CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Theorizing the Media's 'Place' in
Globalization Sessions
Session organiser: Deborah Kaplan
Theorizing the
Media's 'Place' in Globalization: Exploring the Media's Links to Local Culture
Kafiris, Krini (University of Athens,
Greece) THE RADIO SOUNDSCAPE AS A VIRTUAL URBAN PUBLIC SPACE
The soundscape can be understood as one particular aspect of the
"mediascape" Appadurai (1995) wrote about which referred both to
global media flows and to the imaginary global spaces created through them. To a
great extent, the soundscape is created through global radio broadcasting and
flows of aural cultural elements - sounds, music, spoken language and linguistic
styles. This paper explores one aspect of the global soundscape - the urban
soundscape - created through urban radio broadcasting. The focus is on the ways
that the urban soundscape works as an aspect of the global soundscape,as well as
part of the "soft architecture" (Raban 1974) of the city: as a virtual
public urban space. The idea of "social spatialisation" (Suttles 1994)
and the work of H. Lefebvre will be used in order to conceptualise the emergence
of the urban soundscape through the global and local flows of urban radio
broadcasting. Finally, this paper will bring to the forefront the role of radio
in globalisation (the medium which has been globalized the longest and most
intensely, despite its neglect in work on globalisation, media and cultural
studies) and the ways in which it works to shape space and the experience of
place.
Black, J. David (Wilfrid Laurier
University, Canada) AFTER TECHNOLOGICAL NATIONALISM: CANADIAN TECHNOLOGY
CRITICISM SINCE THE 'TORONTO SCHOOL'
"After Technological Nationalism" takes up where the "Toronto
School" of Innis, McLuhan, and Grant left off in the 1970s. Where their
work assumed that technology provided Canadian culture with a bounded
sovereignty not otherwise afforded by the border with the United Sates, i.e.,
technological nationalism, the contemporary electronic environment fails to
provide a safe home. In this paper, trends in recent Canadian media and cultural
criticism, particularly among public intellectuals, will be discussed and
evaluated with particular reference to these changed conditions. The Canadian
literature demonstrates that cultural coherence is sustainable even where a
technologically bounded nationalism isn't, and also offers general conclusions
about cultural integrity in light of globalization. Evidence for an emergent,
uniquely Canadian "cultural studies" will be offered, one which
reflects on the possibility of collective identity in a post-national world.
Dasgupta, Sudeep (University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands) THE DIALECTICS OF DIFFERENCE: POSTMODERNISM,
REPRESENTATION AND THE PLACE OF IDENTITY
Since Benedict Anderson's persuasive argument of the place of print-capitalism
in the imagination of community, theorizing the "place" of space in
contemporary globalization discourses has become an urgent task of critique.
While most arguments have located media as the prime signifier of
deterritorialization, their important in undergirding increasingly chauvinist
notions of identity has been ignored. By concretely locating the importance of
the media in the formation of a transnational Hindu movement, I trace the
crucial role of the media in constructing a place for the symbolic and material
construction of Hindu identity within the flux of contemporary globalization. In
particular, the relationship between television, the Internet and economic
liberalization will be traced to argue for the re-territorialization of Hindu
nationalism. The broader implications of this analysis for rethinking space in
terms of a materialist production of place will be emphasized in the context of
contemporary theories of postmodernism.
Theorizing the
Media's 'Place' in Globalization: The Global and Local in Media Discourse
Horsti, Karina (University of Tampere,
Finland) GLOBAL MOBILITY AND THE MEDIA
This paper illustrates how both global hierarchies and national immigration
policy are negotiated in the media. Europe needs new labour, therefore active
immigration policy has appeared on the agenda. At the same time, however,
attitudes against foreigners have been raised in some European countries.
Globalization encourages mobility, but only some socio-economical groups have
the privilege to move. The paper presents a case study of the Finnish media's
portrayal of Roma asylum seekers from Slovakia in 1999. The media chose to frame
the event mainly with themes of flood, illegitimate reasons, and fortress
building, which constructed an image of threat to social order. When the Roma
had been given a bad name and it was repeatedly reported that there was an
endless flow of them coming, the public climate was ready to tighten the Aliens'
Act. Presenting asylum seekers as a threat rather than a resourse, as dirt and
chaos rather than people making rational decisions, the media reproduce global
hierarchy.
Anden-Papadopoulos, Kari (Stockholm
University, Sweden) GLOBAL ICONS, PAROCHIAL PERSPECTIVES? PHOTO JOURNALISM,
VISUAL CULTURE AND THE SEPTEMBER 11 TERRORIST ATTACKS
The notion of a pictorial turn, of a culture totally dominated by pictures, of
an age of "spectacle" and "surveillance" seems, uncannily,
to have materialized in the iconomania accompanying the September 11 terrorist
attacks and its aftermath. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the
significance of a visual culture approach to photo journalism: that is, an
approach that takes account of the transborder flow of news images. To what
extent did different American and European newspapers - local and national,
serious and popular - use the same pictures to cover the September 11 attacks?
How did their discursive framing of identical images differ? What happens with
the meaning and function of the news images when they are transplanted to more
downright popular-commercial discourses - e.g appropriated by street vendors
near ground zero in New York City?
Burns, Kellie (University of Otago, New
Zealand) GAYGAMES.COM AND THE SPORT OF QUEERING ONLINE COMMUNITIES
This paper considers the technology of the Internet and its participation in the
commodity logic of global “gay” culture. It unpacks the tensions between “queer”
identity politics and globalizing technologies within the increasingly
consumer-driven climates of global sporting events and gay community “pride.”
More specifically, this paper examines the centrality of the Internet technology
in [re]creating the notion of community, both local and global, within the
promotional and productive climates of the 2002 Sydney Gay Games. In the case of
the Gay Games, the Internet offers a preliminary “space” for the
construction of a “virtual” global gay sporting community and extends its
services throughout the “actual” event. The Internet has been positioned as
a technology offering the possibility for the emergence of diversified global
communities. However, close inspection of Gaygames.com suggests that the promise
of heterogeneity may be more of a sales tactic circulating within the gay niche
market than it is a promise of an eclectic, queer community. While the Gay Games
attempt to “challenge, stimulate and extend boundaries,” which gestures
toward the possibility of a transgressive community practice, expressions of “difference”
within either the “virtual” or “actual” delegations are debatable. This
paper asks: What are the queer possibilities within the online community
preceding the Sydney Gay Games? How does this “virtual” community impact
upon the event’s “actual” community construction with its obvious
investment in bridging local and global gay identities?
Kaplan, Deborah (University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) WAR OF THE WORDS: TRACKING U.S. NEWSMAGAZINE'S
DISCOURSE ON GLOBALIZATION BEFORE AND AFTER THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE
The 1999 WTO protest in Seattle can be seen as a sign, the first posed in the
United States, of a global movement rising to challenge the dominant definition
of neoliberal globalization as the social reality, a "new world
order." This paper applies Gramsci-based new social movement theory to the
media's discourse, to see the discourse as a public terrain where many powerful
actors struggle to define reality, to create new, commonplace understandings of
the world. The paper traces the coverage of globalization among three major U.S.
newsmagazines the year before and after the WTO protest to discover whether the
media's definition of globalization changed in ways that would suggest that the
protest had successfully challenged the dominant meaning of the term. The paper
concludes that the metaphoric and binary codes underlying the magainzes'
manifest coverage did change to redefine globalization as less of a
"reality" than a mutable, contradictory process whose outcome is
indeterminate.
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