Media ecology: some random thoughts

Taken from http://www.hindu.com/op/2008/05/04/stories/2008050451461400.htm K.E. Eapen
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Grandmas, grandpas and sundry elders didn’t have the childhood pleasures and pains of media spread which the present youth exploit. The Internet and mobile phones are recent; so also the world-wide-web. Mobile phones, no more a prestige symbol, are possessed largely by the teenagers. This gadget, the size of a match box, is of varying capacities. Some have all the communication facilities built-in. A generation ago, with no BSNL or equivalent, I had to be in the queue for almost a decade before getting a landline. Today they are on the decline.

The media of yore were owned locally or globally by families (The Hindu, Malayala Manorama), corporations (BBC of Britain) political parties (Organiser by the RSS, Desabhimani by the CPI-M), government (as used to be in Zambia), or even by workers (Milwaukee Journal). The internet belongs to all, including the proactive youth. It has no private or public ownership.

A reader scans the daily newspapers or listens to radio or watches television. These are one-way media, unlike the mobile phone which is like a two-edged sword capable of cutting both ways. It is as much a receiver as a sender of information, or entertainment or what you will. Billions of words now swim through or clutter the oceans of new media space. Compare this to our younger days of the 6-8 page daily, a few cinema houses (mainly tent-shows), and the government controlled and limited radio-television.

The 21st century question is: is there a qualitative jump with the quantitative communication explosion? The swelling flow of material through multi-channels is worrisome. Along with it is emerging an interactive (computers for example) and mobile media society.

As I sit late afternoons at the High Street Park, Bangalore East, I see the well-dressed older generation in a group, lost in gossip — personal, social, political — or as passive readers of magazine or supplement pages someone has brought along. All their worldly possession seems to be well polished black shoes, thick glasses, and straight, stiff, and strong sticks. In isolated nooks and corners of the Park, squat the semi-clad, immodest young in pairs, as active producers and consumers of excited multi-lingual, intimate but artificial talk via their mobiles. No senior citizen brings along such handy gadgets with which a click can contact heaven or hell.

Negative influence
Irrespective of age, we all live in a media forest, not necessarily of our choice. It shapes the desires, values, and knowledge which guide our everyday life. The elders continue to worry about the negative influence the media exert on the young. The teenager, for example, goes to multiplexes not for mere watching of movies. The multiplex is a package deal. This is no place to expand on its communication exercises.

The media have many positive roles for nation building. There are the complex challenges of media’s pre-determined use for modernisation: for developing agriculture, for ensuring clean drinking water, etc. We produce enough food for all, though its distribution has not been equitable. Is the latter a media failure?

Scientists goaded us — prompted mainly by American interests — that a Satellite Instructional Television venture can write new lessons on Indian blackboards to educate, ignoring all the millennia-old writings already on them, not easily erasable. After all, the media are essentially channels of entertainment; and that is what is on, as grandmas, grandpas, and grandchildren helplessly watch the screens that have invaded our sitting rooms. The media are as much a bane as a boon.