Vibodh Parthasarathi: Mediating Actions from Music to Governance

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in communication theory, media policy and comparative media practice. Parthasarathi’s current research explores the trans-national history of the music industry, both during its formative years (1900-1914) and in present times (1995-2005), the latter being pursued at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies (Jamia Millia Islamia University) as a Visiting Professor. He studies the music industry in the context of the Indian communication industry under globalisation, comparative media policy, and environmental movements & communication practices.

He is one of the Sage series editors on 'Communication Processes', of- which the first volume, 'Media and Mediation' was published in 2005, and the second, 'Domination and Defiance' is in press. Earlier, he was the international coordinator of an intercultural publishing project on 'Communication and Citizenship', involving scholars and publishers from Brazil, France and India, and co-edited the resulting anthology 'L'idiot du Village Mondial'; Editions Luc Pire, Brussels/Paris, 2004.
Trained in Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies (The Hague), Mass Communication, Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi) and an undergraduate degree in History from St. Stephens College, Delhi University. His research has been variously supported by Prince Claus Fund, Charles Wallace India Trust, India Foundation for the Arts, Netherlands Fellowship Programme, and the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation. Before joining Centre for Culture, Media and Governance at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, he was Visiting Professor at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia (2006-07), Associate at the Centre for Co-operative Research in Social Sciences (2000-02) and Assistant Professor at the Manipal Institute of Communication (1997-99). He has been Founding International Member, Intercultural Library for the Future (Paris, 2002), Member, Arts Education Advisory Committee, India Foundation for the Arts (Bangalore, 1998-99), Associate, South Asian Poverty Network Association (Colombo, 1997-2001), Member, Academic Council, Institute of Social Studies (The Hague, 1993-94), and Delegate to the Preparatory Committee meetings for the Earth Summit (Geneva, 1991).
His association with the media industry in India and abroad has varied from being a consultant, television producer and documentary director.

When transposing a concept like Witnessed Presence from one culture to another some tuning is acquired, according to Vibodh Parthasarathi. When one takes the two words separately, presence could be more universal where the idea of witness and witnessed presence could be more particular and therefore non-universal.

What is considered to be evidence or how one becomes a witness may be different across cultures. An early technology like the fingerprint does not distinct between identities of people. But when two people meet the context of the occasion, be it formal or ritual or just in the street, will deeply influence how one person witnesses another. People read the cues in each others appearances - styles, heritage, cues of community traditions, professional attributes - and this results in a judgement on the other persons identity, be it falsely informed and/or based on prejudice or not. Only when those cues are equally and fully understood can there be a space for dialogue and transaction. This raises the question whether one can be a witness without dialogue and transaction. Is transaction important for witnessed presence?

Technology deeply influences how people can witness each other and experience each other’s presence. Parthasarathi argues that because music can be recorded and be listened to at any time and any place, the relation to the voice of the performer has changed.

The voice that could only be heard before at a special occasion is set free from the boundaries of time and place. As a result of this, the relation between the performer and the listener changed profoundly. The site of the performance changed, the elements of performance changed and the nature of the music also changed. A four hours piece of music in North India can become a 4 minutes piece one can hear anywhere. It is not just playing music, it is re-playing music and in the act of re-playing music different kinds of things change: the context, the nature of the performance, the relation between the voice and the ear, the relationship between where the voice is coming from and where the voice is heard. When re-playing music the experience has become anonymous both ways: for the listener, because there is a voice but no face and for the singer because there is no presence of the audience to interact with.

Parthasarathi’s research suggests that in live performances early 20th century in India the interaction between the singer and the listener was vital. The way the listener responded to what was being sung changed how the singer was performing. The idea of witnessed presence is important when focusing on the rupture or break between the listener and the singer.

Because the witnessing in re-play is anonymous, one can argue that the performances are relatively more similar. If you do not know who you are singing for, than you largely sing a more standardized composition. Early 20th century this gap between the singer and the listener was addressed by advertising to give life to a faceless person, to give life to a faceless machine, which is the gramophone at that time.

Different media today create different kinds of presences dependent on how they facilitate different kinds of transaction in time and place. The telephone for example offers synchronous dialogues and therefore it is not replay, it is ‘live’ transactions. Parthasarathi uses the example of a rock concert: there are three scenario’s. You are in a rock concert for example in the midst of 5000 people. You can also watch the video of the rock concert in a bar on full screen with a hundred people in the bar. And you can listen to the rock concert on a CD in your house. It is the same composition, but there are three different kinds of transactions between the singer and the listener. Apparently the experience is not only determined by whether one listens to the concert being present in the performance space or by way of mediating media, also the difference in context when experiencing the mediated media changes the transaction between the singer and the listener.

The primary quality of the real singer and the real listener is the transaction between them. The moment it is mediated there is not this real transaction. When listening to music that is re-played by a CD for example, the listener will attribute all kinds of qualities to the music he/she listens to. These are not based on a real life interaction with the singer but nevertheless they are sensorial as well. The re-played music has the potential to influence the listener: behaviour, mood, sense of calm, imagination and more. The listener creates a mental map of the replayed music and this is also influenced by other information. For example, Parthasarathi argues, person A has not been to a particular rock concert but person B has and they talk about it. What person B will tell person A, will affect person’s A mental map of that rock concert and will influence person A when he or she listens to it.

Because people use technology devices, they also adapt to them. In the last hundred years have gotten used to another idea of being witness to each other. When studying these adaptation processes one has to distinct between people who already used similar devices and people who never did at all.

Only then one can find out about what people actually adapt to and what part of a person is adapting. This generates a different insight in these processes than rates can provide. The idea of doing something else while being on the mobile phone that may be a thing that calls for adaptation. You find people on the streets who stop when they receive a call and you have people who keep on walking while having the conversation. That seems to be two kinds of adaptation to the same device. And this is both ways, one can also argue that certain activities of people call for changes in technology.

Adaptation to technology is a major issue because also social systems are designed at the same time. The design of technology defines how people will see each other, how people will witness each other, will be responsible and how people will formulate prejudice. There are different directions of adaptation possible as well as different directions of technology. When focusing on adaptation the question arises how far the design of technology can stretch the human capability to adapt. There is adaptation possible within a certain parameters, argues Parthasarathi. Some people may argue that you can constantly adapt, that there is no threshold there. Where others may argue that you can adapt in this direction up to that point after which you can adapt not in this direction but only in that direction. It s clear that there are physical thresholds of weight, size, sound level, clarity of the screens and so on. When focusing on social or psychological effects of media-use one may ask very different questions like for example what happens to the understanding of the national news when one watches it alone, with a group or with three generations present.

Information and communication technologies function in structures of governance. There is the governance ‘of’ communication systems and there is the governance ‘through’ communication systems. The first kind, ‘of’ the communications systems, deals with ownership and regulations, agency of regulation etc. The second part, ‘through’ communication systems deals with information transactions, accountability, transparency, efficiency, so they are using communication technology as one of the proponents through which governance takes place.

One bunch of activities can be done online today which earlier on had to be done in physical presence. And there are things you can do now which you could not do earlier, like tracking down information of for example who said what in the parliament. This may have been possible before as well, but with Internet at least there is a cut in the amount of steps that is required to do a task and you make that task relatively agnostic to physical space. This kind of access results in more feeling of witnessed presence, differently than in physical space.

In a best case scenario if you are better informed, you are also informed more accurately. But does your being informed help you towards action? The question is whether that access then enables you to do what you could not do earlier. A lot of e- governance appears to be not more than information dissemination and that is just one part of governance. If we only focus on the information part of it and the transaction part of it, one would then forget the social action part of it. Information transaction is not only there for its own sake it is part of something else. We tend to give more emphasis to access to information more than on the ability to act based on the information we’ve accessed. Also there is this assumption in governance that the more mechanized and automated processes you have, the less hierarchy there is. This was an assumption of the early Internet for instance that networks were flat, which is not the case. Hierarchies appear to be invisible, but the working of those structures is beyond the purview of just human machine interaction.

When addressing witnessed presence in crisis situations, Parthasarathi elaborated on the media coverage of the Mumbai attacks, which only happened two weeks before. Parthasarathi argues that being witness is very context defined. If one is not part of a context and one does not recognize the context, one cannot be witness to this context and therefore one is not capable of taking responsibility for that specific context.

In the media coverage of the Mumbai attacks most attention was given to the Taj and the Oberoi Hotel, while the railway station was also heavily attacked and had at least as many casualties. In this choice of media coverage the social class of the reporters was of significant influence because for them the hotels were more familiar than the railway station. The ownership of the networks had an influence, especially because they would hire reporters from that kind of social class and one can build upwards to how the coverage happened. Reporters are not trained to take social responsibility and dynamics of self-correction are mostly defined by self-preservation, argues Parthasarathi. When an owner of a network makes a decision he does this as owner of the network and not as a human being. Commercial entities are not sensitive to Human Rights in such a case. To propose that companies, which respect Human Rights, may have a greater profit because trust values would be higher, may not be true globally. It may be true for certain companies in certain contexts at certain points in time.

View full transcript including film fragments here

Hereunder the transcript in text.