Core Post 4- Rojeen

 In David Morley’s “Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the Sitting Room,” he makes plenty of arguments regarding the consumption of television and the activity of television audiences. However, I was most struck by his argument on how communication technologies, like television, can be both ritual and “a process of transmission of ideological (or cultural) categories,” (5). He writes, “The sitting room is exactly where we need to start from if we finally want to understand the constitutive dynamics of abstractions such as 'the community' or 'the nation'. This is especially so if we are concerned with the role of communications in the continuous formation, sustenance, recreation and transformation of these entities,” (12). This argument reminded me of Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, where he argues that nation and nationalism are fostered through communication technologies (he analyzed print capitalism). In my own research, I’m studying media representations of Iran and Iranians in US media, and how these representations portrayed Islam and Iran as antithetical to the West. For example, during the Iran hostage crisis in the late 70’s/early 80’s, ABC aired a special every night dedicated to covering the event, gaining over 12 million viewers nightly. ABC and other news outlets broadcasted images of Iranian protesters burning American flags, and chanting “Death to America” against the backdrop of blindfolded American hostages. During their nightly specials, ABC also manufactured negative images/videos of Islam and juxtaposed them to a white American classroom, to solidify and make concrete the Occident versus Orient binary. Without historicizing the geopolitical relationship of US and Iran, the media’s conflation of "Islam” with “terrorism” perpetuated both a cultural otherness of Iran and Iranians, while cementing Muslims and Islam outside the Western imaginary. Thus, I agree with Morley because the footage broadcast and media representations on the news do take on a major role in shaping and defining national identity. Nationalism and national identity are carefully constructed and exacerbated by communication technologies that reinforce hegemonic discourse, that in turn, shape our Americanness.