Page 75 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

50 Vibodh Parthasarathi

Culture: Between Dominance and Resistance

Contemporary economic organization has institutionalized communi-
cation processes and cultural practices along industrial lines, giving
birth to the culture industry. Leading the universalizing zeal of the
culture industry is the mass media: the epitome of dominant com-
munication today. While a few continue to believe that ‘mass’ signi-
fies a large diverse audience whose members are physically separated
from each other (Trenholm 1995: 276), it is more likely that the term
indicates the economic organization and institutionalized structure of
cultural practice. The mass media is increasingly becoming a zero-sum
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game in which media moghuls seem to be consolidating, while the rest
get eroded. The social relations regulating the contemporary mode of
dominant communication have led to the isolation of the individual
in two ways: through inequities within the production and distribu-
tion of culture, and through the fragmented nature of information
(images, text, music) churned out by it. Although the mass media is
increasingly influencing conflict and status quo, as also the formation
and erosion of identity at different levels, such influences are more
towards strengthening prevailing discourses.
However, unlike the media culture industry, the state is able to
perform a dual role in the processes of producing culture—be it as
meaning or explicitly as ideology. First, the state acts as an active
agent in directly producing and/or patronizing ‘culture’ through, say,
the media schools, commissioning varied ‘culture-ware’, sponsoring
events and financing regional centres of folk culture (some of which
the market and the Hindu right also do); and, second, that of regu-
lating or selectively promoting cultural practices through jural and
administrative means such as the Central Board of Film Certification,
script board, structures of taxation and patterns of subsidies, award-
ing industry status to cultural forms, and so on. Thus, the state is in a
better position to monopolize ‘culture-ware’—both in its production
and representation. However, this is increasingly being challenged by
competing forces from the market (representing both transnational
and indigenous capital) and from society (fundamentalist and seces-
sionist groups). As a result, on the one hand, the beginning of private
broadcasting and cable transmission in the early 1990s represented
an end to state monopoly in television production and distribution.
On the other hand, the emergence of Hindutva as a competing force