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Television, the Internet, and identity 395La2. It is interesting to observe that Catalan-speakers watch television inCatalan (83.4 percent), Spanish-speakers watch it in Spanish (83.4 percent),and bilingual viewers adopt a bilingual behaviour: 48.2 percent watch inCatalan and 51.8 percent in Spanish.But, in considering the influence of Catalan Television in identity building,we observe that, on one hand, knowledge of the language has grown from 50percent to almost 100 percent from the beginning of TVC broadcasting untilnow. On the other hand, we also observe that, even though knowledge of thelanguage has increased a lot, its normal use is still low in proportion. Some43.2 percent of Catalans still consider their own language to be Spanish; 50.3percent speak Spanish at home, and 41 percent speak Spanish with friends.These percentages of Spanish use are higher among young people (Castells etal., 2002).We can conclude that TVC has been an important instrument in normalizingCatalan culture, recovering knowledge of the language, and strengtheningthe country’s cohesion. However, there is still a long way to go in the constructionof Catalan representation. Perhaps, a key differential factor in Catalonia,as a network society, could be a search for a collective strategy of adaptationto the change produced by structural globalization, a search to find new waysto present and represent itself.TVC has been a powerful and successful instrument for the recuperation ofthe language, but, just as important as language is content, which is the creatorof the imaginary, the builder of meaning, and of a specific type of discourse.Catalonia, in spite of the great leap forward that TVC represents, has had andstill has a serious deficit in the control of its own representation, its meaning,caught between the global content and the Spanish imaginary. That is one ofthe main challenges that Catalonia has to face.GLOBALIZATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF THELOCAL: DALLAS AS INSTRUMENT OF LINGUISTICNORMALIZATION IN CATALONIAThe programming choice for the opening night of the new Catalan channel,TV3, in an effort to promote the language and culture of Catalonia to thewidest possible audience, was the hit episode of Dallas, “Who Shot JR?”dubbed, of course, into Catalan. All the autonomous broadcasters havefollowed similar programming strategies, choosing to dub the most popularimported series into their own language rather than pursue a strategy based onsubtitling or on broadcasting in-house production, without the prestige tocapture mass audiences.For an important part of the Catalan population it has been difficult to
396 Imma Tubellaunderstand the choice of Dallas, “the perfect hate symbol, the cultural povertyagainst which one struggles” (Mattelart et al., 1984) as a strong point of theCatalan television schedule. The feeling of Mattelart et al. (1984) was thegeneral feeling in Europe against American programs at this time. Ang (1985)had another vision: “People watch Dallas for pleasure and the ideology ofmass culture fails to recognize this. The high-minded defenders of nationalcultural identities in Western Europe have focused on the wrong level whenthey decry American Imperialism.” In fact, she talks mainly about the French,the leaders of the European normative “Television Without Frontiers” by thattime. She possibly did not know the case of the Catalans and Basques, whowere much more worried by Spanish imperialism than by American culturaldominance.Arjun Appadurai (2001: 19) introduces an interesting argument into thedebate: “It is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianizationmay be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be forKoreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians,Russianization for the people of Armenia or for the Baltic Republics.” On theother side of the coin, France is extremely worried by Americanization at thesame time as it does not allow the expression of their own cultural identity toBretons, Catalans, or Corsicans, to mention some of the different cultural identitiescohabiting inside the French state.In this sense, Schlesinger (1991) suggests that, rather than starting withcommunication and its supposed effects on collective identity and culture, weshould begin by posing the problem of collective identity itself, asking how itmight be analyzed and what importance communicative practices play in itsconstruction. We find a good example in the People’s Republic of China wherepeople interpret and use foreign cultural materials quite differently dependingon their perspective of different civilizations (Lull, 1991). While Chinese televisionviewers enjoy and learn from programs imported from North and SouthAmerica and Europe, because they offer new vistas, new life styles and newways of thinking, they are less enthusiastic about Japanese productions. TheChinese government has even imported certain Japanese programs, hoping toinspire the Chinese to work hard and succeed like the Japanese, but Chineseviewers interpret Japanese programs in ways that differ from their involvementwith cultural materials that are imported from other civilizations moredistant in both in terms of geography and lifestyle, with a kind of symbolicdistancing. Moreover, Chinese consumers prefer Japanese commercial productsto American goods.Coming back to the Dallas example, at the beginning people did not feelcomfortable hearing JR speaking Catalan. For Catalans, the “normal”language of Dallas characters was Spanish. Nevertheless, very soon they feltproud to hear JR speaking their own language. The Disney strategy “Think
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- Page 404: PART VIIThe culture of the network
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Television, the Internet, and identity 395La2. It is interesting to observe that Catalan-speakers watch television inCatalan (83.4 percent), Spanish-speakers watch it in Spanish (83.4 percent),and bilingual viewers adopt a bilingual behaviour: 48.2 percent watch inCatalan and 51.8 percent in Spanish.But, in considering the influence of Catalan Television in identity building,we observe that, on one hand, knowled<strong>ge</strong> of the langua<strong>ge</strong> has grown from 50percent to almost 100 percent from the beginning of TVC broadcasting untilnow. On the other hand, we also observe that, even though knowled<strong>ge</strong> of thelangua<strong>ge</strong> has increased a lot, its normal use is still low in proportion. Some43.2 percent of Catalans still consider their own langua<strong>ge</strong> to be Spanish; 50.3percent speak Spanish at home, and 41 percent speak Spanish with friends.These percenta<strong>ge</strong>s of Spanish use are higher among young people (Castells etal., 2002).We can conclude that TVC has been an important instrument in normalizingCatalan culture, recovering knowled<strong>ge</strong> of the langua<strong>ge</strong>, and strengtheningthe country’s cohesion. However, there is still a long way to go in the constructionof Catalan representation. Perhaps, a key differential factor in Catalonia,as a network society, could be a search for a collective strategy of adaptationto the chan<strong>ge</strong> produced by structural globalization, a search to find new waysto present and represent itself.TVC has been a powerful and successful instrument for the recuperation ofthe langua<strong>ge</strong>, but, just as important as langua<strong>ge</strong> is content, which is the creatorof the imaginary, the builder of meaning, and of a specific type of discourse.Catalonia, in spite of the great leap forward that TVC represents, has had andstill has a serious deficit in the control of its own representation, its meaning,caught between the global content and the Spanish imaginary. That is one ofthe main challen<strong>ge</strong>s that Catalonia has to face.GLOBALIZATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF THELOCAL: DALLAS AS INSTRUMENT OF LINGUISTICNORMALIZATION IN CATALONIAThe programming choice for the opening night of the new Catalan channel,TV3, in an effort to promote the langua<strong>ge</strong> and culture of Catalonia to thewidest possible audience, was the hit episode of Dallas, “Who Shot JR?”dubbed, of course, into Catalan. All the autonomous broadcasters havefollowed similar programming strategies, choosing to dub the most popularimported series into their own langua<strong>ge</strong> rather than pursue a strategy based onsubtitling or on broadcasting in-house production, without the presti<strong>ge</strong> tocapture mass audiences.For an important part of the Catalan population it has been difficult to