The achievement of world cultural convergence can be seen in the success of conglomerates like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Benetton and Nike, and also in huge transnational media companies like The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner and Sony. Their success has been greatly assisted by advertisement driven satellite television, which emerged in the 1980’s and is now ubiquitous. This has sparked many debates especially concerning the concentration of ownership. Only a small number of global companies own roughly 60 to 70% of satellite television. Also many of these transnational media companies are vertically integrated; Sony for example, own the studios, means to distribution, the cinemas and televisions - basically they own the whole domain. Thus it is argued that these companies promote a global consumer culture in their pursuit of profit and transmit their own particular brands of western (mainly American) ideology across the world via advertising and television programming. This is limiting the voice of the nation and it is feared that it might eventually lead to it’s death. Fewer local programmes are being made and viewed because the popularity of local and public service television has dwindled in a number of countries, due to commercial and satellite television taking a share of its ratings. Thus cultural imperialism theorists are concerned that consumerism is being spread throughout the world - very poor people in other countries watch on television screens how people in rich countries live and then start to consume, to buy their new westernised identities. “Cultural flows and global consumerism between nations create the possibilities of ‘shared identities’ – as ‘customers’ for the same goods, ‘clients’ for the same services, ‘audiences’ for the same messages and images – between people who are far removed from one another in time and space.” (Hall, 1992, p.302) “Thus, cultural imperialism becomes a process whereby an imposed culture is in the service of American capitalism.” (Barker, 1997, p.206 ). One of the main anxieties is that local and public broadcasting television will no longer be watched on the scale that it was in the past. Therefore its influencing of national identity will falter, and consequently local traditions, national identities, and cultures will be destroyed by the exposure to outside influences.
However the concept that a nation and national identities are coherent and unified is problematic. Many theorists maintain that nations are not natural and timeless as ideology dictates but emerged with the onset of modernity. (Gellner, 1983, Hobsbawm, 1990, Weber, 1976 and Anderson, 1983) Modernity they maintained, demanded standardisation and uniformity within society and therefore it allowed those in power to orchestrate the rise of nation states. This can be seen at it’s onset around the 1700’s when “Over a period of time national currencies, units of measurement and postal services were regulated, buildings streets and roads were given numbers, censuses were taken and people were forced to speak the dominant language with the correct accent. Eventually through the education-system and mass media the ruling nationalist elite’s launched a social engineering project to align the heterogeneous populations of their countries into a unified community having the same historical symbols, deriving from the same ancestors and, irrespective of social inequalities and class differences, pursuing the same ‘nation’ interests.” (Anderson, 1983, p.89)
In essence the new nation-states were turning the myth of a homogenous, undivided nation into a reality with the assistance of the media which was used as a ‘voice for the nation’ in order to construct national identities. The ruling nationalist elites were legitimising their political and capitalistic pursuits by deviously reconfiguring them as cultural. Therefore within the cultural imperialism thesis it is understood that nations are not natural timeless communities - sharing ethnicity, location, history, belief, language and economic interest - as advocates of the nation would have us believe.
In his book, The location of culture, Homi Bhabha dispenses with essentialist notions of the nation and instead perceives it as nothing more than a narrative, pointing out that any nation has a plethora of ethnicity and culture. ( Bhabha, 1994, p. 139-170) Benedict Anderson argues that nations are “Imagined Communities” (Anderson, 1983, p.15), because the differences between nations lie in the different ways they are imagined. He argues that members of even the smallest nation do not know most of their country’s people and they will never meet them, and yet, in the nations mind lives the ideal of national togetherness and belonging, along with an othering of ‘foreigners’.
Stuart Hall has written extensively on British national identities. He argues participants of the English nation “only know what it is to be ‘English’ because of the way ‘Englishness’ has come to be represented, as a set of meanings, by English national culture. It follows that a nation is not only a political entity but something which produces meanings- a system of cultural representation.”(Hall, 1992, p.292) He illustrates that Britain’s national identity is inextricably bound up with issues of race, gender and sexuality. British national identity is represented as southern, white heterosexual masculine and middle class which is unfairly representative of the different genders, sexuality’s, ethnicity’s and cultures that exist within Britain. It places white English men as the superior race and any one else as the inferior other in varying degrees.
In Modernity and its Futures Hall illustrates that continuity, tradition and timelessness are key ingredients in constructing a national identity. Education, national histories, literature, popular culture and more explicitly the media have all become tools of telling the national discourse. “They provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which stand for or represent, the shared experiences, sorrows, triumphs and disasters which give meanings to the nation.” (Hall in Hall, Held and McGrew, 1992, p.293) In this process, subjective truths are told in the hope that they will be absorbed. The intention is that the national discourse will be naturalised to establish a general universal truth about the nation. This is the way hegemonic regimes surreptitiously construct and represent common sense understandings of national identity, as though they were an inherent part of humanity.
Television (especially public service broadcasting) has been a primary site for the construction and reproduction of the national identity. The BBC in Britain has felt it their duty to unite the nation by fostering a sense of national identity. Consider how many times it displays nationalistic symbols (flags, red roses, lions, and beefeaters) in television programmes. The Union Jack is displayed wherever they cover a sporting event featuring British players. During every football ‘World Cup’ spectators are seen to wave, wear and paint Union Jacks on their faces whilst singing patriotic songs, such as ‘God Save the Queen’. Such nationalistic rituals display individuals participating in the idea of the nation and showing their strength of feeling in British patriotic pride, over other nations. Many pop personalities have also appeared on the BBC wearing Union Jack nationalistic symbolism – on Top of the Pops for example Ginger Spice’s wore her infamous rubber Union Jack dress and Noel Gallagher played his Union Jack guitar.
The BBC uses television programmes to play an important role in the construction and preservation of national identities. History programmes highlight dominant myths concerning the past which work to remind individuals of the nations origins. Period television drama’s such as Anthony Trollope’s ‘He Knew He Was Right’ and films of literary adaptations such as Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”, represent the dominant cultural viewpoint, reinforcing a romanticised view of history. Such televisual productions are littered with nationalistic ideologies that attempt to instil a sense of identity, shared history, pride and belonging in the viewer by acting as a voice for the nation.
The above examples illustrate that television, especially in the fields of public service broadcasting, has been deemed to be a powerful location for the broadcasting of nationalistic ideologies, which produce common sense understandings of national identity. However, the world of television is changing as a result of globalisation and the effect that this is having on the ‘voice of the nation’ and in consequence national identity has become a matter of much debate.
The cultural and (media) imperialist premise that globalisation is silencing the ‘voice of the nation’ and thereby weakening national identities by globally promoting a westernised homogenisation of culture is therefore problematic. Firstly, as I have shown above, the essentialist view that there is an innate homogenous and collective national identity has been shown to be a myth. Therefore the basic premise that the cultural imperialism theory is based on is challenged by many academics, of which Stuart Hall and Chris Barker are two. They argue that the culture supposedly being dominated is not a homogenous culture in the first place and similarly neither is the one that is supposedly doing the dominating, therefore a homogenous culture can not impose or be imposed upon. An example of this in terms of television can be seen when the American programmes Roseanne or The Simpsons are contrasted with say Will and Grace or Friends. The ideologies contained in these programmes would differ greatly and be opposed in their values, for example, Friends takes for granted capitalism and consumer culture and encourages consumption, especially symbolic consumption, whereas The Simpsons would be more likely to critique capitalism and highlight the negative effects that it has on society.
Secondly, the cultural and (media) imperialism theory assumes that the television audience is passive which denies them any agency or resistance. However, other theorists disagree and argue that not everyone reads television texts in the same way. In an essay entitled, 'Encoding/Decoding', Stuart Hall (1980), maintains that the dominant ideology or preferred reading in a media text is not automatically adopted. He argues that dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings are produced depending on the social situation of the viewer.
Also the cultural imperialism theory has been accused by a number of academics, including Chris Barker, of giving too much privilege to the primacy of television. He contends that people have a plethora of other activities in their lives that have an impact on the formation of their identities, i.e. religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc. (Barker, 1997, P.209). It would therefore seem that what is needed is a far more malleable and comprehensive critical perspective than that provided by the cultural imperialism approach. Such a perspective should not rely on modernist essentialist assumptions and attempt to totalise as the cultural imperialism thesis does, but to respond to the different conditions of the contemporary world especially the various local and global paradigms that are emerging.
A new way of thinking about this is globalisation out of which has now emerged the refined term of ‘glocalisation.’ A critical perspective in which localisms are enabled by the globalisation process and where major players adapt to the idea of the local. Barker gives an example of this where he illustrates that although television is a western project and particularly American dominated, it can not been seen to flow in one direction. The cultural and (media) imperialism theory assumes that global television flows from the west to rest of the world, however Barker argues that television is multidirectional and the production of local and global not the same process. (Barker, 1997, p.209) This is exemplified by the case of the music video channel, MTV who in the 1990’s adapted their content to suit local environments in a number of areas including Europe, and Brazil where the programmes contained fifty percent of local content.
In “Channels of Resistance: Global Television and Local Empowerment” Tony Dowmunt describes how local television in a number of countries including Brazil, Africa, and Aboriginal networks in Australia produced alternative and resistant coverage of the Gulf War. In this way he reasons that other cultures are not just being fed the dominant viewpoint. He also describes how indigenous peoples around the globe are creating new opportunities for differing identities to find expression through the medium of television, and he maintains that oppressed minorities may find global space through the media. Perhaps the most well known and largest manifestation of this is the Arabic satellite channel al jazeera. It seems then that nation may not be the best way to understand the impact of global television as there are many other factors to be taken into account.
Chris Barker and Stuart Hall offer a less totalising counter theory than that offered by the cultural imperialism (media) theory, in which they argue that within many subsections and groups in society, identity, and hence identification with nation, is constantly changing. Hall, postulates that identity can only be quantified at a single point of time – that identity is a process of becoming rather than a static state. Furthermore the inputs to this transitory identity are drawn from many other cultures and societies, leading to a hybrid identity. Barker quotes Pieterse who identifies two particular kinds of hybridity, structural and cultural. The former refers to collisions and mixtures of cultural influences which occur at borders, or in institutions where nations mix or coexist, the latter refers to instances of cultures assimilated, assimilating, or becoming “destabilised” and blurred. Studies such as Chris Barker’s research of Asian women’s reaction to British soaps, suggests that television is used by its viewers to position themselves culturally within and without the intended ideology put across by the content. This again argues against the “passive consumer” view of television audiences – audiences may not only identify with the ideas of nation in the traditional sense, but they may also interpret television in a way that demonstrates a clearly defined sense of identity. (Barker, 1997, 192-200)
A further dimension to this debate argues that the ‘voice of the nation’ and hence a sense of national identity across the world is being strengthened by a backlash to globalisation. Although political factions on both the right and left are actively opposed to global trade, media, and the perceived threat of “McDonaldisation,” (Ritzer, 1993) it is primarily on the right where nationalism is invoked as a reactionary force. From Hanson in Australia, to Haider in Austria, to Le Pen in France, the nationalist constituency has been seen to grow dramatically in recent years aided by public service and local television. The perceived neo-colonialist intentions of globalisation and of such globalist organisations as the IMF and WTF, coupled with the pervasive influence of western, primarily American, media have sometimes actually led to a strengthening of nationalistic feeling, rather than a dilution of individual cultures.
In conclusion it can be argued that immersion in a society pervaded by global television, can in certain circumstances dilute the ‘voice for the nation’ and thereby for some of those who subscribe to a national identity weaken previous convictions of an individuals relation to nation. However, this makes a number of key assumptions – firstly that an individual in society has these convictions of belonging to a nation, and secondly that the transfer of information from television will be able to influence an individual’s beliefs. The very volume of media images and experiences, to which many societies are now exposed, can lead to an advanced critical faculty in many viewers. They are not just blind consumers, who can be subjected to an “ideology transplant” – rather many are conscious and accustomed of the need to filter messages from the medium and many others will make their own readings, at counterpoint to the inherent western ideologies of global television. Conversely it is also true that for some countries the ‘voice of the nation’ has become stronger because of a backlash to globalisation and therefore for certain individuals, their national identity can be strengthened. It is also true that alongside national identities being both weakened and strengthened by global television they are also being transformed and new hybrid identities are emerging. The growth in the ability of individuals within society to travel both nationally and internationally, have wider access to information, and to be able to communicate in many new ways, has led to the creation of a myriad of new communities, which can stretch across borders, or be contained as microcosms within them. These can be communities of shared ideology, religious belief, common interest and a thousand other connections – and these hybrid identities often can be as strong if not stronger than an individual’s sense of nation. Therefore for those countries who fear that they will lose their national identity, it has and will continue to be useful for television to still act as ‘a voice for the nation’. The ‘voice of the nation’ can also be useful in counteracting the influx of western imported and satellite television images that pervade many countries. However, it may no longer have as powerful or pervasive an effect as in previous years because of the changing nature of collective identity.
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