Media Representation and the Global Imagination E-Book

Shani Orgad

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PGMC - Polity Global Media and Communication series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others’ lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration.

The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and to relate to people who are remote from our daily lives, by developing ‘mediated intimacy’ and focusing on the self. It also explores how these representations shape our self-narratives.

Orgad examines five sites of media representation – the other, the nation, possible lives, the world and the self. She argues that representations can and should contribute to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in how we think and feel about the world, our place in it and our relation to far-away others.

Media Representations and the Global Imagination will be of particular interest to students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, politics, international relations, development studies and migration studies.

Leseprobe

Media Representation and the Global Imagination

Global Media and Communication

Arab Media, Noha Mellor, Khalil Rinnawi, Nabil Dajani and Muhammad I. Ayish

European Media, Stylianos Papathanassopoulos and Ralph Negrine

Indian Media, Adrian Athique

Media Representation and the Global Imagination, Shani Orgad

Media Representation and the Global Imagination

SHANI ORGAD

polity

Copyright © Shani Orgad 2012

The right of Shani Orgad to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-8085-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

To Yoav and Assaf, whose imaginations extend far beyond the globe

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Media Representation and the Global Imagination: A Framework

I Premises

What are media representations?

What ‘work’ do media representations do?

Why do media representations matter?

II Challenges

Desperately seeking the power of media representations

A compartmentalized field

Globalization and research on media representations: Mind the gaps

III Global Imagination

Conclusion: Towards a Critical Study of Media Representation and the Global Imagination

2 Imagining Others: Representations of Natural Disasters

Introduction

Global Imagination and Narratives of the Other

Imagining Distant Others in Natural Disasters

Lisbon Earthquake, 1755

Representing Lisbon Earthquake

From Quill Pen to Recording Studio – Voltaire with a Twist

‘We Are The World’, 1985 – the African famine

‘We Are The World’, 2010 – the Haiti earthquake

Conclusion

Mediated proximity and intimacy

The individual other

Symbolic space of contestation

3 Imagining Ourselves: Representations of the Nation

Introduction

Imagining the Nation: Between Identification and Symbolic Distancing, Attachment and Estrangement

The French riots

Temporality, exposure and placement

Competing frames

Particularity and generalizability

Invisibility and visibility of the other, what they mean for the vision of ourselves

The Consequences of Estrangement

Conclusion

4 Imagining Possible Lives: Representations of Migration

Possible Lives: Dreams and Nightmares

Dreams

Nightmares

Beyond Dreams and Nightmares: Ambivalent and Incomplete Imaginings of Possible Lives

Conclusion

5 Imagining the World: Representations of New Year Celebrations

New Year Celebrations: A Global Media Event

International News Reporting of New Year Celebrations around the World

The world as a space of sameness

The world as a competitive space marked by distinction

Alternative Cartographic Consciousnesses

CCTV Chinese New Year gala

Gaza diary: Welcoming the New Year

Conclusion

6 Imagining the Self

Imagining the Other/Imagining the Self

Imagining the Nation/Imagining the Self

Imagining Possible Lives/Imagining the Self

Imagining the World/Imagining the Self

Identification, immersion, embodiment and navigation in space

Uncertainty, ephemerality and spatial confusion

Conclusion

7 Conclusion: Nothing Gets You Closer Revisited

The Desire to Defeat Distance Revisited

The value of distance

The value of degrees of proximity and different modes of achieving it

The value of intimacy at a distance

The Desire to Remove the Medium Revisited

The Desire for Completeness, Coherence and Closure Revisited

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

2.1 Santa Catarina Square

2.2 Lisbon, 1755

2.3 ‘We Are The World 25 For Haiti’

3.1 ‘Mort Pour Rien’ vigil

5.1 Fireworks over Sydney Harbour

Tables

4.1 Comparison of SCREWED and ICED video games

4.2 Binary narratives of ‘Not Canada’ and ‘Yes Canada’

5.1 CNN, New Year 2008 Around the World

5.2 Comparison of CNN report and YouTube clip

Preface

This book reflects on the images, stories, accounts and voices that we encounter daily on television and the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers. We take these representations largely for granted; they function as a kind of background to our social lives, but they shape our individual and collective imaginations in consequential ways. My primary concern is to explore the symbolic ‘work’ that media representations do in inviting us to relocate to distant locales and contexts, and to ‘meet’ people that are remote from the contexts of our daily lives. In particular, I examine how this invitation is played out in today’s highly complex and networked global media environment through the centrality of intimacy in media representations, and I consider its implications for how the media feed the way we see, think of and feel about the world, about our relations with others and about our place in the world. The book explores these issues across five central sites where the work of media representations occurs, namely imagining others, imagining ourselves, imagining possible lives, imagining the world, and imagining the self.

This book should be of interest to students of media and communications, cultural studies and globalization, but need not be reserved to those privileged to read it as part of formal study of their subject in school or at university. I hope that the book will be of interest and relevance to a broad audience, at least among people living in stable societies, but also perhaps people in other parts of the world, whose imaginations feed on the representations circulating in the media.

Acknowledgements

Many people have encouraged and helped me to write (and complete!) this book, and also, no less important, reminded me that there’s a world and life out there, beyond the book.

I am grateful to my research assistants, Kerry Arnot, Dorota Kaczuba and Yinhan Wang, and especially to Ryan Cunningham, Stephanie Dixon and Esther Etkin, for their invaluable intellectual and practical contributions and for their genuine enthusiasm for the project.

Several people have generously given time to read and/or comment on parts of the book and I would like to express my gratitude for their helpful feedback. Special thanks to Stan Cohen for his, as ever, incisive comments on earlier versions of chapters 2 and 3. Amnon Aran made a number of insightful comments on different parts and has encouraged me throughout. My colleagues at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Robin Mansell, Sonia Livingstone, Linje Manyozo and Charlie Beckett, have been helpful and supportive at different stages of the book-writing process. My discussions with Richard Sennett were formative and helped me hugely to focus my thinking and articulate the story of the book.

I was fortunate to have some early conversations with Roger Silverstone, at the embryonic stages of the project, from which I benefited a lot. Roger’s intellectual spirit left a heavy imprint on my intellectual development and I have more than once imagined his (critical!) comments and suggestions on different parts of the book. I can only hope I got it right. His posthumous Media and Morality has been a huge source of inspiration and guidance, and a constant reminder of how much I miss him.

Cynthia Little is the best proofreader and language editor I could wish for. I cannot thank her enough for her meticulous reading and care. Cynthia is also a good friend and I thank her for her generosity and friendship. Fi Carroll also deserves special mention, for the tremendous support she has been giving as well as for her useful advice on the musical aspects in chapter 2. I am grateful to Philip Davies for his work on the index.

The book emerged from my teaching the topic as part of an LSE Masters course, in the years 2005 to 2011. I was extremely fortunate to have very interesting and interested and engaged students. The seminar discussions, in which students drew on their diverse cultural and personal backgrounds and experiences and shared their critical thoughts, greatly contributed to my thinking on the subject.

I have benefited from LSE’s excellent library and Heather Dawson’s expertise and help about where to find what. Our department’s administrative staff, Cath Bennett, Jean Morris and especially Vanessa Cragoe, have been supportive and helpful, and I thank them for this. I am grateful also for the financial support I received from LSE to carry out the research for the book.

Several parts of this book were written (and rewritten) at the Giraffe and Maison Blanc cafés in Muswell Hill and I am grateful to their staff for nourishing me (literally) so I could write about the nourishment of the imagination.

My dear friends Ros Gill, Bruna Seu, Hila Shkolnik-Brener, Irit Segal and Avital Shaal were unstinting in their tremendous ongoing encouragement, support and love, which have nourished not only my thinking and imagination but also my confidence, happiness and sanity! Eileen Aird is a fundamental source of support and guidance whose voice I have carried with me: I am deeply indebted to her.

I am grateful to Polity Press and would like to thank Lauren Mulholland, Helen Gray and particularly Andrea Drugan for their enthusiasm for the project, and Andrea for her encouragement and very useful advice and assistance. It has been a true pleasure to work with them.

Finally, I am hugely indebted to my family: my loving precious mother, Atalya Wolf, my darling father, Nechemya Orgad, Kobi Wolf, and my dear brother, Itamar Orgad, and his family. You are far away, but only geographically. Huge thanks to my family in London: my husband, Amnon Aran, for his love, patience and help, and especially my beloved boys, Yoav and Assaf, to whom I dedicate this book. They are the purest joy and light I have ever known. I am forever caught in the elastic love trap they weave with their incredible imaginations.

Introduction

Almost seven decades ago, the American Allen B. DuMont Corporation launched a remarkable advertising campaign for its television technology. An advertisement put out in 1944 promises a prospective consumer of the DuMont Television-Radio Receiver that:

YOU’LL BE AN ARMCHAIR COLUMBUS

You’ll sail with television through vanishing horizons into exciting new worlds. You’ll be an intimate of the great and near-great. You’ll sit at speakers’ tables at historic functions, down front at every sporting event, at all top flight entertainment. News flashes will bring you eye-coverage of parades, fires and floods; of everything odd, unusual and wonderful, just as though you were on the spot. And far-sighted industry will show you previews of new products, new delights ahead.

All this – a world actually served to you on a silver screen – will be most enjoyably yours when you possess a DuMont Television-Radio Receiver. It was Dumont who gave really clear picture reception to television. It will be DuMont to whom you will turn in peacetime for the finest television receiving sets and the truest television reception … the touchstone that will make you an armchair Columbus on ten-thousand-and-one thrilling voyages of discovery! (Billboard, 19 August 1944: 9; emphasis in original)

This text appears under the image of a man in an armchair, on a fireside rug (signifying home), gazing at a huge DuMont television screen, watching what looks like a scene from the Olympic Games, of a woman performing a back-flip dive. The backdrop to these images shows examples of what presumably are the ‘odd, unusual and wonderful’: a huge ocean liner, a group of cabaret artists singing to an invisible audience, and two horses, racing neck and neck, clearing a hurdle in front of the grandstand.

The advert is designed to sell a product, a specific communication technology. But it is also selling the fundamental promise brought by media and communications to a post-war world:1 a promise to annihilate time and space by connecting the viewer, through mediated representations (images and narratives), to events that are occurring miles away and to distant others whom the viewer will likely never meet. Fulfilling this promise depends on media and communications technologies: they provide a platform for experiencing the world ‘just as though you were on the spot’ and they create this experience. Media and communications are both the facilitators and the vehicles of the constitutive experience of globalization: the ‘disembed-ding’ and ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space (Giddens, 1990). Disembedding of social relations is the basis for ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (Giddens, 1990: 64). Importantly, the process of ‘disembedding’ of social relations is inextricably connected to, framed by and dependent on the production, circulation and consumption of commodities in the global market. In this process, media representations not only project and promote ‘new products’ and ‘new delights’, for example, in the form of advertisements, but themselves constitute commodities that are produced, disseminated and consumed in the market-dominated media environment.

In this DuMont ad, it is the enormous television screen that ‘lifts’ the small-sized viewer out of his local daily experience, ‘planting’ him in ‘exciting new worlds’, signified by media events such as large-scale sports events (women viewers notoriously are excluded, characteristic of discourses of technology at that time).2 This technologically deterministic and utopian language, typical of advertising discourse, reverberates in today’s commercial discourses, as well as political, popular and scholarly debates on communications technologies. For example, recent discussions in the press and academia about the use of social media in the Arab world are characterized by a considerably utopian and celebratory fervour about the determining role of Twitter, Facebook, mobile communication and blogs in transforming politics and connecting remote protesters in the streets of Cairo, Benghazi, Tripoli, Rabat, Sana’a and Manama (to mention just a few) to millions of viewers across the world.

However, the disembedding of social relations does not occur automatically by virtue of the technological capacities of the medium. Rather, ‘symbolic dislocation’ (Thompson, 1995), the capacity to relate to distant events and distant others in locales and contexts that are remote from the contexts in which we live out our daily lives, relies on viewers’ acceptance of the invitation issued by media images and narratives to dislocate; the proposal to think and feel ‘as if’ and ‘just as though you were on the spot’. To put it differently, symbolic dislocation and the disembedding of social relations, which are constitutive of the experience of globalization, are predicated on and enabled by the capacity to imagine, to make-believe, ‘to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is’ (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]: 127).

The capability to imagine is not ‘produced fully fledged as a result of some kind of spontaneous generation’ (Boltanski, 1999: 50); nor is it, as Appadurai (1996) observes, solely a personal, private creative faculty of the mind. Rather, imagination must be nourished by personal experience, but also, fundamentally, by collective cultural representations. ‘In order for imagination to play its role in the coordination of emotional commitments, different persons must be able to nourish their imagination from the same source’ (Boltanski, 1999: 50). The ‘stretching’ of social relations across time and space relies on the generation and fostering of a collective global imagination: a sense of ourselves and far-away others traversing a common global social space; a sense of distant places, people and cultures being relevant and connected to us, here and now. The central concern of this book is the cultural role that media representations fulfil as imaginary institutions (Castoriadis (1987 [1975]): how they feed a global imagination and ‘stretch’ relations across time and space.

Media Representation and the Global Imagination explores the images, stories, voices and accounts that appear in the media on a daily basis and feed the ways in which we imagine the world: how we come to see, think of and feel about the world, and our place and relations with others in this world. In particular, the chapters in this book address the following questions. What do contemporary media representations tell us about the world we live in? How do media representations call on us to imagine our lives and those of others in a world characterized by rapid processes of globalization? What ‘scripts’ are being produced by current representations, which, in turn, inform the way we imagine our and others’ lives in the world today?

Global imagination refers to a collective way of seeing, understanding and feeling, at a global level, to a sense ‘of who we are, how we fit together, how we got where we are, and what we might expect from each other in carrying out our collective practices that are constitutive of our way of life’ (Gaonkar, 2002: 10). This is not to say that global imagination is a monolithic, homogeneous or fixed symbolic faculty. Nor does it abolish or swallow other imaginations, personal or collective. Rather, the global imagination is enabled through, cultivated by, and emerges via an ongoing process of symbolic construction of the real and the possible in image and narrative. It interacts and competes with other collective and individual imaginations, which may call into question the very possibility of a global imagination. The symbolic process of representation, on which the global imagination feeds, takes place largely in the media, in the ongoing production and circulation of images and stories. Media representations, therefore, are key everyday agents of imagination; they constitute fundamental resources and facilitators of this collective imagining (Frosh, forthcoming).

This view, which I develop throughout the book, suggests that representations are immensely powerful: that they nourish a wide and deep understanding and feeling that guide and frame people’s actions and practices. However, there is an important caveat to this assumption. The power of media representations as agents of imagination is conditional: the representations circulating in the media have to be meaningful to their viewers. Representations must be efficacious, they must ‘work’ and must accomplish certain things (Illouz, 2007), for the man sitting in the comfort of his armchair and watching far-away spectacles, and for the many other men, women and children who consume (and produce) media representations in increasingly diverse, fragmented and unpredictable ways. Global imagination is far from being a deterministic view of media representations as conditioning or simply cultivating certain ways of imagining the world, which audiences are implied unproblematically to embrace or mirror. It is understood in this book as a complex, unfixed process that is fashioned in and through interaction and contestation among views, narratives, images, statements and voices – contestations in which their audiences take an active part. Thus, the notion in this book of ‘media representations’ refers to images and narratives that originate in different places and have different sources, including media consumers themselves, whose voices and accounts become increasingly visible components of the global field of media representations.

That said, an exploration of audiences’ reception of media representations is beyond the scope of this book. It would be fascinating and very valuable to explore whether and how audiences recognize, accept or reject the invitations of contemporary representations to imagine the world, and to imagine their and others’ lives (see, e.g., Seu and Orgad, in progress). However, the chapters in this book focus on the realm of representation: how the symbolic production of images and narratives in the global media constructs certain ‘scripts’ and calls viewers to imagine the world in certain ways. This study of representation, I believe, is a vital (though not the only) step towards a better understanding of the meaning of the media and how they shape and orient social life.

Although the DuMont ad was produced seventy years ago, the story it tells of communication technologies and globalization, and the implied centrality of mass media to collective imagining, are pertinent today. At the same time, media representations and the global imagination have undergone substantial transformation since the 1940s. Thompson (2005) usefully describes the transformations in the mediated and larger political and cultural environment, in which images and narratives are produced, circulated and consumed, as ‘the age of new visibility’. He observes that twenty-first-century contemporary media, and especially the Internet and networked media, have enabled a new form of visibility which has become a pervasive feature of the world in which we live. Three central features distinguish the mediated environment of the new visibility from the past:

It is more intensive in the sense that the sheer quantity of information flow is much greater than before, as more and more organizations and communication networks make available an ever-increasing volume of symbolic material. It is more extensive in the sense that the range of individuals who are drawn into these networks of communication and are capable of receiving the output of media organizations is much greater than it was a century (or even several decades) ago, and in the sense that the geographical spread of these recipients is much wider: today, information flows very quickly through networks which are not only national but increasingly global in scope. And the information environment is less controllable in the sense that, given the proliferation of mediated forms and networks of communication, it is much more difficult for political actors to throw a veil of secrecy around their activities, much harder to control the images and information that appear in the public domain, and much harder to predict the consequences of such appearances and disclosures. (Thompson, 2005, pp. 48–9, emphases in original)

The Abu Ghraib photos that were circulated in 2004 in newspapers and on screens across the world, which depicted the hidden practices of US military and paramilitary personnel in the closed-offworld of Iraqi jails, and the release by WikiLeaks in October 2010 of almost 400,000 documents from the Iraq War Logs, are vivid illustrations of how the rise of digital technologies has amplified the significance of new forms of visibility. The wide circulation of images and accounts renders it much more difficult to control the flow of symbolic content. It is far more difficult for those in power to ensure that the images made available to the public are those they wish to see circulated (Thompson, 2005: 38).

The concern in Media Representation and the Global Imagination is with the ‘work’ that media representations do (Hall, 1997) in the age of new visibility: that is, the work they do as resources that feed individual and collective imaginations in a highly complex and networked global media environment. Two aspects of the ‘work’ of media representations are particularly important in this context.

First, intimately linked with the notion of the new visibility, is the idea that the work of media representations is characterized by contestation: players (institutions, groups, individuals) increasingly compete for visibility and a voice, through the projection of symbolic representations on to the global media space. Visibility in the media, in image and narrative, is a means of claiming recognition and exercising power. Contestation of representations, fuelled by the competitive logic of the market that dominates the mediated space, carries huge promise for the expansion of collective and individual imaginations. Exposure to a growing range of competing stories, images, feelings and points of view is key to opening up people’s imagination, in particular, to thinking and caring about people and issues that are beyond the self, and are remote from our local contexts and lives; to cultivating an outward orientation to the other and to the world; and to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in terms of how we feel and think about the world, about others, and about ourselves. Much of the debate on the role of social media in the 2011 uprisings across the Arab world, for instance – photos of Egyptians storming Tahrir Square in Cairo circulated on Facebook and tweets from Libyan protesters taking the streets of Benghazi and Tripoli (despite their respective governments’ attempts to block the Internet) – speaks precisely to this promise. At the same time, in a global mediated space defined so intensely by contestation, visibility can easily become ‘the source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility’ (Thompson, 2005: 42; emphasis in original) – as illustrated by the Abu Ghraib and WikiLeaks cases. Furthermore, the sheer diversity of voices contesting each other in the global media space neither means, nor in any way guarantees, interaction and exchange of ideas, understanding or the enhancement of imagination. Media Representation and the Global Imagination seeks to engage with the ways in which the global imagination in the early twenty-first century is carried through contesting media representations, and to highlight the potential of this process as well as its limits and dangers.

Second, a key feature of the new form of mediated visibility is the development of ‘mediated intimacy at a distance’ (Thompson, 1995: 219): a form of mediated intimacy with others who do not share one’s own spatial-temporal locale, and which does not involve the reciprocity of face-to-face interaction. This feature was already present in the 1940s, as evident in the promise to viewers of the DuMont advert that they would become ‘intimate[s] of the great and near-great’. Another advert that was part of the same publicity campaign evokes intimacy even more explicitly, through the sexist message from American actress Betty Hutton, whose face on an image of a television screen is accompanied with the quote, addressed to the (imagined male) viewer, that ‘I’ll be practically in your lap …!’ The rise of digital technologies and the growing importance of social media, interactive mediated and networked communicative forms, together with other broader cultural and political developments (e.g., the increasing centrality of the therapeutic narrative and psychological language in public discourse, the emphasis on personalization in such realms as politics and the workplace),3 not only have created new ways for developing and expressing mediated intimacy, but have substantially amplified the importance of intimacy at a distance, as the fundamental and prime mode of relations to far-away people, events and experiences in the media. This is neatly captured by the 2010 Sky UK advert for its High Definition news channel whose slogan reads: ‘Nothing Gets You Closer’. Beneath the caption is an image of a blonde woman wearing jeans, T-shirt and socks, viewed from behind, standing in a desert battlefield alongside a military aeroplane, looking at some soldiers (wearing uniforms of UK or US forces) on a military operation.

The differences between the Sky ad and its 1944 (DuMont) counterpart are telling. The medium, the technology, which in the 1944 DuMont ad is the television screen, does not appear in the 2010 ad. The viewer in the latter is a woman, whose representation is the same size as that of the mediated strangers (the soldiers) and who occupies with them a singular symbolic space – the desert battlefield. The viewer in the DuMont advert is clearly separate, and represented in miniature, compared to the huge screen and the events that extend from the screen. The slogan on the Sky ad reinforces a sense of intense proximity between viewer and distant other: its message is that the essence of accessing mediated representations is to get as close as possible to the far-away events and the far-away others. The image of a woman viewer gazing at male soldiers (signifying masculinity and heroism) heightens the centrality of intimacy in the ad, by alluding to its sexual connotations, which compound the emphasis on intimacy and closeness. Mediated intimacy is no longer articulated as an imaginary possibility (‘as though you were on the spot’, DuMont ad); it is ‘real’, it is fact: the viewer’s comfort and safety zones and the distant others’ danger zones merge to become one: ‘Nothing gets you closer’. The centrality of mediated intimacy in today’s media and imagination and its implications are at the heart of the book’s exploration, specifically, how intimacy is articulated and enacted in the media representations’ invitation to imagine the world, others and ourselves.

Significantly, the global mediated environment of the new visibility and its features of contestation and intimacy outlined above are not simply a structure or a context already fixed, against which this exploration of media representation is set. Rather, the new visibility describes a media environment that is constantly at work, and in which media representations are integral to its constant state of ‘becoming’. Put differently, media representations do not simply reflect the already existing process of globalization and the conditions of the new visibility; nor are they merely shaped by it – rather, they simultaneously shape and are constituted by this process.4

In undertaking an exploration of media representation and the global imagination, this book seeks to contribute to two key fields: research on media representation, and debate on globalization and the media. Representations have been studied and explained predominantly in relation to national communities and/or their role in feeding collective and social identities, such as ethnicity, race, sexuality and gender. More recently, scholars have been looking systematically at media representations in a global context (e.g., Chouliaraki, 2006; Couldry, Hepp and Krotz, 2010; Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2007; Nash, 2008; Robertson, 2010) and the way they intersect and interact with local and national contexts and with dimensions of identity and difference. The book aims to advance this research strand, in accounting for the work of media representations as major cultural resources that nourish the global imagination. I argue that media representations cultivate an imaginary of the world as a common space peopled by strangers; they bring us closer, symbolically, to distant others and they propel the imagining of the possibility of pursuing alternative lives in a different place. Chapter 1 situates the book within the field of media representation research and discusses the traditions and paradigms that it builds on. It also highlights aspects that depart from the existing literature and the ways the book seeks to advance discussion in the field.

This book contributes also to research on media and globalization. Considerable discussion in this field has focused on how, and with what consequences, media and communication technologies have extended the quantity and reach of messages, the velocity of their transmission, and their networked character across the globe, particularly under the influence of the fundamental globalizing force of capitalism (e.g., Castells, 2001, 2009; Flew, 2007; Herman and McChesney, 2001; Schiller, 1999; Thompson, 1995). However, little attention has been paid to representations as texts, and to exploring how and whether media representations extend not only global reach, but also imagination and understanding. Silverstone (2007) adds a concrete question to the agenda: do the media provide us with tools and ways to think and make informed judgements about issues, people and places that we will likely know only through mediated representations? The stakes for addressing this question are high: we are increasingly dependent, often exclusively, on what we see, read and hear in the news, in our favourite television drama series, in advertisements, radio broadcasts and over the Internet. We rely on media representations to make sense of our lives and our world. They shape, inform and orient the way we see and judge the world, others and ourselves, and how we imagine real and possible lives.

However, as Silverstone (2007: 51) notes, ‘in the mediated space of appearance we no longer need to, nor wish to, nor are for the most part capable of, doubt’. In other words, though media representations have a potentially huge power, and far-reaching consequences for our and others’ lives, we tend to take them for granted. In our daily lives, for the most part, we do not pause to ponder media representations or to question their power. They function as a kind of ‘background’ to our social lives, in the sense that Heidegger and Wittgenstein refer to ‘background’; the ongoing flow of mediated images, narratives and information that shape and inform a complex, unstructured and not fully articulated understanding of life and the world we live in. Media Representation and the Global Imagination seeks to help generate some doubt and provide the tools to develop critical understanding of media representations. By doubt, I do not mean necessarily, and certainly not only, negative suspicions and criticism of representations; nor do I question whether representations are ‘truthful’ or ‘accurate’. Rather, by generating doubt I mean achieving a degree of distance from the familiar, taken-for-granted images and stories encountered daily, in order to realize the crucial role that they play in describing the world, but also, fundamentally, in informing the way we regard, think, feel and make judgements about the world; the way we imagine people, places, cultures, habits and behaviours in today’s age of new visibility.

Before outlining the book’s structure, I want to add a note about its global perspective and its use of the notions of ‘we’ and ‘today’. The book deals with media representations in the context of globalization and, therefore, adopts a global perspective throughout, incorporating examples of media representations from different countries and cultures. While it is impossible fully or adequately to cover representations from all over the world, the intention is to demonstrate the significance of examining texts and images from various local, national and international contexts, and from across a range of discourses, media, genres, themes and forms. This emphasis is a response to the growing technological convergence and the increased blurring of the boundaries between different media, public and private, information and entertainment, which have been accelerated by the expansion of new media technologies, specifically the Internet and mobile communication. The emphasis on the meaning of media representations in a global context and the need to study them across technologies, genres and themes, is aimed also at tackling what I regard as the main weaknesses of current studies of media representations, namely, that they are ‘stuck in time’ and highly compartmentalized, issues I discuss in chapter 1.

However, although the book stresses a global perspective, the ‘average reader’ and the ‘we’ in this book refer generally to people living in stable societies. As Cohen (2001: xiv) notes in the preface to his book, ‘we are the objects of some chapters; but mostly we gaze at distant others in poor, unstable and violent places’. In part, what I discuss as occurring within the current media environment is that this ethnocentric, largely western ‘we’ is changing, specifically because groups and individuals who previously were excluded from the public media space are gaining visibility and voice, a process which is calling into question the symbolic frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Nevertheless, the book was written in London, UK, and although I tried to engage with a range of representations from across the world, I cannot completely avoid the imprint of my geographic, cultural, political and theoretical locations.

If the use of ‘we’ locates my account in terms of place, the word ‘today’, which I use repeatedly, locates the book’s exploration in terms of time. In this book, ‘today’ is used to draw attention to a period of high media visibility that has been significantly transformed since the rise of the Internet and networked technologies. It is impossible – and unhelpful – to point to a particular year or even a particular decade as the beginning of this age, since many of the phenomena that we are witnessing in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and that are discussed throughout this book, represent the continuation of a process that was set in motion in much earlier decades and centuries. However, in other respects the work of media representation that is explored in this book represents a new departure, situated predominantly in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. When I talk about representations ‘today’, I mean particularly to invoke Thompson’s (2005) discussion of the new visibility, in order to refer to a mediated environment that is more intensive, more extensive and less controllable than in the past.

Structure of the Book

Following this Introduction, chapter 1 reviews the central premises and concerns of research on media representations. The chapter discusses key theoretical traditions and approaches in studies of media representations, and highlights aspects in the literature that are particularly relevant to the current global media environment. I reflect in chapter 1 on the challenges and tensions in the field of media representation studies, and conclude by introducing global imagination as a concept that could be used to address some of these challenges and to account for the work of contemporary media representations. Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical and conceptual framework for the book’s exploration of the ways that contemporary media representations cultivate a global imagination.

Based on this theoretical exposition and critique of the research field, I develop the argument that the main work of media representations today is the cultivation of global imagination, through the construction of particular explanatory frameworks and scripts about the world, about ourselves and about the place of others in it. Those explanatory scripts are proposals, which, if recognized, accepted or rejected, inform and orient the way we see and judge others and the way we see ourselves. I suggest that global imagination crystallizes around five particular sites, which are closely interrelated and often overlap: imagining others; imagining ourselves; imagining possible lives; imagining the world; and imagining the self. This distinction is helpful for analysing the operation of media representations and how, by virtue of them, global imagination is developed.

Chapters 2 to 6 explore some of the scripts and imaginaries that are offered at each of these sites, and how they are constructed for people to draw on in imagining their lives, imagining others and the worlds they live in. Each of the succeeding chapters centres on one site of imagination and uses a particular thematic focus to illustrate and elucidate a broader argument about the work of representations in nourishing the global imagination.

The thematic focus of each chapter and the specific examples used help to bound the discussion empirically and provide an opportunity to practise the skills of analysis, which can be applied to other instances and cases. For example, the discussion in chapter 2 focuses on the representation of natural disasters, but it discusses concepts, ideas and analytical tools that relate more broadly to media representation of distant others. The intention is to provide the reader with tools that can be applied to analysing the representation of sufferers in similar and other contexts, as well as to analysis of representation of other types of ‘distant others’, for example, migrants. In each chapter of the book I develop also a broader theoretical proposition about the work of representation: a claim about the practice of representation, the possibilities that it creates and at the same time closes down, in nourishing a global imagination.

Chapter 2 explores central scripts on distant ‘others’ that are available in today’s media space. To interrogate and illustrate how distant others are constructed in the global media, the discussion focuses on the representation of natural disasters. We tend to think of the visibility of natural disasters in the media and the response it engenders, as distinct features of our times. Chapter 2 challenges this view by starting the analysis with a discussion of representation of the first global media disaster event: the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal. Set against the eighteenth-century representations of this event, we examine representations of recent natural disasters: the 1985 televised ‘We Are The World’ video clip and song in response to the 1980s famine in the Horn of Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, and the remake of this song and clip in 2010, distributed on YouTube and other digital platforms, in response to the earthquake in Haiti. A detailed analysis of these three case studies provides an opportunity to evaluate the continuities and changes in the imagining of distant others and to highlight the tensions invoked by media representations’ construction of others – tensions that are developed further in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 3 turns the gaze on ‘ourselves’ as the site of imagination and, specifically, the ways that contemporary media representations construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the nation as a symbolic category of belonging. Using the example of the representation of the 2005 urban riots in France, the discussion examines how representations of national conflict are produced, disseminated and consumed in a changing context of ‘the new visibility’ (Thompson, 2005) and highlights the contesting ways of imagining the nation that the global media encourage. The chapter theorizes this contestation as an axis between two modes of relation to ourselves as the nation: at one end of this axis is attachment and at the other is estrangement. The analysis explores the work of national, transnational and global media representations in symbolically producing, reproducing and reinforcing conflicting positions along this axis. Chapters 2 and 3 are complementary in advancing our understanding of the ways in which contemporary representations inform, guide and concurrently orient us – to the other and to ourselves.

In contrast to the representations of past and present in chapters 2 and 3, chapter 4 focuses on imagination of life in the future: on the pursuit of ‘possible lives’. Drawing closely on Appadurai’s (1996) account of mass media, migration and the force of imagination, chapter 4 explores some central scripts on migration that are offered by media representation and constitute a springboard for people’s imaginings of how they or their children might live and work in places other than their place of birth. I investigate what the ‘store of possible lives’ (Appadurai, 1996) consists of and what frames of understanding are proposed by media representations of migration. The analysis in chapter 4 shows that although mediated discourses on migration are largely polarized between ‘dream’ and ‘nightmare’ scenarios, there is room for more ambivalent representations within this field, which can be opened up and enabled especially by new media platforms. The final part of the chapter examines an example of a mediated site that allows more ambivalent, incomplete and potentially complex imaginings of possible (and impossible) lives.

How the world we live in is imagined and how viewers are called to imagine it in current representations is a question that runs as a thread throughout the book, and on which chapters 2 to 4 reflect from different angles. Chapter 5 takes representations of the world as its explicit focus and examines a particular instance of the world as it appears on our mediated screens: that of New Year celebrations. New Year celebrations constitute a media event that constructs a particular understanding of what the world is. The chapter analyses the production of ‘geographical knowledges’ (Harvey, 2001) in the construction of ‘the world’ in international news broadcast reporting of Christian New Year celebrations. It shows how this media event reinforces a celebratory account of the world as united around sameness, occupied by similar people in similar spaces, and joined by the same ritual and by reverence for the spectacle. At the same time, this image of the world, which is constitutive of the global imagination, simultaneously contains and enacts that which it wants to exclude: it promotes competition as the primary relation through which people, cities and countries interact with each other, establishes symbolic exclusions, and emphasizes hierarchies. Following this exploration, the chapter investigates representations of New Year that may be seen to offer different ‘cartographic consciousnesses’ (Harvey, 2001) of the world.

Chapter 6 is concerned with the centrality of the self in media representations and, inextricably, in the global imagination. The self has come to constitute a primary site for the cultivation of a global imagination and chapter 6 explores articulations of this and considers their implications. Chapter 6 is different from the preceding chapters in that it does not explore the theoretical subject of imagining the self by analysing one particular theme of representation, but rather analyses four ‘mini-cases’ of representations of self that correspond to the four sites of global imagining explored in chapters 2 to 5. It shows how imaginings of the other, ourselves as the nation, possible lives and the world, are produced symbolically by focusing on the self and, in turn, how calling us to imagine these sites renders the self the object of the imagination. Many of the issues and tensions discussed in chapters 2 to 5 converge in the discussion in chapter 6, which leads to the book’s conclusion.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion to this book and draws together the various strands to provide a critical summary of the work done by contemporary media representation to nourish a global imagination. In light of the arguments developed in chapters 1 to 6, chapter 7 also reflects on the qualities and characteristics that may be seen as desirable for media representations in the future, in order to enhance collective and individual imaginations that are more complex, more ambivalent and more relevant to the ‘modern liquid world’ (Bauman, 2010) and the ‘liquid times’ (Bauman, 2007) in which we live.

All the chapters in this book employ an interpretative qualitative method of analysis that is inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis and visual analysis. The specific theoretical and methodological traditions of media representations research that inform the analysis are discussed in chapter 1. The formats and styles of analysis in the chapters in this book are deliberately different; they exemplify different ways of analysing media representations. Chapter 2 examines representations of three global media events of natural disasters from a historical perspective. Chapter 3 is based on the analysis of a case study (representations of the 2005 French riots). Chapter 4 identifies three types of ‘scripts’ of migration – ‘dreams’, ‘nightmares’ and ‘ambivalence’ – by examining a considerable range of representations across different countries, media, platforms, genres and contexts. Chapter 5 focuses on a specific media event – New Year celebrations – first analysing one broadcast news report in depth to illuminate the production of geographical knowledges in a particular representation of the world, and then examining three international and new media representations of the same event. Chapter 6 (as described above) is structured as an analysis of four mini-case studies, each focusing on a particular example related to the broader sites explored in chapters 2 to 5. Chapters 2 to 6 are all empirical insofar as the argument they make is grounded in particular examples. The selected examples do not claim to articulate an eternal truth or to be ‘universal’, but nor are they totally arbitrary:5 they exemplify and shed light on broader, more general characteristics and patterns of contemporary representations, discourses and explanatory and imaginary frameworks that circulate in the media space.

Hall’s (1997:9) reminder provides a helpful setting for the reader in engaging with the analyses presented in this book:

It is worth emphasising that there is no single or ‘correct’ answer to the question, ‘What does this image mean?’ or ‘What is this ad saying?’ Since there is no law which can guarantee that things will have ‘one, true meaning’, or that meaning won’t change over time, work in this area is bound to be interpretative – a debate between, not who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’, but between equally plausible, though sometimes competing and contesting, meanings and interpretations. The best way to ‘settle’ such contested readings is to look again at the concrete example and try to justify one’s ‘reading’ in detail in relation to the actual practices and forms of signification used, and what meanings they seem to you to be producing.

I do not suggest that my analysis of representations in the following chapters is ‘correct’ and that the meanings that I argue are generated are ‘true’. The book is intended to open up and invite contested readings of the media representations it discusses, and of the many other representations encountered in our daily lives.

1   Media Representation and the Global Imagination

A Framework

This book argues that in today’s global age, to understand media representation we have to include in our study two key concepts, namely, globalization and imagination.

Representation plays a central role in constituting and framing the experience of globalization, the symbolic stretching of social relations across time and distance. Concurrently, media representations increasingly are dependent on and determined by the networking of different social contexts and regions on a global scale. However, there has been little theoretical and empirical attention paid to the link between representation and globalization. Media representations have been studied and understood largely and sometimes exclusively in relation to national contexts. A central strand of research focuses on how the meanings of the texts and images that circulate in the media rely on, negotiate and/or reproduce national frameworks of understanding, memories, narratives, ideas, stereotypes and symbols. In that research, the significance of representations is theorized primarily in relation to national identity and culture. Another strand focuses on the significance of representations for other identity dimensions, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, or in relation to units and communities of belonging beyond the nation, for instance, consumer culture, which is not bounded nationally. Nevertheless, many of these accounts suffer from ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2003): their analysis of the meanings of media texts and images is informed by an implicit assumption that the nation is the primary social and political form in the modern world. Even when the analysis draws on empirical examples from across the globe, it tends to privilege the nation-state and national identity in explaining their meanings.

However, in an age of accelerating globalization, driven by economic, political, cultural and technological forces, the national is no longer the only or necessarily the dominant context within which representations are produced, disseminated and consumed, and within which they acquire meaning. Globalization is transforming social interaction and communication in radical ways (Thompson, 1995). These transformations substantially shape and are shaped by representation – the process of producing meanings through the creation of symbolic forms and content. Thus, studying media representation demands that the analysis accounts for the complex nature and consequences of interactions and communication in the context of globalization. Chapter 1 seeks to establish the foundations for this project by bringing together and offering links between key debates and concepts in the field of media representation research and theories of globalization as a social process and a cultural phenomenon.

A second concept, which I would argue is vital for producing an analysis appropriate for understanding the work of media representation in the twenty-first century, is that of imagination. Drawing on Appadurai’s (1996) account of imagination as a key dimension in the experience of globalization, and on Taylor’s (2002) and Castoriadis’s (1987 [1975]) philosophical discussions of the concepts of imagination and the imaginary, imagination is offered here as a way to help address what are perhaps the most difficult questions for research on media representations (and media more generally), that is, how to understand the power of media representations, and where this power is located. While central approaches and traditions in the study of representation provide some compelling accounts that seek to address these questions, they concurrently produce some tensions and difficult problems, especially in relation to explanations of the power and impact of representations. The concept of imagination does not provide a ‘fix’ for these tensions; however, I argue that it can be instrumental in theorizing the power of media representations in today’s global age.

Thus, this chapter sets out to establish a conceptual triangle in which representation, globalization and imagination become the framework for the exploration in this book. The discussion begins with the object of this study, representation. Section I provides a ‘map’ of some of the central ways in which representation has been theorized and studied. The literature on representation is reviewed in light of three questions: what are media representations; what work do they do; and why do they matter? I am interested in particular in highlighting the relevance and value of existing accounts for exploring media representation in connection with globalization. Section II discusses some challenges and tensions in the field of media representation studies, specifically those that arise when existing theorizations seem insufficient to account for and offer tools to understand media representations in the current media environment. This critique forms the basis for the discussion in Section III, which introduces imagination as a concept that could help to address some of these challenges. In particular, the concept of global imagination is proposed as a framework to account for the work of media representations and inform their analysis. The theoretical discussion in this chapter informs the succeeding chapters and is intended to provoke broader critical thought on the subject of this book.

I Premises

This section provides an overview of some of the central ‘stories’ in research on media representations. It provides a selective map of some key accounts, organized around three questions, on which the discussion in the literature centres: (1) what are media representations? (2) what work do media representations do (what do they accomplish)? and (3) why do media representations matter? The answers to these questions vary and rest on diverse and conflicting epistemological, theoretical and analytical premises. The point is not to argue that one account is better or more ‘truthful’ than another, nor to suggest that we should somehow integrate all approaches and reconcile the tensions that are evoked by their juxtaposition. Rather, the purpose is to provide an account of the central ideas and claims that inform the research on media representations on which this book draws. I highlight the relevance and utility of certain well-established theories and concepts for exploring the ‘work’ of media representations in the contemporary global media environment, as well as pointing to some of their limits.

What are media representations?

Representations are images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding what the world is and why and how it works in particular ways (Hall, 1997). Of course, cultural representations have a long history and can be seen in the form of totemic objects created by religious societies as projections of their values and beliefs. In broad terms, any object, for example, a building, an item of clothing, an artefact, can be seen as a representation that carries meanings beyond its immediate function and use. What distinguishes media representations from these other representational objects is that their essence is to represent. In other words, their main function is to produce meaning, to capture in some way ‘reality’ in signs.

When we talk about media representations we are referring to texts (in the broad sense, which includes images) that circulate in the media space and carry symbolic content: news photographs and articles, advertisements, radio programmes, YouTube videos, blogs, Facebook pages, etc. ‘Representation’ refers to the process of re-presenting, the process by which members of a culture use systems of signs to produce meaning. This highlights that representation is an active process of meaning production, the products of which are media representations, that is, texts and images. The study of media representations brings together these two meanings: it centres on analysing representations as texts, by looking at their textual, auditory, visual and discursive properties, in order to establish a better understanding of the ‘work’ (Hall, 1997) that they do, that is, the process of producing meaning.

What ‘work’ do media representations do?

The process of meaning production through signs has been theorized in two main ways: the reflectionist (or mimetic) approach, and the constructionist (or constructivist) approach. Both approaches are underpinned by a radically different view of the relationship between the thing that is being represented – ‘reality’, and the act of representing it – or representation. Consequently, how they conceive the ‘work’ of media representations and their approach to how it should be studied and evaluated are also substantially different.

The reflectionist approach

Rooted in the Greek and Renaissance legacies, the key idea of the reflectionist approach is of mimesis, the notion that language (and by extension any medium of representation, e.g., photography) functions like a mirror that reflects true meaning as it already exists in the world (Hall, 1997: 24). The reflectionist approach assumes that reality is accessible through representation, thus the task of representation is adequately to reflect pre-existing meanings of ‘the real’.

This approach is epitomized by the notion of the historical truth value of photography: the idea of a photograph as ‘proof’ that something really happened, and belief, which runs deep in modern thinking, in the photograph as an inherently objective medium of representation. A notion of the media as reflecting reality is perpetuated in popular discourse, policy and political debate. The media themselves repeatedly endorse a reflectionist claim, as manifest, for example, in the title of the UK newspaper Daily Mirror, or in news outlets’ slogans that describe their commitment to current readers – providing ‘the whole picture’ (1986 Guardian campaign),1 or ‘hunting down the news and beating the truth out of it’ (UK Channel 4’s 10 O’clock News campaign, February 2011). Media professionals, especially those working in the news, largely endorse the reflectionist view. Schlesinger (1987 [1978]) shows that news professionals have a deep-seated belief in their capacity to achieve impartiality and reflect the truth, a belief informed by the pluralist idea that one can present different points of view and achieve an accurate (reflective) representation of the range of voices and opinions in society.

The media landscape has changed dramatically since Schlesinger’s late 1970s study, and both media consumers and producers are increasingly aware of the problematic nature of the notion of representation as reflection. In particular, the ability to access representations originating from different sources and places (e.g., by watching reports of events on different national and international news channels and on the Internet) highlights the simple but fundamental point that representations never simply mirror reality (otherwise representations of the same happening would be identical). Nevertheless, a reflectionist belief remains central to the thinking, discourse and practice of news. For example, in 2006, following a report by the gay rights group, Stonewall, accusing the BBC of having a ‘derisive and demeaning’ attitude towards gay people and rarely referring to lesbians, the BBC responded (emphasis added): ‘We are committed to finding ways of reflecting the audience’s daily lives in our programmes’ (Brook, 28 February, 2006). Similarly, in a panel discussion on reporting of the 2008/9 Gaza War, journalists from Al Jazeera, BBC and the UK’s Channel 4, admitting the difficulties of achieving objectivity and balance in war reporting notwithstanding, unanimously reiterated a view of their objective as of ‘seeking the truth’.2

Much of the critique of media representations is similarly underpinned by the idea that the task of representation is to reflect