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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PGMC - Polity Global Media and Communication series
- Sprache: Englisch
In an interactive and densely connected world, transnational communication has become a central feature of everyday life. Taking account of a variety of media formats and different regions of the world, Adrian Athique provides a much-needed critical exploration of conceptual approaches to media reception on a global scale.
Engaging both the historical foundations and contemporary concerns of audience research, Athique prompts us to reconsider our contemporary media experience within a transnational frame. In the process, he provides valuable insights on culture and belonging, power and imagination.
Beautifully written and strongly argued, Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale will be essential reading for students and teachers of global media, culture and communications.
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Seitenzahl: 416
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Media Reception on a Global Scale
Transnational Cultures
Identifying Audiences
The Point of Reception
Global Scale
Thoughts on the Floor
Part 1 Imagined Worlds: National, International, Transnational
2 The Nationalization of Media Audiences
Cultural Nationalism in the World System
The Standardization of Cultures
Imagined Communities
Ethnicity and Mythology
Reading from the Songsheet
Reading National Audiences
Recommended Reading
3 Imperialism, Dependency and Soft Power
Imperial Disputes
Cultures of Decolonization
Cultural Imperialism as a World System
New Orders for the New Century
Digital Sovereignty
Hardwired and Software Power
Reading Imperial Audiences
Recommended Reading
4 Millennial Globalization and the Transnational Shift
The Second Media Age
Networked Audiences
Surfing the World Wide Market
Narrowcasting the Global
Modernity at Large
Mediascapes
Transnational Agents
Reading Transnational Audiences
Recommended Reading
Part 2 Media Flows: Diasporas, Crossovers, Proximities
5 Mobility, Migration and Diasporic Audiences
Multiculturalism and Diasporas
Diasporic Audiences
Floating Lives
Digital Diasporas
Polymedia
The Call for Hybridity
Communalism in Practice
Reading Diasporic Audiences
Recommended Reading
6 Mediaculturalism, Universalism and the Exotic
Doing Dallas
The Ethnic Comparative
Transnational Cinema
The Culture Vultures
Crossing Over
Parallel Modernities
Reading Crossover Audiences
Recommended Reading
7 Media Civilizations and Zones of Consumption
Physical Geography and Cultural Tectonics
Linguistic Markets as Media Civilizations
Cultural Proximity and Relative Affinity
Intra-Regional Homologies and Complicated Currents
Zones of Consumption and the Primacy of Place
Reading Proximate Audiences
Recommended Reading
Part 3 New Formations: Clouds, Trends, Fields
8 Fan Cultures and User-Led Transnationalism
Rock Music and Transnational Youth Culture
The Rise of the Fans
The Activation of Audience Studies
Digitality and Interactivity
YouMedia and Participatory Culture
User-Led Transnationalism
Reading Interactive Audiences
Recommended Reading
9 Alchemy, Numerology and the Global Social
Pinpointing Users
Capturing the Crowd
Faith in Big Data
Data Exhausts are Dirty
Alchemy and Geography
Network Correlation
Reading Audience Data
Recommended Reading
10 Transnational Spectrum and Social Imagination
The Transnational Spectrum
Inhabiting the Cultural Field
Situating the Local
Nations at the Fulcrum
The Mixed Fortunes of Mediated Regions
Mapping the Global
Tipping the Scales
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Global Media and Communication
Athique, Indian Media
Athique, Transnational Audiences
Chalaby, The Format Age
Flew, Global Creative Industries
Georgiou, Media and the City
Hegde, Mediating Migration
Mellor, Rinnawi, Dajani & Ayish, Arab Media
Orgad, Media Representation and the Global Imagination
Papathanassopoulos & Negrine, European Media
Transnational Audiences
Media Reception on a Global Scale
ADRIAN ATHIQUE
polity
Copyright © Adrian Athique 2016
The right of Adrian Athique 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 2016 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-13: 978-1-5095-0657-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Athique, Adrian, author.
Transnational audiences : media reception on a global scale / Adrian Athique.pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-7021-8 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-7022-5 (pbk.) 1. Mass media and globalization. 2. Mass media and culture. 3. Transnationalism. I. Title.
P94.6.A885 2016
302.23--dc23
2015034095
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.
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Acknowledgements
This book was written across time and space, and there are many friends and colleagues to whom I owe thanks. Kate Bowles and John Robinson were always in my thoughts as I wrote. My gratitude is due to colleagues working with me on the empirical programmes running alongside this discussion. Their patience, generosity and practical insights have all been invaluable. Without space to list them all here, I would like to thank Vibodh Parthasarathi, S.V. Srinivas, Jozon Lorenzana, Devi Leena Bose, Jinna Tay, Chetna Monga and Douglas Hill for their forbearance to date and into the future. For kind invitations to join larger discussions around the disciplines of media and cultural studies, I would also like to thank Karina Ayeyard, Joost De Bruin, Stephen Epstein, Craig Hight, Peter Lunt, Albert Moran, Anna Pertierra, Hari Ramaswami, Susan Turnbull and Graeme Turner. Thanks are also due to Tom O’Regan, Brian Yecies, Pete Randles and Nicola Evans who have engaged with me on these topics over many years. Andrea Drugan and Elen Griffiths saw this project home, as I worked into the gaps between managing various departments, missed deadlines and double-handled my fieldwork commitments. They kept me in line with exceeding grace. My daughter, Kaya, kept me in one piece.
1Media Reception on a Global Scale
Almost twenty years ago, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observed that ‘The centrifugal forces of the globalizing process, and the global reach of the media, virtually oblige the contemporary media theorist to move beyond the restrictive framework of the nation-state’ (1996: 145). Certainly, few would now argue that an analysis of either the aesthetics or the reception of any media source can be presented convincingly within the closed frame of a strictly national history. Nonetheless, the need to make such a statement in the first place reflects the longstanding dominance of a national paradigm in media analysis, corresponding with the heyday of the nation-state system and terrestrial broadcast technologies in the second half of the twentieth century. In reconsidering those logics, media studies has increasingly embraced a new ‘transnational’ paradigm conceived in opposition to the long-running national canons of media content and academic expertise (Ezra et al. 2006; Durovicova and Newman 2009; Shohat and Stam 2003). Even so, we must recognize from the outset that national frameworks for media analysis were never oblivious to the global dimension. It is more precisely the case that national media models relied on the foundational notion of a world structured by national components which, taken collectively, constituted the ‘international’. For decades, the international film festival showcase was the perfect example of this display of nationally marked aesthetics, considered to be favourable to a comparative understanding of discrete cultural formations (Chaudhuri 2005; Goldsmith and Lealand 2012). The great transnational shift that took place over the turn of the millennium was prompted by a fundamental reconsideration of this paradigm.
New forms of mediation (or, in a fuller sense, what Andreas Hepp would call ‘mediatization’) were a central factor in this re-evaluation, as they became embedded within the political, economic and technical functions of the world system (Couldry and Hepp 2013; Hepp and Krotz 2014). This was to be expected, since one of the foundational claims of modernity rests upon the newfound capacity to collapse time and distance within a world-spanning technical apparatus. In that respect, Anthony Giddens’ characterization of the technical impetus of globalization is typical in terms of his explicit recognition of changing media technologies as a driving force within the matrix of globalization. As Giddens put it: ‘Instantaneous electronic communication isn’t just a way in which news or information is conveyed more quickly. Its existence alters the very texture of our lives’ (2002: 11). Arjun Appadurai, similarly, subscribed to the view that ‘electronic mediation transforms pre-existing worlds of communication and conduct’ (1996: 3). For Manuel Castells (1996) it was the rise of information technology, and global computer networking in particular, that informed his formulation of globalization in the form of a network society. Fundamentally, Castells’ new world order was structured by the exchanges of knowledge, people and wealth taking place between the ‘nodes’ where information, and thus economic power, is increasingly concentrated. A global network society takes the spatial form of increasingly inter-connected global cities joined together by dense ‘flows’ of information. Taking this lead, the emerging discourse on ‘transnational’ mediation has tended to emphasize the insistent cultural flows that escape and/or circumvent fixed territories and national structures (for example, Curtin and Shah 2010; Hudson and Zimmerman 2015; Madianou and Miller 2012).
Nonetheless, even now, there is still a strong tendency to position examples of transnational media exchange as exciting anomalies to the general theory, and everyday experience, of communication. Arguably, this is an unsatisfactory framing for contemporary media experiences and, indeed, it is somewhat questionable when set against a serious historical viewpoint. Of necessity, then, I will revisit the theoretical field in the first section of this book, with a mind to clarifying the various concerns and imperatives that predispose our enquiry. Many of the core principles of social communications research rest upon the unique combination of culture and polity that has arisen in parallel with the mass media. The centrality of cultural nationalism, in particular, has far-reaching implications for sociological inquiry. The ubiquitous logics of this pairing determine the ‘majority positions’ through which we commonly seek to conceptualize and identify a diverse world. Bearing this in mind, chapters 2 through to 4 will examine the underlying claims that demarcate the national, the international and the transnational. In the process, we will begin to illuminate the imagined worlds that we habituate in the course of our daily lives. Some historical grounding is required here, since the temporal evolution of this ‘worlding’ process has interacted closely with successive waves of social change, with the evolution of intellectual reason and with a constantly shifting geopolitical situation. Equally, the changing forms and potentials of media systems over the past century have themselves frequently recast the terms of the debate. Thus, I will also make some effort, over the course of the book as a whole, to account for the continuities and ruptures stemming from successive phases of remediation.
In this dimension, social change and technological developments necessarily interact, with neither historical timeline being entirely independent of the other. The prevailing structures of mediation and the nature of the media material itself (that is, what commercial managers like to call ‘content’) are also significant factors in the disjointed discussions taking place around transnational communication. Given the diversity of interests and approaches, the varying conceptualization of audiences for different forms and functions of media has given rise to an array of ideal types that have been given empirical substance through a bewildering series of demographics and datasets. From spectators to users and from households to flashmobs, all of these placeholders for human participation are necessarily implicated in the routine conduct of various methodologies. As such, the second section of this book will canvas some of the major themes, critical concerns and seminal works in transnational audience research. In doing so, I will illustrate how the investigation of transnational audiences has been centred upon particular audience formations, encountered here over three chapters as ‘diasporas’, ‘crossovers’ and ‘proximities’. Each of those chapters presents a brief sample of historical and contemporary studies, with the larger purpose of establishing the impetus, salience and future direction of these particular enquiries. This section will also begin to explore the differences in form and formation that have engendered distinctive approaches to transnational phenomena emerging from film, music, television and Internet applications. Thus, throughout the second, and also the third, section of the book, I will explore transnational audience formations with reference to media phenomena from around the globe.
This book does not, however, provide a thorough empirical account of transnational audiences. That far larger task belongs to the academy as a whole. Nonetheless, I would urge readers new to the field to engage with the more substantive empirical studies listed at the end of each chapter. Paying attention to detailed case studies will assist greatly in demonstrating the practical application (and origins) of the concerns canvassed in this book. These works will also provide the most effective demonstration of the linkages between particular media forms and certain academic disciplines, and of how the methodological toolkits in use tend to favour particular lines of questioning around the intent, structure and operation of global media systems. With this in mind, in the third and final section of the book, I will engage more explicitly with the methodological and epistemological concerns arising from contemporary media applications. Whereas my attention in the middle section is given to the evolution of audience formations that have intrigued researchers over a reasonable period of time, the final section will concentrate instead upon new audience formations that did not exist in the previous generation, and which bring to light new questions, new challenges and new opportunities for future research. In the final chapter itself, I will seek to explicate certain ways of thinking about the transnational through which all of the audience formations explored in this book can be understood as parts of a larger whole. In a nutshell, then, the purpose of this book is to survey the theoretical foundations of transnational communication and to evaluate our present understanding of this proposition using some cogent examples of media configurations operating across our increasingly interlaced world.
Transnational Cultures
Before we begin that journey, however, there is some intrinsic value in elaborating on the title of this book and the terminology it invokes. Steven Vertovec has described ‘transnationalism’ as broadly referring to the ‘multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states’ (1999: 447). Within the existing literature, Vertovec identifies six major strands of enquiry into transnationalism: as a social morphology, a type of consciousness, a mode of cultural reproduction, an avenue of capital, a site of political engagement and as a reconstruction of place and locality (1999: 449–56). Although the media, and telecommunications in particular, are seen as crucial in all of these strands, narrative media forms are seen to be most influential in two instances: as a ‘mode of cultural reproduction’ and as a ‘reconstruction of place or locality’. In terms of the former:
transnationalism is often associated with a fluidity of constructed styles, social institutions and everyday practices. They are often described in terms of syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation and hybridity. Fashion, music, film and visual arts are some of the most conspicuous areas in which such processes are observed . . . an increasingly significant channel for the flow of cultural phenomena and the transformation of identity is through global media and communications. (Vertovec 2009: 7)
In this instance, transnationalism occurs through practices of cultural mixing enacted within the representative arts. A contemporary artistic transnationalism can be seen explicitly in the more conscious examples of cultural borrowing, such as a Thai ‘Western’ movie like Tears of the Black Tiger (2001) or the Hollywood remakes of the Japanese Ring films. It can be seen objectively in the worldwide adoption of American and European television formats or the take up of Indian ‘Bollywood’ styles by African video productions. It can also be seen implicitly in the circulation of media products intended for multinational audiences, such as the success of the Korean ‘K wave’ across a large part of East Asia in the 2000s or the development of the transatlantic popular music industries in the 1960s. Transnational culture takes many forms, from the bland universalism of electronic games to the conscious fusion of contemporary music. It can stem from both imitation and appropriation, which may be a conscious artistic decision by a producer (as with Tarantino’s Kill Bill films) or a cumulative action by consumers, as in the British adoption of Jamaican music cultures. In all these cases, transnational popular cultures are symptomatic of global connectivity and a greater awareness of cultural diversity. Within those contexts, there are important distinctions (in Bourdieu’s sense of the term) to be made between the self-conscious cosmopolitanism of ‘world cinema’ and the continuous spread and revival of post-war youth culture in different times and settings (Bourdieu 1984).
In Vertovec’s summary, it is important to note his conclusion that transnational popular cultures have implications for socialization at a very personal level. The assumption that media usage influences personal identity in some fundamental fashion has been the orthodox view of popular culture since the 1970s. This has shaped our approaches to all forms of media audiences to the extent that we now rarely question the socializing effect of media consumption and its determining role in the making of each generation. Equally, the literature on transnationalism tends to suggest the passing of what were previously discrete cultural spheres defined by the established parameters of national spaces. If we apply these lines of thinking to a rise in artistic transnationalism, then it does appear reasonable to assume that national aesthetics and idioms are threatened with disruption by the mixing and merging of cultural codes. Indeed, this has been a major concern in media sociology for the past hundred years, where the international tastes of the global elite have long been taken to be potentially damaging for the lower social orders. Consequently, the spectre of cultural confusion and the loss of our distinctive human heritages is frequently overlaid with anxieties about political loyalties and public morality. Such concerns also arise around the second strand of transnationalism in which Vertovec sees the media as being particularly significant, that is, in the ‘reconstruction of place or locality’, where:
a high degree of human mobility, telecommunications, films, video and satellite TV, and the Internet have contributed to the creation of trans-local understandings . . . some analysts have proposed that transnationalism has changed people’s relations to space primarily by creating transnational ‘social fields’ or ‘social spaces’ that connect or position some actors in more than one country. (Vertovec 2009: 12)
The critical status of place is obviously central to any exploration of transnational media. What is also significant here is the recognition of the dual function of modern media. They provide the modes of representation through which wider social relations are expressed as well as the means of communication through which personal social networks are maintained. As such, the emergence of transnational social spaces is linked closely to mediated geographies with both symbolic and practical functions. Our everyday perceptions of the larger world are framed by the ubiquitous circulation of media artefacts, while our personal access to global communications systems facilitates the globalization of our personal domain. Both aspects of transnational communication bring distant societies into sensory proximity, as Marshall McLuhan famously noted in his evocation of the ‘Global Village’ during the 1960s (McLuhan and Fiore 1968). A sense of place and a relative perception of location is also where media mobility meets human mobility, which is the other most frequently cited symptom of transnational cultures. Media become active not only in negating space but also in bridging temporal divides. When we relocate we use media to maintain contact with those we have left behind, thus taking our past with us as an active participant in our new situation. The transnational circulation of media content often cohabits with the itinerancy of contemporary life, marking a double movement through the fields of global culture.
Identifying Audiences
The broad discussion of transnationalism in the media tends to draw evidence from the dispersal of media content. On the face of it, there is good reason to focus upon the supply side, since audiences are notoriously elusive and have posed a perennial challenge for media scholars, sociologists and market researchers alike. In the formative years of mass communications, the enduring conception of the crowd provided the putative biological mass which served as the consumer of media content and arbiter of public opinion. Amidst the concrete of urbanization and mass transport, dynamic crowd formations have since continued to provide the commercial basis for evolving forms of spectacle from circus to cinema to rock concerts. Nonetheless, for observers seeking to understand the composition and motivation of any crowd there are obvious practical challenges, given its ephemeral condition and the inherent diversity of a social body coalescing around mass appeal. By its nature, each crowd is indelibly linked by its very nature to a particular place and time, which makes the mobility of media content the only means by which crowds in different locales can be conceived collectively as a mass audience. Thus, prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, there was no real foundation for the idea of a transnational crowd formation. So we had a world of audiences, but no framework for an international audience in the singular sense. It is also significant that the crowd has always been indelibly linked to mass entertainments and emotive behaviours, and has long stood in obvious contrast to the individualized and dispassionate concept of the reader that underpinned the European enlightenment (and the subsequent pursuit of progress through global markets).
The individual, therefore, is well catered for in modernist thinking, even if those particular configurations of culture, class and cognition have proved themselves to be poor travellers in a wider world. In the heyday of print-capitalism, however, the classical notion of the audience as crowd was powerfully juxtaposed by entirely new concepts for identifying the dispersed and anonymous publics facilitated by modern media technologies that spanned time and space (Innis 1952). Looking at the content of mass circulation books and newspapers from that period, it is obvious that communication by print engendered a conscious conceit to address a worldwide audience (Anderson 1991). For those at the receiving end, it is a doxa of modernist thinking that the spread of reading powerfully transformed our everyday sense of being in the world. At the same time, this new kind of transnational audience remained largely invisible as any kind of collective body, appearing only in sales figures and library lending records. A set of dispersed and mediated communes required new forms of shorthand for understanding the enlarged public sphere (which were steadily codified within the ‘enlightened’ discipline of sociology) (Habermas 1989). From the middle of the twentieth century onwards, mass broadcasting gave rise to a new generation of audience formations that also dispensed with the physicality of the crowd, and thereby required new social categories such as ‘listeners’ and ‘viewers’. Here the primary unit was the household, where public life was now deemed to have interpenetrated the domestic domain. For those seeking to construct a viable commercial basis for broadcast media via advertising, the disaggregated audience became a pressing concern that was tackled with a panoply of focus groups, consumer surveys and ratings mechanisms (Balnaves et al. 2011).
By such means, market researchers constructed an empirical account of media audiences that compensated for their disembodiment, but it is also significant that they did so during the high tide of nationalist economic models. As such, audiences were recast at the national level by those seeking to understand the vagaries of voting patterns, consumer tastes and social mores. With the audience broken down into ‘housewives’, ‘teenagers’, ‘pensioners’ and other types, there was still a general assumption of the national specificity of such groups, which took primacy over their local conditions. In this formulation, audiences outside of the national space became of interest primarily as export opportunities and, to a lesser extent, for the comparative purpose of experts in social communication. By the 1970s, the widespread use of ideal types and quantification to produce both market knowledge and social knowledge was being challenged by scholars seeking a more nuanced understanding of media power in the modern age, most notably by cultural studies with its focus on the meaning (rather than the act) of media consumption and the promotion of anthropological methods and thick description (Turner 2002). The goal here was to understand communication as a two-way, rather than top-down, process (Hall 1980). Audiences were recast from a ‘passive’ mode into an ‘active’ category where viewers consciously subverted ideological structures within media content in light of their own social experience (Morley 1980). In the early body of work, much was invested in the notion of working-class subcultures as resistant audiences who worked to counter a privileged mode of national communication (Hall and Jefferson 1977; Hebdige 1979).
Over time, the very British concerns of early cultural studies work underwent a series of translations into the contexts of other societies, and came under the influence of a hyper-liberal doctrine that tended to promote individualism over the more stable categories of community favoured by early ethnographic studies of audiences (Fiske 1989; Gauntlett 2007; Jenkins 1992). As a consequence, the natural correlation between social movement theory and active audience approaches (both products of the 1960s) eventually coalesced in the model of a networked consumer society (Arvidsson 2005; Castells 1997; Jenkins 2008). Thus, in broad terms, we have seen a parallel transition in both sociology and audience studies from approaches largely derived from the primacy of social structure and physical proximity to approaches largely derived from the primacy of individual agency and mediated relationships (Cavanagh 2007; Napoli 2010). At heart, this remarkable convergence between the conceptual evolution of the audience concept and the concept of community was itself the result of deepening mediation (Athique 2013: 49–63). The technological (and ideological) foundations of the IT revolution proved to be critical in reprogramming the co-ordinates of media sociology, as it was significantly recast through the adoption of computational metaphors (for example, Rainie and Wellman 2012). From the mid-1990s onwards, the global scope of the World Wide Web has also served to ensure that online audiences are inherently transnational. Across this vast canvas, the combination of ‘multimedia’ performance, the ‘many to many’ potentials of networked computing, and the rise of mobile and locative media has engendered a bewildering array of audience configurations that are yet to be adequately described (Goggin 2010; Nightingale 2011).
In a classic case of wood amongst trees, our understanding of increasingly diverse audience formations in the digital era has tended to centre around either the residual categories of a generic ‘user’ or, even worse, around the loose deployment of a ‘virtual community’ that has become endemic in most areas of media studies (following Rheingold 1993). The continuing primacy of the concept of community (however virtual, elective and segregated it may have become) in an era of remediation and footloose populations is indicative of a long-term obsession with the role of media in maintaining bonds within groups of similar individuals. Philip Schlesinger has observed that this ‘inherently internalist’ tendency is an enduring legacy of the social communication theory that formed the basis of modern media studies (2000: 24). Thus, despite the laborious attention now paid to the subcultures within national audiences, there is still
no general principle for analysing the interaction between communicative communities, for assessing cultural and communicative flows in a global system . . . because that is not where the theoretical interest lies. Social communication theory is therefore about how shared cultural and communicative practices strengthen the identity of a group by creating boundaries. (Schlesinger 2000: 21)
So, remarkably, amidst the fanfare of globalization we don’t yet have a firm framework for understanding forums comprised of an inherently diverse membership, which is precisely what transnational communication facilitates. In the era of satellite television, playback formats, mobile communication and the World Wide Web, our long-term investment in strictly national media cultures (taken to be ‘held in common’) has been more or less forced to accommodate the rise of narrowcast media and niche audiences across the media spectrum (and with it, across the social spectrum). Nonetheless, this diversification of the audience still tends to take place within a pluralized re-jigging of the national frame.
In parallel with technological change, the steady relocation of ‘ethnic’ migrants into the developed nations has further highlighted the inherent diversity of national populations, as well as underscoring the mobility of cultural idioms aided by a raft of new technologies. The post-1970s understanding of cultural practices in everyday life as major sites of identity formation imbued with political significance (as reflected by the notion that the ‘personal is political’) has quickly drawn the attention of Caucasian governments increasingly concerned with managing the ‘risks’ of diversity. All of these factors have contributed to the impetus for a wide range of studies focusing upon the media usage of minority populations, and the resulting configurations of social identity and their attendant implications for assessing processes of assimilation or alienation (Brinkerhoff 2009; Cunningham and Sinclair 2000; Gillespie 1995). From the perspective of those who grew up amongst the novel conditions of the United Nations, it is easy to see why the accelerating dispersal of media content across a global geography has been so readily seen as destabilizing the analytical coherence of cultural identities. To suggest, however, that transnational media audiences can only be exemplified by Internet-enabled migrants is to miss the far bigger picture of transnationalism in the ‘mainstream’. Accordingly, the analytical turn towards transnational modes of media analysis necessarily requires a broader reassessment of the nature of media reception taking place across so many different locations and contexts.
The Point of Reception
The increasing attention being paid to transnational flows in contemporary media studies is highly valuable in that it explicitly recognizes the inherent mobility of media content as well as the organic solidarity of audiences operating outside a strictly national framework. Nonetheless, any formulation of audiences as social bodies has to be supported by a general theory of social communication that explains the encounter between the symbolic-technological structures of media and the volition of human beings. It may be useful, then, if we define the environmental conditions of transnational reception at variance with those of a ‘resident’ audience of the kind implicitly presumed in studies conjoining a national media with a ‘domestic audience’. Resident audiences are generally seen as being keen to consume content that is simultaneously ‘about here and about us’. The term ‘resident’ is itself, of course, a variable and contested term; a signifier shaped by the social, cultural, geographic and bureaucratic territories in which it is deployed. There is nevertheless a broad unifying context to the word which implies belonging in not only a symbolic but also a physically located sense. A media audience might therefore be considered ‘resident’ under conditions of reception where viewers perceive what is on-screen as somehow coterminous with the society in which they live. This is an allegorical function served effectively by both fantastic and ‘realist’ narrative and, indeed, this was the normative viewing position promoted during the heydey of national media systems (and it applies equally to network news, Batman or AOL).
A ‘non-resident’ mode of media consumption, by contrast, is more useful for identifying audiences within the conditions of reception that fall outside of this viewing position. Non-resident audiences are engaged with media content in a context where the diegetic world cannot reasonably be claimed to be ‘about here and about us’. In much of the world, where imports make up the bulk of media content and where media systems interface with a wide range of transnational territories, it is non-resident experiences of media consumption that are actually the most common. Nonetheless, non-resident media inevitably cohabit with ‘resident’ media reception in our daily experience. You may watch foreign films with intensely local advert breaks, or you may keep an eye on the local weather while communicating across the World Wide Web. As such, the transnational and the national are unlikely to be mutually exclusive. In practice, any social body defined through media-use is likely to be shaped by transnational patterns of cultural consumption and association, since what most characterizes contemporary media is its multiple sources and its intertextuality.
In her recent work, Shani Orgad has drawn upon Arjun Appadurai, Charles Taylor and Cornelius Castoriadis to argue that the globalizing tendencies of media content in the contemporary world serve to simulate a ‘global imagination’ amongst audiences (Appadurai 1996; Castoriadis 1987; Taylor 2002). The driving force in Orgad’s argument is not the complexities of reception, but rather the semiotics of representation. Thus, the global imagination is described as ‘intimately intertwined with the act of representation: the capacity to imagine relies upon a repertoire of symbolic resources (representations) available to be drawn upon. In turn, representation, through signs, makes the absent present, which is the essence of imagining’ (2012: 41). By this account, the flow of global communications (from rotating television news to the global backdrops of Hollywood spectaculars and contemporary backpackers armed with smartphones) all serve to inculcate a set of relativities around which we make sense of our place in the world. Thus, our personalized understanding of our social relationships, responsibilities and potentials is constructed in relation to our capacity to comprehend our place, and other places, in a global totality. As a catalyst, the increasing proximity and density of a ‘global village’ on screen feeds into a ‘global consciousness’ that expresses itself through the production of media representations that address this interlaced narrative (McLuhan and Fiore 1968; Robertson 1992). Essentially, this is a ‘circuit of communication’ argument, where
Global imagination refers to both the faculty to and the process of forming mental images and concepts of the world, and of ourselves and others traversing this global social space. It relies on making this space present through signs and symbols. In other words, global imagination is cultivated by a process of ongoing construction of views, images, understandings, desires and scripts about the world. (Orgad 2012: 51)
There are two components here. The first is a recognition of the ‘mental maps’ through which individuals understand their existence within a society, in this case a polyglot global society. The second component is an assertion that this capacity is inculcated by discursive prompts carried via a textual system. Both should interest us in terms of understanding media reception, but such a strong textual determinism has generally been eschewed in audience studies for quite a long time. Although various modes of representation will construct an articulation of the global through certain conventions, the larger processes of social identification are inherently dialogic. The production of meaning is therefore highly dependent upon the experiences of the audiences that encounter any work of representation. Thus, for audience researchers, the exploration of any given ‘global imagination’ has to encompass representation as only part of a broader pattern of social communication. Culture is not a closed system. Within the larger system of meaning-making, various works of representation serve to mediate the social process, at times both formally and informally, but they cannot encapsulate that larger process. Accordingly, the orientation of any global imagination cannot be grasped independently of the highly variable contexts of social situation, reception and response (see Canclini 2014). A distinction, therefore, has to be maintained between global imagination and ‘mediated worlds’. The former is a fundamental cognitive process, while the latter are communicative envelopments of various kinds.
Taking this view, we have to assume that the global imagination cannot be deduced solely, or even primarily, from systems of representation in the fashion emphasized by semioticians. In order to illustrate this point better, there may be some merit in revisiting C. Wright Mills’ pioneering conceptualization of sociological imagination as a human attribute. According to Mills, the sociological imagination is the set of cognitive processes where two opposing scales of social reality – individual experience and social structures – become comprehensible. Mills therefore defined sociological imagination as ‘the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society . . . the capacity to shift from one perspective to another . . . the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the intimate features of the human self – and to see the relationship between the two’ (Mills 1959: 8). It is this human capacity to correlate structure and experience that allows us to identify and understand the relationship between wider social forces and our personal actions. Thus, the imagination is intrinsic to human consciousness and behaviour in our ‘natural’ state, regardless of its increasing mediation through various modes of representation and interpersonal communication. Self-orientation is something that people do naturally as social animals. Indeed, this is why their personalized insights make audience research valuable and interesting, and why it produces essentially collaborative knowledge. Without the intellectual capacity to situate ourselves in complex relative terms, globalization could be no more than mechanical and would not enter our consciousness to the extent that it presently does.
The application of the concept of ‘sociological imagination’ within the academy tends to be quite different. In sociology, the term is often inflected by the power relations between the research expert and the research subject. That is, a well-developed ‘sociological imagination’ can be associated more narrowly with the particular role of the sociologist, which ‘requires us . . . to “think ourselves away” from the familiar routines of our daily lives’ (Giddens and Sutton 2013: 5). Arguably, however, the real value of Wright’s concept is precisely opposite to this kind of ‘sociological imagination’. Wright’s location of social understanding in our personal experience leads us towards a more mundane, but larger, concept of ‘social imagination’. Here, the imaginative self-orientation of research subjects takes us deep into their social understanding and consequently reveals much about the embedding of symbolic and abstract relationships, both near and far, within the fabric of their everyday lives. It is social imagination in this sense that makes the lives of individuals both functionally plausible and meaningful, thereby reminding us that identity is as much an external matter (of relations) as an internal one (of selfhood). Active at all scales, this process of relative identification implies a personalised global imagination. Equally, in establishing our unique relationship to other individuals, groups and cultures, social imagination is by its very nature an open-ended and dynamic process. The balance between adaptive independence and cumulative interdependence of thought prompts us to consider transnational communication as a consequence, rather than an effect, of mediation.
Global Scale
Going beyond symbolic structures and the orientation of individual subjectivities, it is also worth noting that there is no aspect or practice of culture that is not firmly located in the material domain. This is particularly important for audience studies, since media reception, by whatever means, always takes place somewhere particular, whether this is in the lodgings of a rural migrant to Shanghai or beneath the electronic billboards of Times Square. The time and place of imagining are critical, as is the embodiment of the individual recipient and the particularities of their life-world in material, temporal and relational terms. While other areas of media studies may be adequately focused upon the semiotics of content or the dimensions of certain markets, the primary interest of reception studies must always be the point of contact. This may be less apparent at the overarching scale at which this survey will take place, but it remains a central concern for any empirical researcher within the field. As Nick Couldry observes: ‘accumulating more accounts of media from more places will not be enough unless we can grasp the variety of everyday media practices on the ground’ (2012: 157). Conversely, the richness of point samples from reception studies will only illuminate our understanding when they become situated within a coherent cultural geography, where the larger point ‘is not to track minor variations in media use but to grasp the overall span of media cultures on a global scale and the dynamics that shape that diversity’ (2012: 159).
In that context, the invocation of the global itself must be understood critically. In making the claim that our daily experience of living in the world is undergoing radical transformation, globalization theorists have been compelled to link patterns of technological connections and economic transactions with the shifting conduct of human beings. Although they are commonly conflated in the process, I think it is important to maintain a distinction between the ‘transnational’ and ‘globalization’. Globalization is a term that denotes increasing interactivity and exchange and the collapse of the barriers of distance and ideology which have previously served to frustrate the triumph of a universal capitalist order. The transnational on the other hand denotes cultural practices which take place across the national boundaries that have structured the discussion of human geography for the past century. Transnational phenomena do not of themselves necessarily imply, as does the term globalization, any particular ideological cohesion or historical volition. Nonetheless, the identification of the condition of globalization is itself predicated upon establishing the existence of such transnational exchanges, as well as providing evidence of their increase (either in numerical terms or in terms of their significance or influence). It is probably fair to say that this case has been made successfully in the empirical research of the past two decades. It would be unreasonable to claim, however, that the new conceptual relationships between globalization and mass media have entirely overwritten the discursive power of the national.
Two reasons for this immediately spring to mind. Both serve to indicate that we live in a world which is increasingly transnational, rather than post-national. At a practical level, the official production and circulation of media content as an economic activity continues to operate within a system of exchange where national governments at least nominally regulate, subsidize, censor and/or tax the production, distribution and exhibition of media products. This authority may be at times coerced and is increasingly subverted, but almost all media producers still need to carry passports, request filming permits, obtain broadcast and journalism licences. Media providers must operate within at least one, but typically several, national economic systems. The Internet is a complex jurisdiction in this regard, but certainly not immune to national authorities (as the Megaupload case has demonstrated). The second (epistemological) reason is that the contemporary experience of globalization continues to be framed by the linguistic and semantic dominance of the nation state. The invocation of ‘national interest’ remains an everyday feature of our ‘globalized’ world. As such, we should never underestimate the national in transnational, where the discourse of ‘national interest’ is fostered by the aggressive pursuit of particularity in some instances, while in others the selfsame ‘national interest’ is invoked to promote various international coalitions or a selective (and typically commercial) cosmopolitanism. Thus, while it is undeniable that the functional reality of a more interconnected globe sits uneasily within the discursive logic of nationalism, it is equally clear that national imaginaries continue to provide key staging grounds for transnational politics.
Needless to say, in a globalizing world of this kind, marked by what Shohat and Stam describe as ‘the entrenched asymmetries of international power’ (2000: 381), the globalization of cultural production has received both utopian and dystopian readings. We will consider some, by no means all, of these readings in subsequent chapters. At the individual scale, these debates have tended to focus upon the subjective complexities of cultural influence, hybrid identities and the customizable field of mediation made possible by the intense personalization of digital platforms (for example, Hegde 2011; Kraidy 2005; Goggin 2011). The lived experience of ‘globalization’ at this level often brings to light intense anxieties around ethnic coherence, political loyalty, cultural disorientation and social dislocation. No doubt, there is a lot of fun in it too. In that sense, exploring the ‘demand side’ of cultural crossovers, expanding life-worlds and mediaculturalism more generally becomes necessary as a means of addressing the anxieties commonly expressed at the scale of community. Community, of course, forms the discursive point at which personal expression becomes subject to police action, either figuratively or actually. Cultural engagements at the community level, in turn, draw attention at the national scale, where everyday practices often become linked to political legitimacy, the requirements of citizenship and the gatekeeping of national institutions and narratives (McLaughlin et al. 2011). Nonetheless, alongside such continuing proclivities for sovereign normativity, transnational media streams have become well established as a common feature of everyday life across all social strata.
The interlacing of transnational communication of various kinds within the personal, local and national scales must also be approached from a global perspective. Here the maturation of a global media apparatus (most explicitly in the form of the World Wide Web) necessarily interacts with the rich cultural geography of our world. At this larger scale, earlier maps of a political ‘world system’ defined by a ‘centre-periphery’ power relationship are being redrawn to somehow account for the growing mobility of various forms of media content and communication flows across a more multi-polar terrain (Curtin 2003; Thussu 2007; Wallerstein 2004). As a consequence, researchers have been working steadily towards a new cultural geography that reflects the growth of transnational satellite broadcasting, the circulation of international media formats and the increasing importance of pan-regional publics (Chalaby 2005; Moran and Keane 2003; Turner and Tay 2009). This mode of engagement with transnational audiences tends to demarcate culture in the form of supra-national zones defined by mutual investments in particular forms of language, faith and custom. This ‘area studies’ approach to contemporary media has been well suited to the empirical description of the global media economy, since it is more easily adapted to the broad categorization of various ‘territories’ for media industries and products. There is also a strong geopolitical framing at this level, given the origins of international communication studies in the disciplines of political science and international relations during the 1970s (see Kraidy 2013: 1–8). Nonetheless, work done at this scale relies upon validation at the grassroots since, in essence, any coherent geography of media reception must seek explanations that can be demonstrated at the global, regional, national, local or, even, subjective scale.
Thoughts on the Floor
In the process of unpacking the title of this book in such substantive terms, I have sought to presage some of the central themes of the ensuing chapters as well as identify some of the academic challenges that impact upon what is, in all fairness, a somewhat grandiose undertaking. Taken as a whole, transnationalism scales up the central problematic of reception studies quite considerably. To tackle this, we must seek new ways to conceptualize the implicit connectivity between internal cognition, environmental conditions, patterns in communication flows, and social imaginaries of varying strengths and dispositions. To prepare the ground, at least, an extended exploration of different configurations of transnational audience formations seems warranted. This will naturally involve the juxtaposition of different scales, but also the uncovering of different registers through which we can interrogate the interactions between media flows and the cultural geography of a diverse world. My account will also remain attentive to the temporal dimension, which I will periodically allude to in terms of the evolution of both media technologies and academic thinking. The outlook of studies in transnational communication has itself changed profoundly from the Cold War period in which it began, through the high tide of decolonization, the millennial triumph of neoliberal globalization, and into the present contingencies of neo-pragmatism and the return of the Great Game.
