Transnational Audiences

Media Reception on a Global Scale

Adrian Athique

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745670225, 9780745670218
• eBook ISBN: 9781509506576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1
Media 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 concer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Media Reception on a Global Scale
• Part 1 Imagined Worlds: National, International, Transnational
• Part 2 Media Flows: Diasporas, Crossovers, Proximities
• Part 3 New Formations: Clouds, Trends, Fields
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement