Untitled - socium.ge

Television, the Internet, and identity 397global, act local” works the same way. Children are used to thinking thatDisney characters are local because they always speak local languages.Thompson (1995) describes this situation as globalized diffusion and localizedappropriation.The vast majority of audiovisual products circulating across borders arefrom the United States, but the evidence suggest that national cultures remainstrong, and foreign cultural products are read and reinterpreted in new anddifferent ways by local audiences. Dallas 6 and Disney products are goodexamples of this local reinterpretation. There are others where the translationhas not been enough. MTV, the global music television service, began todifferentiate its content around the world and incorporate local music and localprograms in addition to local languages. They adopted this strategy after thecampaign to establish a Pan Asian TV service failed for lack of cultural specificity.They forgot that India and Japan and Malaysia have little in common.Moreover, the lesson of the 1990s has been that, although American films,music, and culture have considerable following worldwide, this acceptancehas its limits. In Western Europe during the 1980s, prime time was American.In the 1990s, it began to be domestically produced and, in many cases, audiencesoften prefer in-house programs to Hollywood productions. In the case ofcinema, this has happened later, after multiple precedent windows: pay perview, pay channels, and DVD.CONCLUSIONCollective identity refers to the sense of oneself as a member of a social groupor collectivity. It is a sense of belonging, a sense of being part, an actionsystem, a mode of praxis that makes sense of the world and one’s place withinit. What is the relevance of communication media to the construction of thisidentity? The media provide some of the important symbolic materials for theconstruction of identity, both at the individual and the collective level: beliefs,assumptions, and patterns of behavior. The construction of identity can neverstart anew; it always builds on a pre-existing set of symbolic materials whichform the foundation of identity. But with the development of communicationmedia, the very nature of this construction has been reshaped in significantways, and not always in a negative way.The experience of Catalan television shows us that the media can be usednot only to challenge traditional values and beliefs but also to extend andconsolidate a sense of belonging and to incorporate new patterns of behavior,called by Thompson (1995) “cultural migrations,” due partly to the globalizationof media products. The development of the media has transformed identityand, above all, identity building, a process increasingly dependent on forms of