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.

 

[[wysiwyg_imageupload:118:]]Of course, television doesn’t exist outside of mass culture; our everyday life is generally within mass culture, and television is not the part of our life that can slip out of that culture. However, like AR, ALM also operated contrary to the patterns of mass culture. Mass culture is anonymous, but creative thinking with a copyright stamp was present here. Amateurism and improvisation have no place in mass culture — this is the work of a collective of professionals having a narrow specialization. There were no professionals at ALM; everyone — from the broadcaster to the political figure (who were basically the same person) — were amateurs. The mass culture product is commercial, but ALM’s wasn’t commercial — it could be sold only to the author (the audio recording of a song to the singer, the video of a political broadcast to the political figure invited as a guest, and so on). 

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

 

 

Read the first part of this series here.

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.