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The telegenic citizen
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It is now the citizen who has become the main performer on the small screen. Where does he score?
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FOR MEDIA guru Marshall McLuhan, the book was Marxist, while television was the quintessential post-Marxist medium where ideological diatribe yielded to the sound byte. But even the prescient McLuhan could not have estimated how much television would change the framework of our lives, creating in the petri dish of change a new generation of telegenic citizens, altering the DNA and code of viewer engagement with the medium. The citizen now has the vote, so to speak. The rules of engagement have moved from passive to active. Interactivity is the buzzword of the new viewing dynamics borrowing more from video games, the Internet and mobile telephony rather than living within the diktat of TV rules alone. A new hyper reality has been created. The rise of the telegenic citizen. The viewer makes the transition to being the viewed and the wooed. His or her real performance is played out on TV. He has the right to vote his choice in or out via a host of multi-media options.
Citizen performers
In India, television's recency — only 10 years since cable TV — is only balanced with its awesome ability to gobble, consume, co-opt and regurgitate almost 50 years of television from the West. And produce an instant generation of citizen performers. Now it is no longer the actor who mouths his part or the anchor who reads his lines, it is now the citizen who has become the main performer on the small screen. The master of effective sound byte and the purveyor of collective angst, the one who in letting it all hang out connects instantly with the millions of viewers. Gudiya, Raju painter, Indian idols, aspiring cinestars are all telegenic, all camera confident, their body language speaking of control, with enough flash and passion for zoom-ins and dignity that can be digitised into an effective cutting point. They effectively render the real anchors and real performers plastic and unreal. At some stage, we do not know which one is real and which one is the performance.
On Zee TV's Cinestars Ki Khoj, in a strange role reversal, the judge Satish Kaushik weeps, while citizen Himanshu, who has been voted out, consoles. Mothers, fathers, spouses of sports stars and neighbours of beauty queens come forth and hold forth for the cameras. The hangman after the Dhananjay trial becomes an instant celebrity — we know he is devout, reads the Hanuman Chalisa and prays before he fulfils his dharma of hanging as much as we know that Shah Rukh Khan has a back problem and eats chicken. Business moguls now undergo a new induction into empire building — the television performance. The citizens of Simla waiting for the moon to rise on the North Indian day of Karva Chauth and covered extensively by channels give an effective run to the multiple actresses on the small screen wearing sindoor and mehendi celebrating a fake reality — small screen Karva Chauth.
Nothing to do with looks
In the continuous manthan of art imitating life and life churning itself to imitate art, the reality show gives television a new lease of life. Real people go on travels in Discovery Travel and Living, real people choose to play survivor and bachelor, real people show us their lives. The public wants to see the person. Because one day it may be one of us. Being telegenic has nothing to do with looks. It is having the effective pitch, the relevant sound byte, and the ability to use rhetoric in palatable, memorable bytes. The ability to let your vulnerabilities show. Not surprisingly, in reality shows, confident people who actually would be terrific boardroom performers or achievers get voted out. It is the underdog who wins. Spin-doctors can do it but finally it is the citizen with the real experience who can deliver the lasting telegenic frame into the final fade out to the ad break. Eventually Marx triumphs over McLuhan. In a spin on Marxist thought, technological determinism decrees the citizen is no longer the couch potato, the citizen is an actor, the citizen in the final democratisation of the medium is the star.
GEETA RAO
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Madurai
Mangalore
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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