On A Wide Canvas
Manoj Jena
FREEDOM, CIVILITY, COMMERCE: CONTEMPORARY MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC by Sukumar Muralidharan Three Essays Collective, 2018, 491 pp., 950
August 2019, volume 43, No 8

This is a fascinating book on contemporary media studies comprising eight chapters focusing on the existing debate on speech and freedom, nationalism, the state, civil society, satire, media, market, advertising and journalism.

The first part of the book primarily explores historical and philosophical underpinnings of free speech. It argues that speech exercised through organized apparatuses has significant influence over identity, as well as formation of both social solidarities and particularities. The book also avers as to how ‘print capitalism’ was once regarded as the forge in which nationalist consciousness was shaped and it is a role that continues to be played by the complex media industry today. With the dawn of liberal democracy, free speech has been regarded as a worthy goal for society to collectively pursue and protect. Free speech is a subject that is deeply implicated within the complexities of politics, law and the interface between the two. The book persistently holds that a newspaper that enjoys the strongly entrenched patronage of corporate advertisers could sustain a higher volume of circulation and find greater traction for its editorial content. Media industry structures, particularly within the neoliberal policy dispensation, are seen to lend excessive and undue importance to the advertiser and demote the voice of the public. Furthermore it highlights how the advertiser power is gradually taking over editorial space.

The chapter on nationalism engages with Benedict Anderson’s idea of nation with the use of historical data including various events reported in the newspapers. The book maintains that since the 1990s, the Indian elite that continued to imagine the nation in English had stepped more confidently out of its sequestration and become a player on the global stage. But they are yet to figure out a satisfactory answer to the troublesome question of how to deal with the ‘minorities’ within the fold of nation, which are represented and reproduced by the media in the image that the ‘mainstream’ would like to cast them in. ‘State: Exception and Use of Ambiguity’ discusses various questions pertaining to a short history of crime against the Indian state, society and the press and a moment of triumph for the online community. In ‘Civil Society: Media and the Politics of Anti-Politics’, there is a recount of the potential of the social media in the mass movement phase of 2011 particularly media as a revolutionary accessory. The chapter highlights that the media, especially the new networking techniques enabled by the mobile phone and the Internet, undoubtedly did facilitate the protests and multiply their impact.

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