Television: a danger to democracy?

Rejane Xavier 

Television has come to threaten democracy through the excessive power it has gained and because, according to Popper, it corrodes the basic foundation of the rule of law, which is the rejection of violence.

The exaggerated proportion of scenes of sex and violence on television at times when children and teenagers form a large part of the audience has aroused in increasingly wider sectors of society a call for some kind of control measures on the part of some kind of responsible authority.

A similar situation in the USA has brought about a strong social reaction fuelled by a broad-reaching discussion on the code of ethics of the culture industry, the authority of parents to choose the type of psychological and moral influence they consider suitable in bringing up their children, and the most effective ways of ensuring the freedom of choice of everyone within a society that recognises and accepts ethical and cultural pluralism.

In Brazil the topic unleashes two opposing but converging types of reaction. On the one hand the unbending paladins of free enterprise feel it is absurd to impose any kind of interference, whatever its origin, with the "freedom of creativity and information" exercised by telecommunications companies. On the other hand, genuinely democratic and well-intentioned intellectuals and artists, scarred by the experience of the dictatorship, tremble before anything that seems to them to evoke the odious ghost of censorship, and rise up with one voice against the faintest shadow of a "threat to freedom of expression". In the face of this double, solid barrier, rational discussion on the influence and role of the mass media becomes an extremely delicate matter.

Economics and Culture - Production and Circulation of Values

SÃO PAULO - WORLD CULTURAL FORUM

2nd JULY, 2004

LECTURE 5 – LARGE AUDITORIUM

REJANE XAVIER

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(Representing the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP))

Prada shoes, with Burberry pattern

According to the old rule (‘the cultural good is that in which meaning is more important than usefulness’) today nearly all goods are ‘cultural goods’: the brand is worth more than the training shoe or the pair of jeans, the label is worth more than the spectacles, the design is worth more than the chair.

 The first question that we face when considering the title of this lecture is really to define what values we are talking about.  Economic value and cultural value are frequently placed in opposition to each other and the ‘mercantilization’ of culture has been seen as a threat in these times of accelerated globalization, when cultural production is increasingly thought of as merchandise that has to fit the same rules that apply to the international trade in goods and services.

The growing importance of cultural industries in an increasingly globalized marketplace is an unquestionable fact although it still creates doubts and conflicts of interest.  On the one hand the ability of these industries to generate value, work and income is celebrated; on the other, fears are generated concerning their effects on traditional cultures and the pressures they exert on the creativity and freedom of artists.  

Writers, musicians, cinematographers and painters justifiably aspire to seeing their work exhibited, recognized and well paid, and see in the cultural industry a chance of achieving these aspirations.  However, they either refuse or are reluctant to make their art conform to the ‘rules of the marketplace’: producing a new record album every year, even when they have no new work ready; making films that the follow the dazzling action sequences of American cinema (we may consider here those wonderful Iranian films that the public often feels are ‘slow’ and ‘tedious’ because their ways of seeing and appreciating films have been moulded by Hollywood productions); producing paintings and sculptures adapted to western decorative taste, and writing novels following publishers’ models of  best sellers.

It is about this tension between market value and cultural value that I would like to reflect, if possible broadening the scope of the analysis in order to bridge the contradiction between them without ignoring the differences and even the points at which occasionally their differences cannot be avoided.