Today
when, with the dissemination and access of the Internet, television as
means of obtaining information is gradually yielding its dominant
position and turning into a means of entertainment and leisure, it's
worth retrospectively examining the path taken by post-Soviet Armenian
television, pointing out the main stops on this path.
The
biggest change in Armenian television is tied with ALM TV — the channel
that kept different layers of the Armenian viewing public glued to
their screens for 10 years. It wouldn't be an exaggeration if we said
that the history of independent Armenia's television is divided into two
parts: before ALM and after ALM.
AR or the Tenderness of Irony
Before
ALM TV, Armenia had television that tried to overcome the legacy of
Soviet television, but still had numerous strings attached to it.
Conditioned by the free market, democratic pluralism and
anti-ideologization, a new situation was created in which many of the
former functions of Soviet television became anachronistic, though they
continued to be applied in whole or in part. Television caught between
the inevitable processes of nationalization and commercialization was
trying to free itself from ideological propaganda and educational
functions. The nationalization process assumed that television
production should satisfy the demands of different and as many as
possible social strata, while commercialization assumed that the
production of television was according to market demands. However, high
culture continued to dominate the airwaves, which couldn't have a large
audience — neither then nor now. At the same time, the airwaves were
completely closed to the "rabiz" subculture, which had no small number
of followers. That is, taste was being dictated directly, as in Soviet
times. The educational function wasn't overcome, but television was more
open and penetrating the airwaves were elements considered marginal in
the Soviet era, such as, for example, pornography and the avant-garde.
The
quintessential of post-Soviet Armenian television was the AR TV station
of the 90s — we could look at the main trends of the time using it as
an example. AR was an example of an elite TV company, no matter how
absurd that sounds when it comes to television. Art films, broadcasts
with original content, a significant portion of which might be shown not
only on television, but also in theaters, as a form of conceptual art.
Working at AR was the Soviet Armenian underground, the dissidents, who
had been waiting decades for this historical moment to propagate their
ideas. They weren't TV professionals; they were painters, writers,
thinkers. The main thing in AR TV's programming was the creative
approach, originality, uniqueness. The emotional backdrop was the tender
irony, the intellectual irony toward mass culture in which it operated,
perhaps not fully realizing the nature of this culture but presuming
that ideology no longer works and citing another instance of truth above
ideology.
Thanks
to AR TV, that which generally contradicted the essence of TV took
place in television — as a cradle of mass culture. That culture which is
sheltered in the marginal space, which is the monopoly of the
marginalized minority, through the television funnel became the property
of the broadest masses of people.
This
was due to the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
dissident intellectual elite, which dictated its tastes to the public
via television, came to power. Using the pendulum principle, this elite
government was quickly replaced by a militarized, criminal element,
which, in turn, brought to television its subculture and its tastes,
continuing to oblige the public in a direct manner. Basically not much
changed: one marginal phenomenon came and replaced another marginal
phenomenon. The idea of public television, which was to serve the
demands of all social strata, remained unfulfilled. The closest anything
came to this realization was not National Television, renamed Public
Television and funded by the state budget, but the privately owned ALM
TV station. But ALM did this through a truly alternative route.
ALM or the Procession of Cynicism
ALM's
name, the acronym of which in Armenian means Alternative News Media,
already suggests that ALM was conceived as an alternative to the type of
television prevalent in Armenia, the ideal example of which was the TV
station AR. The founders intended to provide an "alternative" on the
political level, but the alternative ALM proposed to the public was
chiefly cultural. ALM's "cultural revolution" refered to the castling
and merging of high and low culture, to the processes of eliminating
absolute taste which took place as a result of the domination of mass
culture and within that culture.
Until
the mid-20th century mass culture was classified as low culture and was
subject to criticism by European intellectuals, despite having the
status of an official culture in the US. And though the USSR criticized
it for bourgeoisification and hedonism, it had its version of the same.
Since the mid-20th century, the attitude toward mass culture has been
changing, becoming tolerant and more inclined toward analysis than
criticism. This pertains to the Western world which was entering the
post-modern era. In addition to eliminating the contrast between high
and low culture, post-modernism also extracted mass culture from that
contrast. In the face of mass culture, we are now dealing with a new
type of culture, which opposes neither elite nor national nor urban
cultures. Here, the elite and the national (that which belongs to the
people), the high and the low intersect and peacefully co-exist. This
democratization of taste is a process that guides the democratization of
society (it's no coincidence that this happened in Armenia only after
the collapse of the Soviet Union). In art, the problem of
nationalization arises, which is overcome through the multi-layeredness
of creation: through an abundance of illusions, references and links —
post-modern work is for the intellectual, informed "consumer" but it
doesn't pressure the uninformed through learnedness. Everyone gets
according to what he knows and no one feels degraded.
The
ALM alternative was created for the imaginary "ignoramus" but it was
watched and understood also by intellectuals — not feeling themselves to
be belittled. That is, ALM even approached nationalization, but not how
it was done in television (by breaking up airtime and offering
different programs for different segments of society), but how it was
done by an individual creator — ensuring multi-layeredness in every
broadcast. This is not surprising as ALM was not a collective of
professionals, but rather an amateur, person-driven TV company.
One
of the most important functions of mass culture is acculturation,
whereby the individual accommodates to the given cultural situation. The
mechanism of acculturation works like the mechanism of general
education, but the mass culture is presented as a culture of
entertainment and seemingly refuses to shoulder educational
responsibility. It "educates" without educating, by averaging the
knowledge circulating in different segments of society. ALM founder and
director Tigran Karapetyan (pictured) was the first television figure
who had the courage to straightforwardly declare that it was not
television's mission to educate. It was the awareness of this reality
that spurred the rapid commercialization of Armenian television.
AR
and ALM were the path that Soviet television was to have passed to
become the channel of mass culture. It's no coincidence that AR and ALM
existed not simultaneously, but replacing each other as one the reaction
of the other. If AR was ironic, ALM assumed the positions of cynicism.
It denied the existence of any "upper level" and leaned on the lower
levels. If the value system collapses, it is one of the paths to
orientation.
Parallel
to ALM, Armenian television began to change and assume the appearance
that it has today. It became the indifferent transmitter of Armenian
mass culture, as television is destined to be in the modern world.
Arpi Voskanyan
Translated from Armenian by media.am
Translated from Armenian by media.am
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