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Concept of Mass Communication:
While we observe that communication is important in the life pattern of human beings and that language has its importance in that context, it is necessary to go into the question of mass communication which is a unique feature of every industrialized society. Mass communication is a product of modern technology and one may venture to add that modern man is a product of mass communication in very many ways.
Communication in any of its forms increases the susceptibility of men to suggestion and imitation and when it is effected with the help of the ‘mass media’, the impact of such communication upon the receptive individual is tremendous. ‘Mass communication’ can be described as a system of building contact which is capable of reaching out to large member and, in fact, to the nation as a whole, with the help of technical facilities that science affords, so that the basis of such communication remains strictly impersonal.
The technical facilities are the different media through which the message is transmitted, and all such facilities together constitute the ‘mass media’. The mass media include, in order of importance, the press, the radio, the motion picture and the television, with magazines and periodicals forming a semi- separate medium by themselves. Mass communication has effected a tremendous impact upon collective behaviour by vastly expanding the size of the audience.
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Millions in this country can sit in their respective homes at the same time and come to acquire the same ideas and hold common interest upon some matter presented by the national programme on television. The radio has a particular advantage in our country since about 70.55 percent of the population is illiterates who cannot respond to the messages transmitted by the newspapers; and the innovation of the transistorized set has advanced the radio’s message even to villages that do not have the advantages of electrification.
Village community centres like educational institutions and other places requiring community activity, official or otherwise, bring the broadcast messages within the reach of the villager so that he can enjoy the benefit of this form of the mass media. To the illiterate, the film theatres are places where he can pick up knowledge from, and the pattern of development in rural India is that a number of villages are served with a small town which invariably has a high school, a hospital and a cinema hall.
Not only are the government even commercial advertisers conscious of this fact. The newspaper is important in cities and town and, as a mass medium; it suffers from the disadvantage that can speak out only to the one who will know the script that it uses in forwarding its messages.
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Moreover, while the radio and the newspaper rely primarily on the audio effect that transmission of their message causes, the television and the film produce visual effects which can ‘doubly redouble’ the impact 6f the message upon the viewer. The television in India is a very recent medium of mass communication but, as was expected, it has carried home its unique impact in a very short period of time. Let us look at the following Tables, prepared with the help of official figures as stated in the Government publication India 1977-78, and relating to factors of mass communication in our country.
On the basis of the language used in communication, the following table is prepared and it will show that Hindi had, in 1976, the highest number of newspapers, magazines and periodicals, while English papers had the highest circulation.
However, as regards the circulation of individual newspapers is concerned, 23 newspapers were recorded in 1980 as having the distinction in each case of crossing the one lakh mark, of which the following recorded the highest:
Ananda Bazar Patrika, Calcutta (in Bengali) — 4, 20,440 copies
Nav Bharat Times, Delhi (in Hindi) — 3, 35,386 copies
The media that have the direct visual impact are the films and the televisions.
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In 1976, the following number of feature films was produced in the different Indian languages as shown in each case: –
The films produced in that year show that the social theme is still the favourite. Out of the films as shown above, 332 films were made on the social theme, 81 were based
on crime stories, while there were only 2 films that could be properly termed as children’s films. Other than feature films, there are Government newsreels and shorts and the advertisers’ strips which look to the commercial side of the utility the medium.
According to the figure below, there is a radio set per 42 persons. Though it compares very unfavourably with the position in other countries in that respect, id the Indian context the statistical figure does not present a poor picture. When the country has a population exceeding 650 million, the number of T.V. licences issued by the Post and Telegraphs Department in some of the States in 1976 will show that this medium has not yet reached the masses on a large scale.
The number of licences issued in that year was as follows:
Maharashtra – 202,072
Delhi- 155,758
West Bengal – 24,763
Tamil Nadu – 18,540
Radio licences issued in 1976 were 1,73,59,710. Maharashtra accounted for the highest number with 24, 11,434 licences and Orissa the lowest with 2,04,438.
Factors in Mass Communication:
Mass communication is not as simple an affair as a speaker holding a limited audience on to his speech, and such audience can cross neither the limits of time nor those of space. The mass media have widened the scope of the broadcast, the telecast or the total number of readers.
Even if one takes the roadside hoarding as an example, one would like to consider the number of persons that every day looks it up crossing end re-crossing it on their way. Tremendous potentialities have opened up for the propagandist and the seller for selling their ideas or their goods and such agencies as the mass media require, therefore, careful planning and effective control if they are to do any good to the society. The factors involved in ma^ communication must then be identified, their nature examined and their mode of functioning analysed.
Methods of Mass Communication:
Mass communication methods have made possible the creation of a ‘large audience’, which is neither in physical proximity with each other nor of the homogenous type. When a particular programme is broadcast, or when the national leader’s address to the nation is telecast, it is difficult to assess the number of persons immediately reacting to the occasion; but, in a country like ours, that the number will be overwhelming is, of course, of no doubt at all. Besides that, programmes presented by the radio or the television are within the reach not only of a specified locality within the national boundaries; in European countries, extra territorial effects of such programmes are very common.
The audience today, unlike a physical assembly, is composed of members of all different types of communities, of cities, villages, regions and places beyond the national boundary. The participants in this type of an audience do not know each other, and yet they are somehow linked with each other by some ‘common’ or ‘like’ interest, as when they eagerly await the results of elections held or the coverage given to a leading sports event respectively. Some sociologists have called this type of audience as the ‘diffused audience’ in order to distinguish it from the one that is in physical closeness as in the case of crowd listening to a minstrel.
Cinegoers are, perhaps, not as heterogeneous and distant and anonymous as the audience of the radio or the viewers of the television. They are small groups in physical proximity with each other, and their immediate reactions to the film that they are viewing can be forthwith assessed.
The programmer for the radio centre or the Doordarshan will have to wait for some time after presenting his event for the audience for viewer reaction and that, too, will be conveyed to him by mail. But even with the films the characteristics of the diffused audience are not totally absent; a film may be shown simultaneously at different centers, at times on the television too, and then the groups of viewers become as anonymous and as variegated as in the case of the diffused audience.
In 1975-76 there were 5,650 permanent and 3,367 touring cinemas in India as a whole. The touring or the mobile cinema is a matter of tremendous interest and enthusiasm in the rural parts of our country.
The impersonality of the diffused audience must necessarily have its mark upon the workings of the mass media. When a man goes to a theatre to watch a play being enacted, he reacts instantly to the programme to the glee or utter discomfort of the actor. He receives it or rejects it and makes his decisions known to the programmer on the spot. Reaction is direct and instantly effective; there is, in fact, no scope for reviewing his judgement of passions at a later stage.
In the cases of the modern mass media operating to the diffused audience, the position is entirely different. If one has not been able to comprehend the message transmitted by the medium, he can take another chance by viewing the film again or by viewing the film again or by discussing the merits or otherwise of the programme in the cool comfort of his arm chair, when passion will be very unlikely to spoil the reckoning.
This fact alone will impress upon the programmer the importance of preparing and presenting his programme with due care and conscious assessment. There is a kind of secondary and impersonal contact with voice or image, and the appeal tends to be upon the audience as a ‘collected mass’. In totalitarian countries, full advantage can be taken of this fact; and programmes may be made to fit in with mass moods and mass sentiments, in order to excite mass euphoria or mass hatred.
The more authoritarian the administration of a country become, the more likely it is to use the media as an instrument to excite feelings or to broadcast planned and controlled programmes. In democratic countries, the audience is not all that likely to grow into a ‘mass’ because, on the one hand, views and ideas are diverse and, on the other, programmes present different aspects of different issues to the audience.
In the Western democracies, different channels of the mass media bring a multitude of ideas to the audience so that the nation can easily be fragmented into small, heterogeneous groups. The people in it do not then get indoctrinated by a single view tutored by a centralized administration.
Even with regard to the press, if they are to collect news from only one centralized news agency, the readers tend to get converted into a collected mass; when different news agencies are allowed to operate, the readers are allowed to compare the different coverage and exercise for themselves their own judgment. The impersonal diffused audience requires them to be shielded against the ruthless use of the mass media.
The following points should be considered by the programmer:
(i) Technology and Technical Efficiency Involved:
The programmer or advertiser in a country like India must consider the efficiency of not only the programme or the advertising copy to be transmitted through the mass media; he must take into account the technology of the relevant medium that will produce the desired result. In Western countries, the advertiser has brought his wares, or at least the conception of them, right upto the door of the consumer with the help of television. Film theatres are not of relevant importance in this regard those countries; the TV screen or the ‘idiot-box” as it is called there, can acquaint the buyer with commodities that are to be sold or ideas that are to be propagated.
In fact, commercial as well as non-commercial propaganda runs riot in those countries with the aid of mass communication systems. The television in India is a recently acquired medium and, though its unique qualities of being a very powerful advertiser are recognised, its use is limited to select viewers of the well-to-do classes and certain clubs and community centres.
The medium is beyond the purchasing power of the average Indian and, taking the case of West Bengal as a representative example, when one finds that the annual income per capita in the State is about Rs.775/-, the question of enlarging the community of TV viewers is still remote. In this context, the more popular mass media in our country are the radio and the press.
Along with these two, the cinema joins the band with its mass appeal, and the possession of the characteristics of a visual medium keeps it distinct from them. While the press has a larger appeal to the literates than either the radio or the cinema, the illiterate people of our country cannot derive much inspiration from it.
The latter of necessity shall depend upon the messages put on the air by Akashvani, and a variety of topics suiting different interests bring to them a direct appeal from the programme artiste or announcer, giving them the satisfaction of engaging in a conversation of the type of a monologue. It is here that the press will not have a stronghold, and that medium is reserved for the appreciation of the urbanite, the suburb dweller and the more fortunate village literate.
However, with the progress of adult literacy programmes, one can expect the press to fulfil greater obligations to the society, particularly when one considers the accepted conviction among the common man that, while the radio transmits the official views of the administration, the press is more liberal and accommodative of different points of view.
What one hears is only half believed; what one sees carries conviction. If the press and the radio can affect the mind of the common man so convincingly, the film as a medium with the visual attributes can be overwhelming in its effects. When one hears of the construction of a new bridge or a dam, or reads of it in a newspaper, one merely takes cognition of the fact; but when the cinema screen, or the television screen for that matter, shows it as an actuality, recognition of the matter becomes deep-rooted.
‘Seeing is believing’ goes the saying and the current trend in advertising is to stress on the visuals. Yet, in the Indian context, the cinema cannot yet take the place of the radio or the press for at least two reasons. First, there are not a sufficient number of theatre houses that can accommodate a large number of viewers at the same time. The radio, on the other hand, can have its voice felt far and wide, and the newspaper can be read by a few while many others listen.
Secondly, the cinema is an expensive affair when one compares it with the other media and a good many people in large parts of the country can make it an occasion only in two to three months to attend a single show. In this respect, radio broadcasts are more general and do not require entry tickets; a curious villager who does not possess a set can be welcomed to the residence of a more fortunate neighbour, or he may simply eavesdrop and fill himself with information.
Again, if a person from urban surroundings cares to stray about in village lanes and rustic meeting grounds, he is more likely than not to come across a band of uneducated villagers eagerly devouring the words printed on newspaper pages as are thrown to their hearing by the sonorous voice of an elated literate of their surroundings.
Taking it for certain that the programmer will first select his medium according to the type and the size of the audience that he wishes to cater to, it will be his next duty to model his programme according to the taste of the audience and the types of response that he wishes to arouse in them.
He may in this regard be assisted by the psychiatrist as well as the sociologist with their expert advice; and the more recent trend is to bear in mind the analysis made by the market research operator, who knows exactly what the nature of the demand of the consumer is, what factors give them the impetus to buy and what contingencies make them shy away from expenditure.
They guide the manufacturer as to tastes, fads and taboos and the complexities of male and female behaviour. The gallup poll expert similarly advises the political candidates as well as the nation, and hustling efforts can be frantically stepped up on the basis of their predications. An average Indian shows his characteristic love for film songs; and the broadcasting medium, as well as different commercial advertisers, have taken advantage of this factor in jointly devising the Vividh Bharati programme.
Almost every Indian knows about it and in between his ecstatic appreciation of the adored singer, he willy-nilly listens to the ‘ads’ and gathers information about many things that are necessary in life. The advertiser ‘informs’ him and ‘impresses’ him with the style of presentation of his theme, which has become a competitive effort.
(ii) Means of Social Education:
The mass media in our country are not mere instruments that help recreation or moods of relaxation; in many ways, they help in imparting social education, that is, in breaking down the barriers of human understanding besides investing the listener or the viewer with knowledge and cultural stimulation. Several programmes on the Akashvani and the Doordarshan have purely educative value; and the importance of the medium in this regard is felt all the more because, on the one hand, the number of illiterates is high and, on the other, schools and colleges, where this work can be done, can still hold only a fraction of our population.
In this condition, the role that the different media are required to play as educators is of immense social importance. Wrong or distorted information always creates a knowledge that is superstitious or prejudicial in nature. The media can help in removing prejudices and blind and illogical beliefs about persons or objects that are unknown, and the important task of national integration can be thereby achieved.
The Union Government and the different State Governments have programmes of rendering assistance to, and also for rewarding, efforts along these lines. Much has been done in this regard; yet what remains to be achieved is a stupendous task.
The press, too, has a vital role to play in this regard and, whatever conditions may be obtained in countries that are advanced in the measures of literacy and general knowledge, in our country the mass media must first remember that they have to play the role of the educator before other considerations are taken up for reckoning. The task cannot be left to the educational institutions for their exertions, since the ‘mass’ element is lacking in such institutions and their process of imparting knowledge is slow and painstaking.
(iii) Propaganda and the Mass Media:
Propaganda might be taken to mean a well-organized programme for the spreading of any theory, dogma or belief; it can at times be the exercise in diffusing knowledge of certain facts. When any society accommodates a number of faiths or beliefs and a number of competitive ideas, and the possibility of the common man’s acceptance of any of them is very high, the efforts that are made it inducing him to accept one or the other belief or idea can be termed as propaganda. Such efforts may be directed at controlling the thoughts of, say, the consumer as an individual or the electorate as a group.
Propaganda efforts that are begun with a desire to influence the thoughts of certain persons or groups will be different from the line of thinking of the propagandist. The propagandist may, however, like also to exercise his influence upon those who hold views that are similar to his as he would definitely like to retain acquired grounds as he tries to encroach upon new ones.
The aims of propaganda are to provide the listener or the viewer with ‘information’ and to ‘impress’ him with the materials which are the subject of such information. Propaganda efforts may be linked with political, commercial or even religious activities though, in our country, at the official level no propaganda along religious lines is permitted by the secular structure adopted for our society.
Propaganda and educational efforts can not be identified with each other. Education encourages the development of a personality that would learn to reason and rationally examine knowledge. Propaganda, on the other hand, is based on the efforts made at imposing one’s belief upon another quite consciously and deliberately.
If the propagandist’s materials are based on truth, he would probably be educating the public and seeking to remove their misapprehensions, but then he would turn out to be an educator and instantly cease to be a propagandist. Again, when any society adopts a particular line of political thinking like democracy, socialism and secularism, the values and standards that are cherished by such thoughts may be propagated by the mass media and the standards of education in such society cannot vary from such values and standards. Hence, it may be argued that in a broader sense, the mass media can combine efforts at making propaganda and imparting education.
Techniques used by the propagandist may, however, be different in different cases. Didactic efforts in any direction leave the listener cold as a general rule and, therefore, his methods must ‘camouflage’ his true objective. He may present a mere picture copy, or there may be copy writing in addition to it; and when the film or the radio is the medium, short, instructive episodes may be presented as distinctive features in the programme.
A variety of features may be devised with the same objective, but the propagandist will ever be alert about concealing his motives from the audience or the viewer, least they shift their attention from the moral that is to be transmitted to the moralist himself. ‘Repetitive exercises’ along the line may have the effect of hitting the nail on the head, where the advertiser is aware of the fact that first impressions tend to fade away; and it is equally important to impress by repetition the hesitant or the non-believer, for whom the exercise will have a persuasive effect.
Choice ‘slogans’ and ‘captions’ carry the merit of precision and, as a result, they become weighty arguments that render elaborate arrangements comparatively less effective. Obviously, captions are based on witticisms or Sarcasm for carrying the message through; and slogans can become impressive only when they are linked with some definite emotion that the listener or the viewer is susceptible to.
In political as well as commercial propaganda, the message carries conviction if ‘prestige suggestions’ are made by linking the advertisement material with a famous name. Thus, a biscuit manufacturer may tell the public that a famous film star with an irresistible he-man image is fond of his products; or a shaving cream can sell immensely after the image of a cricket superstar that has been associated with it. The younger section of the public is more amenable to overtures of this kind and, at times, the craze for emulation of the ways of one s hero may often reach the point of obsession.
McIver and Page emphasize the importance of the mass media in working up the herd sentiment in people, after cutting across national frontiers. Communications have no doubt brought the world much closer and within a smaller ambit, and peoples of different countries may soon catch up trends that are distinctly foreign. As long as that process helps in the exchange of cultural traits, a better understanding among peoples of different nations is encouraged and, perhaps, effected.
The herd sentiment in man accounts for group understandings, as distinct from individual discerning; and unless a rational approach is adopted by the listener or the viewer towards anything that is printed on a large scale or broadcast or telecast to the nation as a whole, the mass media may dangerously come near to being a tutored and edited instruction agency that will, at the official will, incite passions and fanaticism and have a cleavage effected in the very intellect of man. Hence, it will be necessary to consider the role of the mass media in the context of official control over them.
(iv) Official Control over the Media:
Whether the administration in a country should exercise control over the media or allow it to function free of any constraints and, if control is necessary, how much of control shall be regarded as proper are questions that every citizen must be debating about, if not openly, at least in his own thoughts.
Freedom to the media may be interpreted by some as licence and, in commercial advertisement activities; there may remain an element of insincerity and immorality when the advertiser knows that he must use certain expressions for impressing the buyer even though, to his knowledge, the product does not merit them.
Similarly, official control may be so stiff that only the authorized point of view is allowed to be propagated; such an approach may be taken as a corollary to the totalitarian methods of governance but when, in democratic countries, tutored programmes are broadcast or telecast, the party in power may seek to obtain for itself an advantage vis-a-vIs the ballot box that is not otherwise due to it.
Not much of thought was given along the line of lifting control from the media by the Government in our country until, on August 17, 1977, the then Government appointed Sir B.G. Varghese as Chairman of a committee to go into the questions of autonomy being granted to Akashvani and Doordarshan as mass media.
The Varghese Committee in its report submitted on February 24, 1978 advocated autonomy for both these establishments with a view to accommodating them to various points of view, a feature that is vital to the working of a democracy.
The committee even suggested that the radio and the television media be brought under a single administration to be set up by the name of Akashbharati. The Government of India then adopted the report in principle and a Bill was brought before Parliament seeking to lighten control over the new mass medium that would broadcast and telecast services to the public and would be known as Prasarbharati. The new Government under Mrs. Gandhi has, however, discarded the suggestion.