Manufacturing bias

Collective global memory is shaped by the dominant media in such a way that society's consciousness is in danger of being transformed into biased fiction meant to serve specific political ends.

THE collective memory of our society or that of any other society has been shaped over the centuries by a variety of factors that have been studied by scholars the world over. Ballads, poems, myths and legends have all contributed to it; so have seemingly inconsequential things like nursery rhymes, old lullabies used by mothers for generations, proverbs and, to the extent they reflect certain attitudes in society, superstitions. Theatre has been a formidable influence; Shakespeare pointed to this in Hamlet in which Hamlet says of theatre in general that its purpose,

"both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold as `twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

The strength of theatre lies in that reflection of the `form and pressure' of society, which through time forms its collective memory and because of this it feeds into the collective memory of society more completely than any other element.

And so it was, till technology altered the manner in which societal memory was shaped. The advent of what were wonderingly called the wireless set and the gramophone made it possible to feed information to society in a very different manner; the chief difference being that what was conveyed was conveyed on a very wide scale - far more than hundreds of concerts, performances of plays, ballads sung on festive occasions or dances all put together. And it was not just the arts; it was information on events, on the actions of leaders, of mass political action of different kinds. If the mere purveying of this information was new, even revolutionary, the fact that this information could be organised in specific ways - `edited', to be specific - made them even more powerful as agents shaping society's collective memory and ultimately its attitudes, beliefs and values.

The `wireless' and newspapers coupled with faster, longer means of transportation like the railways, and then the quantum leap to television, satellite communication and the Internet in the last few decades has made information and showbusiness, as opposed to the arts, Ally McBeal as opposed to Jane Eyre, the chief agent in shaping collective memory. If today the young think it essential to wear tight jeans or denim tops, and `hang out' in Barista's, it has a great deal to do with the manner in which their perceptions have been shaped by the information surrounding them, engulfing them and drowning them out through television and films.

Perhaps there was a time when the collective memory of any society was shaped more by the values and attitudes fostered by the heightened perceptions of creative artists - writers, painters, musicians, dancers and dramatists. That translated into certain beliefs, values and attitudes, not necessarily faithful to what was set down by the poet or sung by a musician or portrayed by a dramatist, but close enough for it to be possible to trace those elements in their manifestation in forms of social behaviour, social intercourse.

No longer. The arts have been displaced by an industry more lucrative than the manufacture of steel or finished goods, or of what the trade calls FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) namely, the entertainment industry the origins of which are in the United States and which is disseminated by means which also have their origins in the U.S. or are owned by major U.S. interests - satellite networks, television channels, film studios. The perceptions that inform that industry have filtered down through a variety of sources like Afro-American music, Caribbean dance rhythms and lyrics, and films, which, like theatre, represent not so much the form and pressure of the times as what stimulates minds that want to be entertained in a manner that does not require them to think except in very basic terms.

And, of course, information. News and `current affairs' are poured into the passive tired minds of people who live high-stress lives during the week and look to be fed with information packaged in appealing forms and, of course, edited to suit their interests. This is well as far as it goes. The problem arises when the interests are not really those of the recipients of information but of those providing it. It was really only a matter of time before the providers of information came to realise that that information could be `organised' to look like what the recipients wanted but was in fact something else.

This is not a very easy, simplistic issue - often the organisation is by people no less than the writers and poets of old, whose heightened awareness of values and moral sensitivities enabled them to see farther than most people, and so the information presented by them was more perceptive and, in its persuasiveness, enriched the collective memory more than the mere retailing of information would have. Here, a few U.S. examples - U.S., because as I said, the origins of the new well-springs of collective memory are there as are the means by which they are communicated around the world to what one can call the nascent global memory. Take the early television series called `See It Now', aired on CBS in the U.S. by the television news analyst and anchor Ed Murrow. He focussed on the hearings of the Senate Committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy which, under the guise of investigating `un-American' activities, began a witch-hunt to identify persons - often people of eminence in their fields - who may have once held or professed or been sympathetic to socialist (read communist) beliefs. Murrow used his cameras skilfully, in `murderous close-up' (as one commentator put it) of the lantern-jawed hard-faced McCarthy, his eyes cold and unfeeling, grilling helpless persons who perhaps in their youth had said socialism was a good thing. Murrow's programmes produced a wave of revulsion; and McCarthy found himself isolated and deserted by former party supporters. His committee was wound up and he died a few years later, unwept and unsung.

But the Ed Murrows and Walter Cronkites have long gone. Instead, we have the story of Private Jessica Lynch. Here is a classic example of what actually happened. Pvt. Lynch was injured when the vehicle she was in crashed and was treated in an Iraqi hospital. The doctors then tried to send her back to the U.S. but could not because the trigger-happy U.S. soldiers opened fire on the vehicle in which they had brought her to the U.S. outpost. What was reported in the U.S. and through the U.S. in the world media was that brave U.S. soldiers did a sort of Hollywood-style rescue of Pvt. Lynch from evil Iraqi hands, where she had been beaten even though she was injured; lots of `Go! Go! Go!', shouted by intrepid soldiers who swept in and took Pvt. Lynch to safety. They actually took her away from a handful of surprised and frightened doctors and nurses; this, of course, was not mentioned in the `information' fed into the world-wide systems of mass communications.

And now we have the story of the capture of Saddam Hussein. It now transpires that he was actually captured by a Kurdish leader who negotiated terms with him and then, having drugged him, left him in the `spider hole' for the U.S. to take away. But the world was told that U.S. soldiers combing the area found him and took him into captivity - a truly historic and brilliant feat, they said, based on sound intelligence provided by the CIA and MI6. Which is rubbish, according to the story in the British Sunday Express. The U.S. and British intelligence agencies had not a clue about Saddam's whereabouts till the Kurdish leader told them where to go and pick him up.

This is the terrible danger that now awaits the shaping of collective memory. It will be filled with `entertainment' in place of artistic creations and it will be fed with doctored information. Eventually it may come to be a collective memory which is a piece of fantasy, but a fantasy which will be taken to be very true, since the means of revealing it to be fantasy will be increasingly difficult to find, and even if they are found, they may not be believed. It will be precisely what Edward Said wrote about in his book Orientalism. That will be the final triumph of the transformation of society's consciousness into biased fiction meant to serve specific political ends.