Paper short abstract:

Drawing on empirical explorations of rapid media expansion and urban transformation in India, this paper builds a theoretical framework of desire/visibility disjunction which seeks to overcome the limitations of public/private division running through journalism literature. The paper advances media theory by drawing attention to recent urban transformation, globalization and the specificities of news cultures in the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

The recent expansion of commercial news media in the globalizing economies of the Global South has brought to the fore the limitations of media theories rooted in the experiences of Western democracies. In these regions, the revived and reframed engagements of the news media go beyond mere dissemination of 'information'. They take on new roles and self-presentations to directly shape social change in the uncertain milieu of urban transformation and deeply fractured integration into global economy. This paper proposes that the news media's current transformations and their implications for social change and urban politics could be understood in terms of a tension between two mediations: 'desire' and 'structured democratic visibility'. On the one hand, the growing commercialization of media mediates desire-as-aspiration in ways that 'desire' itself extends beyond the realm of consumer commodities, into new imaginations of ideal citizenship, civic activism, lifestyle, cultural ascent, social mobility, body and self. On the other hand, 'structured democratic visibility' relates to acts of visibalization, emerging as intended and unintended outcomes of the news practices through their intersections with the wider social and cultural field, and imprisoned neither within the liberal conception of representation and rational-critical discourse nor within the paradigm of absolute elite control. I suggest that the framework of desire/ visibility disjunction could overcome the limitations of the public/private division running through journalism scholarship, especially those which draw a distinction between public good and private accumulation. Eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork on news production in urban India informs this analysis.