By M H AHSAN

Since the early 1990s the spectre of a new revolution has been haunting us. Variously called the Information revolution or the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution, it assumes a paradigmatic shift in production processes and relations, the emergence of a new knowledge-based economy, and a quantum leap from an industrial society into an information society. It is an epochal change anticipated as far back as the 1970s in Alvin Toffler's metaphor of a Third Wave, in Daniel Bell's evocation of an emerging white collar workforce replacing blue collar industrial labour, in MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte's dizzying vision of a digitally determined world. It has sparked a combative post-industrial discourse that came to a head with Francis Fukuyama's dire predictions of an `end of history' and a `great disruption'.

In the first flush of this revolution there were tantalising opportunities conjured up for developing economies like India. Here was our historic chance to bridge the North-South divide the Industrial Revolution had left us chafing under. Since the principal and popular instruments of the Information revolution - the electronic media and the computer - came to us close on the heels of their application in the West, we could, suddenly, transcend the technological lag of the industrial epoch and move forward abreast of the developed world. In any case, `endism' in history and rupture rather than continuity in the political economy (a la Fukuyama) meant that we could all start afresh on a clean slate.

A later variant of the same theme, and in fashion now, is `flatism': that all the world is a level playing field with easy enough exits and entrances. Thomas Friedman's history in a hurry `of the globalised world in the 21st century' seeks to reconfigure the world as flat in this sense. It is a queer mix of anecdotal empiricism and suspended disbelief which seems to make out that the bonding of exclusive IT enclaves in different countries at different stages of development into a global supply chain makes the world one big happy family. It would be a harmless, idiosyncratic proposition if it were not so callously indifferent to the lived lives of the masses of real people outside this virtual flatland.

Stretching the `flatness' figure of speech to the media of our times takes us into post-modernist territory, especially in terms of the flattening of heights and depths into one surface sweep. Susan Sontag has pointed out that "in the post-Nietzschean tradition there are neither depths nor heights, there are only various kinds of surface, of spectacle". Roland Barthes too, like Nietzsche, rubbishes the idea of `depth' as a repository of any concealed meaning and Jean Baudrillard's take on television as a mirror metaphor reinforces the surface-spectacle dimension of the media. Depth has yielded to breadth and we `surf" television channels across a shallow expanse. Seeking our way through the dense clutter of images, we find ourselves stumbling on the prescient aphorisms of Guy-Ernest Debord. In his Society of the Spectacle, written in the late 1960s, Debord observes: "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Every thing that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

"The spectacle as the concrete inversion of life," Debord declares in another burst, "is the autonomous movement of the non-living". Or again, "... the specialisation of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself". Scholars such as Pierre Bordieu have noted how Debord, whose work has remained relatively obscure, was way ahead of his time and how relevant he is to our understanding of the organic role of contemporary media. Society of the Spectacle has even been called the Capital of the new generation and one Debord enthusiast (A.H.S. Boy) explains the comparison: "In the same manner that Marx wrote Capital to detail the complex and subtle economic machinations of capitalism, Debord set out to describe the intricacies of its modern incarnation, and the means by which it exerts its totalising control over lived reality".

The peculiar manner in which the tension between the represented and the real is abstracted by the represented subsuming or becoming the real is not a new problem. As far back as 1843 we have Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, in his preface to The Essence of Christianity, pointing out that his era "prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being". In the Indian context, Dushyanta, in Kalidasa's Abhignanasakuntalam, laments the trick memory plays on him thus:

Like one who doubts the existence of an elephant who walks in front of him but feels convinced by seeing footprints, my mind has taken strange turns.

More recently, Heidegger held that a distinctive attribute of the 20th century was that it saw the world in terms of representation; and post-modern studies are suffused with the idea of a mediated universe that is autonomous and self- fulfilling. Marshall McLuhan was coming to haunt us with a vengeance. The medium was the message; and self-obsessively so.

Post-modernist empathy with the media takes a new turn with the shift from analogue to digital technology. In the new pixellated media environment McLuhan's soothsaying finds fresh meaning, as when he talks of a dispersed media structure "whose centres are everywhere and margins are nowhere". The constructs and methods of the analogue world are jettisoned as we plunge headlong into this digital realm. In the process, the hierarchisation of text and the logical cause-and-effect sequencing of content give way to a simultaneity and multiplicity of information bytes. In the dominant medium of television this change is manifest in the altered role of the screen as a site where montage and collage combine at the same time. Live and taped talking heads; intervening fast cut visuals and reportages; layers and tiers of discrete information delivered as charts, financial text or animated graphics; insets on the stock or commodities market; news update scrolls; commercial pop-ups and a medley of sound and musical effects ... all vie at once with one another for your attention. That is the look of the new age television screen and it demands fairly developed multitasking and non-linear ingestion capabilities of the viewer.

The digital-driven speed of the media has converted what used to be seen and experienced as a seamless `flow' across channels into what Todd Gitlin calls a `torrent'. The sheer pace of it is self-defeating because there is less and less time and space even to pay attention to it, let alone assimilate the barrage coming at us without let or pause. Attention spans have dwindled to ridiculous lows and the turnover of media-generated celebrities seems to keep pace with the rapid rate of obsolescence of the technology itself. The future that Andy Warhol spoke of, when everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, may well be here.

Celluloid cinema too seems reconciled to a makeover where the depth, resolution and tone of film negative stock defer to the speed, malleability and, above all, cost saving of digitisation. The distribution and exhibition ends are likely to conflate with the prototyping of digital release, whereby satellite-fed signals of a new film are tapped and simultaneously screened by appointed cinema theatres.

The Information revolution, then, with the media as its shifting eye of the storm, is in the melting pot, constantly redefining and reframing even the objective conditions in which it plays itself out. Coming to terms with this evolving media ecology can at best be tentative and open-ended. As first and second generation beneficiaries (or victims, depending on how you look at it) in the thick of it, we do not have the benefit of distance to assess how it will all turn out. But it does appear that new dynamics are at work in the information sector, which, combined with the impetus to globalisation and the free market, put us on a course whose direction we need to have some sense of.

Two determining features riding tandem in this media situation in a flux are convergence and corporatisation. Convergence, in the MIT's Media Lab definition of the term, implies a coalescing of what were hitherto three separate segments, namely (a) broadcasting and the movie industry, (b) print and publishing industry and (c) computer industry, into a single electronic delivery screen of the future. As it turned out, this became a model for business consolidation with forward and backward integration. The turn of this century saw a frenetic spate of mergers and takeovers, the first half of 2000 alone recording deals totalling $300 billion. When the dust settled, nine transnational corporations were in control of the global media market - namely, General Electric, AT&T and Liberty Media, Disney, AOL-Time ...