The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday 28 January 2012

AIR WAVES’ SENSE OF PRIORITIES: NOT THE ONLY MODICUM


The media as an institution has come to stay as an integral part of a variety of social institutions. Nothing is left untouched. Individual lives, families, social institutions like schools, hospitals, workplaces, political and military systems, even religions, and their real and virtual assemblies, all have got its glare, and more so, are more than willing to face the glare. The age old cliché! - ‘Publicity is not good or bad, it is just publicity’ is happening to be the prima-donna. So publicity is replaceable with propaganda now. Hyping a story is has become so routine that ‘take it easy’ catchphrase is advised to survive the absurdity.

Is it safe to say so? It is skewed but is debatable.

Media shape the ways; ways of news gathering and transmission, advertising, political processes and campaigns, wars, diplomacy, education, entertainment, and socialization. The pervasive effect of media can be seen in every walk of life.

But media is not the only gatekeeper. Indeed, we are living in a set-up with layers of gatekeepers, tightly gripping the information dissemination process. Media is not the lone player in this blame game now.

What else would you say when every six months the debate on legalities concerning how the freedom of expression is screwed gets renewed?

Can we rule out State and Corporate imprint in this blame game?

Cultivating the mood, or to say more technically Priming, is not something that media can do alone. There needs to be more than one pillar of a democracy working hands in glove to set the hallucinating tapestry in motion.

Priming is more rampant than ever. Agenda setting is more in vogue than ever. The partnership is getting more and more reciprocating. Several ‘Truman Shows’ of different colours but almost similar hues are the most talked about buzz words.

But where is the debate?

The air waves come at a price. The aerial pipeline has to be filled with the stuff that could convert this modicum into a sustainable medium. Survival instinct pushes any venture to fight alone first. Failing here then compels to look for partners who can be a party and certainly the partying has its own menu and cocktail. Here the air waves create the duet of priming and agenda setting to balance the balance sheet. Soon the duet attracts the chorus. Soon the chorus attracts the audience. 

Hype dominates. Sensationalism Culminates.

Did you say something of quality and democratic responsibility?

Priorities are skewed, priorities are revisited.

Sometimes they make, other times they break.

But something remarkable is happening that is rewriting the rulebook of priming and agenda-setting.

The time is ripe to come out of the academic cocoon. It’s the harvest season. The dots are falling into the place by a wave that is affecting every existing pattern.

What is that?

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/