doanhson
Posts : 3 Points : 9 Thanked : 0 Join date : 2014-04-25
| Subject: EUROCULTURE Communication, space and time Fri Apr 25, 2014 1:36 am | |
| The empires of communications moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are undeniably potent forces in the world, and it is not really surprising that many observers attribute them with absolute powers. Thus, it is argued by Richard Peet that ‘the tendency is towards the production of one world mind, one world culture, and the consequent disappearance of regional consciousness flowing from the local specificities of the human past’ (1986:169). The global media are seen as unproblematically capturing the hearts and minds of their audiences and producing an increasingly homogeneous global consciousness and culture. We are, according to Peet now in an era of ‘ultra-culture’ in which the world’s people have been transformed into ‘latent cogs in the capitalist production and consumption machine’ (1982:298). The power and influence of transnational media conglomerates we take as given. The really significant question, for us, concerns how we think of the functioning and effectivity of this power. What is the nature of the relationship between communications, culture and identity? In the prevailing view, this relationship is conceived (with varying degrees of technological determinism) in terms of the ‘impact’ of new communications technologies upon culture and cultural identities. It is precisely this approach that informs Richard Peet’s account of the creation of a ‘world-synthetic consciousness and culture’ by the global communications industries. Such a formulation is fraught with difficulties. The power of the media is assumed and never demonstrated. Such an assumption is grounded in the model of the communication process that informs this approach, what James Carey (1977) has referred to as the ‘transmission view of communication’. Within this model, communications technologies are the active and determining forces, whilst culture and identity are passive and reactive. Communications technologies are the causal forces, and identities are the effect, shaped and modified by the ‘impact’ of the technologies. It is also the case—and this will be a major focus of the subsequent discussion—that there is no theoretical understanding of cultural identity within this perspective: cultural identity is a black box. The only real issue that is raised concerns the vulnerability of cultural identity to attack from the exogenous forces of ‘foreign’ communications empires. The problem then is one of resisting cultural invasion and fortifying indigenous identity. Change is seen as problematical, a matter of cultural erosion and even extinction. The great fear, apparent in the work of Peet, for example, is that positive national identities are being replaced by a global non-identity. This kind of thinking is also apparent in those strategies which, in response to the perceived threat of ‘colonisation’, seek to sustain and defend ‘a sense of European identity’— strategies which easily succumb to a protective ‘Fortress Europe’ mentality. From that perspective, cultural identity is both an unproblematical and a residual category. If we are really to understand the relation between communication, culture and identity, then we must move beyond this deterministic model of the communication process. Within this prevailing framework, cultural identities can only ever be responsive and reactive to the controlling stimulus of communications technologies. What is needed is a better formulation of the problem, one that takes cultural identity as a problematical and a central category. As Philip Schlesinger argues, in the context of a discussion of national identity: We now need to turn around the terms of the conventional argument: not to start with communication and its supposed effects on national identity and culture, but rather to begin by posing the problem of national identity itself, to ask how it might be analysed and what importance communicative practices might play in its constitution. (1987:234) The challenge is to understand how social and cultural identities are constituted and to consider the parameters within which cultural identities and orientations might be reconstituted in the present period. Within this more fundamental agenda, we can then begin to ask questions, theoretical and political, about the power and the potential of new communications technologies. Our concern is with collective cultural identity. Against the static and fixed conception in the dominant communications model, we need to develop an alternative which emphasises the active, dynamic and contested nature of collective identities. Collective identity involves the achievement, by individual actors or by social groups, of a certain coherence, cohesion and continuity. Such bonding will always be provisional and more or less precarious. As Alberto Melucci argues, Collective identity formation is a delicate process and requires continual investments. As it comes to resemble more institutionalised forms of social action, collective identity may crystallise into organisational forms, a system of rules, and patterns of leadership. In less institutionalised forms of action its character more closely resembles a process which must be continually activated in order for action to be possible. (1989:34–5) The cohesion of collective identity must be sustained through time, through a collective memory, through lived and shared traditions, through the sense of a common past and heritage. It must also be maintained across space, through a complex mapping of territories and frontiers, principles of inclusion and exclusion that define ‘us’ against ‘them’. At certain moments the established and normative bases of collective identity enter into crisis. Coherence and continuity are threatened by fragmentation and discontinuity; the emotional investments that inform the sense of identity are disconnected. Symbolically, 1992 was the date that identified one such critical moment. The question is how we manage this crisis: whether it will be regressively through the reassertion of ‘traditional’ identities and allegiances, or whether it will be possible to imagine new forms of cohesion and collectivity.
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