Social Media and Minority Languages

Convergence and the Creative Industries

Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed, Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847699060
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sociolingüística

As a field in its own right, Minority Language Media studies is developing fast. The recent technological and social developments that have accelerated media convergence and opened new ways of access and exchange into spaces formerly controlled by media institutions, offer new opportunities, challenges and dangers to minority languages, and especially to their already established media institutions. This book includes debates on what convergence and participation actually mean, a series of case studies of specific social media developments in minority language, as well as comparative studies on how the cultural industries have engaged with the new possibilities brought about by media convergence. Finally, the book also offers a historical review of the development of Minority Language Media worldwide, and evidences the areas in which more extensive research is required.

Part 1

Theoretical Debates on Convergence and Minority Languages

1 Minority Language Media Studies and Communication for Social Change: Dialogue between Europe and Latin America

Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed

Introduction

This chapter stems from my personal interest in expanding minority language media research into the Latin American context. It also arises from a desire to present some of the achievements of Communication for Social Change in Latin America to a European media studies community not acquainted with them.

In order to do this, the chapter begins by presenting the common ground between the two areas of studies. It draws attention to the fact that language is but one of the many cultural aspects under which indigenous and ethnic communities are marginalized from and by the main media outlets in Latin America.

Because of this, research into Latin American minority language media needs to have a contextual approach that studies the processes of identity negotiation and participatory agency defined under the concepts of hybridity and convergence. It also demands research to increase participation of its subjects of inquiry, as consistently requested by practitioners of Communication for Social Change.

Finally, both of these aspects, a contextual approach to hybridity and convergence and the call for more participatory research, are presented as the fundamental dialogue both to expand minority language media studies to Latin America and to provide feedback for its advancement in Europe.

Developing Minority Language Media Studies in Latin America

Studies on minority language media (MLM) have gathered momentum in Europe recently (Cormack, 2004; Guyot, 2006). Although they do not limit themselves to recognized traditional languages, they usually refer to them, rather than to immigrant languages (Extra & Gorter, 2008; Hourigan, 2007). Cormack and Hourigan’s (2007) work presented the state of the art of debates on this topic. The western European focus through which Cormack (Cormack, 1998, 2004, 2007a) has framed the specific area of studies in MLM reduces the global vision originally proposed by Riggins (1992b) and expanded by Browne (1996, 2005, 2007 see also the introductory essay to this book). Cormack (2000, 2004, see also his chapter in this book) has privileged linguistic – over cultural or ethnic – diversity to define the extent of the area of studies.

This seems almost self-evident in the case of Europe, but it is not as clear the world over. In Europe, ethnic distinctions seem to have been erased from collective memory, and nation is taken as a community based on other non-ethnic cultural parameters (Castells, 1997, presents this to be the case for Catalunya, for instance). This makes language the most salient feature of difference that justifies separate media provisions. However, in other ends of the world, issues of ethnicity are still relevant in contemporary debates.

Just like Aboriginal people in Australia (Ginsburg, 1991; Meadows & Molnar, 2002), ethnic and indigenous people in Latin America have demanded media spaces to express their own perspective, not only to the members of their groups but also to the national society at large. This demand arises because not only their language but also their whole culture and world view remain absent from the nation-state hegemonic discourse. These identities, originally marginalized from, and by, the media, aim to become oppositional identities which ‘present themselves contesting the label of marginalisation that has been set upon them, pushing the margins of legal normalcy and social esteem’ (Sampedro Blanco, 2004: 140).

The issues of marginalized groups have been fundamental to Communication for Social Change (CfSC) in Latin America. CfSC is a proposal developed by academics and activists interested in promoting social change through empowerment, granting agency to individuals to become key actors in their own development, providing them with communication tools to achieve self-representation and encouraging them to promote development from a grassroots perspective (Gumucio-Dagron, 2007; Gumucio-Dagron & Tufte, 2006; Servaes, 1996a). Among the communication tools promoted, CfSC supports the design and establishment of media outlets to modify negative collective images and one-sided representations, which is fundamental if we are convinced that ‘power in the network society is communication power’ (Castells, 2009: 53).

However, the interest to change negative portrayals, and provide a more ample media space, is accepted only reluctantly by the already established media structures. They allow for these alternative media spaces as long as they have a narrow area of effect, because ‘when [Indigenous broadcasting] grows large enough to require valuable resources, however, hegemonic pressures kick in more fully’ (Evans, 2002: 324) and hamper change to the prevalent media power status quo.

Concurrently, although the use of their own minority language within their social institutions grants them a space free from the hegemonic influence of the majority (Nichols, 2006), it also restricts their possibility to present their struggle to other population groups which, being also minorities, may be under the same hegemonic vision that oppresses indigenous peoples and ties them to poverty by excluding them from public debate, amongst other things.

Conflicting Identities

According to the model presented by Riggins (1992a), cultural assimilation towards the majority culture increases when ethnic minority media seek to reach out to larger audiences to become inclusive and use the majority language for this end. However, taking the opposite strategy and trying to avoid the use of the majority language in order to preserve linguistic cohesion leads, in turn, to the loss of an audience whose ethnic or indigenous identity may still be strong, despite having already switched to the majority language.

This dichotomy portrays the contrast between Browne’s (1996) observation about language as a fundamental aspect for the establishment of ethnic minority media, and O’Reilly’s (2001: 15) statement that ‘there are non-linguistic aspects of ethnic identity, such as a sense of kinship and territory, which are often considered more salient than language’. The same is to be found in various indigenous groups in Latin America (Favre, 2006), because some users of ‘indigenous languages identify themselves not as members of an ethnic group but as campesinos [peasants] or as people from particular communities or regions’ (Smith, 2008: 187). Hence, Browne (1996: 223) concedes that ‘while language revival or revitalization has been a major reason for establishing indigenous broadcasting stations, very few of them broadcast exclusively in indigenous languages and most of them broadcast in the majority culture language’ despite the centrality of language to their identity.

Moreover, indigenous people are wrongly classified under one single heading, because each one of the indigenous people espouse different cultural structures and rationales, including their relationship with media (see Rodriguez & El Gazi, 2007, for the Colombian experience). Notwithstanding, there is no question that media produced, defined and established by the indigenous groups serve as spaces for their own voices and their own vision of the world (Communication for Sustainable Development Initiative, 2010; Wilson & Stewart, 2008).

Despite modernizing technology being different from a modernizing political discourse, ‘in reality the two are almost always intertwined’ (Sparks, 2007: 195) and, thus, the appropriation and re-signification of technologies, such as the ones required for the media, demand a process of negotiation between the cultural elements embedded in the technology and the cultural interests of the communities (Ginsburg, 1991, 2008). These negotiations can be described as falling under two categories difficult to disentangle from one another: hybridity and convergence.

Hybridization or Convergence: Two Faces of the Same Coin?

The two concepts have arisen to describe aspects of transnationalization and globalization of media products, but they can also be applied in local contexts.

Hybridization

Hybridity, as a theory, is grounded on post-colonial discourse (Kraidy, 2010) and refers to the process of appropriation, modification and re-adaptation – or deculturalization, acculturalization and reculturalization (Wang & Yeh, 2005) – of cultural products (e.g. TV shows). It is a space where external media pressures are not only adapted but also reconstructed, and their meanings are re-elaborated in an active engagement between modernization and traditional views (García Canclini, 2000; Martínez et al., 2008), and it ‘entails a cultural (re)creation that may or may not be (re) inscribed into hegemonic constellations’ (Escobar, 1995: 220).

This process involves a negotiation that is rarely carried out on even grounds and may lead to ‘rough adaptations of the local cultures to the hegemonic and transnational cultural paradigms’ (Roveda Hoyos, 2008: 62). They are uneven spaces, because imported cultural goods, or those elaborated by a majority culture, have the quality standards and supposed superiority granted to them by the hegemonic economic and structural advantage of the cultural industries where they were originally produced.

But despite this hegemonic influence upon the process of hybridization, new proposals and ways of engaging with the media develop, from mere adaptation to blatant resistance and re-appropriation of media spaces as places to redefine cultural boundaries. Adaptations of audiovisual products from one market to another exemplify the different types of negotiations that may ensue: (1) hegemonic, or centre-to-periphery, in the case of ubiquitous Hollywood films and their canon of cinema quality (Fu & Govindaraju, 2010), and mass television products of the global north; (2) counter-hegemonic or periphery-to-centre, as in the case of the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la Fea and its American remake Ugly Betty (Miller, 2010; Rivera-Betancur & Uribe-Jongbloed, 2011; Rivero, 2003); and (3) alternative or periphery-to-periphery, in the case of amateur indigenous video, with its own outlets, distribution channels and own aesthetic proposals outside the hegemonic markets (Salazar & Cordova, 2008).

Convergence

Another term used recently to describe a similar process is convergence (Deuze, 2006, 2010; Jenkins, 2006; Roth, 2006) which can be summarized as ‘contemporary emergent norms, values and patterns of activities that blur the boundaries between media production and media consumption’ (Deuze, 2006: 268). Though participation of the public in the media is not a new trait, the amount of input, and the direct omnipresence it has on the internet, makes it more clearly visible at present (Deuze, 2010). This has occurred because consumers are at the same time producers – prosumers – defining the extent and shape of the society of ubiquity through manipulation of available communication technology (Islas-Carmona, 2008). Technology infrastructure and availability, and the corresponding competences they demand, are the main hurdles for active convergence (Jenkins, 2006), because disparities in access to the same channels of participation separate social groups and evidence the gap that renders the ‘digital age’ as nothing of the sort (Ginsburg, 2008).

Convergence means appropriating different media to provide new avenues of participation which complement, rather than replace, the role of specific outlets. It is seen as a way to expand the remit of existent media, as stated on this call to development practitioners:

While the benefits offered by the Internet are many, its dependence on a telecommunications infrastructure means that they are only available to a few. Radio, on the other hand, is a much more pervasive, accessible, and affordable medium for most people. Blending the two could be an ideal way of ensuring that the benefits accruing from the Internet have wider reach. (Communicat...