Core Response #4 - Emma

The readings for this week seem to be in conversation with each other while each offering a distinct perspective on the topic of globalization and the global versus the local as it exists (or does not) in television studies. I don’t think they would necessarily disagree with each other, but I’m not sure they would completely agree with each other either.

I really appreciate Michael Curtin’s approach from a more historical perspective, and his explanation of “media imperialism” helps to contextualize the other scholars that he says later contract the idea of media imperialism. Through historical contexts, Curtin reveals the pitfalls of media imperialism in global television studies (and global media studies as whole)—instead, there are “complex dynamics of cultural interaction and exchange” (110). Additionally, I was interested in his discussion of government-sponsored media. I am familiar with the BBC and other government-sponsored channels of public access television outside the U.S., which are vastly different from PBS in the U.S. because they receive more funding and because their purpose is not strictly educational—instead, their purpose is to provide quality media. I have always wondered how the BBC was able to produce and distribute more scandalous/controversial shows and films, but Curtin’s contextualization of the BBC and other iterations of this kind of media was eye opening. By situating them as “intended as a bulwark against cultural invasion from Hollywood” (115), and in the case of the BBC “with responsibility to clear a space for the circulation of British values, culture, and information” (115),” it makes much more sense to me that the BBC would focus its programming on a wide array of media, as long as it is “British”. Channels like the BBC are, as Curtin says, “like public parks and libraries…they foster identity, enhance social cohesion…and provide spaces for public discourse” (117).

David Morley’s interpretation of the “global” was refreshing as well, though his argument takes a very different direction. I was most interested in his discussion of the global as being a constantly negotiated space, through television itself but also in our relationship to television. Increasingly, “the sense of ‘nation’ is manufactured” (13) in our experiences of media through television: we experience events through our television (or, today, through our phones or computer screens usually), isolated and alone, but we are still experiencing the event together. Morley suggests that we may still be together, but in a diaspora—participating in a “diasporic ceremony” (14). In these experiences is “the (re)creation and maintenance of traditions, cultural and ethnic identities which transcend any easy equation of geography, place and culture” (14). Instead, we might exist in a “television-geography” defined by our own television (or online) participation, which we ourselves choose.

Briefly, I also want to say that Kumar’s argument that we must be critical of theories of globalization is key to round out these quite disparate discussions. What assumptions are we making in these “mythologies of globalization” as a “common culture of consumption and style” (136)? What potential dialogues of diversity are conversations in this space leaving out and shutting off?