-will-stoop-as-low-as-it-takes media jamboree is something that has been amusing me and angering me for a long time. take the evening news bulletin that i just sprang angrily out of watching for instance. in the bulletin, NDTV decided to leap onto the moral highground as its opening gambit, detailing the numerous ways in which other news channels have made news into a farce about godmen, superstitious village folk and bizarre rutals practised in the hinterland (this is true). looking suitably pained, the terribly genteel news anchor on NDTV hindi could almost not speak with embarrassment at what her colleagues from other channels were up to. this led to much hand-wringing on the Problem with 24-hour news, and how does one survive and do sensible news (insert ‘as the sole voice of reason’ here) in this tamasha.
Published by matti.pohjonen June 27th, 2007
in Ads, India diary, Theory and astrology.
In the university circles there has been a lot of talk about how we understand non-Western contexts to avoid the eurocentric roots of theory and research. De-Westernizing media studies, they call it. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Non-western metaphysics. Etc.
So, tell me, is this one example of how it happens in the “real world?” I read this article this morning and found its suberbly bizarre. But then I thought - why not? If communications and media theorists are now taking the Upanishads seriously, why should the ad-world be restricted to methods that were devised by some loonie American communications theorists in the 1950s and 1960s.
Read as follows:
JWT India has unleashed a proprietary strategic planning tool for brand development, called Brand Chakras. The inspiration for inventing this tool comes from the Chakra system from the Upanishads as laid out in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Mythili Chandrasekar, senior vice-president, corporate initiatives, JWT, has devised this tool.
According to JWT executives, this is the first system of understanding human behaviour based on the seven major nerve/energy centres in the human body, which has, so far, never been applied to brands.
Published by matti.pohjonen June 25th, 2007
in Internet and technology.
Following my ramblings about social sites such as FaceBook (as all my friends I know suddenly got into it and it now includes obscure groups on Schizoanalysis and Deleuze etc), here is an interesting article from BoingBoing about the class divisions of online communities. It cites a recent study looking into two of the most popular sites, MySpace and FaceBook. Saying:
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
Dear statistically-imagined audience-segments of Sacredmediacow,
So … I was lured into writing something about online communities and audiences for the Paris conference. Usually, when I hear the word audience, to be honest, I tend to run the other way and scream. I find the debates rather futile (see Baudrillard). But as I had to write about audiences, in the paper I argued that there are now two ways of imagining audiences in the web 2.0 scene today: as participant-producers and as statistical data that legitimises and guides business decisions. It is the raw force of numbers behind participant-production that sells: MySpace, a hundred million clicks; YouTube, another hundred mill; FaceBook … you get the point. However, sometimes we do find some interesting that is happening with audiences in the online evironment that makes me smile occasionally. Such as the following I found this morning, from ContentSutra (also see AcencyFaqs). I quote:
Online Advertisers Thirsty for Reliable Data - Interactive’s Naifr
By Anupama Chandrasekaran - Sun 24 Jun 2007 10:17 PM PST
Published by matti.pohjonen June 22nd, 2007
in blogosphere, music and video.
While Som is rummaging in Morocco at a music festival, Angad learning the tricks at his new job and Meenu criss-crossing India, I realised I spend a little bit too much time online and with the computer. So I found this interesting article that reminds me occasionally of the Funkadelic song lyrics: “Shit, goddamn, get off your ass and jam.” Hmmmm …. I wonder if there is a Hindi version of this? I leave this to the resident genius behind Remainsofthedesi to find this for us. Anyway, read out the following and see if you suffer from a SMC, MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, Jaiku etc etc burnout:
Facebook, MySpace and Social Burnout
by: Roger Dooley
Here is the first behind-the-scenes look at the paper I will be presenting in Paris in a month. Its not a full paper but a rather caffeinated and quick outline I made and submitted for the 12 minutes or so that I will have time to ramble. There are something like 200-300 other speakers all rushing through their “great ideas” and “findings” so you see the information overload that we will have to deal with. In any case, I will attach it both HERE as a .pdf if somebody wants to see what these things involve (as if I would know either!) or give comments or suggestions. Also, as I gave the abstract earlier HERE, which pretty much is also the introduction, I will present the conclusion of my paper draft here if full. Perhaps, it tangentially also overlaps some of the hooblah around the future of the SMC website and our conference and other activities; details that we shall announce here shortly as soon as we know how much resources the God of Mone … er … Knowledge will bestow upon us for such a project.
So I conclude:
Published by Somnath Batabyal June 18th, 2007
in Som's Blog and tabloid.
Our friend Som, brave and injured and sporting a broken thumb (from Cricket) has now gone to Morocco for vacation. Meanwhile, putting his column up as usual. Click on image or HERE to read full page.
In our neverending quest for transgressive and revolutionary activity in the subcontinent, we’ve so far seen Lal the-chicken-eating-cow. We’ve also seen our dear friend Suzi, the Pakistani elephant who lathi-smacks his master for food. We now welcome to this proud brother/sisterhood a new addition: Gabbar the elephant. It’s amazing how the lives of our friend from the animal kingdom resemble the lives of PhD students. What we do for bananas. Well, you do the connections … from CNN (read full article HERE):
NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) — An elephant in eastern India has sparked complaints from motorists who accuse it of blocking traffic and refusing to allow vehicles to pass unless drivers give it food, a newspaper has reported.
The Hindustan Times said Monday the elephant was scouting for food on a highway in the eastern state of Orissa, forcing motorists to roll down their windows and get out of the car.
“The tusker then inserts its trunk inside the vehicle and sniffs for food,” local resident Prabodh Mohanty, who has come across the elephant twice, was quoted as saying.
“If you are carrying vegetables and banana inside your vehicle, then it will gulp them and allow you to go.”
Folks, some of the details of our upcoming conference have been now sorted out. We are glad to announce the line-up for the key speakers. These are the established names that usually introduce and end such conferences and say many nice things about us in general; a bit like celebrities at events that bring visibility to the different activities that might not be otherwise noticed. So warning: lots of names with capitalised titles must now follow.
OK. As our opening address, we have Professor Paul Webley, the Director of SOAS. As our keynote speaker, we have Dr. John Hutnyk, the Academic Director and Convenor for the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University, and who has written extensively on the popular culture in India (see also his blog). And for our endnote speaker, we have Professor Laura Mulvey, a professor at Birbeck University and who (for those interested in film theory) is a rather important figure and now also works with Indian cinema. Do check them out. Do check us out.
Folks, for those of you who have been following the case in Pakistan of Shahzima Tariq and Shamialal Raj, our guest writer and colleague Adnan Sattar has alerted us to a column on the subject by Fatima Bhutto, grand daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Read the column here.
There have been quite a few responses today to Blair’s effort to exorcise the “evils” of the new technologies and its impact on the political debate and the mainstream media. The Guardian had another article discussing how the Blair years brought spin and scandal into mainstream political methods of communication. Perhaps the bubble of naivety has now finally bursted, friends. And Blair’s outcry we just read was the child’s last crying tantrum after looting the cookie jar: “no, no, no, this is not what I wanted to do!” The Guardian article talks about this (read full Here)
In government, Labour professionalised and politicised media handling. In November 1997 Mr Campbell went on the record, albeit using the formula of requiring journalists to refer to him as “the prime minister’s official spokesman”, and set up a strategic communications unit to think beyond headlines and enhance the prime ministerial message, by trying to reach, for instance, women’s magazines.
Published by Somnath Batabyal June 13th, 2007
in News, Panic time and Som's Blog.
Folks, just got up to see this. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has issued a scathing savagery of the UK media. It will take us a bit of time to go through the speech and understand, comment and analyse on it. But I put it up for your perusal here.
It is interesting that as he finally moves out of office, Blair feels brave enough to “take on” the media. Also his singular critic of The Independent is interesting. It is the only left wing critical paper that exists and it does take apart the Blair years. Anyway, more after mugs of coffee. Read and comment as we at SMC shall.
Published by matti.pohjonen June 12th, 2007
in Ads, Theory, audience and conferences.
And last but not least, our own Angad, who is somewhere in Bombay now. I’ll let him put up his own introduction here once he re-surfaces from meatspace into our online pastures … ’till then, here is his tentative draft for the Paris conference.
Relationships in Mumbai Advertising , based on field work at Lowe-Lintas as well as advertising training schools in Mumbai, tries to show how media effect is imagined. In this paper, I approached the relationship between advertisments and the ‘consumer’ from the way ‘agency planners’ imagine it. In particular, it outlines a journey into the advertising industry in Mumbai, culminating in my attending a series of workshops training young advertisers. Rather than assume that advertising has any effect, I take the strong nominalist position by suggesting that advertising is represented as having effect. To put it in cruder terms – there is a rhetoric about advertising having effect, amongst advertisers, PR companies and censorship councils. The imagined nature of effect, rather than any emperical or positivist reality, is the major theoretical affiliation that this paper develops.What this leads us to, ultimately, is a series of assumptions about ‘audiences’ - these audiences are imagined as being effected in particular ways - and ‘non audiences’.
Then we have our own Meenu, saving things, never killing, travelling somewhere in muggy India peacefully at this point. Meenu? Meenu! Er … I better shut up now. Here is her abstact for comments and suggestions and, why not, for some non-violent trolling…
In recent years the mainstream news media in India has indulged in much hyperbole about India’s arrival on the global stage, summed up best by the slogan “India Shining†used by the ruling BJP in the National elections in 2004. Many big blockbuster films in India have also been part of this imagining. However, recently some films have taken on more self-reflexive tones to ask critical questions of whether such euphoria is justified. Rang de Basanti (Paint it Yellow, Rakesh OmPrakash Mehra, 2006) was such a film. It rose to a cult status enthusing many with the spirit of change. The ‘Rang de Basanti phenomena’ was the term used by the news media for the anti-reservations campaign in 2006 by young upper caste students in India to protest the ‘Reservation’ policy of the Government (similar but not identical to the policy of Affirmative Action in America). How did a film about changing a corrupt Government machinery get deployed for a story against the Government’s Affirmative Action policy? While originally the film was meant as a challenge to the slogan “India Shining†it got redeployed within that very same framework. Who is the historical spectator to which this film was addressed and who were the audiences for these news stories? This paper is an attempt to understand the ways in which the film Rang de Basanti got deployed by the news media.
I killed the audience in the previous post, but Som now begs to disagree. But before I go again on my ranting soliloquy, will just put up his abstract next. Here is … again, comments and suggestions are welcome (its Som after all!).
This paper will draw from a year of ethnographic research in Indian newsrooms in 2006, specifically Star News, a 24-hour national news channel. The paper will focus on the journalists’ understanding of the audience and claim that the era of imagining the audience is over and the news producers in India have defined and captured their audience. Through a sociological and a “scientific†approach, this paper will attempt to support the claim.
a) Sociological: Who is the audience? In over 80 interviews conducted, the answers never varied. “I am the audience, my family and close friends are the audience. What I like to see is news?†Journalists come from middle or upper middle class families and thus what they want to see and therefore produce results in a homogenous content across nearly 40 news channels
As I have a secret propensity for violence but am too wimpy to carry out my libidinal desires for mass-murder, the paper I proposed for Paris wants to kill you - the audience - in bulk.  Oh, but, wait a minute! Audiences didn’t exist anymore. They were imagined all along. Ah, thank god, I finally have an alibi! Anyway, more seriously, as promised, here is the first abstract that we sumbitted to the Paris conference. It is called **DRUMROLL** “Death of an audience?” Haven’t really made up my mind if the pun here is on the Death of a Salesman or Death of the Author, for those who get the joke … but you can comment on it and give suggestions and I promise will not kill you…
The death of the audience?
Matti Pohjonen
Blogs are often quoted as examples of a more participatory mode of media production made possible by new digital technologies. One key argument has been that blogs allow for a more decentralized form of production where the hierarchical division between the writer and audience becomes less clearcut as it is with older media forms such as print newspapers and TV. Yet despite the abundance of commentary new media forms such as blogs have received in the recent years, many of the claims, however, have not been backed up by detailed empirical research.
We’ve all been busy here at SACREDMEDIACOW plotting our off-line guerilla war strategies. The first of these is a panel we are jointly presenting at the International Association for Media Communication Research (IAMCR) in Paris in end of July. This is probably the biggest gathering of communication researchers accross the world (yawn!?). It will take place at the Sorbonne, UNESCO and at the Bibliotheque Nationale for anybody interested and/or familiar with these landmarks of intellectual life in Paris; or perhaps what used the be the myth of Paris of philosophers and intellectuals but perhaps more taken over today by economic depression, American tourists looking for the “original” thing and right-wing political resurgence. Haven’t been to Paris for a year or so will be a good change to meet old friends (outside the conference) and, of course, eat well and drink good wine amongst a thousand or so academics who watch too much television, surf the Internet too much and grow grey hairs about what it all means. The organisers self-describe themselves this way:
We’ve been ocassionally dealing here with cybercrime and censorhip of the Internet in India. Angad has especially has a long-running fascination towards MMS scandals and Orkut murders and other such seedier sides of the Internet. Well, now the Delhi police has established a cyber-crime unit to tackle what is happening in the dark alleys and pastures of cyberspace.
I’m fascinated with the attempts at controlling the Internet because there seems to be a constant double-pull at play. On the one hand, the authorities want to discipline and domesticate what is going on. On the other hand, there are the more unruly centrifugal forces that try to escape control and use it in ways that are not expected. This is one reason why I used to love, for example, visiting the pirated software markets in Mumbai and Delhi, which (across India) have probably played a key role in the success and skill levels of Indian information economy by providing cheap software for people to learn from.
I predict that cybercrime will become an increasingly confrontational and turbulent space in India as multinationals begin enforcing copyright policy for especially pirated software. Especially, if the numbers they give are correct: a 100 percent rise in Internet subscribers in 6 months. That is, a million more in just 6 months! Interesting …
Published by Somnath Batabyal June 11th, 2007
in Som's Blog and tabloid.
Folks, as usual, here is my weekly column at Metro Now. Click HERE or images to read. Enjoy!
I was reading in the about a new construction project that will become prominent in the Mumbai landscape. Being a little bit of a urban planning and architecture freak, I found this fascinating. It also reminded me in an uncanny way of my earlier post.
See the following excerpt from the Guardian article:
In the most conspicuous sign yet of India’s unprecedented prosperity, the country’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building a new home in the financial hub of Mumbai: a 60-storey palace with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking.
The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles and be home for Mr Ambani, his mother, wife, three children and 600 full-time staff.
Draped in hanging gardens, the building will have a floor for a home theatre, a glass-fronted apartment for guests, and a two-storey health club. As the ceilings are three times as high as a normal building’s, the 173m (570ft) tower will only have 27 floors.
Read the full article HERE. Or read about it more HERE or HERE.
Published by Angad Chowdhry June 7th, 2007
in films and guest writer.
From our Guest Writer, Joseph Zeitlyn -
India Untouched- A people Apart- A film by Stalin K
Caste under the camera…..
Joseph Zeitlyn
There are not many cinematic outings or cultural representations of the practice of untouchability, drifting into the realm of taboo and denial as it is. That this documentary covers it is thus original in itself but its portrayal has a sense of completeness that must be viewed in the true sense of the word documentary, for document it does.
Wide ranges of interviewees divulge their pain and exclusion or prejudice and revulsion. What amazed the maker of the film however was the strong sense of hierarchy that even 6-8 year old children display for the camera, responding with natural, childish enthusiasm whilst detailing their inability to take water from a certain house and yet possessing no idea of where this knowledge came from; indeed for the maker, Stalin K it helps one; ‘get a sense of how early on these young minds are polluted with the caste sickness’. The subconscious of these innocents is juxtaposed with the shocking proponents that state their position as being ‘fundamentalist’ and explain their absolute belief in the Varna system and untouchability.
Published by matti.pohjonen June 6th, 2007
in Internet and censorship.
There was this interesting editorial in the Guardian today by Cory Doctorow, the editor of Boing-Boing, about Internet filtering and censorship. Did you know that our SACREDMEDIACOW is also censored by Internet filters (tried a computer that had one in Germany) cos it includes badbad words such as “teenage virgins” in random contexts. So we are now classified pornography and children need to be protected from us. Cory writes:
People say bad things online. They write vile lies about blameless worthies. They pen disgusting racist jeremiads, post gut-churning photos of sex acts committed against children, and more sexist and homophobic tripe than you could read - or stomach - in a lifetime. They post fraudulent offers, alarmist conspiracy theories, and dangerous web pages containing malicious, computer-hijacking code.
It’s not hard to understand why companies, government, schools and parents would want to filter this kind of thing. Most of us don’t want to see this stuff. Most of us don’t want our kids to see this stuff - indeed, most of us don’t want anyone to see this stuff.
Published by matti.pohjonen June 6th, 2007
in Panic time and animals.
First Lal, our chicken-eating cow friend; now this. From Reuters:
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani zoo is appealing for donations to help feed its sole elephant, Suzi, which gets angry and beats its keeper with a stick when its meals are late.
“When Suzi is not fed on time it holds its master’s cane in its trunk and starts beating him,” an official at the zoo in the city of Lahore told the Daily Times.
The zoo is hoping philanthropists and schools will “adopt” Suzi and pay for its food, the paper said in a report on Monday.
“We don’t have enough funds to feed Suzi and its expenses are more than our budget,” said zoo director Yousuf Pal.
Published by Somnath Batabyal June 4th, 2007
in Som's Blog and tabloid.
Folks, as usual, here is the weekly column. Click HERE or on the image to access the pdf. Enjoy!
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