On*****Media and Power

                It is interesting to look at the evolution of media that G.H. Hovagimyan discusses in “On*****Media” in terms of power dynamics. As the world moves from technology to technology to technology, who is really the beneficiary? What are the impetuses behind these changes? I think that the evolution of forms of media is motivated, especially in modern times, less by a desire for a greater level of art, but rather as an effort of the political and economic elite to have a more powerful tool. If media is art and art is communicative, as Hovagimyan suggests, then innovation of that art means a novel (and thus potentially more persuasive) form of communication. As such, I think the crux of the issue, what is truly at play here, is not so much the physical transformation of media, but rather the manipulating of it in order to produce a new message.

Hovagimyan cites the radio’s role in politicizing the masses during World War II. The television played a similar albeit antithetical role during Vietnam. While FDR used the radio as a means for his brilliant oration to calm a nation, journalists provided TV viewers real moving images of the carnage of battle—an incredibly powerful example of the medium as the message. No longer could citizens allow themselves to believe the platitudinal claims of a commander in chief without acknowledging the realities on their TV screens. Although in this case the result was a resistance to the decisions of those in power, it was a more or less singular occurrence. Vietnam was the first and last war to have such broadcasting freedoms. The state and its corporate interests clamped down on media from then on, thus curbing their ability to communicate an oppositional message. Thus, TV and internet coverage went quite the same way as the war photograph: rather ineffectual at stopping wars.

This is not to say that all forms of media are facets of a self-serving authoritative influence. For example, the Bauhaus movement was particularly innovative in its transformation of architecture into art with a message of egalitarianism and utopianism. Dada and Duchamp made prefabricated objects into critiques of the bourgeois nature of art. Yet in these cases the message was too narrowly received and/or too radically perceived, and thus these forms did not have the overwhelming success that other, more corporatized media did.