[Irene S. Wu is the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence, School of Foreign Service , Georgetown University . Her book From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand: the Uneven Path of Telecommunications Policy Reform in China is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in fall 2008. Dr. Wu received her B.A. from Harvard University and Ph.D. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Wu thanks the many scholars who welcomed her to Ahmedabad in March 2008. This article is part of ongoing research and she welcomes comments, please send to ireneswu@yahoo.com.]  

At one level, information and communications technology seem best the province of engineers, geeks who program, techies who fiddle, and if they hit on a commercial success, more applause to them. They have made their mark and should reap the rewards. Often, at some point, however, governments meddle. There are many reasons why, but the most fundamental is that the distribution of information and ideas in a society is one of the foundations of political power. Once a techie phenomenon goes commercial, and becomes popular, it has achieved two things – it has reached a lot of people and a lot of people love it. Communications services that have widespread reach and ideas that are popularly accepted attract the attention of politicians. In such circumstances, decisions made by businesses for largely business reasons often have major political effects and, therefore, it should not be surprising that there are significant political reactions.  

Information is a kind of currency in politics; and, therefore, anything related to the production, distribution, and consumption of information is relevant to power politics. Looking back to the feudal history of Europe, Asia and other regions, the source of wealth was land. On the control of land, power bases were built. With the coming of the industrial revolution, ownership of land was no longer the main route to status, wealth, and power. Capital was another option. The essential change the industrial revolution wrought on the organization of society was to make important the distinction between those who own capital and those who do not. Those who own capital, profit. Those who do not must sell their labor.[i] Now, it is not just capital and land which are possible paths to wealth and power. Information is a third path, another basis of power that divides society among those who have it, control it, and understand it, and those who are at its mercy. Governments have long recognized that controlling information relates to controlling political power. A few historical examples from Brazil, Taiwan, and India will illustrate this nexus between commercialization of technology and major shifts in political power.

Governments sometimes seek to use new communications technologies to build the idea of a nation, where none may have existed before. In 1865, Paraguay invaded Brazil’s southern Matto Grosso, and it took the capital Rio six weeks to hear about it. When in 1889 in Rio, the monarch was overthrown and the country declared a republic, it was a month before word reached the residents of Matto Grosso. The new republic of Brazil, therefore, resolved to build a telegraph system through its interior states to tie them to the rest of the nation. Starting in 1890, Candido Mairano Da Silva Rondon led a series of military units and commissions to establish the first telegraph system across the Amazon. Through Rondon’s work, the central government sought to extend its power throughout Brazil, especially the northwest regions dominated by local power. It took a month for Rondon and his soldiers to travel from Rio to Matto Grosso. Between 1900 and 1906, Rondon built nearly 1100 miles of telegraph lines, 220 crossed the swamps of the Pantanal, 150 through forest; 16 telegraph stations and 32 bridges. Rondon also mapped areas for the first time.[ii] The stated goal of telegraph construction was to connect settlements and forts, facilitate troop movements, and secure borders. However, Rondon also underscored how the telegraph was a tool to develop the region, populate it with farmers, and build towns where no one lived. In 1921, six years after the line was inaugurated, more than 80% of all telegraph messages were government communications. As a tool of the state, it had some results, but the extended benefit of encouraging development had not materialized.[iii] The Amazon lands were not incorporated under the center’s control, development did not occur, indigenous people were not assimilated. In the end, Rondon’s effort to unite the country via the telegraph was not very powerful at all.[iv] Governments that introduce communications technologies into the market for political objectives frequently fail. Brazil’s telegraph crusade in the nineteenth century is only one of many examples. In general, commercial operators that are profit-driven to provide customers with a useful service build the most robust communications networks.  

In contrast, cable television in Taiwan was a hugely successful commercial industry and became an important network for organizing political opposition and creating a foundation for democracy. Terrestrial television in Taiwan from the beginning had always been controlled either directly by the government and the Nationalist ruling party. The three main television stations, first established in the 1960’s, were all run by the government.[v] In the mid-1970’s cable operators in greater numbers illegally installed videocassette recorders, coaxial cable, and transmission equipment.[vi] Videotape and satellite programming made it easy to fill up cable networks with programming. Cable boomed because people wanted more news, information, and entertainment.[vii] In contrast to the three government television channels, cable services were collective known as “the fourth channel.”  

Parallel to the emergence of the fourth channel was the “Green Team” part of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Reaching the height of their popularity in the mid-1980’s, the Green Team used personal portable video cameras to make about 1500 documentaries on the difficulties of farmers, students, workers and environmentalists, that offered a viewpoint alternative to official television. In principle the sale, rental or broadcast of their programs in public was prohibited, but the programs circulated by mail and through street vendors.[viii]  

To add to this running battle against the ruling Nationalists, just prior to the 1989 election, a DPP opposition party politician’s application for a television station license was rejected. These elections were the first time opposition party politicians were allowed to run for office and getting their messages out to the public was important to their campaign. They established a guerilla “Green Television Station,” using smuggled equipment to broadcast a two-hour program to introduce its candidates to the electorate two days before the election.[ix] The government ordered a full-scale, but ultimately ineffective crackdown. Censors would cut television cables in the morning; cable operators would reattach them in the evening.[x]  

In 1990 the DPP announced formation of Taiwan Democratic Cable Television Association, a group of about 50 cable systems that broadcast news and information from the opposition perspective. They jointly produced political programs and also carried video and satellite programming like other cable operators. The DPP protected members from government crackdowns and sought legalization. In the meantime, a new opposition party which had splintered from the Nationalists also began to participate in the cable market and also sought to legalize cable television. A third factor was the international movie industry, which pressed the government to end the illegal pirating of their content by local cable operators.[xi] Consequently, the ruling Nationalist party was faced with pressure from two opposition parties and foreign investors, and in 1993 passed the Cable Law, which in effect legalized the expression of opposition views on television.[xii] In 1996, Taiwan held its first presidential election, completing the full democratization of its government.  

The Green Team videos and the Green Television Station created an atmosphere where people became more comfortable openly articulating the opposition point of view. Cable television took hold in Taiwan in the early 1990’s when cable networks’ ability to pick up foreign satellite signals dramatically increased and diversified the volume of entertainment programming available for distribution, even though illegally in the beginning. When the proliferation of cable television merged with the already active distribution of videotapes by the underground opposition party, cable television networks themselves became the major distributors of an alternative vision of Taiwan politics. They began expressing a new political identity. The formation of the two cable television associations was part of the institutional change that challenged and destabilized the authoritarian state. The legalization of cable effectively legalized open political debate on Taiwan’s television, which was essential to the democratization process.

Another example of how business decisions affect politics comes from television in India. In television’s early years in India, programming emphasized national culture, a secular India, united by English and Hindi languages. However, Doordarshan in the 1980’s altered its programming strategy and launched teleserials. Most notably, Doordarshan sought to appeal to Hindu middle classes by serializing Ramayana, one of the two major Hindu epics.[xiii] Ramayana’s first episode aired in 1987. There were 78 weekly episodes in total, a blockbuster hit.[xiv] Market research companies estimated audience from 40 million to 80 million per week over a few months. As Rajagopal reports, “city streets and marketplaces were empty on Sunday mornings. Events advertised for Sundays were careful to mention: “To be held after Ramayan.” Crowds gathered around every wayside television set, though few could have seen much on the small black and white sets with so many present. Engine drivers were reported to depart from their schedules, stopping their trains at stations en route if necessary, in order to watch.”[xv] Ramayana was a runaway commercial success. The show had twenty-minute commercial breaks. It transformed Sunday morning from a quiet time in television schedules to a major, popular slot. In other respects, it was a breakthrough for Doordarshan. They achieved high viewership across linguistically diverse regions.[xvi]

The broadcast of the Ramayana serial coincided with the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, a movement which has fed communal tension and violence. For example, the teleserial casts the world as Hindu, on the one hand, and full of demons from Central Asia and other places, on the other hand.[xvii] The television series gave Hindus great pride in their traditional Hindu identity in a political context where conflating of Indian and Hindu identity excludes other religious identities.[xviii] While the television serial did not cause the rise of this violence, the TV program gave the movement prestige, visual symbols, and a language to express itself. The activists of the Birth of Ram (Ram Janmabhumi) appropriated visual images from television in their demonstrations. As Rajagopal reports, “In the launching of one procession from Delhi to Ayodhya, Ram’s birthplace, volunteers dressed to look like the television versions of Ram and his brother Lakshman, with their bows strung, posed for photographs in front of a pile of bricks intended for the proposed Ram temple.”[xix] Processions like these, for example, culminated in December 1992 in the destruction of a mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics who wanted to build a temple at Ram’s birthplace. These events led to communal riots in cities across India, about 2000 deaths and 7000 injured.[xx]

There is an irony here. The television era is part of the economic rebirth of India. It offers access to an identity defined by consumer goods, rather than by traditional caste, religion, and language. Yet, one of the identities to emerge in this satellite television era is a new Hindu identity. While the middle class is gaining materially, it is losing its old religious and historical connections, and looking for new ones.[xxi] It would not be correct to say that a television series caused communal violence in India. Doodarshan’s Ramayan and other similar religious teleserials create a specific narrative – complete with language, visual symbols, and commercial products – that give this new Hindu identity some material reality.[xxii] However, without these extremely popular programs, the Hindu nationalist movement would lack the language and visual symbols, essentially the cultural infrastructure, to distribute their ideas powerfully. By enabling the consolidation of Hindu nationalism, this television show contributed to reconfiguring the discourse of nation, culture, and community.[xxiii]

Frequently, popular cultural symbols are adapted to political debates, often at key turning points in a movement. An image, a slogan, a catchy tune flows quickly over the cultural infrastructure driven by commerce to the political system driven by power. In her work on public opinion, Noelle-Neumann shows that people dread isolation more than they fear being wrong. Whether it is fads in fashion or momentum in political campaigns those groups whose members speak openly and confidently give others courage to speak those same views openly and confidently. In contrast, those with a different view keep quiet until in a spiral of silence; as she calls it, they become mute. This is more than a person’s desire to join the winning team; this is a fear of being disliked, isolated, and ostracized that reaches to an individual’s ability to survive and points to the essential social nature of human beings.[xxiv] A television drama that is overwhelmingly popular like Ramayana not only articulates a world view, but also silences others. A political movement that adapts the language and symbols of popular culture takes advantage of that world view already propagated, and the silence already generated.

Change in communications technology and massive flows of new information result in significant political transformation if the people who use the technology re-imagine their own identities and if new institutions emerge in society to compete with the old ones. With access to new information and different views of the world, people can see themselves in altered light. In some cases, knowledge of lifestyles in other parts of the world affects the local lifestyle. In other cases, these new views of the outside world are not accepted as good, and an opposite reaction occurs, an ever-tightening adherence to local values and customs.

There is a connection between commercialization of communications technology and the use of that technology as a political tool. Benedict Anderson identified the innovations in printing presses and development of commercial newspapers as instrumental in constructing a national identity.[xxv] Commercialization spreads technology the fastest. In other words, every household may buy a television in order to watch soap operas, but once the television is an established service in everyday life, television programming can convey politically-relevant messages as well. Ironically, in political science, the preponderance of studies of communications services and politics tend to focus on elites – the study of Internet’s effect on politics in China, the countries of the Middle East, for example, in this period of time when only the highest educated and most wealthy have access to the technology. While such work is important, it is equally important to understand the political effects of those communications services which are popular – the soap operas on satellite television, pop songs on the mobile phone, and even the tabloid newspapers where scandal stories can carry political messages. The advantage to studying these kinds of services and technologies is that we can be sure of two things – they have broad reach and widespread acceptance in the community. In other words, commercially successful information and communications services are clearly relevant to the study of politics and power, the challenge is to develop the frameworks and tools to understand their impact more clearly.

References  

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso: London, 1983.

Chin, S. “Broadcasting and new media policies in Taiwan.” In Sreberny-Mohammadi, Winseck, McKenna and Boyd-Barrett. Media in global context: a reader. Arnold: London, 1997, pp 77-97.

Diacon, Todd A. Stringing together a nation: Candido Mairano Da Silva Rondon and the construction of a modern Brazil , 1906-1930. Duke: Durham, 2004.

Farmer, Victoria. “Mass media: images, mobilization, and communalism.” David Ludden, ed. Making India Hindu: religion, community, and the politics of democracy in India . Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2005, pp 98-115.

Hashimoto, Hidekazu. “The importance of the free circulation of information.” Media Asia . Singapore: 1998. Vol. 25, Issue 4, pp 213-218.

Hou, Cheng-Nan. The transition of alternative media in Taiwan, 1970’s-2002: a historical, political, and sociological examination. Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo . April 28, 2003.

Khanwalkar, Seema. Research Fellow-Semiotics, Mudra Institute of Communications Research. Interview with author. Ahmedabad, India. March 5, 2008.

Mankekar, Purnima. Screening culture, viewing politics: an ethnography of television, womanhood and nation in postcolonial India. Duke: Durham, 1999.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Vintage Books: New York, 1977. Translation by Ben Fowkes.

Monteiro, Anjali and K.T. Jayasankar, Professors, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Interview with author. Mumbai, India. February 28, 2008.

Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The spiral of silence: public opinion – our social skin. University of Chicago: Chicago, 1984.

Rajagopal, Arvind. Politics after television: religious nationalism and the reshaping of the Indian public. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001.