Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This paper intends to make use of the instances from the ongoing farmers’ movement in India to revisit the existing media theories. It is argued in the paper that the media theories suffer from technological determinism and ignore the social relations. The techno-determinism has reduced communication studies to ‘mass media’ modality. The ongoing farmers’ movement demonstrated that communication is an articulation of social relations, therefore, despite the shutting down of the internet and mobile services as per the government orders, the farmers mobilised themselves in huge numbers. The methods of communication used in the villages of Punjab and Haryana exhibit the need for revisiting the techno-determinism of media theories and affirm the centrality of social relations. The paper proposes to highlight the role of peasant economy in shaping communication practices in India, thereby, offering insights from a context where capitalism’s development took a different route due to its colonial context. Hence, the paper postulates that the ‘mass-media’ modality is inappropriate to capture the communication processes of Indian context. Farmers’ movement acts as a catalyst for new insights into media theories which have primarily emerged in the backdrop of advanced capitalist countries and uncritically followed in Third World countries.