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.