Core Response #5_Ann

It feels so appropriate, timely, and enlightening to read the three articles this week on global television after our discussion last week on media convergence. While the industry studies articles last week mostly center around the US television synergies, Jenkins’s article does bring up the increasingly globalized playing field of television and the potentiality of media convergence, which nicely transitions into this week’s readings. The three authors this week, although having different methods and approaches, all question the legitimacy of a Western-centered global television while suggesting potential solutions to this problem (especially Curtin and Kumar). Although all written more than ten years ago, the three articles this week have rightly elucidated global television’s unbalanced environment as a discussion that is not only still relevant but also has increasingly gained importance in today’s intensely convergent media climate. 

While I have many things I want to mention in all three readings, I would like to think about the materiality and transmission of global media in relation to Morley’s article. In “Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the Sitting Room”, Morley mentions how VCR grants the audience certain autonomy in response to television as a mass communication format (6). Subsequently, Morley also writes: 

As the availability of television programs comes to depend, to an increasing extent, on people's ability to pay for them, the airwaves can no longer be considered as a shared public resource. As the provision of information, education and entertainment passes into a “regime of value” determined by the cash-nexus, television’s contribution to “a public culture” will increasingly be divided between the 'info-rich' and the “info-poor” (10).

Although Morley does not directly relate it to global television outside the Western world, this idea of the “info-rich” and the “info-poor” is extremely important in thinking about non-Western media practices. Class differences and the accessibility to certain materials and services—especially in today’s subscription-based digital media environment—are determining factors in looking at locality in a global environment. With the importance of this concept in mind, I want to, in some ways, challenge the disparity between the “info-rich” and the “info-poor” and question the definition of “info-poor”. It is interesting to think about what comes into our minds when we define “info-poor” in a global—and still undeniably Western-dominant—context. Does “info-poor” simply, as Morley suggests, refer to the financial problems faced by the audience in accessing priced content? Or does “info-poor”—maybe unintentionally—also entail a lack of access to the dominant Western media like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO? In my opinion, the latter is a question which the study of global television has to confront sooner rather than later. For example, in a tightly regulated and censored media nation-state like China, although there is no access to dominant Western television, there is an increasingly booming local media ecology where television shows and streaming platforms operate on a playing field parallel to that in the Western/US world. How do we reconcile this Chinese media environment within global television studies? This Chinese media ecology is no doubt growing into something that might be comparable to the Western media. However, there is a tendency, oftentimes seen in Western news and scholarly works, to categorize a closed-circuit media environment like that of China as illegitimate and illegible due to its censorship. This tendency brings me back to Curtin’s argument where he points out the shortcomings of media imperialism in saying that “Globalization of media, therefore, should not be understood reductively as cultural homogenization or western hegemony. Instead, it is part of a larger set of processes that operate translocally, interactively and dynamically at a variety of levels…(111)” I am not saying that a heavily censored media environment like the one in China is positive; I’m simply questioning the so-called mainstream and legitimate media in our world today. Of course, this is but one aspect in rethinking the definition of “info-poor”. If we delve even deeper into the transmission of media between nation-states and cultures while considering Morley’s financial perspective of “info-poor”, it is not hard to realize that topics like media piracy, ethnic-minority media practices, and illegal internet sharing all complicate the picture of global television. I personally do not have an answer to many questions raised in my thought-scramble, but I think these are important questions to ponder in the overall conversation. 

Lastly, I would like to briefly reflect on Shanti Kumar’s article, “Is There Anything Called Global Television?”.  I really enjoyed Kumar’s theorization from the “dialectical” to the “dialogical” (147). He writes: 

The significance of the shift from comparison to imparison…is evident for television studies as a global discipline: all television practitioners…engaged in East-West discourse open themselves up to a dialogues with others, and in the process undergo changes. Thus the goal of dialogical studies of television is not to teach but to learn, not to rescue the "other" but to understand the “self” through the incommensurability of irreducible differences one encounters in the dialogue (147).

This emphasis on learning rather than teaching really makes clear a potential path for global television (and media in general) studies where the East and the West are not in comparison but in dialogue with each other. With that, I couldn’t help but think of a book I read recently by Naoki Yamamoto, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame, where he cites Rey Chow’s theory of “grid of intelligibility” when complicating the comparison between Western and Japanese film theories. Yamamoto writes:

In her 2006 book The Age of the World Target , Rey Chow undertakes the difficult task of establishing “a fundamentally different set of terms for comparative literary studies” appropriate for the twenty-first century. Although originally conceived in the late nineteenth century as a transnational project of disseminating the cosmopolitan ideal of “world literature,” comparative literature as a discipline became ideologically problematic in its next hundred years of history, since it always placed literature as understood in Europe as a “grid of intelligibility,” or the “common ground” for comparison. The problem with this traditional comparative method is that it tends to render incongruous differences found in non-Western literary texts as mere examples of “chronologically more recent variations to be incorporated into a familiar grid of reference” (7).

Yamamoto then continues to propose a solution to this problem similar to that of Kumar, which calls for the treatment of non-Western theories at the same level as their Western counterparts. East does not complete the West; it complicates it. In reading both authors, I kept reflecting and rethinking my position as a Western-educated Eastern student in media studies. How can I, in my own research and writing, be aware and avoid tendencies mentioned in the last paragraph on “info-poor” towards non-Western media and audience? What can I do to negotiate and reposition myself at the intersection of East and West? I think these are questions without definite answers, but I think they bring me new perspectives and help me in reading and understanding global media. 

Work Cited: Yamamoto, Naoki. Dialectics Without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2020.