Page 196 - Culture Society and the Media

186 CULTURAL DEPENDENCY AND THE MASS MEDIA

process: the stage of political integration in the early phase of independence, the
onset of ‘modernization’, and then the reaction against it. The initial concern for
political integration is seen to require a stress on common traditional symbols, or
the creation of symbols that are then made to seem commonly traditional. But
this use of media proves insufficiently competitive with western-style
programming, which is seen either as economically inevitable or as positively
related to modernization, or both. Attempts to preserve the ‘traditional’ may not
survive the transfer of traditional arts to the new technology of mass media for
mass audiences, while resources for local production may be too tight to allow
real competition with dubbed imports. The use of media for modernization,
unlike its use for national integration, is fundamentally divisive and may cancel
out any impact attributable to integrative goals. Modernization sets generation
against generation, old élites (for example, tribal elders) against new (for
example, urban professionals); it may itself be associated with the newly
achieved dominance of a particular tribe or social grouping and in this way can
become an anti-integrative symbol against which the disadvantaged, the minority
tribes and the dispossessed may be mobilized. There then re-emerges a concern
for national integration to overcome such conflicts, and this may involve a
deliberate identification of the agents of ‘neo-imperialism’ as the common
enemy. This in itself may expose the illusory character of the original claim for a
positive relationship between mass media and national integration, inasmuch as
the mass media may have been sponsored by western corporations, based on
western technology, carried western programming and in other ways illustrated
the general socio-economic process of dependency. If integration has been
achieved, it may now seem that it has been achieved at least as much in respect
to a particular world order as to a particular national system of government.
The claim of many early researchers that the media had an important role to
play in the establishment of a national consciousness directly or indirectly
endorsed a model of development in which an urban political élite, often advised
by international agencies or western governments, determined the goals of
society and set about manipulating the masses towards these goals. The very
models of broadcasting imported from the west confirmed the notion of heavily
concentrated media systems, physically and structurally located close to the
centres of political and military power, employing technologies equipped only for
one-way communication as in the west. In this sense the claim entailed a
basically conservative view of the role of the media. This was then enhanced by
the particular contents that governments often used to promote national
integration, often involving a focus on inherently conservative national symbols:
the presidency, the state religion, an urban and élitist version of ‘national news’,
a particular language or group of favoured languages, etc.