Publications and Media Books

Ananda Mitra's "Television and Popular Culture" is a path breaking study, which considers television in India as a distinct cultural form with a specific role in the production of popular culture. Dr. Mitra presents a set of conclusions about the state of television in India and its ability to produce a national image. He discusses the political, social and cultural movements in India with an emphasis on religious fundamentalism and the struggles over issues of language and gender.. The first chapter "Introduction and History of Doordarshan" talks about the various developments in Indian television and gives an overview of the different time periods in the history of Doordarshan.. The second chapter "Reformulating Culture in the Indian Context" examines the position of Doordarshan in the cultural map of India. Mitra here examines the relations between television and the nation, television and religion, and the role of television in relation to gender and language. He reconsiders the notion of culture as a combination of a variety of practice that are often in conflicting relationships, pulled together by ideology and circulated by a hegemonic leadership. Ideas of Gramsci and Althusser are also incorporated in this chapter with respect to ideology. Chapter three "Doordarshan: A Critical Glance" examines television formation as an independent cultural element. Mitra considers the variety of texts like Mahabharat and Ramayan in depth to obtain some conclusions about the position of Doordarshan in Indian culture. Chapter four "Mahabharat on Doordarshan" examines the position of the religious soap opera and its relationship to Doordarshan in variety of cultural practices. This textual analysis makes it clear that programs such as Mahabharat reinforce a specifically Hindu-Hindi/North Indian image of India, thus marginalizing other regional, linguistic, and religious groups. He specifically examines the role television plays in shaping as well as reflecting Indian popular culture. Defining culture as a set of everyday practices that reflect the lived experiences of various groups of people, Mitra explores and interprets the way in which it is presented in the extremely successful serial Mahabharat. Chapter five "Beyond Mahabharat" examines the way in which the struggles represented in the serial are connected with the ongoing tensions in India. Dr. Mitra argues here that Doordarshan is redefining what is currently considered the preferred combination of social, religious and cultural elements. He says that Mahabharat is redefining the image of a secular India to a Hindu Fanatic India. Chapter six "Television and the Nation: Doordarshan's India" examines the same concern as in chapter five of India's representation through Mahabharat. This qualitative look at the serial concentrating on its signifying practices and narrative strategies leads to a discussion of the ideological effectively of Doordarshan. Mitra says, "Doordarshan selects a small set of interconnected elements for representation on television and this in turn, produces a national image of India on Doordarshan". Chapter seven "Doordarshan: Its Internal Contradictions and Positions in Everyday Life" comments on the Mahabharat serial and its increasing popular culture, where the dominant articulations are between Hinduism, Hindi, Northern India and a male patriarchy. He also considers the position of television within the everyday material practices of the people who watch it. Dr. Mitra concludes that there exists a hegemonic system informing the centralized production of television programs does exist in India, the author suggests that it is possible to challenge this system through regional and alternative programs. Finally, a broader perspective of India's current political, social, and cultural movements is suggested to rethink the phenomenon of television in India. "Television and Popular Culture" by Ananda Mitra analysis the extremely popular serial Mahabharat in the 90s and describes a set of relations drawn between the narratives, its representation on Doordarshan and its relationship with the popular culture of India. There are hardly any books of local origin that are based on a cultural studies approach. `Television and Popular Culture in India' attempts to redress this imbalance and is arguably the first exploration of its kind in the Indian context. This book is based on the cultural studies approach combined with its policy implications for the future role of television in India. The understanding of popular culture in India will be an invaluable resource both to students interested in the methodology of cultural studies as well as those who are on the look out for a critical introduction to television in India. It should stimulate an interest in an exploration of the underlying connections between popular culture and the complex, multivariate terrain of cultural politics in India.Althusser referred to ideology as a false consciousness. He explained how myth is naturalized, contrived and constructed to blindfold people. Mitra in his book tries to expose this ideology by a textual analysis of the serial Mahabharat. One important aspect that puzzled researchers was why the serial was so popular.. If we examine Mahabharat in the light of study done by Rossen, we come to the conclusion that Mahabharat has impacted the general public by its conservative dogma. . But in context to the religious soap opera, Mitra shows us how such serials try to portray a Hindu reality depicting the "Hindu Sensibility" and didacticism.What Mitra questions in this book is very true as in reality these religious soap operas project a Hindu macho image and fanaticism which has swept across the country, bringing in its wake miserable violence and threatening the very integrity of India as a secular and united nation. We have witnessed this in the 1993 bomb blasts on the Ayodhya issue.While reading this book one realises that Doordarshan is not free of internal contradictions. The struggles over language, region, religion and gender are textually reproduced in the diversity of texts that are available on Doordarshan now. A textual analysis such as this takes a step towards rethinking the issues that are often considered as normal and natural, pointing out that there are indeed contradictions that exist.

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= Flavia's Nonsense
Reviewer: Sharad Sharma from Notre Dame, IN United States
This is a typical nonsense from someone who has no idea about India's culture. First of all, author seems to be one of the left leaning "liberals" who hate everything Indian. Mahabharat is one of the literary masterpieces and largest work of literature in the world.
Now let's discuss Flavia's review. She says "This textual analysis makes it clear that programs such as Mahabharat reinforce a specifically Hindu-Hindi/North Indian image of India, thus marginalizing other regional, linguistic, and religious groups." Nothing can be more ridiculous than this. Mahabharat is a scripture revered by people all over India. It has nothing to do with Hindi/Hindu. It was originally written in Sanskrit and when no Hindi existd. That the serial was made in Hindi was because of commercial reasons than anything else. By this logic I can conclude that a program on Bible will reinforce a Semitic worldview. Will it Flavia???
Again Flavia says "Dr. Mitra concludes that there exists a hegemonic system informing the centralized production of television programs does exist in India, the author suggests that it is possible to challenge this system through regional and alternative programs." Again, this is the usual nonsense from leftists who are uncomfortable with the popularity of the serial. The author conveniently forgets that same Doordarshan broadcast " Bible Stories" after Mahabharat. But that was not at all popular like Mahabharat. Leftists cannot digest that (By the way, are you a missionary Flavia? ). And hence, they launch a vilification campaign against innocuous things like a television serial like Mahabharat. The real reason behind this is leftists fear that serials like Mahabharat will expedite the rightist movement and will marginalize the left. Serials like Mahabharat present history form Indian perspective and which is in contradiction with the lies propagated with leftist historians ( or their masters elsewhere???).
And finally, the religious strife in India is a result of political skullduggery and has nothing to do with a television serial. It has been there for ages and is because of historical reasons which I would not like to go into here. Get a life Flavia and show some rationality in your arguments.

This book has stories that inform. In a fun
way. I like this book because I`m Irish and
It has good fun and informative stoies.
Go with God. Kevin.

I am extremely disappointed with the stories. They are dry and boring. I wanted something enticing to read to the students for Halloween but this was definitely a bad buy.

A layer of scholarship is antibody to liberation. The bonafide purpose of an introduction to a first rate thinker is to give the student a precis of the first rate.

But the obvious question, one raised by Adorno in his lectures on Kant, is why the student needs a mentor to explain the guru.

Adorno's answer was that Kantianism exists in partial independence from Kant and even from Kant's thought, in the sense that Kant raised concerns that Kant did not have the time to think through.

There is nothing mystical about this. It may result in part from the fact that Kant himself, in Keyne's image, heard "voices in the air" in the form of thoughts that arose out of material struggles during Kant's epoch.

Unfortunately, Witkin seems unaware of this possibility and provides instead a precis of "Adorno on Popular Culture" which reduces Adorno's thought to a biographical series of complaints about the way in which popular culture moronizes its consumer.

This biographical approach forces Witken unconsciously and by default into the role of answering Adorno, and laying Adorno to rest; Witkin becomes an Adorno antibody in the manner of antibodies to the HIV virus which are the diagnosis of AIDs.

In Adorno's own words and Adorno's own theory (which is almost never self-applied by texts in the Adorno industry) the thing represented is conquered by its representation in a way that has the Tedster, probably, spinning in his grave.

Witkin's Adorno machine is constructed by a scholar who is tone deaf to the music of the dialectic.

Witkin's Adorno machine emits racist music about jazz and Witkin seems to fail to realize that in the 1930s and 1940s, the word "jazz" was coterminous with popular music in an era before Coltrane. Adorno should not be forgiven, in writing about American music, for his apparently complete failure to inform himself about country blues and Scott Joplin but when asked to write about Jazz, he used the word in the same way ordinary GI's of occupied Germany used the word.

Witkin's major case against his Adorno machine is Woody Allen, a filmmaker who probably knows about Adorno: an Adorno figure appears in Woody's Hannah and Her Sisters.

Allen's films considered as a static *oeuvre* are thought by Witkin to constitute a riposte or counterexample to Adorno, for they are films with mass appeal that do not reject "inwardness and erudition."

The problem is the failure to apply Adorno's deep methodology. When he appeared in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, his colleagues were struck by the thoroughgoing influence of dialectical thinking on Adorno's details of thought and for better or worse, this makes a thinker unlikely to think in terms of a closure, which Witkin is seeking in raising the case of Woody Allen.

Witkin fails both the appreciate Hegel, and read Variety: for in fact, ever since the 1980s, Allen's personal and professional reputation have been under continual attack beginning with accusations about his relationships with his step-daughter.

The horror was based on the failure, of a large number of moviegoers, to connect with a Manhattan island of inwardness and erudition that was, in this period, diminishing both in Manhattan, and, at a rapid rate, elsewhere.

During Reagan's presidency, universities in self-defense conducted a *kulturkampf* on universites, and inwardness and erudition, in the form of commodified education, the replacement of tenured faculty with adjunct faculty, and student moronization.

The modal Allen clone became in this period a figure under increasing suspicion, and Allen himself expresses his rather bitter reaction to this in Deconstructing Harry.

The dialectic was not suspended, and a frozen, hypostatized Adorno not counter-exampled and demolished by Allen's now very retro oeuvre. Instead the gradual brutalization of the Allen "type" becomes a confirmation of Adorno's critique and more interesting than old Woody Allen films.

University faculty too often survive by pretending to celebrate liberation while in fact performing an older ideological function: thought control, and ensuring that things don't get outa hand. The reassurance, however, that popular culture is in any way a medium by means of which ordinary people can express their needs or find satisfaction is malarkey.

The reassurance requires Witkin's nonsensical theory of transparency of communication (something predemolished by Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity) in which the mechanisms of popular culture provide a way for fellow spirits to communicate in Buber's mode, and eliminates a "third" term consisting of a shared set of ideals, considered unnecessary and indeed Quixotic.

The problem is that for Cervantes as for Adorno, humanity is the reverse of a brutalized, face-to-face, "I and thou" humanity which in fact is the face of one-on-one authority. Don Quixote was able to escape this exhausting struggle not by reification but by integrating an ontology into his praxis in a redemptory way..

It is dehumanizing to so erase the possibility of shared ideals and Witkin fails to show how this creates anything but twilight struggle in the name of "authenticity."

As I write, abstract ideals labeled Quixotic a year ago are proving to have weight, like the physicist's light. The Bush administration finds itself today in front of an obsidian wall, carved with serpent shapes, expressing abstract Enlightenment ideals and although it may circumvent this barrier it will be perceived, world-wide, as untrue to its own professed ideals. This will have enormous consequences for the United States in the real world of economics and diplomacy.

American media uses a jargon of authenticity and indeed, a debased, confrontational I and thou ethical style to REDUCE the hard work of arms inspectors to a series of completely misleading sound bytes. It is an anti-Quixote in that it refuses to test its results against any texts, whether chivalric novels or the Charter of the UN.

In this context, we do not need to exorcise Adorno but instead to channel him.

mass communication reseach, how to know the effect of mass communication, and how about advertising. what is relation betwen advertising and marketing communication

This book, which is a major study on the impact of media on what we refer to as reality, is interesting. The ideas are set forth in a very logical, matter-of-fact fashion. It covers first the methodology, the historical (such as it is) ideas, and then it presents the data, and finally the conclusions. For those interested in media studies, this is invaluable as a starting place and for a general overview.

That said, this book is flawed. It spends a lot of time repeating itself. In one chapter near the beginning, it makes a statement, and in the next chapter, it repeats itself ad nauseum. When a whole chapter can be summed up in less than a paragraph, there's a problem.

The other major flaw is a definite lack of examples. Weimann makes blanket statements and then neglects to back them up with sufficient description. It's nice to say that cop shows convince people that there are many more policemen in the world than there really are, but does this happen in other fields? How does this affect people? Are they less likely to go into police work because they feel there is a surfeit of policemen? Do they feel safer at night, knowing that there are more police around?

Too often, the book neglects those questions.

However, as a general overview or textbook (with the implication that the student must find the answers or examples him- or herself), this book works very well.

With the WWW changing daily, research is hard pressed to keep up, but the methods used by these folks are pretty solid -- good starting point for anyone doing net research. The essays in the book concentrate on Usenet/newsgroups in particular.

I wrote a few of the entries in this handbook and am quite sorry to read in the Booklist review that the weight of the the Handbook is decidedly in the direction of potential negative effects of media. The terms of the effects arguments are in general hyperbolic and poorly researched. If this is a fair reading of the handbook it makes me sorry to have contributed. On the other hand, I can't afford a copy of it myself so have never actually read the entries. That alone would be a good reason to ignore the star rating I gave -- I have no basis for making this judgment but it is not possible to submit a review without clicking stars.

This is a decent overview on the issue, but Mr. McNair spends too much time examining pornographic magazines, and no time at all discussing the Internet. He was quite clearly wrong in stating there has not been a trend towards more violent imagery, anyone perusing the net can attest to that. So, the book is in need of an update.

I think this book, by format, is best suited to be used as a research tool, and as a source for students like myself to find information to support papers dealing with its subject. This book does an excellent job of gathering the information and statistics on the effects and influence of media on males and makes it clear that the men presented in the media reflect a minority in the male community. However, it presents this information in a dry, unentertaining manner. After reading it I feel that the information is very important, but I feel that the authors present it in a way that makes it largely inaccessible to those who could benefit from it most, the common man. I think that after reading this book most men would have a different outlook on media, from the advertising industry all the way to the format driven set up of sitcoms. Perhaps it would even alleviate some of the pressure men feel to be like the men they see in the media. I fear that it would be very unlikely to find anyone reading this book that would not be using it as a research tool.

This book is OK ... but a lot of the motifs are very much the same. Some instruction on how to use them and where would have been helpful. I really wanted something to help me with a wainscoted dining room and this was not it!