| McLuhan was very critical about the media when he said "medium is message." After about four decades since Marshall McLuhan published his world famous book "The Medium is the Message," the entire world is coming to terms with his warning. In the first four years of the new millennia, McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" has become the most frequently referred book in the field of mass media and communication. And perhaps McLuhan will remain the most influential and dominant figure for the next five or more decades. Why has he become so dominant and influential? One answer could be that the book he published in the late 60s was extremely prophetic.
"Who is omnipotent?" These days, ask any industrialist, or any business tycoon this question and the answer will invariably be "media." They know well how the media rules the world. It was my lack of knowledge to assume that our industrialists consider Maoists omnipotent. One of my friends, an industrialist and a businessman, told me that instead of the Maoists it is still the media that they consider omnipotent.
McLuhan's "medium" could be anything like CNN, BBC, VoA, Zee TV, Nepal 1, NTV, Radio Nepal, the local FMs and so on. And if all of them are "mediums," they are messages also. If NTV and Zee TV are "mediums," they are "messages" in themselves.
How can "medium" be "message"? It's a question that has been troubling the philosophers and psychologists ever since McLuhan tried to answer it. The scholars like Theodore Adorno and other hard-boiled Marxists like Antonio Gramski interpreted the riddle in Marxist perspective and rebuked the debilitating effect of capitalism. In simple terms, and in the superficial level, medium is message because medium always affects (and distorts) the message that it conveys. There could be multiple messages and multiple realities, if there are multiple mediums. This thesis should be easily clear, at least to the audiences of Nepal who have been facing the problem daily. If one happens to watch the news coverage of both the government-owned and private channels, s/he would get confused. Whom should the viewer believe? There are two completely different news story of a single event. This is how "medium" can become "message."
The effect of advertisements can also show how "medium" can be "message." We are well aware what messages most of the Nepali commercial advertisements are giving to the public by means of media manipulation. Doctors, film stars and other so-called national heroes are dragged into the commercial advertisements to recommend the most low-quality products. On the one hand, they are virtually blackmailing the public by selling their popularity, and on the other hand, they are mesmerizing the illiterate public by blurring the difference between the message, the medium and the media. Can an illiterate woman deny what a doctor recommends in her television set every evening? I have seen many women in the village replacing breast milk with powder milk manufactured by the Nestle Company after televisions came in their villages. Doesn't a child insist on buying noodles everyday for his lunch if a class teacher in the television ad teaches him to do so?
The hard-boiled leftists are in fact right on this count. They say that hypnotizing consumers with colorful advertisements is a capitalistic influence, where the industrialists determine what we should desire. We become mere "desiring machines." They think they have full authority to assert what we should crave for. The audience and the consumers have no rights to recommend what they should be informed of. In the absence of a regulating body and proper laws, mass media have become a place where any buffoonery can be practiced. At this, the poor ad aesthetics in Nepali mass media do not have much to say about the "medium" and the "message." They would see no difference between the two.
But there have been people who have seen the difference and have explained how "medium" can become "message." In the late 70s, the two scholars, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri (often known as D&G) became popular as they tried to deal with the question through an interdisciplinary approach. They applied psychoanalysis and Marxism in their study and came up with the key words "Schizophrenia" and "Capitalism." Their book "Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism" explored that media has a psychological effect on the audience and it leads to the disease called "Schizophrenia." A schizophrenic audience is a divided personality. He faces the problem of choices and depression.
For instance, take again the television as a "medium." We watch TV everyday and it is a very familiar and common thing in our life. We are unaware how it controls us - consciously or unconsciously. Someone, a researcher in mass media, has said that in most of the modern houses the television set is turned on at seven in the morning and left on all day.
And its audiences are totally metamorphosed, somewhat like the Kafkaesque insect. Mother becomes a "mass women," father becomes a "mass man," and children "mass children." Another researcher Charles Van Doren further ridicules that "mass woman" watches it while she is at home, and "mass children" watch it when they return from school. The whole family views it for a few hours in the evening. He proves how the idiot box has become really hypnotic. It is indeed an undisputed fact, especially in the LDCs like Nepal. The TV set has become an indispensable part of the recipe for most of the families. There must be something about the flickering blue of the tube that mesmerizes them.
However, there is nothing wrong with the growing attraction for the media or the medium. The problem is that the "medium" has become the "message" itself. The medium is under the (negative) grip of industrialists and business tycoons. Its symptoms are less visible at this hour but it will erupt like the epidemic of HIV/AIDS. Serious consideration, I think, should be given to this issue from both the governmental and non-governmental side. Why don't we try to make the difference discernible (difference between medium and message) at least in our media? If we could initiate little efforts in this regard, we could be the icebreakers in the process of reforming the mass media about which very few have even thought. Let medium be medium and message be message.
[Originally published in The Kathmandu Post Monday September 27, 2004] |
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