A tool for indoctrination

Mass media helps to produce self-serving, de-humanised units, cut off from one another and dependent on it.

Just like schooling, if we understand the undemocratic and un-engaging nature of the mass media, then we begin to see what a great affront to our humanity it is becoming. Exactly on the lines of divides and gimmickry that we see on offer in education, the mass media is harbouring the culture of competition, profit and material growth. Exactly along the lines in education, it aligns with the dominant political economy to indoctrinate us towards already set choices of social and economic development,  eliminating honest probing and exploration. Just like securing ‘A’ grades in schools, winning, on its terms, means greater consumption of market services and products and greater submission to power structures: “Don’t raise critical questions, instead have a drink, or buy a mobile connection, or a lottery ticket, and keep trying to win (i.e. fit into this system).

Following the footsteps of education in form, method and content, the mass media also silences our individual and collective expressions. It does this first and foremost by devaluing our own lived experiences. Who we are, how we live, how we express ourselves, is nothing in comparison to the images we are shown and the commentaries we are given about ‘reality’. Those are assumed to be more important and more honest than our own lives. The media’s obsession with celebrities, from film actors to sportsmen, serves to remind us how boring our own lives are or how inadequate we are as humans.

The ever-growing and expensive technological grandeur of the mass media ensures that only a few can be involved in designing and conceptualising it. And although it is disseminated to many (like schooling), in doing so, it promotes the notion that authority and ‘right answers’ are far more important than the particularity of a person’s life, story, feeling, wisdom, etc. The scale and size of the mass media thus effectively kills self-esteem, creativity, responsibility and  diversity, which are the building blocks of local expressions. We have seen this happen over and over again, with children in our education system. By design, children are made to consistently doubt their own abilities to create something in our schools — be it a dance, some music or a drawing — and prefer instead to copy what they have seen in books or on the blackboard.

The blame of this dehumanising attitude is largely put on advertising — by far, the most dominant feature and function of the mass media. Indeed, without advertising, the mass media could not exist. Advertising seeks to remind us how sad and needy we are, how incomplete and imperfect. And after showing us our problems, it also gives us the solution: we can attain happiness and a sense of wholeness by purchasing the right motorcycle, or cosmetic, or detergent powder. Advertising, of course, is made more potent by the format of the mass media which media is physically isolating, psychically-numbing and disconnected from real life interactions and context. We are mentally alone, even if with company, when we watch television or read the newspaper. The format thus guarantees that messages are transmitted one-way, from external authorities to passive/silent viewers. All of this combined leaves us ripe to follow the advertisers’ messages without even a hint of analysis and questioning.

In this way, the mass media helps to produce self-serving, de-humanised units, cut off from one another and dependent on massive institutions for their thoughts, values and actions. This makes it a powerful tool for social control and indoctrination, and enables it to reinforce the unjust status quo — the 80-20 divide in society, in which 80 per cent of resources are controlled by 20 per cent of people.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2010.