Introduction

It is my great honour to share some reflections with you
all today in this awesome space and time. I want to thank
the organizers of the World Social Forum for their
invitation and generous welcome. I feel, like all of you,
invigorated by the electric spirit of change that is in
the air, and revel in it, and am in awe of it…

I feel particularly hopeful today because as an feminist
activist interested in questions of media, information and
communications, the space that has been given in this
forum for a discussion of media and globalisation
recognises the intricate and complex relationship between
media in the broadest sense of the word and the global
powers. It is time that we recognize and give strong
resistance to what transnational corporations and
governments have long understood - that seizing power may
require guns and military and political machinations, but
ultimately staying in power, is about conquering the
hearts and minds of people - which is why the
corporatisation and control of media and communications
systems has been crucial.

I will try to examine this notion of conquered minds and
hearts that takes place through media manipulation and the
project of cultural domination - which I believe has
merely changed in form but not essence since the period of
global colonialism. I will do so by reflecting on some of
the experiences that feminists have had in their brave
challenge to media corporations as the high priest of the
patriarchal capitalist enterprise. I will also try to
reflect upon the colonising effect of Western-dominated
media with a viewing from the margins. By the margins I
mean a space where there is an intimate and politicised
struggle of identity and self-determination taking place,
whether it be the struggle of indigenous people, the
struggle of Dalit communities, the struggle of various
ethnic, social and religious minority groups whose are
being brutally suppressed by totalitarian regimes.

There are multiple homogenisation projects taking place,
not just that of cultural homogenisation most apparent
through the large media enterprises of the West. Within
many countries of the South, there has been a forcible
attempt to stitch together national boundaries and make us
all "One People" by a purposeful playing down of cultural,
social and political diversity in the name of National
Unity. In countries where the pretense of democracy is not
required, i.e. those countries where internal voices of
dissent have been near silenced, there is a blatant and
open domination of culturally and socially dominant groups
over the most marginalised, tribal and indigenous
communities. Therefore, when we speak of resisting the
forces of globalisation by challenging media moghuls and
new information and communication empires, we need to be
willing to challenge our own beliefs. We need to stay
cogniscent of the multiplicity of sites of resistance and
keep vigilant against glib binary statements that carve
out the world into the Good and the Evil. This would be
too easy, and ultimately, essentialising leads us to
dogmatism and political and intellectual stagnation.

As a way of threading my thoughts together for this
presentation, I have chosen five facets of the challenges
we face when we think about mainstream media in the
context of globalisation:

· Subjugating Minds and Hearts
· Creating the Hyper Enemy
· Normalising Militarism and Violence
· Growing Alliance of the United Nations with
Transnational Communication Entities
· Mounting a Broad-based Resistance

I want to state before I start that these represent a mere
narrow slice of all we might discuss in a topic as broad
as this one. I also do not intend to generalise all of my
points onto all media, and certainly not onto the
complexities of local, nationalized or regional media
institutions, or of alternatives to the mainstream. In my
frame when I speak is what Noam Chomsky refers to as the
elite media, or the agenda-setting media, those that have
the resource and set up the framework upon which others to
operate. These are almost all exclusively owned by
corporate interests of the North.

Subjugating Minds and Hearts

Subjugating minds and hearts is core to any imperialist
project. Where guns are too crude or blatant to openly
brandish, there are many ways to reach into the minds of
people and subjugate: put bans on indigenous language,
religious practices and customs; introduce notions of the
modern to 'correct and save' "the primitive"; create
hierarchies of cultural supremacy by demeaning and
anthropologising the cultures of those being colonized;
classify, systematize, rationalise and order the cultures,
languages, mythology, religious and healing practices of
those colonized so that we are all squeezed through the
lense of Western epistemology.

Such that when MTV holds a World Music Concert, we, the
formerly colonised, willingly dance and gyrate, beat
drums, shake beads and clank cymbals, sing progressive
lyrics of pride in our nation and pride in our culture.
Few of us have reflected into these questions long enough
to ask- why all the cultures of the South are squeezed
into that narrow sales bracket in the music industry known
as World Music, that reinterprets our culture, music, and
language into acceptable, synthesized sound-bites
palatable to the West?

In that post-colonial frame of existence, where notions of
inferiority to the West are so deep rooted in larger
society - and there is endless expression of this in Asian
societies, from skin-whitening lotions and hair
straightening to eye-lid doubling and nose lifting, and
other body alterations - it is easy to manipulate and
modify cultural norms and values, and shape consumer
behaviour accordingly.

Transnational capitalist enterprises know this better than
most. The trillions of dollars spent in advertising, which
works symbiotically with globalised media systems, has
proven to not be in vain. It can be argued that
advertising and how it is completely interwoven with all
forms of mass media from newspapers, television, movies,
and now the Web, is one of the most crucial arms of
capitalism. Advertising together with the mind lulling,
largely American, music, television programming and movies
are a most effective way of subjugating values and
thoughts, shaming people away from that which is
indigenous and local, and homogenising our tastes in food,
clothing, housing, furnishing, communications, art and
even to what we regard as sexually desirable. Global media
is to corporate capitalism what missionaries were to the
colonial enterprise - it creates the sensibility, the
cultural posturing and the values base necessary for a
full scale expansion and capture of markets.

Most of the global fashion, beauty and cosmetics industry
comes in the wake of a decimated sense of self-worth and
total inadequacy that is the result in large part to the
subtle and not so subtle messages that come through the
globalised reach of mass media today. This is true of
people in both the North and the South. It is tragic and
sad when women in places such as Japan and Hong Kong
desire to stay young and western looking do cosmetic
surgery to change their brown nipples to pink or used
coloured lenses to turn their eyes green or grey for the
same reasons. It is tragic and sad when women in Europe
spend thousands of Euros, cosmetically changing the shape
of their breast into perfectly round ones, or spend
hundreds to buy bras that have that same effect.

This is just a small part of the total project of
subjugation. Feminists have tended to be more vocal and
vigilant on issues such as these, since this is what we
regularly do; interrogate the soft underbelly of society
that most have been unwilling to examine, and challenged
the most fundamental assumptions of women, men and
societies. It is now time for all of us to join in this
critique.

Creating the Hyper Enemy (and the Victim)

The creating and reinforcing of the image of the Hyper
Enemy and the Hyper Hero works on pre-existing categories
of Good and Evil that have been kneaded into the fibre of
our societies through hundreds of years religious
indoctrination. The pre-Judeo-Christaic religions have
Gods and Goddesses that are far more complex and fallible
than the one True God or the Infallible Leader of an
unquestioning flock. It appears that modern nations, and
perhaps all groupings of people at some level, thrive on
the notion of an ominous external threat - well, certainly
the United States of America does. No country has better
mastered the art of creating fictive enemies and bombing
them out of existence as a means of fuelling the
production and trade of arms thus bolstering flagging
economies that are in crises, and then managing to
convince some, if not all, of its citizens of its just
cause.

We all know who the Hyper Enemy is…A Hyper Enemy is one
that is larger than life, that steps out from the unknown,
with incredible seemingly supranatural powers, including
being able to survive in a cave for weeks while thousands
of innocents around him die from a devastating bombing. He
escapes incredibly and still lives, despite reports of his
near death, to return…the way Hyper Enemies do in the
movies, for more block-buster sequels a la Terminator or
whatever. Only these sequels, the pre-emptive pogroms
against terrorism that George Bush intends to wage will be
Real, and real bullets will be shot, real bombs exploded,
real people blown into bits, real blood to flow.

And where does globalised media stand in all of this? Well
consider that several years before the event of September
11th, we already had a bearded, turbaned, military
jacketed, Osama ben Laden, introduced to us as Public
Enemy Number 1. The stage was set, the villain identified,
and type cast. Many of us who missed the live telecast of
the collapse of the Twin Towers saw the horrific images of
the planes crashing into the Towers repeated ad nauseum
for weeks after - and after that the display of grief, the
recounting of infinite stories of sorrow, hurt, rage over
the events, were repeated throughout the world for whoever
was connected through satellite to CNN. What we did not
get see in equal magnitude was the display of grief of
tens of thousands of Afghanis who lost their loved ones,
we did not hear their stories of sorrow, hurt and rage
after October 10th, when the United States of America
started its brutal retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan. Or
the thousands others in countless other places that have
lost their loved ones due to American or American backed
bombings and aggression over the past few decades in
different parts of the Third World.

The construction of the Hyper Enemy is deliberate and
crude, but highly effective. The image of a bearded man,
some turbaned and long robed - the stereotyped Muslim man,
has been burned into the back of public consciousness. I
doubt that there is a bearded man, particularly one that
is garbed in something that looks vaguely traditional,
with a face that is vaguely South Asian or Middle-eastern
who has not been at least once been cat called and hooted
names at, at the very least.

It is not just the Hyper Enemy that gets created through
the media…those of us who come from countries where poor
people die regularly, seemingly silently, in the tens of
thousands, from natural disasters, malnutrition, disease
and the violence of poverty know that the tragedies of our
lives are only to be commodified into sound bytes and
visuals for global consumption. The tragedy lasts for only
as many days as there are before the next tragedy, as CNN
hops through the world for ever more tragic disasters.
When 40,000 people died in Turkey in 1999 in the
earthquake, the most important story that emerged in the
news magazines and the World News was that of an American
woman who survived the tragedy. Her story was told in full
length, while everyone else's was just a paragraph. When
there were thousands dead in Bangladesh and the Eastern
Coasts of India one year, their story was a mere column in
the inside page of our newspapers, because on the same day
a hurricane swept through the Southern states of the USA,
and we were shown full frontpage colour images of women
grieving over lost property though not a single life was
lost.

Normalising Militarism and Violence

"Normalising the unimaginable" is a concept that Edward
Herman lends us, and something that anti-war feminists
such as Sunila Abeysekara of Sri Lanka have spoken about
in different ways. Media enterprises that are controlled
and strictly censored or that are owned by the status quo,
interested in keeping in power governments that are of the
same mind, have played a crucial role in normalizing the
culture of militarism. These same enterprises have
perpetuated the notion that violence and war are necessary
and even a necessary step towards the creation of peace.
The centrality of war, heavy artillery, and hero-killers
as part of the daily diet of the consumers of world news
and television programming has normalized at some level
the presence of soldiers in society and their purported
role of defending us from the external enemy. More often
than not however, soldiers are turned against non-pliant
or rebellious citizens, and more often than not external
support is sought to quell dissent from within.

Military strategies are society's best kept secrets, and
it is rare that we ever hear the truth about what the
military has, does or intends to do. The news of military
encounters get reported with a purported objectivity that
fails to ask the more fundamental 'why' questions that dig
deep into what the real reasons for a conflict are. We are
pummeled with verbose garbage of the reasons for one
military encounter or the other, and rarely are the real
economic reasons behind these conflicts ever heard about.
In recent history, when the United States is involved,
there's oil, natural gas of some of scarce commodity that
they want control of. Instead, the version that we get
dished out as news usually some canned, repetitive
propaganda that prevents the possibility of the ordinary
thinking person of understanding what is really happening.
We rarely get to an answers to the questions that we are.
In the name of national security, the military often
exists has extra-legal powers that are presented as
necessary and normal.

In the words of a media analyst known as Norman Solomon,
in his book, False Hope : "Today's dominant news media are
good at repeatedly covering the same ground, carefully
avoiding much exploration beyond the sanctioned
boundaries. A narrow band of terrain is trod, as if it
were the universe of ideas. We may get used to equating
what is familiar with what is objective, what is usual
with what is balanced, what is repeatedly asserted with
what is true." This is the essence of propaganda…endless
repetition until it becomes true, until it become
familiar, and until it become normal.

Growing Alliance of the UN with Transnational
Communication Entities

I flag this as a point of concern for all political and
social activists, not because I, nor my organisation, have
done a sufficient amount of research on the topic, but
because I feel it is a trend that we should closely
monitor. I feel that there is a too-close-for-comfort
alliance building taking place within the UN system with
large transnational media corporations, started when Ted
Turner, formerly owner of CNN, gave to the United Nations
as a gift US$10 million, in the name of development. This
was followed by the setting up of a website by Cisco
Systems Inc. to fight hunger and poverty. I recall when
the site was set up, there was a slew of emails from well
meaning friends and activists from all over the world
urging me to click into this website. It was advertised as
a way of instantly donating one US dollar towards the UN's
fight to end poverty through its development programmes -
we finally have arrived at the age of virtual armchair
activism!

More recently, the United Nations Women's Development Fund
(UNIFEM) has partners with Cisco Systems Inc. and Cisco
Foundation in a joint programme launched in Jordan known
as "Achieving E-quality in the IT Sector" which will build
ten gender academy sites to provide training for Jordanian
women. The programme aims to - and I quote from a press
release by the UNIFEM Arab State Regional Office -
"optimize… on marketing demand-driven skills to
women…[and] to empower women in the IT sector and
mainstream them into the work force by building system
networking capabilities to increase women's advantage in a
heavily male-dominated market." And I further quote, "upon
successful completion, candidates will be able to design,
build and maintain computer networks, and they will
receive the CCNA certification, a world renowned world
class standard." While I relate to the instinct to
equalise women's opportunity in the jobs market and in
information technologies, training women specifically in
the use of specific patented products, essentially means
that they are technicians for Cisco products, and not
necessarily equipped with more broad-based skills and
knowledge that can be applied outside the framework of
Cisco Systems. In one sense, it can be viewed as a way of
capturing the market of users, since these women who join
the workforce would probably advocate Cisco products,
since this is the technology that they have greatest
familiarity with.

We cannot view these gestures by these large corporations
as benign or as demonstrations of corporate social
responsibility intended for the greater good of humanity -
because it has been proven in different instances that
corporate dollars never come unattached. Cisco Systems
Inc., like all multinational corporations have a global
expansion plan, and would want to be poised to become a
"world leader" in the computer systems networking sector.
Leadership in the corporate sense means the creation of
monopolies, in the most traditional sense of the word I
believe that there is justification in viewing this
alliance with gut-level suspicion. Some fundamental
questions need to be asked about the changing face of the
UN's development agenda.

Mounting a Broad-based Resistance

There are various things that we must do, to put up
resistance that is broad-based and non-sectarian, that can
draw in more people into this struggle against the
perpetuation of an unjust, violence, oppressive system.

1. We need to keep our minds open to being deeply
challenged, and to be willing to give up our familiar
analytical lenses and known platforms for advocacy and
action. This is the challenge that I believe that the
Porto Alegre process has thrown up to feminists globally -
it has demanded that we stay cogniscent of the
multiplicity of the platforms of struggle for change. We
can no longer speak of sexist portrayal in the media,
without taking on the ways in which media misrepresents,
caricaturises the most dispossessed and marginalized in
society in ways that maintain the moral, social and
cultural authority of dominant classes. I believe that all
of us from various social movements need to be more
cogniscent of the struggles of other social movements,
their analyses and si