Contemporary television and the concept of transparency

Abstract

Stuart Hall’s seminal article ‘Encoding, decoding’, while discussing the hegemonic-dominant mode of televisual communication in which the receiver decodes the message ‘straight’, describes it as a ‘transparent’ scenario, referring to the smooth symmetry between the two ends of the encoding and the decoding. By the early 1990s, when private satellite television channels started transmission in India, their operations hinged around a notion of transparency which is entirely different from the sense of ‘straight communication’ which Hall was referring to when he used the term. Calling it ‘process transparency’, I try to show in this article that the private satellite television identified ‘simulating the effect of revealing the encoding process’ as key in producing a spectatorial address distinct from how the state broadcast institution had come to address the viewers. Through a performative revelation of the coding process, which in turn can produce an alluring effect of immediacy, the aesthetics of process transparency promises a higher fidelity in representation. The first part of this article discusses the case of Asianet, the Malayalam satellite channel which, when it started its telecast in 1993 as one of the first private satellite television channels in India, attempted to institute a new set of professional codes that were meant to produce the effect of revealing the internal processes of representation/mediation. The article later explores the larger implications of this route to transparency and immediacy, by identifying and discussing a set of aesthetic registers deployed in news programmes in contemporary television across the world.