ISA- IDELOGICAL STATE APPARTUS

ISA- IDELOGICAL STATE APPARTUS

These refer to institutes that uses methods of socialization for people to accept an ideology and not force. Althusser points those key institutions that carry out socialization process- Church, family, education system and the media. The media has taken over from the Church. 

The media as an ISA

n  The media tends to support the dominant ideology. They support these dominant ideologies by simply producing programs and products that support these ideas.

n  For media to win support for dominant ideology through media products that gives pleasure to minority groups. 

n  Media is drawn towards social conflict. The best example is the Hindi serial where are constant clashes between family members. Even movies have conflict, be it a love story or action movie there is a conflict, between family or good and evil. This is a staple of the media that it feeds to the public. Take even yesterday, the confict in Ayodhya case was hyped up a lot.

n  However there are times when the media does bring social problems to light, but this is only for the pleasure of the viewers who find it entertaining. In a way this also become a sort of conflict.

Media playing its Role as ISA

n  Media supports the dominant ideology and pushes asides social problems. They do this by:

-          By simply not giving the minority sections in society enough representation.  For example in Bollywood, lower castes like Dalits never present, even religions like Muslims and Christianity are never given enough representation. The dominant representation is Hindu.

-          Social difference is ignored by the media. For example, in most of the Indian serials the families are Hindus, which simply ignores the presence of the other minority religions in India.

-          Social Problems have been in the media have been misunderstood. For example take Police dramas. They depicted the culprit not as a person who has social background problems, but as psychological problems such as revenge or greed.

n  Media supports dominants ideology by incorporating or containing other ideologies.

-          Take for example the Hippy culture in America amoung the youth during the 60s and 70s which was first seen as anti-social but eventually joined the main stream ideology.

-          Media also at first attempt to contain the Black culture, especially during the time of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

-          Even when they spoke of other ideologies media always found a way to subvert it the the dominant ideology.