Mass Media: Democratic or Hegemonic?

The role of mass media (culture industry) has been variously defined and hotly debated. There are two sides of the matter: one its democratic potential, and the other its use for hegemonic purpose. The idea is who produces and who consumes knowledge or information. What can be the effect of the rise of World Wide Web in information politics? What about the authenticity of the news? On the other side is the tendency in some intellectuals to question the information or knowledge produced and reproduced by the dominant media as they are in one way or the other appropriated by the rulers. So, some people think that rumors can be more truthful than the news in dominant news media or the information in official discourses. Can Internet or WWW provide a space for rumor and have some revolutionary(?) potential?
Mass media has the potential to shape the mind of the people. Very often people talk of the appropriation and distortion of information or knowledge by media to fulfill their vested interest. However, there are others who see an immense democratic potential in visual mass media as it opens up the avenues of mass media to the general public. For instance, people like Adorno and Horkeimer see mass media as a means of control and domination rather than freedom and liberation. Whereas people like Habermas and Rorty see a high potential in mass media (as public sphere) to keep watch on the activities of the rulers and to indirectly but very powerfully keep them on the right track.
The Marxists (like Adorno and Horkeimer) believe that the mass media is mostly owned by the big corporate houses and businessman or multinational companies and they do nothing more than providing consumers to those companies and corporate houses. The media, through various advertisements, instills the idea that “we buy therefore we are.” But as the writer in this book says, though that is partially true, media is not so much monolithic to propagate and promote the values of the single community and to fulfill its selfish interests. Now media has become diverse and both the forces work simultaneously. On the one hand, media like TVs have started participatory approach to the representation of voices of the diverse population. On the other hand, the rise of WWW has offered multiple forums to counter the hegemonic practices of the dominant media and the official discourses. On the one hand Internet offers an ample and incredibaly vast global reach for the dominant media, on the other hand, it can equally be used by any group to articulate their view and counter the hegemonic practices.
However, there is still another complexity. Do the people at the margin own the public sphere? I think the matter of access is again there. Second is the issue of authenticity. Though we question it, most of the public still believe that what CNN or BBC reports is authentic and what we see on the internet is either false or fictional. These big media houses have the resources and manpower to gather information, though screened through their orientation, and to disseminate it. Whereas the news or information served by individuals or a particular group is considered biased or one-sided or insufficient. Maybe we can never come out of this contradiction.

Question for discussion: How does Internet or World Wide Web affect the role of media in the present world? What can be the positive and negative aspects of it?

The Gaze

The idea of gaze that the writers talk about is interesting. This continues the discussion in the earlier two chapters regarding the social and communal constructions of reality through the interaction between the producer, recipient and the context. Visual culture appropriates reality (?) to fulfill the expectations of the idealized viewers. For instance, in most of the cinemas and other visual representations of women, they are (re)presented as objects of male desire. Similarly, in many of the movies, novels, or other books, the Arabs or the ‘Black’ (inclusive term, including all other than Anglo-Saxon Whites[?]) are often presented in the role of the villain. This bears witness to the fact that both the gaze of the producers and the consumers is conditioned by the ideology of the society. Another interesting nature of the gaze is that it is not often turned back by the object of gaze, rather it is turned inward. This is what Foucault calls by the normalization of the institutional gaze. However, we should not think of this process as uniform and one-way. There are several negotiations and conflicts in the realm of visual productions. The gaze can equally be appropriated.
The gaze, usually taken to be individual and neutral, is always, as the writers contend, social and ideological. This is often both conscious and unconscious, as the various theorists suggest. We have a long history of presenting women as nudes or objects of beauty in painting and photography, which corresponds to the dominance of patriarchal ideology in the long history of the West (same is true to many of the non-western societies). The subversion of the ideology in recent times has been accompanied by the production of visual culture dismantling the traditional notions about gender.
Similarly, the idea of the gaze extends, as Edward Said says, to the relationship between the west and the non-west. The way the western people look at or expect to see the non-western (or often third world) people and society is conditioned by the kinds of knowledge they have acquired from their culture (readings, movies, and television). For instance, the pictures in the book of some girls in the paddy field, the exotic picture of the women and men from Papua New Guinea reflects how the Westerners exoticize the non-Westerners. The interesting thing is whoever is the photographer, the pictures captured will have, in most cases, the similar nature. This is because they have always built a lens through which to see the world they actually visit. The same holds true to the case of the co modification of women.
However, such representations are also challenged. I remember one poem written by Sylvia Plath in which she challenges the male gaze by inviting the spectators to see her body in the public. In her performative act, she turns the gaze back to the males and assigns agency and the counter-gaze to the female speaker of the poem. I was reminded of this poem when I read the debate about pornography, which is really a complicated issue. Thus the meaning of a image is also the product of the gaze of the spectators.

Chapter 1 & 2 Practices of Looking

The initial chapters (chapter 1 and chapter 2) of Practices of Looking introduce us to the nature of visual representation of reality. The writer demonstrates how the production, circulation, and consumption of images are inflicted with various social and individual orientations. Images or photographs, even if look objective and neutral, are always captured from certain perspectives and with a certain manifest or latent intentions. That is why images construct reality rather than reflecting it.
Our culture is becoming more and more visual and visual culture makes tremendous influence on the way we see and make meaning of the social practices. Visual culture constructs and is constructed by the broader social and cultural phenomena it inhabits. The basic notions the writers discuss in these two chapters can be narrowed down to: a) the relationship between the images and reality; b) the relationship between culture/myth/ideology/power and images; and c) appropriation and re-appropriation of images by both the producers and consumers. To cut the whole idea short, the acts of coding and decoding meanings through and of visual images is always a matter of negotiation among producers, images, context, and consumers. So, the meaning making process is dependent on all these factors.

This is just for testing how blog works (I am an immigrant into the world of blog and into the world of technology as well). However, this looks as exciting to me as the world around looks to a child before its senses are deadened by the social habits.
I am thinking of a theme for my viscom project. Janet seems to have got a really nice beginning, about to come up with a little more specified and narrower topic. I was really attracted by her topic, even if I misread golf for gulf in her post. May be because I was thinking of something like that for my portfolio theme. Let me see how my gulf works even if there are many gulfs to go across.