YouTubeOrator

Check out YouTubeOrator, a database cinema project by SUNY Buffalo graduate student James Boatwright.

Salons, flaneurs, and e-gender

In setting up the historical, theoretical, and highly gendered conceptions of the 18^th century salon, Dean creates an opposition between Habermas’ rigorously rational (read: male) version of the salon, one founded upon parity, interrogation, and inclusiveness, and Benhabib's feminized space predicated on bonding, identity construction, and self-discovery. I’m not sure of the utility of unquestioningly maintaining these essentialist binaries unless it’s simply for organizational clarity in introducing and contrasting the cyber salon—she never seems to attempt a reconciliation between the gendered spaces even as she enacts critiques of both historical formulations and the “regulatory fiction of the pubic sphere” (247).

Anyway, the male salon is inevitably civic-minded, dispassionately practical, and purposive, and in an almost offensive binary contrast, the friendly salon (what a stupid name) is practically pastel and floral-scented, suggesting a Care Bear sorority of nurturing, orality, and sharing—all the things we communicative females are supposed to do. I assume Dean maintains these poles of gendered space and gendered interaction because they are historically situated; additionally they serve as a ballast for her contention that former conceptual models of the salon and civic society are limited, ineffectual, or inapplicable to the cyber salon, in all its fluctuating, contested, heterogeneous manifestations.

However, despite my confusion at Deans’ unexamined invocation of gendered spaces, and the apparently unproblematized reinscription of hetero norms and coding, her description of the friendly salon strongly reminded of something I’d gleaned from a discussion on gender and video game play. She writes:

Benhabib brings to the fore the feminine, ludic, and erotic components of the salon. She highlights the world-disclosing aspects of the language used in the salon, the joy and magic of shared speech. She emphasizes the play of identities at work in the salon, the ways in which self-revelation and self-concealment disrupt the public sphere’s ideal of transparency…Accordingly, she presents the ideal of the modern salon as the joy of conversation, the search for friendship, and the cultivation of intimacy (245).

Forgive me gamers, if I botch this hypothesis and maybe you iMAP students can help me flush this out in a more sophisticated way, but I remember hearing that certain studies of game play found that women tend to be more discursive and exploratory in the game world, preferring to meander, learn about the milieu, seek out is its boundaries and parameters--rather than being instantly goal-oriented, active, and linear, they are more peripatetic. I don’t know if this actually has empirical evidence, or if it was just anecdotal observation, and obviously it can cause fits in gender studies circles since it perpetuates all the essentialist cants about women being more passive, communal etc, and since I’m sure women like first-person shooters too. However, this idea of the wandering female gamer being more attuned to discovery and exploration, also brings to mind another historical analogy, that of the 19^th century flaneur, or in this case flaneuse traversing the city with joie de vivre and abandon.

For all of our vigorous dismantling of heterosexist assumptions and gender constructions, are there verifiable and consistent differences in the way females and males utilize interactive media? And if so, can that be ascribed to (horror of horror) actual biological and cognitive differences, or do our varying styles and preferences for new media simply perpetuate preexisting and naturalized gender roles?

Tying in Dean’s work with Castells', the divergent observations and expectations about authenticity are interesting: Dean posits Habermas’ rational salon as being the most reflective and transparent, with literal, reliable meanings and a consonance between surface and substance; Benhabib’s salon is slightly more complex given the primacy on play, and the cyber salon’s disembodied nature makes authenticity even harder to ascertain. However in every iteration, Dean acknowledges that this desire for transparency is largely elusive, and there will always be a measure of self-presentation, performance, and construction in the public sphere, with its “stylized and ceremonial dimensions” (255):

Public utterance are supposed to be authentic. For Habermas this means that what one says in public is connected with a larger conception of reason, with an appeal to a common reason that transcends particular goals, desires, or machinations. For Benhabib, authenticity is more nuanced. She does not presume interactions in the salon are transparent or that one’s presentation in public is necessarily a presentation of who one is. At the same time, however, her account of intimacy in the salon relies on a link between speech and authenticity. Benhabib's reliance on a link between speech and authenticity appear in her depiction of the salon as a place where the soul is “discovered” and in her appeal to civic friendship. …It provides the locus for truth and accountability, precisely those attributes necessary for the solidary bonds of citizenship, reciprocity, and respect (255-56)

Consequently it seems oddly naïve that Castells claims that the newfangled Net can be imbued with a degree of sincerity /authenticity because of its anonymous inclusive nature, “Virtual communities seem to be stronger than observers usually give them credit for. There is substantial evidence of reciprocal supportiveness on the Net, even between users with weak ties to each other. In fact, the on-line communication fosters uninhibited discussion, thus allowing sincerity in the process” (388-89). This seems wildly optimistic and I’m trying to remember what the popular discourse and general sentiment was back in 2000, and if Castells held a minority opinion.

Dictatorship and private media: a case study of Gabon in 2009.

Reading the article on China's "new authoritarianism" made me lay a different look on what happened in Gabon (Central Africa) when President Omar Bongo Ondimba (OBO) died after 42 years in power. His son Ali Bongo Ondimba (ABO) succeeded him (with an "electoral coup") but faced many difficulties in controlling the communication networks to legitimize his arrival to power. ABO and his governement had to deal with a network which had opened to private and foreign companies, which could not be totally controlled.

In 1967, when OBO arrived to power, mass media in Africa was certainly not a threat for many of the postcolonial regimes which were to turn into dictatorships (Zaire, Côte D'Ivoire, Togo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo). Most of them had single party systems, public channels only, no internet, no cellphones. With more or less no real political/public contestation, OBO ruled over Gabon for 42yrs.

However, it looks to me that the survival of the new authoritarian regimes in Africa will now highly depend on how they handle the regulation of their communcation networks. Lu and Weber quote Zhang saying "the integrity of the new authoritarianism rests on balancing state control over the public sphere, including political power and public opinion, while allowing the gradual opening of the private sphere for economic prosperity and a limited degree of individual freedom" (p. 938)

When we look at the regimes that collapsed during the past 12 months (Côte D'Ivoire, Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia) we can see that mass media (tv, internet, radio) played a significant role in how those populations started their revolution. Since the communication networks were no longer only controlled by the state, it created room for contestation. In 2009 in Gabon, we had a similar phase, but were not been able to take advantage of it... yet.

Indeed, in June 2009 when OBO died, the Gabonese communcation network roughly looked like that:

3 national channels - RTG1 (public), TeleAfrica (private but owned by the Bongo family) and TV+ (private and owned by Andre Mba Obame, who would subsequently join the opposition)

Satellite cable TV (French owned CanalSat is the biggest provider)

Internet (provided by national companies with GabonTelecom (public) being the biggest provider)

Mobile phone, the biggest providers are Zain (private owned by a group from Kuwait), and Libertis (public, part of the same group as GabonTelecom )

Radio, the biggest news providers are RFI (private French) and Africa N°1 (private but was owned by OBO, who then sold it to Libyan's guide Khadahfi in 2008)

On the early evening of June 7th, French cable news channels I-Télé and France24 announced the news that OBO had just died. However, on national TV no channels dared to cover that kind of news. But people started texting and calling each other so much to spread the news, that by the end of the night everybody knew.The next morning (around 9AM), the national channels eventually reacted. The Prime Minister, Jean Eyéghé Ndong appeared on RTG1 to contradict the rumor and confirm that OBO was still "very much alive" (those were his words!). The Prime Minister explained that he called OBO's doctors in Spain (where the President was hospitalized) and they confirmed that he was not dead. Eyéghé Ndong then flew to Spain the very same day, with a team of reporters from RTG1. Meanwhile in Libreville (the country's capital), it was crazy paranoia because people didn't know who to believe with the contradicting news coming from national TV and cable TV. Indeed, all day France24 had coverage concerning OBO's rumored death, while national channels (all 3) did not interrupt their regular programs. However, on Monday afternoon (just a few hours after the first denial) a female journalist from RTG1 appeared on the screen (with dark clothes and no make up) to read a statement from the Prime Minister announcing that OBO had just died in the early afternoon.

Afterwards, while cable news channels France24 and I-Télé had increased coverage of the news, and started potraying OBO has a dictator, local channels (including TV+, because AMO was still part of the majority at that time) mourned the loss of "papa Omar," the one who "built Gabon and maintained peace for 4 decades". As well, as soon as OBO's death was made official, his son Ali (ABO - then Minister of Defense) appeared on RTG1 to announce that all borders would be temporary closed for secutiry purposes. That created a real frenzy in Libreville, people rushed to stores (including myself) to buy water and food as we all prepared ourselves for likely violence.

Internet was immediately shut down during this time, up untill OBO's funeral. Mobile service was still working though, but people were aware that conversations might be monitored. People with a Blackberry (which was just introduced in the Gabonse market by foreigh mobile provider Zain) were among the only ones who still had Internet access (through satellite) and could post on blogs what was going on in Gabon. The local press (both public and private) would not dare to cover the news of people panicking. Foreign journalists of French news agencies such as France24 and L'Express were denied entry visas to Gabon, even after the borders reopened.

The "democratic" election that followed counted 23 candidates, including ABO and André Mba Obame (AMO who now joined the opposition). It created a "tv channels war" between ABO and AMO. AMO owned TV+, the biggest local private channel, while ABO could easily control RTG1 and TéléAfrica (which started broadcasting nationally during the campaign). ABO's channels were doing Bongo propaganda, while AMO's channel was doing his propaganda. AMO had a little edge in this war, because his channel was the most popular. As well, he was a former Minister of Interior during his time with the regime, during which he was a really close friend of ABO's. They called each other "brothers." Therefore, he was perceived by many as the one who would constitute the real opposition for ABO.

On the day of the election (August, 30th) around 11AM, the President of the National Concil of Communcation (censors) shut down AMO's channel TV+, because it kept on broadcasting political messages, while the campaign period was already over. The big censor confiscated TV+ transmittor. At 8PM, at the time of the evening news, everybody had to tuned to RTG1 to get the official results. The channel had announced that for the first time, it would offer an "election night" program, during which the results would be revealed. But, with frankly no surprise, people realized that they would not. They claimed that the CENAP (national election commission) was not done counting the votes, and had to collect results from all over the country.

African news channel Africa24 (broadcast on cable by CanalSat) was among one of the few international channels that were allowed to cover the elections from Gabon. This favor was granted under the condition that on the night of the election, they would not communicate any results that doesn't come directly from the CENAP. So they too, did not announce any results.

For 5 days, the CENAP was unable to announce any official results. However, people started texting each other saying that the CENAP was changing the votes, that some people had had access to the real results of AMO's victory. SMS of unofficial election results started circulating for a couple of days. Then, all of the sudden, everybody who had a cellphone received a SMS from Libertis (public) saying that the ARTEL (agency for regulation of telecommuncation - censors), temporarily suspended SMS service because of people feeding the paranoia by spreading dangereous rumors about the election.

In the early morning of Sept 2nd (around 3AM) an other transmittor of TV+ was being destroyed, and shot at with guns by an "unknown" commando unit. Indeed, TV+ was part of the communication group GO AFRICA which broadcasts in half a dozen African coutnries. The channel was planning to use this second transmittor to resume broadcasting.

Eventually, on Thusday Sept, 3rd (around 11AM), RTG1interrupted its broadcast to announce that the CENAP was done counting the votes. However, on two foreign websites (Europe1 -French- and Koaci -Panafrican-) I remember reading around 9AM the puzzling news that claimed that the commision was about to declare ABO the winner of the elections. I didn't believe it, because at that time, with all the many rumors that were circulating, every unofficial results had to be dismissed.

Yet, about 2hrs later on RTG1, the CENAP did announce the victory of ABO, with roughly the same results that were published on the two websites. Ali Bongo Ondimba had successfully stolen the election and become the 3rd President of Gabon. Yet, thanks to the non-controllable communication networks, people were aware that ABO had no legitimacy, but unfortunately they did not take it to the "next level".

When I look at what happened in other African dictatorships with similar political regimes, with leaderships struggling to muzzle private media, I can't help but feel upset about the missed opportunity in Gabon...

Castells’ The Power of Identity – But First, Some of His Earlier Work Too

For this particular blog post, I thought I would share with the class an annotated bibliography-type entry of Manuel Castells’ The Power of Identity, the second installment in his Information Age trilogy after The Rise of the Network Society. His CV verges on the ludicrous, so I’ll spare everyone extensive details (I figure you know who he is anyway), but suffice it to say I think it’s worthwhile to share a bit about his research as he’s made a compelling, perhaps natural transition from urban sociology and planning to globalization and the network society. (For now I’ll just encourage you take one of his two seminars in Annenberg; one’s “Globalization, Communication, and Society;” the other on the Network Society. I’ve taken the former and plan on taking the latter. Because, people.) [NB: I’m reading from the first edition of The Information Age trilogy (1996, 1997); pages might be different but the content is not.]

His 1977 The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach is regarded to be the first fully articulated neo-Marxist critique of the socio-political, economic, and spatial organization of cities. His position here (and where he introduces Henri Lefebvre here to English-speaking audiences) is this: space itself is a social construction. The spatial environment is not the root cause of behaviors; rather it is a reflection of the socio-political and economic conditions. The urban structure, then, is the articulation of the economic system in space. The urban symbolic distinguishes between the signifier and the signified; the city and especially its center are indeed symbolic. See? Way Marxist.

In The City and the Grassroots (1983), he relaxes his Marxist stance and focuses on devising a theoretical framework for understanding what causes social change. He still asserts the city is a social product, adding that its innovations generally arise from grassroots efforts, the most successful among them, “urban social movements.” He finds the most successful urban movements articulate all of the following goals: (1) organizing around use-value, “collective consumption use value” (in opposition to capitalism and production); (2) searching for cultural identity, “community” (in opposition to technocracy); and (3) achieving decentralization and self-governance, “citizen movement” (in opposition to statism). Urban social movements to Castells are more than symbolic—they are symptoms of societal contradictions and can potentially overcome such contradictions.

As we know from “The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of the Interactive Networks,” Castells believes the new spatial logic is in fact one of flows, not places, and that the three foundational realms of the new social structure are space, time, and technology. Spaces of flows manifest from the small, elite, interpersonal networks’ projection of interests and preferences into the macro-level networks on the global scale. Castells stresses that since capitalism and information have collapsed to becoming the same thing, spurring a transformation from modern capitalism into informational capitalism, the network society story is not, in fact, one about classes. There is not a global capitalist class but “an integrated, global capital network” (1996, 474). The network society underscores a qualitative change in the human experience: “culture refers to culture” (1996, 474).

And so we approach The Power of Identity (1997). In the 2010 edition’s preface, Castells asserts the tensions and violent outbreaks emerging from identity building have been the most pronounced since the volume’s first publication. Quite so. Using a series of empirical examples, the most relevant among them the close cousins American Christian and Islamic fundamentalist movements, he proposes an identity-building typology: (1) legitimizing, effectuated by dominant institutions to rationalize power and establish civil society; (2) resistance, wherein actors in devalued positions produce communes or communities; and (3) project, wherein actors develop a new identity and transform the overall social structure, creating subjects in the process. Castells hypothesizes that subjects are no longer built from civil societies but by expressions of “communal resistance” (1997, 11). He explores a social theory of contemporary nationalism, averring that in it nations are separate from the state (indeed, the nation-state is weakened in the information economy); nationalism is neither linked to the formation of the modern nation-state nor directed by elite interests; and since nationalism is more reactive than proactive, it’s more cultural than political.

Castells further hypothesizes that ethnicity is “not the basis for communal construction of meaning in the network society because it is based on primary bonds that lose significance” (1997, 59). Territorial identity-making functions as the lynchpin for local community-making in that it is so deeply connected to sense of belonging, all the more important in this increasingly deterritorialized world. Cultural communes are: (1) defensive identities that act as refuge/solidarity, (2) culturally-constituted, and (3) reactions to prevailing social trends. Castells then enters a discussion about globalization’s and informationalism’s social movements, saying they must be understood on their own terms, and that they can be radical, conservative, both, or neither. In addition, he believes Alain Touraine’s (1956, 1966) typology is indispensable for understanding them. Touraine’s framework foregrounds a social movement’s identity, named adversary, and social goal; identifying each allows one to comprehend, perhaps predict, a particular movement’s processes.

Next he hypothesizes that the crisis of patriarchalism is another key element of the Information Age. Feminism and the gay rights movement (which he covered in some detail in The City and the Grassroots, as well) has come about with the transition of the economy, the revolutions in biological sciences, and the rapid diffusion of ideas in globalized culture from the 1960s onward. The crisis of the patriarchal family comprises a total reconfiguration (and shrinking) of the nuclear household in its manifold forms. Of course, the fundamentalist project identity movements consider the reformation of patriarchalism to be essential and attempt to block, through policy, violence, or usually a devastating cocktail of the two, anything they perceive as a threat to such reformation.

His position on the “powerless state” echoes much of what we have already discussed in class. “Globalization/localization of media and electronic communication is tantamount to the denationalization and destatization of information, the two trends being inseparable for the time being” (1997, 259). Multinational cooperation requires an “irreversible sharing of sovereignty…and…entrenchment of nation-states” (1997, 268).

Finally, not buying into media imperialist theory, Castells asserts that while the political realm is played out in the media, control of the media does not translate to political control. Still, he’s not so rosy. “Mediacracy” is “not contrary to democracy because it’s as complementary and plural as democracy ([which is to say] not much)” (1997, 317). Since the nation-state can’t sustain both national citizenship and singular identity, we’re seeing the “penetration of the political system by symbolic politicos, single-issue mobilizations, localism, referendum politics, and ad hoc support for personalized leadership” (1997, 349). Power still matters, of course: “the new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation” (1997, 359). Again, “the message is the message” (1996, 368).

Some thoughts on "The Public"

The questions raised last week surrounding the meaning of “public” seemed particularly relevant to this week’s readings. Although at best I have only a basic understanding of the arguments made by Habermas, Benhabib, and Jodi Dean, I found Dean’s distinction between the public sphere and civil society to be quite useful in thinking through issues of global communication.

What struck me in our discussion last week was our tendency (mine included) to throw around the term “public” without a careful consideration of what we actually mean by it. Often, when we talk of “the public,” we have in mind the masses, “commoners,” or that portion of society that is outside of government. Other times, as in the case of the salons described by Habermas, Benhabib and Dean, this term can be used to describe common spaces outside the home (in opposition to “private”), where all people can come together and interact, or do what I would describe as practice society. And yet on other occasions, in direct opposition with the first definition, when we speak of “the public,” we actually have in mind elements of the government itself, such as in the case of public institutions including schools, libraries, museums and monuments. Although work has been done to make this term more useful (for example, the “let’s throw an s on the end” approach that is so popular in academia), I still find the term to be highly ambiguous, and this lack of specificity has often been counterproductive.

Dean’s civil society is one logical response to this problem. Again, I feel I should stress my limited understanding of her argument (at times the heavy political theory was a bit much for me to hold), but her basic argument, particularly her emphasis on the inequalities in civil society seemed to me quite reasonable. Because civil society is, as noted on page 252, centered on communication, unequal access, particularly to communications spaces and technologies such as the Internet, raises important questions that challenge the egalitarian rhetoric tied to the public sphere. This fact struck me particularly on page 262, when Dean writes that “[r]ather than a common humanity, there is the uncommonality of cyborgean experience that threatens to increase the gap between rich and poor, or between those with information and those without it…”

In Gamer, this distinction between the haves and the have-nots was present throughout, although because technology was practically everywhere in the film, the boundaries felt to me, almost invisible at times. However, the boundaries surrounding “Society” and “Slayer” served a dual function: they defined not only the spaces of play, but also those with access to controlling technology from those without it (and who were instead controlled by it). This distinction was most evident when the police were interrogating Simon after Kabel escaped. The officer contrasted the realities of Simon’s life with Kabel’s, calling attention to the reality of human life on the other side of the screen. In this moment, I felt the false sense of egalitarianism and equal access of the public sphere come crashing down around both Simon and me, where suddenly we were made to acknowledge the presence of an outside, or an experience existing beyond the boarders of technology. Although this recognition was only a fleeting moment in the film, I hope that we as media scholars can hold it with us as we continue to press on in thinking about issues of global media. For, while it is very easy for us to think and theorize within the limits of our own experiences, our work will only reveal a fraction of the picture if we do not take into consideration those beyond the boundaries of our minds.

Work's Intimacy

A new book for your reviewing attention -- also a great fit with next week's discussion.

http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745650279

Taking issue with Waisbord

Okay, it's pretty clear that Silvio Waisbord is a smart guy. I don't want to argue with that. I do want to ask, however, why such a smart guy, in this McTV article we all just read, would work in such a fuzzy and imprecise way with terminology that doesn't seem to trouble other scholars of similar questions.

Specifically, there was a perturbing collapse of the terms "local" or "regional" and "national" running throughout "McTV..." This starts on the second page of the article (360 in the version I have), with the following claim:

The popularity of formats...reveals two developments in contemporary television: the globalization of the business model of television and the efforts of international and domestic companies to deal with the resilience of national cultures.

Hm, I asked myself, and wrote down in the margins. Are these really national cultures? or regional? Further down the page, Waisbord contends that "television is...shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures." (Emphasis added) Here, and continuing throughout the article, Waisbord adopts a hyphenated approach to the local-and-national, or national-and-regional, that seems to me both imprecise and inappropriate.

Let's look at reality TV, which he uses to support many of his format arguments (which, for the record, I think are, in many ways, on point). Take the Real Housewives franchise. If this franchise were really reflective of national values, and local meant the same thing as national, would we really have a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, one of Orange County, and one of New York City? Isn't this far more reflective of regional sensibilities, and isn't it more interesting to reflect on the contrast between regional and national reception than to simply lump them all together? I guess one could make the assertion that only US viewers will understand the full implications of the different regional cultural stereotypes at play in these series, but especially in the case of Beverly Hills I don't think that's true. Which raises a whole new set of questions, about the international appeal of some regional shows over others, in a way that doesn't truly seem to involve US-national sensibilities at all.

This fuzziness around the local/national distinction was aggravated by Waisbord's simplistic, reductive and (maybe I'm overreacting but I found it) absurd discussion of language as a national unifier, or "a pillar of cultural distinctiveness and national identities." I understand where this instinct comes from, but as Waisbord notes himself, languages exist independent of national boundaries, and indeed this has been a huge problem in some of the more recent colonial projects of the West (as in the Middle East). Straubhaar puts it elegantly, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I read this, so I'll just quote him:

Nearly all television systems work within long-term patterns of language and culture that sometimes coincide with nation-states but are frequently either larger--the Arabic-speaking world--or smaller--serval states in India that have distinctive systems of language, culture, religion, and television.

Waisbord's resistance to acknowledging this basic fact about language undermines some of his more nuanced explorations of how accents in Latin America become national unifiers--though this is undermined, again, by the very regional qualities of accents in larger countries (like Mexico, or the US).

In short, while I think this article has its merits, it suffers from some pretty serious elisions and dissolutions between key concepts that I was happy to see addressed in the other readings we completed. In his arguments for the resilience of national cultures in the face of globalization, I found Waisbord in fact making more convincing arguments for the departure from national frameworks, as nearly every cultural element he identified as "national" is more properly described as "regional." But maybe that's because I hate the nation?

My Media Secret

I have a confession to make: I was raised by media imperialists.

Given that both of my parents had free range over their television and viewing practices growing up, it is somewhat of a mystery to me that they chose to impose such severe restrictions on my own. Television didn’t seem to have affected them negatively in any way; both are intelligent, friendly and creative, and without a propensity for violence, vulgarity, or any of the other usual suspects often associated with the medium. Yet, my first memory of media was around age two when my babysitter had me stand with my back to the television while the other kids watched Mickey Mouse cartoons because my parents said they were too violent.

Instead, I was fed a strict diet of PBS, growing up on shows like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, Newton’s Apple, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Nova, and the occasional Joy of Painting. As I grew older I was also allowed to watch other “exciting” shows like 60 minutes and the local news, but the imperialists were always careful to push the mute button during all commercials. By high school I had achieved a ration of 2 hours of television per week, which I dedicated entirely to black primetime shows including Martin, Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, Sinbad, and Living Single. Naturally, their intense oversight also extended to encompass other forms of media, including video games (which were strictly educational computer games), music (oldies and classical), and of course, the movies. Although by middle school I had begun to sneak in some “banned” material, I grew up largely outside of popular media discourse.

As Lauren Berlant is recognized as arguing in the Morely article, “through the accident of birth within a particular set of geographical and political boundaries, the individual is transformed into the subject of a collectively held history and learns to value a particular set of symbols as intrinsic to the nation and its terrain” (107). In my case, this accident of birth meant that I would learn to value the symbols of a very specific, although somewhat different, kind of nation: nerds.

While I must acknowledge that their tactics appear to have been successful to some extent (both my brother and I are currently in Ph.D. programs), as a media studies scholar I am also constantly reminded of how this approach positioned me as an outsider. Discussing the role of media in cultural belonging and identity, Morely cited Scannell when noting that “[c]ultural citizenship…entails responsibilities (to have seen crucial television broadcasts) as well as entitlements. Rather than conceiving of cultural citizenship as a simple binary in/out mechanism, we might do better to think of it as a graduated incline, in which fuller membership depends, among other things, on particular types and amounts of media consumption” (109). This last point, regarding the value placed on certain types of media consumption rang particularly true to me, and I recalled all the awkward moments both while a student in this program and before, when my lack of familiarity with 80s television shows provoked looks, laughter, or at best my own self-conscious sense of not quite belonging.

Of course, at the same time, in other more specialized circles (what I affectionately think of as “the nation of nerds”), I have all the right cultural capital. I mean, my name is from The Hobbit, for goodness sake! I can reminisce about playing Monkey Island on the computer, talk about my favorite Masterpiece Theater fairytale, and provide comfort to a fellow nerd who grew up without television by admitting that I didn’t get those cultural references either. Goonies? Sandlot? Such films are of little use here. Instead, the fact that my father and his 60 year old friends still get together every Tuesday night to play Xbox holds much more currency.

However, this cultural capital has proved largely useless in other circles. While I do hold enough of it to be accepted into the “imagined” American community (who didn’t watch Sesame Street & Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as a kid?), my lack of many other popular media has been prohibitive, both for my admission into full citizenship and for my own feelings of national belonging. Part of this is likely explained by Morely’s recognition that “[t]he question is always which forms of sociability feel foreign to whom. Any one form of sociability must have its constitutive outside, some necessary field of exclusions by which the collective identity of those whom it interpellates successfully is defined” (112). I am, after all, an outsider not just as a nerd, but also as an African American and as a woman. Morely makes a good point by fleshing these differences out in the remainder of the article; however, not much time was spent addressing the ability (and, I would argue, also the obligation) of individuals to belong to multiple imagined communities simultaneously. Furthermore, this belonging, as Baker practically beats to death in chapter 1 of Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, is based on a fluid construction of identity that is constantly changing.

On My Good Buddy Bradam

Last Sunday, a friend of mine--let's call him "Bradam"--watched an illegal stream of a sporting event online. The game involved his favorite sports team, and Bradam and I are both fans of this team, so (let's say) he called me afterward to tell me all about the experience. It was streamed by a kind of underground celebrity, a person who illegally streams all of the sporting events, from multiple sports, from a particular geographic region. Let's call that region, "Scruffalo."

The site where this game was streamed, Bradam told me, was filled to the brim with Scruffalo fans. And the cult hero streaming the game was a Scruffalo fan, too, so the space had the feel of hometown bar. Scruffalo songs were played, Scruffalo jokes were made. Bradam wasn't sure how to interact in this space, at first, but the Anonymous But Still Celebrated Streamer Person regularly blocked out the feed's commercials, and used that time to, among other things, inform people of the rules of etiquette for the webspace. Bradam tells me he's planning to watch this feed again this coming Sunday, if he can find it--the stream-space moves, like so many other underground and less-than-legal communal spaces, and so there's no guarantee he'll know its location.

This experience seemed directly relevant to the kinds of things we're talking about in our class. So, being the industrious student that I am, I immediately thought I should write one of my required blog posts about it. And then I thought some more, and realized how dumb it would be to post information like this on a public forum. After all, who would want to get their "friend" in trouble, and potentially run the risk of exposing a secretish underground community, just to complete a little old homework assignment?

Fast-forward to this week, and my good buddy Bradam calls me again to ask if I want to attend the U.S. Day of Rage event in downtown Los Angeles. It's a solidarity protest, in support of those protesting on Wall Street in New York City, meant to convey outrage over the role of transnational corporations in American politics. Again, this seemed like great fodder for a blog post! Of course I would attend!

And then, again, I second-guessed myself. After all, how was I supposed to find time to write my blog post, if I'm spending four or five hours at some protest downtown? Besides, it's not like I'd be missed. Tons of people were already at the Wall Street protest, so undoubtedly the Los Angeles one would be jam-packed with energetic, homeworkless protesters. I was already watching some of the live webstreams from New York City, so maybe I could write about those video feeds, and those people, instead of going myself. Better to send Bradam, while I stay home.

I find myself wondering if this will become a tradition of sorts. Bradam will call me and tell me about the experiences he's having: the television he's watching, the games he's playing, the DVD's he's burning, the software he's torrenting. The classes he's blowing off. I wonder if I'll be able to keep up. Maybe I can convince Bradam to do a vlog or something. That way, I can watch him whenever I want.

Article on TLC version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding from The New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/89173/my-big-fat-gypsy-wedding-tlc-traveller-roma?page=0,0

Fatih Akin and collaborators on transnationality

A couple of people asked me to post the Fatih Akin and Idil Üner quotes I referenced in class yesterday. Here are my translations, along with links to the original German interviews for anyone who is interested.

Akin:
"I am in flux, back and forth, on the bridge. I’ve noticed that I still have my largest audience in Germany, but also a new one in Turkey. And I’ve started to think for both markets. What I write should work here—but also over there. In my experience, if a film works in these two cultures, I can be fairly sure that it will be understood in France or Asia or Mexico. My two places of socialization, Germany and Turkey, represent globalization, so to speak: Whoever understands both systems understands the worldwide contexts. Thus, what I make becomes world cinema." From here.

Üner:
"I’m not a German, I’m a Turk; that’s how I feel. I have a German passport. To say it better: I’m a Berliner with Turkish roots. I don’t really have much to do with the typical second or third generation Turks. I stay away from the whole Kanack Attack movement. I’m definitely not going to call myself a name that was used to insult my parents, a name they are still afraid of. I’ve never had the feeling that I had to clamp onto the Turkish community just to protect my identity or because otherwise I feel pushed away by others. I have seven good friends: two or three Germans, Turks, Greeks. Sometimes we sit with the film crew in Hamburg, and then we’re made up of ten nations. But we have absolutely no need for explanation, designation, or categorization.
We, as the children or grandchildren of the immigrants, have it a lot easier. We profit from the order here, we can go to school, don’t have to work in order to support our families. We can build our lives securely. However, we do have a connection to the whole problem, because we still aren’t completely accepted—not here and also not in Turkey. That’s material for our stories and our films. Fatih Akin didn’t make anything up for Short Sharp Shock. We have the good luck to carry two sides around inside us. The Turkish side is very temperamental, the German is the orderly, that holds its feelings back, in order to function better. This mix is an advantage.” From here.

I have several other links to interviews and articles if anyone is interested, just send me an email and I'll be happy to give you a list.

keep music cambodian

I found this article from the Phnom Penh Post to be particularly relevant to our talk on Tuesday, especially in regards to "national" cultural forms and the idea of innovation and progress through transnational identities. I mentioned that in the music world, hybridized music happens regardless of outlets--it's just an extension of a cultural situation--and that issues of national vs. transnational seem to be less important than in film studies. Welp, I was wrong!

Fearing that young musicians were being infiltrated by too much foreign culture, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen released a statement last Thursday urging Cambodian young people to "stop copying foreign styles and instead develop the country's unique musical identity."

But this request raises so many issues. Firstly, considering that today's global music culture affects nearly everyone (think of the kids in Brazilian favelas that idolize Tupac) how can one avoid making music that incorporates in some way other music they've heard? His request is an even bolder one considering that officials in the same statement suggested that young musicians draw influence from the "golden era of Cambodian rock," which in the 1960s was a controversial hybrid genre built on top of psych rock and surf guitar riffs, themselves products of another country's milieu.

The government's statements of national heritage and pride become even more contradictory when one considers how Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge destroyed the 60s Cambodian rock scene in its systematic elimination of all artists and creatives. At the time, the music was blasphemous and too American, but today, it is the music that the country wants to build its national sound on top of?

I am having an even harder time understanding the country's fear of dependency on foreigners for their music since the only reason that Cambodian rock has seen a revival at all is because of foreign musicians' interest in collecting and preserving the few recordings that still exist, namely a band I mentioned called Dengue Fever. Through this ethnically diverse L.A. based band (that fuses 60s Cambodian rock with African rhythms, jazz and American pop) the once-lost music genre is being introduced to a new generation of both Cambodian and international listeners. In fact, the cover of their latest album (see below) features a photo of the band's custom instrument--that is part Fender Jazz Master, part two-stringed Cambodian guitar (called a chapai dong veng)--being shown off by the band's Cambodian-born singer, proving that this hybridity is not only happening, but there is now a physical object that embodies it.


So, is it wrong to allow foreign music to have an influence on a national musical identity? Does it make music less authentically Cambodian if it uses an electric guitar instead of a traditional instrument? Isn't part of the country's contemporary identity the fact that many citizens left for other countries during the Khmer Rouge and are now representing Cambodia with new knowledge of the Western world? Contradictory statements from the Cambodian Prime Minister bring to mind many questions like these and highlight how complex the issues of transnational culture are even in the music world.

Authenticity

Heather's comment in class today made me think of this recent NY Times article, about the value of authenticity.

Note from Istanbul

I did this week's readings on a plane to Istanbul.  I feel like the literal act of transit should imbue the whole question of transnational cinema with extra insight, but at the moment it just feels like I left my brain trailing behind me in the ether over Europe somewhere.  There must be something useful to explore along the lines of air travel and confinement - a kind of prison in the air, it's own world apart, to be endured as a right of passage.  I wonder if there are good examples of 'transnational' films that delve into this experience.  Most examples I can think of treat planes and airports pretty superficially, as places of arrival and departure, as chapter markers, or as visible evidence of mobility and or the aspiration for such.  I've never seen The Suitors, but it seems like the extreme example of being confined in a suitcase isn't that far off. Not that I'm complaining, really, I sort of like being in my seat with nowhere to go and nothing to do but read and flip through the in-flight media offerings. Maybe that's where I should be looking for a connection - the airline movie market as the ultimate transnational cinema. Hmm.  Hopefully my brain will catch up to me soon and I'll figure it out.

I know Safe was a few weeks ago now, but I couldn't help but see the connections.....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14887428

African binaries and Academic Plurality

Paracinema by Any Other Name

“Upward mobility plus romantic entanglements: a sure recipe for success” –Barlet, 221.

While Olivier Barlet is cautious not to reproduce the inevitably elitist argument over quality and value in African cinema, that “trivial binarism” still seems to inflect the essay, and the prolific Nollywood output seems to be implicitly denigrated in a high culture/low culture schism. Barlet is quick to acknowledge that commercial success does not preclude artistic sophistication or prescient social and political content, but again and again, the African home-video market is marked by a sense of relegation, and acceptance, as if it is a necessary evil, a national shame on the international stage, and geared towards palliative mass appeal. Barlet makes repeated reference to their formulaic structure and the superficial, materialist, or sensationalist nature of their content,

Nigerian video film will not make African cinema shine any more brightly around the globe. Despite some rare exceptions, it is characterized by the same self-perpetuating formula as Indian films. These super-codified films retell endlessly, and at top speed, the same stories without generating the myths and utopias needed to bring people together and help them build their future…Much like Bollywood, Nollywood responds to its audiences’ demands. The Nigerian films rework anxieties of a society confronted by violence and the growing role of the occult and money, while replaying the ambitions of upward social mobility in tales of romance and jealousy (218-219).

Passages like these suggest that Nollywood serves as both a fantasy projection and an opiate for mass taste, playing to a desire for the lurid (tales of prostitution, witchcraft, gangsterism), as well as a reassurance that material success is possible (the rags-to-riches narrative). Admittedly, my only experience with Nollywood is the provocative documentary on Lancelot Imasuen Nollywood Babylon (2008). In the doc, he comes off as a sort of manic messianic figure—something like Moses crossed with Ed Wood. He has vision and passion and truly wants to create a sustainable and powerful Nigerian cinema, but he is also admittedly venal and desires material success by churning out film after film. A contradictory figure, he is deeply religious (he engages in prayer circles before takes), and completely meretricious and status-seeking—his persona seems to embody the dichotomies that fuel Nollywood, like the stark moralism counterpointed by valorized violence and glamorized crime; the religious revivalist zealotry combined with a clear fascination with the occult and supernatural storylines, etc.

Given the content and the rapid-fire nature of production, I can see why Barlet may be unintentionally lamenting the lack of “quality,” but then, paradoxically, he seems discomfited by the fact that subsidy commissions and cooperative programs will ultimately control quality in their criteria for funding, and exercise a European influence (221). However, despite the particularization of this essay on African cinema, is this phenomenon of mass-produced popular cinema vs. quality cinema really any different from any other film industry? Reading Barlet’s description of the Nollywood model, it brings to mind American exploitation cinema, and based on its production style, content, and reception, Nollywood could probably fit neatly into Jeff Sconce’s concept of “paracinema.”

With his frantic, guerilla-like shooting schedule, his savvy funding, his keen knowledge of the audience and its desire, and his predilection for the salacious, sensationalist, and didactic, couldn’t Lancelot be the Herschell Gordon Lewis of Nigeria, or any one of the grindhouse and exploitation luminaries who gleefully entertained outside the margins of mainstream Hollywood (and certainly outside of the arthouse crowd that would be deemed 2^nd cinema in the Solanas/Getino model). Lancelot and his Nollywood compatriots seem to be operating from a similar imperative of crowd pleasing/shocking and formulaic fare that can be quickly cranked out and consumed, so is it really a cause for concern? Then again, unlike America with a firmly established cinematic culture and the hegemonic rule of Hollywood, I can understand Barlet’s anxieties about the ascendance of a definitional African cinema. Can and should Lancelot and the home-video filmmakers speak for a country? Will they fill the void of a direct African address that the disaporic hybridized filmmakers are unable or unwilling to fulfill? Admittedly, I have the luxury of having access to first cinema, while be able to delve in second and third cinema if I desire something outré—perhaps for a nascent film industry this a more pressing goal, one of identity and definition, but I do wonder if it’s any different that paracinmea elsewhere.

Mette Hjort: Amen to That, Sister

All I could think when reading “The Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism” was “Testify!” True, I probably couldn’t tell you the exact difference between affinitive transnationalism and milieu-building transnationalism, but that’s beside the point. I love that Hjort takes scholars to task for relying on a conveniently malleable and pluralistic term without the necessary clarifications. As she concedes, the semantic umbrella that is “transitional” is very useful, and it doesn’t get bogged down with competing theories, but that very unification can be confounding and counterproductive, so I really like the idea of setting up a typology that is inclusive, rather than a proscriptive definition that works through negation or exclusions. I also really like the reference to fashion, that at once acknowledges the de rigueur, trendy element of transnational discourse, while accepting its longevity and potency as a concept:

It is the discussion of these films in transnational terms that is giving rise—among certain film scholars and students, and certainly among colleagues in other disciplines—to the suspicion that the discourse of cinematic transnationalism is driven to a significant extent by fashion, which is not, of course, to say that will not be with us for a long time” (13)

.

Whether or not it would actually play out effectively, I found her new taxonomy immensely helpful to deconstruct these ubiquitous terms and ground them in a bit of an empirical reality, with case studies, examples, and scalar levels. This is probably my favorite thing that I’ve read with the word “globalization” in it.

Questions of Realism and Representation

Reading through the articles this week, all the authors I have read so far (Naficy, Higson, Barlet) make some type of implicit or explicit argument for (or complication against the current) alternatives to the critical category of the national cinema. I have found the terms of these discussions—largely the problems inherent to notions of national cinema and national audiences in an increasingly transnational climate—to be predominantly as I expected, however I found a provocation in Olivier Barlet’s discussion of diasporic filmmakers. He writes on page 222:

…the fact that they live principally in Europe casts a shadow of suspicion on the filmmakers of the ‘diaspora.’ Here too contempt is the norm, and the force of accusations proportional to the frustrations felt. They are said to be disconnected from African realities, uninterested in their audiences’ expectations, sell-outs to the West. Would such accusations be made against an abstract painter? Is a filmmaker no less of an artist?

The tone of Barlet’s article marks it with a polemical quality, and a number of moments in the piece include what I perceive to be a certain degree of rhetorical imprecision or exaggeration, particularly when he addresses “the West” or African audiences, which are in keeping with the article’s call for a change in attitudes. This temper is well evidenced in the question “Is a filmmaker no less of an artist?” which I would imagine I am not alone in judging to be a fairly unproductive inquiry outside of the emotional register. What particularly struck me about the quote above however was Barlet’s implicit assertion that an abstract painter would not be faced with “accusations” of cultural disconnection from his homeland and incomplete/failed/distorted representation. While I think that, on the level of practice, this claim is probably not true (as I would guess that painters enjoy as much critical attention as any other high profile cultural practitioner), what interests me here is the underlying question of realism, which seems to be built into many of these discussions. For the sake of argument, if Barlet is correct and an abstract painter would not be subject to the questions aimed at diasporic cinema, what about a realist painter?

Throughout the articles by Naficy, Higson and Barlet, there are particular norms at work in the evaluation of the relative “national” qualities of various works. Within the question of cultural relevance is also the question of cultural representation. Each of these three authors assumes or argues that diasporic and transnational filmmakers will create works that are representative of their experiences and thus, will resonate with the multitude of communities with which they belong, but to what to what degree does this representational assumption/obligation break down if the work is not based, at least to some degree, in a realist mode of storytelling? What if the work in question is abstract or avant-garde, and thus does not directly resemble the experiences of the audience(s)/communitie(s) to which it belongs? To what extent do non-realist films belong to the national/transnational/diasporic dialogue and to what degree is their belonging predicated on multiple filmmakers creating works in a similar vein (the Czech surrealists for example) and thus developing a movement or taxonomic category? I would argue that particularly strong or cohesive moments in national cinemas are marked by a level of perceived cohesion between multiple filmmakers at a certain place and time. To what degree does a transnational, diasporic or global cinema require or demand this same type of thematic and formal interconnection?

Dublin travel essay

a link to my travel essay on Dublin (and a sneaky ploy to get extra hits on my own blog)

Anachronistic Americanization and War Wounds

I Love the '90s a.k.a Perceptions of America

Just to put this week’s readings in conversation with last week’s, I’m intrigued by the varying portrayals of America and the extent of American influence, especially in contemporaneous articles. Specifically, I’m looking at Morley and Rovins vis a vis Appadurai, writting in 1995 and 1990, respectively. For all the subtlety that they exhibit elsewhere, Morley and Co. seem to espouse the common (overly simplistic?) view of American exported culture as being one of homogenization, if not outright imperialism, “The flow of images and products is both more intensive and more extensive that in the past. What should also be emphasized is how much American cultural domination remains a fundamental part of this new order…”(14-15). While they do acknowledge a tendency towards particularizing the product for the economic imperative of niche marketing (15), they still seem to contend that this is ultimately in the service of homogenization, American style. It’s interesting then, that writing five years before, Appadurai already sees the fallacy or perhaps the overstatement of the claims and fears about American cultural influence:

The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization…Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization, and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way (“Disjuncture and Difference,”32).

His prescience in deconstructing the common global cant suggests that maybe the globalism discourse is not so much beholden to periodization and academic trends as it is to individual scholars, because writing years before Morley and Robins, he already sees the flaws.

I’m fascinated by the discourse around globalism, the lexicon, and what seems like the ever-shifting currency of certain terms and ideas—perhaps that’s what makes me feel like a perpetually uncool kid who can’t hang with the hipsters at lunch—just when I think I grasp a concept, it is pronounced faddish, reductive, or outmoded. So this conceptual obsolescence is something I’d like to look at throughout the semester. To that end, the Morley readings cite the now foundational Dallas research, which makes me wonder if the idea of “transparency” is still viable; that certain cultural products have an innate appeal and transmissibility that either retain their probity through travel, or engender specific reading strategies that become tailored to the receiving culture. If anyone knows what’s “sexy” in the academic discourse of global media culture, please let me know. Maybe I can be cool for once.

Balkanism, Regressive Regionalism, and Rane

All of our readings have articulated the recurrent notion that pervasive global shifts have caused an inchoate anxiety that transfers into mythologized nostalgia, reactionary nationalism and regionalism, or at its most extreme, fundamentalist ethnocentrism. Additionally our reading this week references Said’s Orientalism, so I’d like to address the related concept of Balkanism and put it in dialogue with the idea of atomized regional/tribal identities, and the film Rane. The Wounds (which I would subtitle “Nasty People Doing Nasty Things”) offers us a sort of micro/macro portrayal of post-communist Yugoslavia, most potently, in the fragmentary nature of self-identification (Croats versus Serbs etc.), and the insular nature of the criminal street world that seems to disavow national and ethnic ties in favor of opportunistic materialism.

While Pinki’s father maintains strong political ties, to the point where his fervor becomes manic, we get the sense that his Tito-worship and outbursts are anachronistic, futile, and code him as a tragic clown who can’t adapt. The youth generation on the other hand has a bit of gritty pragmatism in that they’ve abandoned their allegiance to ineffectual authority figures and political parties, and instead have created a cottage industry based on greed and their own aggrandized romanticized images of gangster culture, largely gleaned from American products –even they way they dress and ridiculously brandish their guns seems like the effect of watching Scarface too many times, peppered with some music videos. It’s no accident, that Pinki wears Mickey Mouse print boxers and the well-meaning, trashy moll wears a John Wayne shirt—emblems of American supremacy, transnational corporate dominance, and Western influence.

Returning to the concept of Orientalism and by extension Balkanism, I’m interested in this film and its adherence to or rejection of Balkanist motifs and clichés. The only other experience I’ve had with Yugoslavian film is the 1995 movie Underground that Priya screened for us last semester. It’s a madcap, carnivalesque imagining of Yugoslavia from WWII through the fall of communism and the subsequent territorial division. It’s highly self-reflexive and an ironized, fanciful interpretation of history, and despite, or perhaps because of its self-awareness, it makes full use of Balkanist clichés, even while making deeper implications about the state of in-fighting and divisive tribalism. To paraphrase a complex theory, like Orientalism, Balkanism suggests that there is a constructed imaginary of the Balkans created from aggregate representations of mediated images in literature, art etc., and some argue that even filmmakers who seek to offer alternate or realistic approache are still fated to employ the familiarized Balkan iconography, which is essentially riotous gypsy life: drinking, dancing, screwing, and playing the violin.

Underground takes full and winking advantage of this by having a raucous gypsy band absurdly follow the main characters around, playing an incessant oomp-pah-pah that serves as both the diegetic and nondiegetic score (incidentally, the actor who plays Pinki’s father is the Chaplinesque lead in Underground). By contrast, in The Wounds we see a hint of that gypsy jollity in the street parade scenes where a band plays, and then perhaps more subtlety, we could also interpret their gangster mentor’s glorified lifestyle as being constructed as somehow “Balkan”—he lives big, drinks, smokes, fucks, kills with equal zeal, with a sort of primitivist passion that is bedrock of Balkanism.

I also find it interesting the way the film introduces and then ironically undercuts the phenomenon of regressive regionalism: the boys aren’t actively engaged in the political scene, but they distractedly follow the news and reference the Yugoslavian division—however, the new Balkan identities are more a source of childish taunts then actual upheaval and destabilized identity. In their first scene, they hurl the new national titles as slurs, like little boys name-calling as they play their imaginary war game. Of course the playground become a literal battleground by the film’s final scene, but it is significant that the conflict, anger, and revenge are all mobilized by familial ties, lust, and betrayal—none of which are tied to localities, but caused by interpersonal relationships.

Media Globalization: Myth vs. Fact

After completing this week's readings, I mostly see two things about media globalization. I don't know if I'm right.

* Myth: Media Globalization is about democratizing mass media?

No, because media conglomerates AND local governments are the ones who produce and really control mass media (McChesney, Parks). The masses of consumers have no actual control over the content, even though with the convergence in media industries, consumers might now have a little more opportunities to influence and affect the content of mass media (Jenkins).

* Fact: Media Globalization is essentially about the consolidation of a global media market dominated by US-based oligopolies & TNCs.

Indeed, media globalization is driven by the incentive of US-based media conglomerates to conquer and dominate, more and more of the cultural industry:

- through media convergence and synergy (McChesney, Jenkins),

- through penetration of other markets by acquisitions of local companies/firms (McChesney, Sparks)

- through standardization of media systems, and representations that position the West at the center of the "spider web". The West looks at the rest of the world, the West defines and characterizes the Other (Orient, Japan, Communism, etc) (Morley & Robbins, Sparks).

Consequences:

- Redefinition of the concept of media imperialism, with this US "colonization of communications space" (Boyd-Barrett).

- Europe tries to reduce this US-based cultural domination by trying to limit its penetration with taxes, quotas, and protectionism of the European space (the European community) and the European cultural identity (Morley and Robbins).

- Still the West (North America & Europe) agrees on preventing any cultural domination by "Others" such as Japan/Asia (Morley & Robins) or communists (Sparks).

the IMDb, Al-Jazeera, and RT

I took notes (and notes of notes) going through all these readings, aiming to write up something a bit more comprehensive. But then putting pen to paper (as it were), I find that all I really want to explore is (1) how IMDb is a simultaneously informative and heartbreaking website and (2) a sort of reboot of the Morley & Robins plus Sparks readings.  

So why and how did the IMDb hurt me so? It told me that Dušan Pekić (Pinki) died in 2000 while serving in the military, circumstances unknown. Wikipedia corroborated, adding director Srdjan Dragojevic cast him because he and the Pinki character grew up in similar backgrounds. This made me wonder about the rest of the actors’ post-Wounds lives. Fellow classmates recognized Suzana as Ana, the erstwhile fourth sister-wife Henrickson, in Big Love. Svaba seems to have a successful Serbian acting career. Pinki’s father, Stojan, is a national cinematic hero, having received a Life Achievement Award ("Pavle Vuisic") in 2004 for his roles in Yugoslav cinematography. Looking at just this cast of players’ real lives, I feel we see globalization’s contradictions and ambiguities, writ large. Their fora are local, global, “glocal.” Their fates* countervailing examples of globalization-proffered opportunity and catastrophe. (*Incidentally, I hate using the word “fate” here, given that no military operation is any more destined than are globalization’s aftereffects inevitable. Apologies.)

Now we turn to Morley and Robins. Certainly Morley and Robins’ thoughts are located in a particular moment; 1995 was lifetimes ago in the communications revolution timeline. Still what strikes me is how just as true those chapters are today, only the names are changed. It might be comical if the accusations of racism were so on the mark, but replace every “Japan” with “China,” change the story from being one of technological innovation to economic, and we have a story about the current Sinoparanoia. Only the West is even more freaked out because okay, we’ll grant that other cultures can be modern, but communists can definitely not be capitalists, right? Right?

“Under Western Eyes: Media, empire, and Otherness” features Saddam Hussein as the Evil Other of the early 1990s, whom we know was later re-demonized after 9/11. Bin Laden’s satanization lasted us nearly a decade with Ahmadinejad throughout, a sort of trusty lower-level demon. And in recent months, our characterization has extended to include two of the Arab Spring’s losers, Mubarak and Gaddafi. None rightful men, obviously, though their collective portrayal has, per Morley and Robins, psycho-historical foundations in America’s need to treat military actions in the Middle East as cleansing military operations, absolution for the devastations of the Vietnam War. "America could recover its moral purpose and emotional wholeness" (140). But of course we haven’t and the American moral compass is damaged worse than ever.

Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera’s emergence has complicated hegemonic attempts at whole cloth villainization of the Middle East. Not only did U.S. media outlets lose market share to the outlet during the Arab Spring, but American audiences petitioned for the channel’s inclusion in American cable markets, expressing their consumer power (Jenkins 2004). Despite being entirely state-owned, Al-Jazeera is considered one of the world’s trustworthier, legitimately global news providers. Recalling Sparks, that Al-Jazeera and RT (once “Russia Today”) are state funded is secondary to their dedicated relationships to their audiences. I now go to RT for its perspective, use of political analysts and scholars over book-peddling “experts,” and unflinching coverage of American policy, but I admit it won my heart with a deliriously fun interview with Brian May. Stepping well outside the traditional bounds of celebrity chats, the interviewer asked things like, "Do you believe in God?" and "You've been very depressed before and almost killed yourself. What made you stop?" May remarked more than once on the interview's singularity. I stay reading their headlines for gems like this: “Banks bulldozing towns across America… If something is giving you a hard time, there is one surefire American way to deal with your problems: knock it straight to the ground.”

Heh. US hegemony has it coming. 

Forbes Magazine piece on how administration kills global media mergers

Compare this piece from the conservative Forbes magazine with Morley and Robins's overview of media globalization.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-looking-job-killer-chief-223223598.html

"Speculating with Lives: How Global Investors Make Money Out of Hunger"

Following our readings from last week, I thought I'd share this article from Spiegel, which deals with the effects of futures speculation on the prices of agricultural commodities.

Documentary and Space

The latest drop in the ocean of media-space publications. This one includes some USC contributions.

http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/

Feminist Media Studies call for reviewers

Scroll down for call for book reviewers for Feminist Media Studies. They are looking to get specific books reviewed; but you can also contact journals' review editors and propose to review a book.

FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
Commentary and Criticism Call for Papers
We invite contributions for the Commentary and Criticism section of
Feminist Media Studies.

Potential contributors can write to co-editors, Kaitlynn Mendes (kmendes@dmu.ac.uk) and Kumarini Silva (kumisilva@gmail.com) to express preliminary interest. Final essays are due by 1 January 2012.

FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY


Revisiting—in the hopes of rejuvenation—the relationship between feminism, capitalism and patriarchy, we are soliciting papers between 1500-2000 words that utilize a feminist political economy approach. We are especially interested in contributions that interrogate emerging questions in feminist political economy and/or various case studies that highlight continuing challenges and new directions for approaching these challenges.

Papers should be sent to Kaitlynn Mendes (kmendes@dmu.ac.uk) and Kumarini Silva (kumisilva@gmail.com) by January 1st 2012. Please see the Feminist Media Studies style guide for information on how to format the paper. Potential contributors are encouraged to contact us with any queries regarding the call.


BOOKS TO REVIEW

Potential contributors can write to the co-editors, Kaitlynn Mendes (kmendes@dmu.ac.uk) and Kumarini Silva (kumisilva@gmail.com) to express preliminary interest in doing a review on one of the following books. Reviews of 800 words will be due on 1 January 2012:

Kuntsman, Adi (2009) Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond. Bern: Peter Lang Publishers

This book offers a nuanced and critical analysis of the complex relationship between violence and belonging, by exploring the ways sexual, ethnic or national belonging can work through, rather than against, violence. Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine, and also in cyberspace, this book provides a journey into the world of hate speech and fantasies of torture and sexual abuse; of tormented subjectivities and uncanny homes; of ghostly hauntings from the past and anxieties about the present and future.

Munshi, Shoma (2010) Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television. Abingdon: Routledge.

This book focuses on ‘urban family soaps’ on television and analyses them as an important resource for anthropological insights into contemporary social issues and practices. It studies the ‘popular’ and ‘everyday’ while also concentrating on the middle class.

Brown, Jeffrey A. (2011) Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism and PopularCulture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

This book addresses the conflicted meanings associated with the figure of the action heroine as she has evolved in various media forms since the late 1980s. The author discusses this immensely popular character type as an example of, and challenge to, existing theories about gender as a performance identity.