Page 84 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Interventionist Tendencies in Popular Culture 59

media technology in our times. On the one hand, we are in era where
we have the technology to democratize communication in a manner
unimaginable a century ago. On the other hand, the biggest hurdle to
the democratic social organization of communication, and therefore
strengthening the ‘popular’, is the corporate control of communica-
tion technology and over media production. Hence, the belief that the
technological possibilities demonstrated within the mass media make
it the privileged and most dynamic terrain of popular culture, hides
more than it reveals.
A more holistic perspective on communication technology brings
to light its three principal facets. Communication technology is, first,
economics, being a product in itself as well as the raw material for the
creation of cultural products; second, it is knowledge, in itself as also
being an instrument for the further generation of knowledge either as
ideology or as culture and, finally, it is social structure, as its produc-
tion and utilization is defined by class, gender and race. 3
One corollary is that dominant ideas governing communication
technology, in their drive to universalize themselves, effectively mar-
ginalize subordinate institutions of communication. For instance, when
optimists rejoice at TV reaching the villages and articulate it as the
‘democratization of technology’, they fail to mention that the success
of the culture industry is at the cost of a vibrant popular culture—back
to the zero-sum game mentioned in the beginning. Moreover, far from
being neutral, communication technology responds to the dominant
tendencies of societies, and, thus, mediates relations between indi-
viduals and groups in a society. What satellite TV has brought to the
villages in the subcontinent in the 1990s is a mass culture produced and
governed by a national, increasingly transnational, industrial minority.
Such a critical conceptualization concerning television’s inroads into
society, therefore, uncovers the ideological packaging of what media
optimists choose to label the ‘democratization of technology’. In fact,
even the proto-history of communication in the previous century
indicates that the very trajectory of technological innovation was deter-
mined either by its business application (Laing 1991) or by the need to
maintain a social structure (Ghose 1995). 4
Attention has often been drawn to innovative applications of com-
munication technology in a participatory manner, which it is alleged
runs contrary to the media industry. A case in point is the social