Beyond television studies

Abstract

That a new media studies is needed is clear; that a rapid, inspiration-seeking survey can find this from South Asia in an international frame, after 10 years of the War of Terror, comes as no surprise. The obsessions and ideologies of television globally are still there to be critiqued, and this can be done with some of the authors considered here. That these readings are contingent only means that reviewing contemporary events through a distorting lens is also a part of the game and a wider remit of media studies is now urgent. From the anti-Muslim ultra-racist attacks by Breivik in Norway to the photographed-but-not-televised scenes in the White House situation room in May 2011, through the grainy aesthetic of green night vision combat patrol videos, there is a need to deploy critical ideas gleaned from the work of authors such as Ravi Sundaram, Arvind Rajagopal, M. Mhadava Prasad and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. The contemporary has a political purchase that was once national, but is now both wider and more specific, and more urgent. For a new media studies.

Keywords:

• television
• terror
• media
• Osama bin Laden
• war

Notes

1. Nalin Mehta's study of satellite television remains closely tied to the medium of television itself, however much transformed by new modes of delivery. The ‘citizen journalist’ (p. 248) and ‘tele-democracy’ (p. 257) are terms that have insider network currency. Mehta, India on Television.

2. For a closely argued study of how media must now be seen inextricably bound up with the staple themes of urbanism, modernity, technological change, aspirations, dreams and desires, see Sundaram, Pirate Modernity.

3. Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children.

4. See Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid.

5. See Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film.

6. In this paper I refer to Asia and Asian as a wide specificity that could include Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the diasporic South Asians discussed as ‘Br-Asian’ in the volumes Sayyid et al., eds. Postcolonial People, and Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma, eds., Dis-Orienting Rhythms. This is problematic, as it leaves out many other Asias, East, South-East, Austral- and Middle – this is best discussed by Gayatri Spivak in her 2008 book Other Asias.

7. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 335.

8. For an interesting survey of White House information, telecommunications and computing security protocols, see the PhD thesis of John Paul Laprise 2009 ‘White House Computer Adoption and Information Policy’, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

9. See, for example, the comparison of a 2008 image and the 2011 image here: Today's NEWS NJ, http://todaysnewsnj.blogspot.com/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-corpse-photo-is-fake.html.

10. Dye and Dale, Code Word. The authors call this text ‘an American celebration’ – interview with The Associated Press reported in The Guardian, June 24, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9710347.

11. Hutnyk ‘NDTV 24x7’.

12. See http://youtu.be/ctepAW35O9Q for AC/DC and http://youtu.be/bOWmTyrz1RA for Manson.

13. Adorno, Hegel, 91.

14. King and Hutnyk, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Gaius Balthar’, 237–50.

15. Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men.

16. See reports on MSNBC and MSNBC staff.

17. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 39.