Media Matters...


Pragya Vats



In the way media presents itself and the realities around gives an imagery of a crisis, metaphorically a spiral, producing and reproducing itself in the variable of time and space. What is perturbing about the media practice and action is that by which the representation has become more and more detached from the human and the real. There is a pressing need to foreground the concerns of the people and mediate through the omnipotent entity – the polity.

Crisis is not what a war brings or what is perceived as an aberration from the normal but what was called a “stasis” in the Greek world, the crisis in the common parlance, is actually a “daily battle against the hunger, thirst, violation and at times negation of one’s life and existence” And all of this happens in what we perceive as normal times under the veneer of normalcy, in a way a naturalized crisis of the daily grind for the “invisible” populace , living always on the other side of the divide.

The concern is to develop a responsive communiqué that brings lives close to one another. What Ricardo Rosas calls a “tactical media” which means, “Opening up new spaces for cultural, artistic an d media interaction, creating forms of access to knowledge resources to individuals or groups excluded from the paradigm raised by technological revolution, developing visual, sonic and textual sensibilities and making social action of collective utility possible”

The catch of the phrase is the “social action “ and “collective utility” and of curse “making it possible”. But how? Media has appropriated to itself a lot of power.Supposed to be a medium , an access , a little window to the real has become a means to an end – an end which are arbitrary at times. Not that media is “unpurposeful” all the times but the focus needs to shift, not also that it lacks tenacity and credibility. What one argues is only to draw it into the forays of “unspeakable” realm and to the “tacit bearers” of quirks and cranks. If one reads this outpouring as one of those “subaltern sentiments” I would not make much headway.

What is intended through this is to awaken those who control the reins of the “medium” and also the “common” wo/man like you and me to take notice of the “commonest”. To read more intricately into the crisis that prevails assuming a human like face and not just as an intermittent aberration of a sort. The aberration if still one chooses to look at it as one, emanates from and bears upon the flawed and misguided peace , weaving surreptitiously into each of our lives.

Its time now that media and all those humanists rise to action and makes a little difference to the milieu we live in and not sing those neutral songs day in and day out.