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17. Television, the internet, and theconstruction of identityImma TubellaCOMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: ACOMPLEX WORLDWe live in a complex world where communication media and cultural flowsextend more and more across boundaries. Accordingly, one of the characteristicsof communication media in the network society is that they take place ona scale that is increasingly global. Concepts like time, space, and distanceobtain new meanings because of the proliferation of networks of electroniccommunication, which, as Castells (1996) has pointed out, represent the newsocial morphology of our societies. The end of distance involves the reorderingof time and space, and a set of processes that are transforming modernsocieties. These processes are described today as globalization, a growinginterconnectedness producing complex forms of interaction and interdependency.The globalization of culture has a long history. Development and implantationof religions, for instance, show how ideas cross continents and influencesocieties. Nowadays, the concept of globalization is used to refer mainly totwo processes: the globalization of the world economy, and the global diffusionof cultural forms and meanings. Information and communication technologieshave opened up a vast number of communication channels that crossnational borders and create a massive quantity of new images and new culturalhabits, moving very fast, even if there remain significant differences in informationdensity and velocity in different zones of the world. Globalization isabout growing mobility across frontiers, mobility of goods, information, andpeople. Will this mobility affect collective identities? In this chapter, I willfocus on the global diffusion of cultural forms through communication media,the local appropriation of these forms, and the impact of this process of globalizationand localization of meanings on collective identity.At the same moment that communication is settling at the heart of transformationsin the network society, cultural and collective identities are takinga central place in the debates in contemporary communication theory and in385