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.