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The Nationalization of Media Audiences

From the outset, we must question the privileged status of the national framework adopted by media studies. How did the media come to be so comprehensively nationalized? Given that any 'media history' needs to be aligned with a wider set of histories, it is also prudent to consider how the idea of the national itself developed over the period in question. In that respect, it is obviously significant that modern nationalism as we experience it today is scarcely much older than the mass media systems that concern us here. A firm birth date remains a matter of debate amongst historians, but for our purposes, it was the long nineteenth century that witnessed the great evolution of civic nationalism and its steady transformation into the cultural nationalism that prevailed across much of the world in the twentieth century. So, without making this too much of a history lesson, the key thing to bear in mind is that the rise of the mass media and the rise of nationalism occurred in parallel. This is why the most influential thinkers on nationalism have all tended to see the mass media as being absolutely central to the spread of nationalism and to the present form of the nation state. Conversely, for those scholars focusing on media history, it is widely accepted that the institutions of the nation state have played a vital role in the development of everyday media (for example, Winston 1998).

Cultural Nationalism in the World System

While we can identify a number of cogent geopolitical, technical and economic factors behind the linking of mass communication and national audiences, our basic conception of the role of culture is critically important. Thinking about culture on a national basis has become a predominant way of thinking about our own place in the world, and about the geography of humanity more broadly. Like most things that we take for granted, this is far from being a simple matter. Culture, as Raymond Williams (1983) famously said, is one of the most complicated words in the English language. It carries a whole host of meanings, and the present epoch of mass media and consumerism has massively expanded the usage of the term. We can talk blithely in everyday conversations about the glories of 'classical culture' and about our fondness for 'café culture', while complaining about the everyday psychosis of 'office culture' or, indeed, about the 'culture of complaint' that has taken hold in heavily mediated social systems. It is obvious, from the start, that these are hardly 'cultures' in the same fashion. Various forms of the expressive arts have maintained a strong claim over the term culture since the nineteenth century, but the notion of cultures of behaviour has become increasingly widespread since the 1960s. Above these competing and very modern usages of the word, the idea of national and ethnic cultures as overarching frameworks for determining the identities of just about everybody in the world holds sway.

In everyday usage, the word culture variously denotes artistic endeavours, social behaviours and environments, as well as linguistic, racial and religious identities. Consequently, classical culture, café culture and the culture of complaint are all components of an intrinsically French culture, to be distinguished from a transplanted American 'mall culture' or the equally vigorous whingeing of the nearby English. Thus, we tend to begin from the more or less explicit observation that human society is variable in forms of expression and behaviours across different regions and populations. These differences are recognized officially in the phrase 'cultural diversity', which encapsulates the notion that human differences operate at the level of language, spiritual belief systems, socializing rituals, kinship structures, moral regulation, cultural performance and formal political organization. With the important exception of the latter, these factors are all seen as contributing towards a sense of collective identity. Since social knowledge is seen to be both expressed and received through an overlapping set of culturally distinctive processes, there is a further implicit assumption that human difference in its present form is to a certain degree determined by the stability of cultural forms. This is why successive generations of English-speaking children are compelled to read Shakespeare and play football. Given that the vast majority of social communication now takes place via media technologies, the mass media are inevitably seen as having a profound effect upon the existing order of cultural diversity. We can, and probably should, think about cultural diversity in any number of ways. We could, for example, think about differences between generations, social classes and professions, or about preferences in politics, sexuality or consumption (all, arguably, matters of taste). Nonetheless, the distinctions of culture in our present world system are primarily made on the basis of ethnicity.

The precise meaning of the word ethnic, derived from the Greek ethnikos, is 'outsiders', although its contemporary use more typically denotes social groupings identified on linguistic, racial and/or religious grounds. Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, the word 'race' would have been more commonly used, but the hierarchy of racial supremacy fashioned in the colonial world was progressively discredited by the eclipse of European colonialism, the Jewish Holocaust and the American civil rights movements. With 'racism' publicly eschewed, the somewhat nebulous concept of ethnicity has taken its place, marking a shift from understanding human differences in terms of innate racial characteristics towards a system of differences based upon the cultural practices of distinct 'ethnicities'. In an age of nationalism, this anthropological scheme of human difference has had enormous political significance. One reason for this is the critical juncture that takes place with the acceptance of the principle of 'self-determination' as famously expounded by US president Woodrow Wilson in 1918. If all peoples have the fundamental right to choose their own government, and the definition of peoples is primarily made on the basis of ethnicity, then this implies that each and every ethnic group should have its own nation state. In all likelihood, this was hardly what Wilson had in mind (since he wasn't proposing self-government for African-Americans), but the inexorable combination of self-government and ethnic particularity has driven the worldwide phenomenon of cultural nationalism for most of the last century.

Without a specified cultural component (as in simply 'we, the people') the liberal ideal of nationalism merely implies that each and every citizen should have common rights and responsibilities, not that they should have a common culture or ethnicity. When compared to the autocratic monarchies and Empires of the eighteenth century, liberal nationalism can thus be seen as a democratic and inclusive alternative to aristocratic privilege and, typically, long-distance and self-interested government. By contrast, cultural nationalism further implies that citizenship is predicated upon common membership of a single ethnic group, which generates a political crisis in any territory where there is an ethnically diverse population. Over the past 150 years, this very modern 'crisis of culture' has given rise to new national federations, the dissolution of Empires, civil wars and mass migration. It has furnished statehood for numerous peoples of the world, bloody genocides for others, and various state-sponsored programmes of cultural re-education designed to achieve the assimilation of 'ethnic minorities'. Nonetheless, after all of this social engineering and much bloodshed, hardly any nation in the world has an ethnically homogeneous population in the twenty-first century. Consequently, governments devote a huge amount of resources to managing the 'problem' of ethnicity close to home, while loudly celebrating cultural diversity at the United Nations. Since both xenophobia and cosmopolitanism draw their legitimacy from matching ethnicity and culture it becomes as difficult to separate the two terms as it is to decouple them from the political process.

Precisely because cultural nationalism is the most widespread and influential political ideology of the modern world, any cultural analysis of nationalism faces a particular set of conceptual problems. National frameworks provide the systematic parameters for discussing culture, but contemporary nationalism in itself, from a historical perspective, is a phenomenon of culture. If we add the functional inseparability of media systems and contemporary culture, then it is far more practical to simply correlate culture, ethnicity, entertainment, communication and political rights than it is to try and untangle them. Nonetheless, if we want to understand transnational communication, then we have to denaturalize, and then interrogate, the implications of a cultural-nationalist world system for mass media and their audiences. For opposite reasons, the majority of strictly national media studies also tend to be prefaced with references to the work of renowned historians of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner (1983, 1998), Benedict Anderson (1991, 1998) and Anthony Smith (1988, 1998, 1999). Whilst there are important differences between the explanations they offer, all of their respective positions rest...