The Mass Media Are Dead- Long Live The Mass Media

The Mass Media Are Dead? Long Live The Mass Media Communication today has come to mean much more than the original Latin term communis that meant ‘to make common’. With the expansion of media technology the scope and definition of communication has undergone a rapid expansion. The same applies to mass communication. The simplest definition of mass communication could be – it is a process of disseminating information to an unlimited ‘mass’ of people that is physically separated from the source of the information. Following from this definition, mass medium would be the tool that would aid such mass communication. The initial dominant position of the traditional mass media like print and radio was due to the large number in which they could reproduce messages and information. In a physically large and culturally diverse country like India, however, it is difficult, almost impossible, for a single mass medium to reach or represent all segments of the society at the same time and at the same degree of intensity. This paper takes a look at how the limitations imposed on the media due to social, economic, political, cultural, linguistic and regional differences make it necessary for media to be fragmented and to, in turn, fragment its audiences. This paper specifically looks at Internet as a mass medium of today. “If the role of the mass media is to reach the masses, then Internet is today’s mass medium.”1 The rise in the popularity of the Internet has been due to its ability to reach an indeterminately large number of people and at the same time to allow the people to represent themselves on the medium at the same time. Advances in communication technologies, broadband internet connectivity and mobile phones have provided an impetus to the growth and spread of the Internet over other traditional media, both economically as well as structurally. Evolution of the Mass Media What do we perceive as a mass medium? If any medium which can communicate a message to a large audience can be termed as a mass medium, then the public address system and the displays at the entrances, platforms and overbridges become the mass media through which the railway administration reaches out information to the commuters. A month long study2 of 14 railway stations of suburban Mumbai conclude that the daily commuters found the public information system inadequate leading to discontent and demonstrations. The study suggested there should be large displays of relevant information at the entrances and overbridges showing the train timings, the platform numbers and expected time of arrival of trains were implemented by the railways immediately. This was a clear change brought about by the discontented railway passengers. Does this mean that the masses decide on the content and the popularity of the medium? Does this phenomenon apply to what are known as the traditional mass media – newspapers, radio and television? When a new medium, the internet evolved, was it a result of the discontent of the masses? What effect did the new media have on the older ones? This researcher shall attempt to extrapolate on these issues.

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The Internet as Mass Medium by Merrill Morris and Christine Ogan, Indiana University. Personal Interview with Dr S K Modak, transport economist, 29 July 2007.

Mass media has evolved in what are popularly known as the four waves. The first wave was caused by the discovery of print. As Innis, McLuhan et al have pointed out, the print medium and its result, the newspapers, brought about a radical change in communication and deeply impacted human society. Produced in masses, the newspapers could reach a large number of audiences. A serious limitation of this medium was the necessity of being literate in the language being used by the newspaper and the financial strength to purchase a newspaper or in some way have access to one. The second wave was caused by the discovery of the radio. This technology overcame the limitation of literacy. The third wave was represented by the invention of the movie camera, followed by television. The fourth wave, brought in by the invention of the computer followed by the Internet, has so far been the most far reaching of mass media. In his celebrated work ‘Understanding Media’, McLuhan pointed out that a printed paper acts as an extension of our hand, radio acts like an extension of our ears while television acts like an extension of both the eye and the ear.3 Makoto Sei argues that the computer is an extension of the brain because it frees the brain from doing certain computational and repetitive tasks. 4 The tools themselves, were a result of scientific discovery and technological innovations. Gutenberg invented the printing press, Macaroni the radio and JL Baird, the television. These innovations became an extension of the senses of man, turning them into tools of mass communication and because they were produced in large volumes and could reach large audiences, they became popular mass media. With every wave of evolution, the new mass media replaced the older one in popularity. This was mainly due to the additional extensions that the new media provided and also due to the inadequacies and limitations of the older media. The main limitation of the newspapers was that it needed a person to be literate in the language in which the newspaper was printed. The radio dispensed with the need of literacy and became instantly popular. The television added another extension of the sense of visual. Now a person could hear, as well as watch events unfolding in the world in the comfort of the living room, thus replacing the radio as the popular medium of mass communication. Thus, the radio replaced the newspaper, the television replaced the radio and the computer is fast replacing all these traditional media in terms of popularity. It must be stated, however, that none of the newer media have been able to displace the older media and all have survived in the battles for popularity and revenues. Computers and the Internet When invented, the computer was a huge device, used only by the scientists. With the invention of the transistor and the miniaturization, the computers became cheaper and the introduction of the PC (Personal Computer) by IBM made the computer affordable and popular. Initially used only as a computational device, with the invention of accessories like the mouse the computer became a word processor, a gaming device. The modem enabled the networking of computers, thus enabling the users to communicate with each other over the networks. When these networks were 3

Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man Induction Design: A Method for Evolutionary Design by Makoto Sei http://books.google.com/books?id=YpiM9VGO0dAC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA3&dq=the+computer+is+an +extension+of+the+brain&output=html&sig=FYcN4xmXPFH0K_UeMiJsr2aN2g8 4

connected together all around the world, it came to be called as the Internet – an international network of computers capable of communicating with every other computer in the network. The networked computer is arguably the most important phenomena which has affected lives all around the globe. The shift of the computer from a computational to a communicating device is perhaps the most significant mass media evolution so far. Why have the computers and the Internet become popular? The NRS 2006 figures show that the reach of internet is growing rapidly.5 The primary reason could be that the computers are an extension of the brain. The computers can create on its screen whatever the user has thought of and help distribute what is created. Thus with a word processing software, one can write and edit text or with the calculator, one can compute and with a 3D imaging software, one can create architectural models and special effects for films. The internet has affected all spheres of life. Internet allows the user to voice their opinion without the limitation of control, censorship and space on groups and communities on Yahoo and Orkut. The chat rooms on the internet allow the users to ‘talk’ with other like minded people, forge friendships. There are numerous of people getting married by knowing each other through chat rooms. There are websites on almost any subject on the earth. Typing a few words on the search engines like google or yahoo enable the user to instantly enter a virtual world of his liking. Online learning, online examinations conducted by organizations like Microsoft, Oracle and adobe have lent credibility to the process of online education. Business is conducted online by e-commerce sites and even the common man who can now browse through the bank account, pay bills online, buy garments, diamonds and grocery. One can transfer money with a click of the mouse. Children can read books, watch cartoons and get help with their homework from numerous online resources like homework.com, yahooligans.com. Sports enthusiasts can keep themselves abreast of cricket scores or football matches. The science community has loads of information available. RSS feeds, newsgroups and the websites hosted by the newspapers and the television channels provide the users the latest news from all over the world. The internet does not limit the transmission of information but provides information to and from communities and individuals all over the world. Thus you can open the Guardian, The New York Times, The Pravda, The Times of India, at the same time on your computer screen and compare and browse through the news happenings all over the world. Webcasting enables large audiences to hold live conferences. Websites like e-chaupal offer advice to farmers. The list is endless and exhaustive and this researcher can not list all the benefits the internet has. Suffice it to say that the Internet has done to mass communications what no other media has. The growing popularity of the internet can be attributed to the ‘coolness’ of the medium. McLuhan catagorised the media into ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. Hot media are the ones which offer little or no interactivity from the audiences, whereas the ‘cool’ media are the ones which allow the user to get involved. Thus, the radio is a hot medium and the telephone is a cool medium; films is a hot medium and the television is a cool medium. Similarly, the Internet is a ‘coolest’ medium. No other mass medium has offered as much interactivity as the Internet. Everything from piety to 5

http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/news/pressnews/nrscnrs2006/nrs2006keyfindings/market/stocks/ article/237197

porn is represented on the internet. This allows the user to connect to like minded people all around the globe with the click of the mouse creating huge online communities in the virtual world. The internet has, in a way brought together the fragmented societies. Fragmentation of the media. In a country like India, vast geographical, cultural and linguistic differences makes it almost impossible for a single mass medium to cater to the communication and representation needs of all the segments of the society. As a result, the media in India are fragmented. The process starts from the margins of the society, from the small local bodies who do not find representation.6 To cite a few examples, to cater to the demands from the suburbs, The Times of India had to start the Westside Plus and other supplements representing the suburbs of Mumbai. Mid-day launched the Midday Metro to cater to individual local communities. The tremendous growth of the vernacular press in the recent years is a clear indication of this phenomenon. Robin Jeffrey states that the next revolution in India will be created by the power of the vernacular press.7 When the Marathi language newspapers and books did not represent the marginalized Dalit society, the Dalit literature and newspapers emerged with a vengence. When terrestrial broadcast of the TV signal was the only way of distributing radio signals over vast areas, there were huge audiences for a very small number of channels, like Doordarshan in India. With satellite broadcast and liberalization of the media policy, there was a humungous increase in the number of channels, each catering to the demands of their selected sections of the population. Star TV has recently started Star Anand and Star Maza to reach the Bengali and the Marathi audiences, which it felt was missing. The emergence of local news channels like Thane Varta in Thane, a town near Mumbai, 7 local newspapers like Bhiwandi Varta which cater only to the needs of Bhiwandi, a communally sensitive city near Thane, the local TV channels reporting on events in suburbs of Mumbai are other examples of fragmented media. Similar changes are affecting other media. Digital radio and podcasts are dividing the audience for audio. Completely new media like the web and the mobile phones are competing with old media, dividing the audience further. The mass media, while fragmenting themselves have also fragmented the society and isolated the individuals. McLuhan believed that the ‘unforeseen consequence of mass media was the isolation of individuals from the society’.8 One can read a book in privacy, or can watch a movie at home, listen to music on the iPod, MP3 player or the FM radio in a crowd. Individuals can stay in their own world, shut off from the society while physically still being in it In computer terminology, fragmentation means random placement of data on the storage media. For example, when one saves a word file on to the hard disk of the computer, the words which we see on the screen are converted into ‘computer language’ and stored randomly on the hard disk, the storage medium. The more data one saves on the hard disk, more and more random segments of the media are created. 6

Harold Innis http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/news/pressnews/nrscnrs2006/nrs2006keyfindings/mar ket/stocks/article/237197 7

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McLuhan Marshall, The Medium is the Massage, pub

Just as the user does not have a control over the fragment where it is saved, the media do not have a control over where and how their programs and media are read or watched by the audiences. There is one difference, though. The mass media find it almost impossible to locate and bring together their audiences. However, a computer user can use a software tool called defragmenter to bring all the data together. To collate all the data. The internet plays the role of defragmenting the society. Since no one controls the information that can be passed on the internet, any person can log on to the internet and create a forum with his or her topic of choice and start a forum. What effect does the fragmented society have on the internet audience? Internet has actually served to bring these fragmented societies and isolated individuals to come together, albeit virtually. For an example, let us consider the new Marathi news channel launched by Star TV called ‘Star Maza’. There was no way that the large audiences which tuned in to Star Maza could communicate with each other, except by personal phone calls, articles in the news papers or discussing it by coming together. In today’s world, it is virtually impossible for the isolated individuals to come together as a large gathering just to discuss Star Maza. This is where the Internet came to the rescue. Almost immediately after the channel was launched, a community called the Star Maza was created on the popular community website, the Orkut. Members of this community can discuss Star Maza, bringing them together. Similar is the case with CNN IBN. Effects of Fragmentation. What happens when the media is fragmented? The Limitations of the Internet Though the internet is today’s mass medium, perhaps it is the medium which could lead to more marginalisation. The NRS figures showing tremendous growth of the internet can be deceptive. 12 out of 1000 individuals have access to internet in India. But what about the remaining 88? There is a huge gap. This gap is due to the inadequacies and the limitations of the Internet. To browse the internet, one requires a computer, an electric and phone connection and knowledge of English, which is the predominant language of the internet. As per the examples given elsewhere in this paper, how can a farm labourer earning Rs.30 daily even think of the internet, let alone buying a newspaper? How does one expect parents of malnourished children in the Aarey colony to buy a newspaper or visit a cyber café instead of spending on food? Apart from money, can one expect them to be educated? There have been attempts to rectify this situation. The MSSRF – M S Swaminathan research Foundation works in villages like Vaiphad to provide computer education to children of the farm labourers. n-Logue Communications, `CorDect' wireless local loop technology and `Minnow'-Internet service provision in a box developed by Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai are some examples.9 Sugata Misra, a scientist 9

Sustainable Internet access for the rural poor? Elements of an emerging Indian model by J. James

at NIIT Delhi launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Misra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree. What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. 10 Yet, there are always competing forces which try to sabotage these movements. As Jhunjhunwala recounts ““ ... egged on by competing companies, all kinds of obstacles were put up to prevent the product from being commercially deployed in India. One suddenly found out that the spectrum in which we were asked to develop the product was not even available with the telecom department. Specifications were framed for the Wireless in Local Loop product making it as different as possible from the indigenous product. Competing (and expensive) imported products were given tax concessions such that a locally manufactured product paid more taxes than imported ones. Questions were raised whether the product was really Indian and investigations were started. Court cases were filed to prevent the telecom department from placing even a meagre order, claiming that our system was an obsolete analog wireless technology, when in fact it was a fully digital system.” 11 This does not in any way undermine the position of the traditional media which are growing in their circulation and viewership. However one must remember what Innis said in his provocative essay "Minerva’s Owl," Innis suggests that the richest flowering of an empire comes just before its decline and fall: "Minerva’s Owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk." Innis reasons that "a monopoly or an oligopoly of knowledge is built up to the point that equilibrium is disturbed". Thus we learn from Innis that all great empires are most vulnerable in the moment of their overreaching12. Should we say that the traditional media like the newspapers, television and the radio have reached their peak? Is this the beginning of the end of these media. The author feels that it is too early and speculative to make such a prediction. Even though radio gained popularity and television took away large chunks of audiences from the newspapers and the radio, all these media have co-existed and growing. All new media have affected the market forces, the strategies and audiences of their predecessors. But none have obliterated the other. This is mainly due to the hunger of the masses to know more, read more and to see more. Audiences too do not always chose one medium to the other, but buy all the media when they have the means. Thus one can expect the Internet to be another important mass medium.

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http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm A. Jhunjhunwala : Making the telecom and IT revolution work for us, in: Paper Presented at the Technology Day, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, 2001 12 Harold Innes 11

However, the Internet is poised to play a dominant role as a mass medium because of its ability to converge all the other media within itself. Conclusion The primary objective of media is to dissipate information to the masses, the lowest common denominator of the society. If Internet is the newest mass medium, it should reach the common and the poorest of individuals. Education alone is not going to be enough in today’s, Internet driven world. Even the urban population has experienced this. To achieve this objective, initiatives like the MSSRF, PC in a hole, and cheap Internet connectivity for the poor should be encouraged and promoted. The traditional media and the new media should come together to play a role in upliftment of the marginalized masses. If this does not happen the marginalized and the poor will remain on the fringes. Past has shown that all the media revolutions have failed to bring up the really downtrodden, poor in the population. If the masses are not catered to by the media, they will have only 2 alternatives. Either create new media or take to the streets in protest. If the society as a whole does not progress, it will lead to anarchy, demonstrations and riots, because these will be the only means left for the people to challenge the monopoly of the rulers and keepers of information, which will be in a way, the failure of media, defeating the very purpose of their existence. While Digital technology and the Internet could spread and enhance democracy, it may only be achieved if basic literacy and information literacy is pursed as national strategy for improving information technology access. Content, especially that created at the federal level, will also need to be diverse and interactive to achieve this vision.13

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Gail Feldman is a management and policy consultant in Berkeley, CA.