Identity and Communication

New Agendas in Communication

Dominic L Lasorsa, America Rodriguez, Dominic L Lasorsa, America Rodriguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136768996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Identity and Communication offers an innovative take on traditional topics of intercultural communication while promoting new ideas and progressive theories.With essays by emerging voices in identity communication, volume contributors discuss the ways that racial, cultural, and gender identities are perceived and relayed within those communities and the media. The text's essays are structured into four parts, each highlighting different themes of identity communication, from general approaches to racial perceptions to female and adolescent identities. Originating from the University of Texas at Austin's New Agendas in Communication symposium, this volume represents some of the latest and most forward-looking scholarship currently available.

Chapter 1 Mass Media and Social Identity

New Research Agendas

Dominic Lasorsa and América Rodriguez

DOI: 10.4324/9780203557105-1

As this book's main title implies, the book is about how identity and media relate to each other and, in particular, the role of the mass media in establishing and maintaining social identity. As its subtitle implies, however, the book is not designed to describe or even to critique the existing body of literature but instead primarily to point to new and exciting directions for future research. To accomplish this goal, we turned to bright, young, enthusiastic scholars who have been recognized early in their academic careers for having already promoted promising and innovative ways for advancing knowledge on some aspect of this increasingly important topic. Even in their still-budding careers, these junior scholars have helped shift our attention in forward-looking ways toward productive scholarship that we believe will have a lasting effect on social identity research. This book is a testament to their groundbreaking ideas.

What do we mean by “social identity”? While each of us has a unique personal identity, we also possess a social identity, an identity shared with other members of a social group. Individuals recognize the social groups to which they belong, as well as other social groups to which they do not belong. Persons also learn to characterize these social groups and their members. Each chapter in this book takes the position that the mass media are integrally implicated in the construction of a social identity. While the chapters look back at what we already know, the focus of each chapter is on the future, to draw attention to promising directions for future research and to show how and why this research agenda is the way to go. It is relatively easy to make (and therefore common to see) suggestions that future research should replicate an existing study in a different context. So, an article on newspaper coverage suggests that future studies should examine television coverage, and an article on coverage of one marginalized group suggests that future studies should examine coverage of other marginalized groups, and so on. Each chapter here, however, attempts to do much more than that. These chapters point to future studies that are novel in the ways they theorize, conceptualize, and measure. The result is a cornucopia of fresh ideas both appetizing and nutritious, and ripe for the picking. Those interested in identifying new research projects that will advance our thinking about the relationship between social identity and mass media will find a variety of opportune ideas in each of the chapters here.

All but two of the chapters in this book examine the role of the mass media in the formation of the social identity of the members of a specific social group, with chapters focusing on adolescents, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Mexicans, and Muslims. One chapter deals with marginalized social groups generally in a new media landscape, and one chapter deals with ways to build theory regarding all social groups. Obviously, not all social groups are covered here, nor was that our intention. We selected chapters for inclusion in the book because they broke new ground and exemplified the research of the future, regardless of what social groups happened to be the objects of study. However, we did include chapters that represented an array of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

The chapter authors take a variety of both qualitative and quantitative approaches to their work, including activist, critical, cultural, economic, historical, humanistic, and technical frameworks, utilizing a variety of methods from content analysis to in-depth interviews. The chapters are not presented in any precise order, except that we put chapters on the same social group together and we end the book with the chapter that deals with marginalized groups generally, followed by the chapter dealing with all social groups.

In her chapter, Meghan Bridgid Moran (San Diego State University) examines how peers, specifically peer crowds and subcultures, act as sources of social identity for adolescents, focusing specifically on the role of the media in the process of connecting peers through their media use. Moran shows how the mass media play powerful roles in promoting specific social identities which adolescents experiment with and ultimately adopt (e.g., jocks, emos, preppies, nerds). The chapter also explores how the media can be used to reach a specific adolescent social group in order to attempt to influence the behavior of its members. Moran explains how the role of the media in the formation of social identity is unique among adolescents because adolescence is often a time of experimentation with a variety of social identities. Adolescents use the media to help them recognize and explore social identities; the media can also be used to reach and influence the adolescent who identifies with different social groups.

In his chapter, David C. Oh (Villanova University) explores how Asian Americans “read” the media in ways that allow them simultaneously to accept the mainstream media on one level while rejecting them on another. In doing so, he encourages audience reception studiesto begin to address directly the influence of popular media on identity construction. He investigates how audience members make sense of the influences of popular media and the tactics they use to incorporate or insulate themselves from dominant ideologies or, at least, to convince themselves they are doing so. Guided by grounded theory, Oh uses the technique of in-depth interviews to explore Asian Americans' views of their racial identity, their perceptions of popular media representations of Asian Americans, and their beliefs about the media's impact on their own self-identity. He finds that Asian Americans often engage in what he calls “biased optimism,” which allows them to believe in media effects on their own self-identity, including negative effects, while still allowing them to feel positive about their consumption of mainstream media.

In her chapter, Carolyn Nielsen (Western Washington University) marshals three narrative framing studies to illustrate the important role played by the Spanish-language press in the formation of a positive Latino social identity. Nielsen builds her work on the notion of the “counternarrative,” an idea derived from critical race theory, one tenet of which is that interests of nonmajority social groups are addressed by the mainstream media when and in terms of how those interests are perceived to affect society's dominant social group. Nielsen examines how the mainstream press, such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, covered the same three important news events in a systematically different way than did the Latino-oriented press in the same cities, such as La Opinion and El Diario-La Prensa. Nielsen shows how the counternarratives that these Spanish-language daily newspapers provide begin with a different set of assumptions and that, unlike the narratives provided by the mainstream media, these counternarratives reinforce and shape a positive Latino social identity.

In his chapter, Arthur D. Santana (University of Houston) introduces readers to an important yet almost completely ignored facet of the role of the media in the construction of social identity. Santana focuses on the growing number of Spanish-English bilingual newspapers in the United States and the roles these newspapers play in language development, acculturation, and identity. Santana maintains that the bilingual newspaper is a product of cultural contradictions that permeate the “neither-nor” cultural identity of later-generation Latinos. As such, Santana argues, the bilingual newspaper has become an increasingly important part of the acculturation process that plays such a critical role in the establishment and maintenance of social identity.

In his chapter, Michael J. Fuhlhage (Auburn University) advances our understanding of the historical development of the negative stereotyping of Mexicans in the early American press. Fuhlhage shows how leading communication scholars meticulously have traced media stereotypes about Latinos back to the start of the 20th century. Fuhlhage, however, has located negative representations in the press dating back a half-century earlier. He shows how the U.S. media in the 1800s “brewed” stereotypes about Mexicans which developed over decades. Fuhlhage uses a method of analysis called “cultural contrapuntal reading” which considers not only authorial presence and intent in determining the extent to which media sources reflect reality but, in addition, elaborates upon the influence of an author's social identity on his or her portrayals of an outgroup. By probing into the education, travels, and other experiences of those who wrote historical accounts of borderland inhabitants, Fuhlhage shows the mentality behind many of these writings which so influenced for so long others' understandings of these remote and therefore “exotic” people. One aspect of these 19th-century writings that is particularly remarkable is the extent to which religious differences permeate the conclusions drawn by these early writers. Fuhlhage's account of the extent to which anti-Mexican sentiments were connected to anti-Catholic sentiments raises a whole host of new questions about the role of the media in establishing and maintaining social identities—which is exactly the intention of this book.

In her chapter, Ammina Kothari (Indiana University) examines how communication scholars have envisioned and contextualized Muslim identity. She exhaustively reviewed all research on Islam and Muslims published in peer-reviewed journals between 1999 and 2009 and identified 31 studies that focused on how media construct Muslim/Islamic identity. She finds that the research is limited to text-based analyses of traditional media and that research predominantly uses the framework of Orientalism. Kothari concludes that the lack of diversity in the geographic location of research, the scarcity of scholarship on the topic, and the exclusion of multiple Muslim voices all work together to impede understanding of how media-constructed identities of Muslims and Islam influence both non-Muslim audiences and Muslims themselves. As with all of the chapters in this volume, this one culminates with a clear agenda for future research on this important contemporary topic.

In their chapter, Meghan S. Sanders (Louisiana State University) and Omotayo Banjo (University of Cincinnati) emphasize understudied aspects of the role of the media in establishing and maintaining the social identity of African Americans. Instead of examining the media's impact solely from the perspective of majority audiences, Sanders and Banjo focus as well on the impact from the perspective of the marginalized group itself. In addition, they draw attention to the impact of Black-oriented media on establishing and maintaining social identity. Furthermore, and importantly, they stress the importance of recognizing the interaction of characteristics and traits that make up a person's complete identity, rather than just one dominant characteristic, such as ethnicity or gender alone. It is the study of the “intersectionality” of marginalized groups' characteristics, Sanders and Banjo maintain, that offers the most productive and rewarding way to move research on social identity forward.

In their chapter, Katie Margavio Striley (Ohio University) and Shawn King (University of Oklahoma) look beyond the vast majority of research on computer-mediated communication by focusing on how marginalized individuals use it. Not only do Striley and King thereby broaden the context of computer-mediated communication research itself but they also demonstrate how those in marginalized groups, unlike more “typical” users, utilize CMC for a specific type of identity formation and maintenance. Furthermore, Striley and King broaden the theoretical understanding of CMC generally by recognizing a critical shift in the nature of computer-mediated communication. Earlier, CMC was utilized primarily to filter out identification; it was precisely the potential of being anonymous that made CMC alluring to many users for many years. Thanks to technological developments, however, CMC is now being utilized in other ways that encourage users to avoid anonymity and instead to provide more and more relevant personal information about themselves in their online communications. Striley and King show how this “filtering in” perspective has important ramifications for the role of computer-mediated communication in the construction and maintenance of social identity.

In her chapter, Maria Leonora (Nori) G. Comello (University of North Carolina) draws upon the metaphor of a prism to introduce a general model for the study of social identity which draws attention to two possible intervening roles that identity can play in explaining any causal relationship between communication and behavior. Identity can influence the effect of communication on behavior, thus serving as a moderator of communication effects (i.e., altering the impact of communication). Identity also can be a conduit for the effects of communication on behavior, thus serving as a mediator of communication effects (i.e., explaining the impact of communication on behavior). Since these two intervening roles can occur simultaneously, Comello observes, they can add to the complexity—and richness—of any analysis of the impact of communication on behavior. Ultimately, Comello demonstrates how her prism model can be used to help build theory about the role of the mass media in fostering social identity.

As can be seen from these brief descriptions, the chapters in this book do not form a closely knit tapestry in which all of the threads are woven together to spell out a single message. Perhaps the metaphor of a quilt is a more apt metaphor. In this book, we have attempted to stitch together a remarkable set of chapters, each of which in its own unique and fresh way draws attention to promising directions for future research on the role of the media in the cultivation of social identity. We hope you agree.

Chapter 2 Media Influences on Adolescent Social Identity

Meghan Bridgid Moran¹

DOI: 10.4324/9780203557105-2

Adolescence can be a turbulent and uncertain time in an individual's life. Adolescents are learning how to negotiate any number of situations on their own for the first time and often look outside their family and home lives for guidance. At the same time, adolescents are developing their own identities, figuring out who they are as individuals independent of their families. As such, peers, in the form of individual friends, cliques of friends, and more amorphous crowds and subcultures, play an important role in the lives of adolescents. The following chapter details the nature of how peers—specifically, peer crowds and subcultures—act as sources of social identity for adolescents, with the focus being specifically on the role of the media in this process.

The Importance of Social Identity in the Lives of Adolescents

Adolescence is the time during which children, making the transition to young adulthood, learn to function in the world independently of their parents (Gavin & Furman, 1989). In the adolescent years, parents often give their children new freedoms (staying out later, getting a driver's license); as such, adolescents are facing new and unfamiliar situations that they must deal with on their own. For example, the adolescent years are often the period when teenagers attend their first parties alone (where there may or may not be drinking and drugs), have their first job, and enter into their first romantic relationship. The myriad of new decisions, freedoms, and experiences that teenagers face make adolescence a time riddled with ambiguity (Eichorn, Mussen, Clausen, Haan, & Honzik, 1981).

In addition to uncertainty over how to negotiate these new situations, adolescents also face uncertainty over their identity.² Adolescence is a time for individuals to explore and eventually form stable identities (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1966). As children enter the teen years, they must determine who they are outside of their family and how to fit into the larger world of their peers (Blos, 1975; Seltzer, 1982). As a part of this process, teenagers will often “try on” a series of identities before finally committing to one or more that can be used as a framework to understand the self (Erikson, 1959; Marcia, 1966). For many adolescents, this process is filled with false starts: teenagers may experiment with a number of identities (punk, jock, goth, etc.) before settling on a stable and enduring one.

Over the course of the teenage search for identity, many adolescents look to their peers for support and guidance (Brown, Mory, & Kinney, 1994; Erikson, 1968; Newman & Newman, 1976; Palmonari, Pombeni, & Kirchler, 1989, 1990). Whereas during the childhood years, the family was often the prime resource for this kind of support, adolescents now look toward peers as a resource for identity formation and for a source of guidance as to how to behave in uncertain situations (Brown et al., 1994; Stone & Brown, 1998). More specifically, adolescents often identify with peer crowds as a way to find stability during the teenage years because they can provide teens with clear identities complete with behavioral scripts.

Peer Crowds and Social Identity as Coping Mechanisms

A significant body of research has documented the phenomenon commonly known as peer crowd identification (Sussman, Pokhrel, Ashmore, & Brown, 2007), the process through which adolescents affiliate with a cert...