Reception, Identity, and the Global Village

摘要

Introduction Media scholars operating within a Marxist framework view the penetration of mass media into Fourth World cultures as a form of oppression enacting a colonialist agenda upon helpless spectators. Proponents of cultural studies, however, argue that television audiences actively and creatively construct their own meanings rather than passively absorb pre-packaged meanings imposed upon them (Ang 243). In this article, I will posit an alternative approach. I will argue that Fourth World people are forced to ask not only "Who are 'we'?" but also "Who are 'they'?" The answer to the second question shapes and informs the answer to the first question, as Fourth World people are forced to negotiate their identity upon exposure to First World television. The result is a transformative process whereby Fourth World viewers reassign the roles of "self" and "other" in order to defend, preserve, and re- construct their own selfhood. An Anthropology of Television Studies on audience reception have been virtually ignored within anthropology. Spitulnik bemoans the fact that there is as yet no "anthropology of mass media" as anthropologists have largely managed to neglect the centrality of mass media in 20th-century life (293). Anthropologists in industrial countries have paid scant systematic attention to the production, distribution, and consumption of mass media in their own societies and even less to mass media in non-industrial societies (A. Lyons 432). While there are emerging wide-scale debates on the subject of anthropology and film current within the field of visual anthropology, discussions concerning anthropology and television are scarce (Weicker 273). The glaring lack of reception studies reflects the unacknowledged assumption that all viewers process information in the same manner. Studies have shown, however, that there is an intrinsic link between culture and communication and that each culture socialises its members in its own viewing habits and interpretive strategies. Simply stated, the media do not affect all equally or in the same fashion. The dynamics of image interpretation are magnified when the producer of the image and the consumer of the image come from different cultures. Messages encoded in the First World may be aberrantly decoded wholly or partially in Fourth World countries, or they may not be fully acceptable (A. Lyons 442). Although television attracts a tremendous amount of popular interest, serious criticism is relegated to the margins of film or communication studies if it enters into academia at all (Joyrich 21). Anthropologists are only beginning to consider the rich cultural forms of television that are so pivotal in the development of national sentiments (Abu-Lughod 493). Most TV impact studies done so far are generally limited to the First World and tend to focus on a limited target group (i.e., children) and range of effects (i.e., violence) (Kottak 11). This is unfortunate considering television's huge cultural significance as one of the most important parts in society's mass communication. In many parts of the world, television is the most popular and ubiquitous public medium, offering a diversity and availablity unmatched by the print media (Abu-Lughod 509). Mass media, and television in particular, are forces which provide audiences with ways of seeing and interpreting the world -- ways which ultimately shape their very existence and participation within society. Television must be viewed with a wider lens. Framed by the discourses of television, contemporary formations of identity have shifted in ways that radically alter the epistemological, aesthetic, and ideological space of cultures (Joyrich 22). Television is the site of convergence that joins the private world of the home with the larger public worlds beyond the front door (Moores 9). The "Global Village" In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan prophesied the worldwide coalescence of human awareness into a single community that he