Vibodh Parthasarathi, associate professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance at the Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, was in town over the last weekend to speak at the Habib University post-colonial higher education conference. Maleeha Hamid Siddiqui met him the next day to find his views about citizen journalism through social media, sacred cows in Indian media and the globalization of the music industry.

How are digital technologies being used for governance in India?

The whole idea of e-governance is moving rather strongly. The quality and detailing of the disclosure has gone up over the past 10 years. There is financial, departmental and legal information [that is being disclosed by the government]. Citizens-related governance such as passports to gas connections are not only expanding but are also becoming efficient. However, it is largely limited to cities.

Civil society organisations are also stepping into the idea of e-governance. There is a mobile application My Neta where one can SMS to a particular number in a constituency and get disclosures of the parliamentarian.

How has social media empowered people through citizen journalism?

The most prominent faces of citizen journalism are TV channels where citizens record stories and send them. I wonder about their reliability.

There is a lot of energy on social media platforms. It is especially there in terms of discussions around election time. Conflicts and disagreements also come out on social media. As a researcher it is interesting, as lots of people are available digitally with different views that can be analysed.

What social media platforms are Indians largely using to express their views?

Facebook is expanding tremendously largely due to mobile phones. Twitter followings of some politicians and of some even leading journalists are over millions. Interesting thing about Twitter is that when I talk to regional journalists they say they follow tweets of national journalists and in a sense decide what the agenda is for their local newspapers.

Investigative journalism has found a big boost through online medium. The other big thing about social media is its relationship with politics particularly of agitation politics. The agitational-Aam-Aadmi-sort where the connection is unclear. But there is definitely some sort of correlation between politics of agitation and how certain urban sections are active on media.

Why is the connection unclear?

In cases of agitation around the Aam Aadmi Party and one around the sexual assault case in December two years ago, there was already a lot of dissatisfaction with the way things were moving. The social media was more complementary. It needs a more nuanced look as there were various factors that were working together.

Are there sacred cows in Indian electronic media?

There are over 50 news channels in regional languages and I can only speak about TV channels in certain dominant languages. Events in conflict areas are shown in a manner, which is highly filtered. There is not much reportage on criticism of business. The sacred cow in India is not necessarily the government but big businesses. Many of these companies have significant investments if not complete ownership in the media sector so it makes the whole kind of thing complicated. It is a clear case of conflict interest.

In your talk at the Habib University you brought up media freedom and media diversity, could you expand on it?

There are two common values: media freedom and media diversity. Actually, they are a part of one thing. Historically, policy-wise and legally, we have seen the value of media diversity is being deprioritised for media freedom. It is not a question of either/or. Both need to be addressed.

One can understand why that happened [curbs on media freedom] in colonial times. During the 1950s, courts always checked those forms of regulation [dating to colonial times] in the name of media freedom.

If you look at the researches coming out of North America and Europe [on media], [they say] the Indian press is under-regulated. It is a case of regulation required in a normal democracy even that is not there. To be fair, the legacy of the state’s regulation in many sectors has often tended to be against private enterprise in our part of the world. We are aware that we don’t want that kind of [regulation].

We have had 15 years of deregulation that has now led to this environment of abundance, chaos and even lack of profits. This raises the question that who should be allowed to run a channel and who should be not. Can the government own the media? Can political parties own the media explicitly, because right now they are owning implicitly.

Media diversity is at various levels. At its most basic, it means, are we getting different points of view? So if there is a dominant newspaper in terms of circulation, does that dominance in circulation also lead to a dominance of a particular view? Then, are we as a reader or viewer getting diversity of different news and opinions? There is also diversity in terms of who is providing these views. Are all news channels owned by big companies or politicians?

We often tend to focus on the diversity of news content but to a large extent source diversity will also contribute to news content. There is diversity in terms of newsmakers themselves. Also, how representative is the newsroom in terms of diversity? How many women or minorities are there? Are they in decision-making roles?

What were your findings while researching the history of music industry in South Asia?

I was researching the coming of sound in South Asia which came with the gramophone that happened around the early 1900s. There were foreign record companies which sent their engineers to India to record music and that music was taken back to Europe, made into records and sold back to India. What is fascinating is those foreign recording engineers didn’t understand the language.

Our region in terms of the music industry got globalised nearly 100 years ago, much before Bollywood, since these recordings reached different parts of the world because of the South Asian diaspora.

There was the economy of sound i.e. different musicians travelling in different parts of the world. It was also interesting to see the languages of the recordings which were in at least eight or nine languages. The musicians were largely out of the classical tradition who were drawn into this. Nobody thought 100 years ago that it would become so big. The traditionalists never took it seriously. There was a big debate on how the gramophone would spoil the music culture.

This has also come up in different periods of time. When cinema and TV came, the same thing was said. I trace this back to the first media technology in which all our anxieties of what a technology will do in terms of disrupting our society, all those paranoia are put on those devices. Then, these devices become a part of our lives and we look for another device to transfer our anxieties. There is a long history of media and human beings that I was looking at during my research.

Published in Dawn, October 30th, 2014