Journalism and Mass Communication III: Indian Traditions of Communication from the Vedic Era to the Twenty-First Century; Western and Eastern Philosophical, Ethical and Aesthetic Perceptions; Media and Culture in a Globalised World; and Globalisation in India

The Hindu ethical tradition joins truth with care in speech. A verse of the Manusmriti says one should speak what is true and what is pleasing, and should not speak an unpleasant truth or a pleasing falsehood, a counsel of tact that sits uneasily with journalism's duty to publish unwelcome truths and is often discussed for that reason. Satya (truthfulness) is among the first virtues in the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad Gita (17.15) describes austerity of speech as words that cause no distress and are truthful, pleasant and beneficial.

In Buddhism, right speech (samma vaca) is a step of the Noble Eightfold Path: abstaining from false speech, divisive speech, harsh speech and idle chatter. The Buddha taught in the vernacular Magadhan speech of his listeners rather than in Sanskrit, adapted his teaching to the capacity of each audience (upaya, skilful means), and built the Sangha as a travelling network that carried the teaching across Asia. The emperor Ashoka's edicts (third century BCE), inscribed on rocks and pillars in Prakrit in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, and in Greek and Aramaic in the north-west, are among the earliest state public-communication campaigns anywhere, preaching dhamma to subjects in their own languages.

The Islamic tradition gives communication a duty and a method. Tabligh is the duty of conveying the message; the Friday sermon (khutba) is a weekly public address. The Quran (49:6) directs believers to verify news brought by an unreliable person before acting on it, lest they harm others in ignorance, a verse often cited in discussions of journalistic verification, and it condemns backbiting and slander. The science of hadith evaluated each report by its chain of transmission (isnad), examining the reliability of every narrator, which is an early and rigorous method of source criticism. In India the Sufi khanqahs, the qawwali tradition associated with Amir Khusrau, and a shared Hindustani idiom made Islamic communication part of a composite culture.

Plato distrusted rhetoric. In the Gorgias, Socrates calls it not an art but a knack of flattery that produces belief without knowledge, as cookery flatters the body while medicine heals it. In the Phaedrus he allows a true rhetoric grounded in knowledge of the soul and the subject, and has Socrates tell the myth of Theuth, in which writing is said to weaken memory and give the appearance of wisdom without its reality, a worry that returns with every new medium. In the Republic, the allegory of the cave pictures people mistaking shadows for reality, and poets are banished because their imitations (mimesis) stand at two removes from the truth.

Aristotle's Rhetoric defines rhetoric as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. There are three modes of proof: ethos, the speaker's character and credibility; pathos, the emotions stirred in the audience; and logos, the argument itself. There are three kinds of rhetoric by occasion: deliberative (political, about the future), forensic or judicial (about past acts) and epideictic (praise and blame, about the present). His Poetics defends imitation as natural and instructive and describes tragedy as effecting, through pity and fear, a catharsis of these emotions. Aristotle thus supplies both a source-message-audience scheme, two thousand years before Lasswell, and an aesthetic of audience response that invites comparison with rasa.

An Eastern counterpoint comes from Confucius, whose "rectification of names" (zhengming) holds that social order depends on words matching realities: if names are not correct, speech does not accord with the truth of things and affairs cannot succeed. Confucian communication stresses hierarchy, harmony and ritual propriety, and the Daoist Laozi opens by saying that the way that can be spoken of is not the constant way, a scepticism about language that resembles the Indian sense of meanings beyond the uttered word.

Culture was defined by E. B. Tylor (1871) as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities acquired as a member of society. Raymond Williams's essay "Culture is Ordinary" (1958) insisted that culture means a whole way of life as well as the arts, and Clifford Geertz (1973) described it as the webs of significance people themselves spin. Media are both carriers and makers of culture: they transmit a society's heritage, which is Lasswell's third function, and they produce the shared stories, images and celebrities through which people now understand themselves.

Four frameworks dominate the study of culture under globalisation. Cultural imperialism, argued by Herbert Schiller, holds that the one-way flow of media from the West, especially the United States, erodes other cultures; the UNESCO MacBride Commission's report Many Voices, One World (1980) gave it an international platform in the call for a New World Information and Communication Order. Cultural proximity, proposed by Joseph Straubhaar (1991), observes that audiences prefer programmes from their own or nearby cultures when these are available, which is why local content usually beats imports. Glocalisation, popularised by the sociologist Roland Robertson, describes global forms adapted to local markets. Hybridity describes new cultural forms made by mixing, and Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996) proposed five interacting flows, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes, in place of a simple centre and periphery. Daya Thussu's idea of contra-flows adds that media now also flow from the global South, Indian films among them.

Politically and economically, globalisation in India dates from the reforms of 1991, adopted during a balance-of-payments crisis: liberalisation of licensing, privatisation of state enterprises, and integration with world markets through lower tariffs and foreign investment. India joined the World Trade Organization at its creation in 1995. For the media the reforms coincided with satellite television, which arrived with CNN's coverage of the Gulf War in 1991, followed by Star TV (1991) and Zee TV (1992), and later with the opening of print to 26 per cent foreign investment in news (2002), private FM radio, and the telecom boom that preceded the smartphone.

Socio-culturally, the effects were mixed and are still argued over. Advertising and consumer culture grew with a new middle class; global formats were localised, as when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire became Kaun Banega Crorepati (2000) and music channels switched from Western to Hindi film music; the Indian diaspora became an audience for Indian films and channels; and Indian cinema, television and later streaming content reached abroad, an example of contra-flow. Critics point to commercialisation of news, homogenised urban tastes, and a widening gap between media-rich and media-poor Indians; others emphasise the vitality of Indian-language media and the way global forms were Indianised rather than simply imposed. A balanced answer notes both, and notes that Straubhaar's cultural proximity describes India well: local content in local languages generally won.