Edited by Lasya Adiraj
These ideas are not original. They come from ruminations inspired by the works of Walter Benjamin that I had the pleasure of studying in one of my courses.
The commodity is alive in a way it never was before. It finds new life like a massive subterranean monster silently assimilating everything in its wake. What is left in our world that has not been commodified? The life of a newly created commodity has a catch. It is defined by the glamour of its novelty- being up-to-date, the latest, and fresh in the market. Novelty is a distinctly modern fetish created and upheld by commodity culture. And it is this novelty that delivers the commodity to its quick death. All that comes into the folds of commodity-hood is cursed to die the moment it stops being new because it is in the design of the commodity to go out of fashion and be replaced. The new and glamourous commodity slowly withers away and swells the ranks of a purposeless and dismal afterlife. This is the underlying mechanism of a hyper-commodified age. Nothing is meant to last and everything is prematurely out of time.
One could write pages upon pages about the many ways in which commodity culture has colonised our existence but I will confine my discussion to its influence on information and the modes of its transmission. Specifically, I will analyse the news as a form of information transmission and trace the lines of influence between it and commodity culture. The word ‘news’ itself contains in it a strange confluence of meanings. The word new is contained in news. Etymologically, the word ‘news’ goes back to the 14th century and was used as a plural for new. In the early 15th century, it gained the connotation of ‘tidings’ and it was only in 1923 that it acquired the journalistic meaning that we currently associate it with. Language seems to live a mysterious life of its own because the word news really grew into its meaning during the modern era and the fact that the word new should be its progenitor is fittingly prophetic. Even though the rhetoric surrounding news would lead us to believe that it is a fact finding mode of knowledge, its predominant concern seems to be its ability to present information as novel and drag on its novelty for as long as possible.
To better understand why an incessant pursuit of novelty is problematic at a fundamental level, let us look at news channels as a literary or videographic form of showcasing information. Like all forms and genres, television news presentation is governed by a set of conventions. Information comes to us as headlines, as snippets moving swiftly across the screen, as running commentary or as a debate. The debate aspect, of course, appears to have morphed into a nightmarish screaming competition but for the purpose of this discussion, I will consider features of news reporting in their most basic forms. To begin with, none of the aforementioned forms work very well in creating a formal structure for a step by step, in depth engagement. At their best, all news channels allow for is a series of short pointers to topics deemed significant enough to merit public attention. Here is where the conflict lies. There is a disjunction between the virality of news and the timeline of the information it represents. In their slogans and jargons, channels reiterate the novelty of their news but the fact is that the issue being covered is long standing. And once they have lived out their novelty on screen, they are buried right back into oblivion, the proverbial afterlife, even though they may continue to have great relevance to social and public life. If something starkly prominent about that issue comes up again, we see it back on our screens, revived from the dead, as though they are two separate instances and not two events in a long standing problem. The issues continue to exist regardless of whether or not they are reported but on television news we see only the most eye grabbing manifestations of it. To one who relies on the television for news, there is no coherence in the information that they receive. What they have instead are fragmented bits and pieces of isolated snippets that are poor indicators of a larger issue.
The problem of deep engagement has significant ramifications in the way it shapes the human consciousness. There are features of news channels, other than their formal structure, that negatively impact the attention span of the viewer. What we see right now on certain pro-government channels is just a heightened, monstrous form of what was already in the construct of television news. The aesthetic of the font, the screen display, the tone of speech amongst other features have arrived at the point of parodying their own sensationalism. The striking sound effects, the red and clinical blue templates, the bold font emphasized by the sounds – once just stylistic forms, have now reached a state where they are reminiscent of an anxiety dream. It would be no understatement to say that at an affective level, news channels evoke paranoia and a sense of constantly being in crisis. Instead of provoking thought, the modic specificity of the news channels is that they confound the ability to think by overwhelming the senses, scattering attention, and providing information that can only come through in disjointed snippets and fragments. And herein lies the dark irony of the news and commodity culture. It is not only the audiovisual and verbal means that news channels employ that reflect a hyper-commodified world. The information is only one of the commodities in the equation. The other is the viewer. The viewer is both a consumer and a commodity in an everlasting transaction with the powers that be. The information is not only commodified in and of itself but also acts as a means to commodify the viewer. As a predominant source of information, it has a wide reach and tampers the intelligence of its audience at a very basic perceptual level. It manufactures ‘stupidity’ on a large scale, because stupidity is a profitable venture. The powers that be pay a large sum for it.