Page 162 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

(Radical rightist) Bill Bennett, (leftist) Leon Panetta, and (lesbian
activist, daughter of Sonny) Chastity Bono on tomorrow’s show . . .
hey, only in America!
(Larry King billboarding his CNN talk show)

Does Anything Bind us Together Beyond Cheeseburgers?
(Headline in Portland Oregonian newspaper)

A person’s cultural identity traditionally has been shaped to a large extent by
his or her nationality, defined here to mean membership or citizenship in a
politically recognized nation-state. Nations are political organisms that organize
and reinforce cultural consciousness for a community of individuals in power-
ful and distinctive ways. People often refer to and explain themselves in terms
of an overarching national framework that is believed to apply fundamentally
to everyone who lives in a particular historical-geographical-political location,
especially if that place is relatively homogenous ethnically and racially.
Throughout the history of modernity, for a community of persons to declare
or win national independence has been a way to formalize, legitimize, and
defend common cultural values and practises.
Partisan interests dramatically shape the symbolic cultural imagery that
nations depend on for their political viability. As the legal scholar Monroe
Price points out, ‘what is grandly called national identity may be no more than
the collection of myths, promises, and renderings of history that will keep one
political party rather than the other in power’ (Price 1995: 64). Assumptions of
dominant cultural identity lie within the political-ideological framework of
any nation as well.
Like all hegemonic constructions, nations are more or less fragile entities.
They will be defended most strongly by those who stand to lose the most from
their disintegration. When the Falun Gong spiritual movement became so
attractive to urban Chinese around the turn of the century, for instance,
Chinese government authorities swiftly jailed the leaders of their ideological
competitor. That spiritual challenge to China’s nationhood and to communist
ideological hegemony was, and still is, embedded in a matrix of other con-
tradictory ideological discourses fueled by post-Tiananmen economic and
cultural developments. These developments included a dramatic increase in
private business and consumerism beginning in the 1980s, accompanied a
decade later by the dramatic entry of chaos-producing information technology
and the Internet. Like other totalitarian nation-states, China’s political leaders
have had to walk a fine line that recognizes and utilizes the Internet as a
necessary tool for national economic development while trying to minimize
the potential ideological and cultural damage threatened by Internet com-
munication. The challenge to hegemony presented by the Internet only
extends a long-term struggle between authorities and communications tech-
nology in China during the latter decades of the twentieth century (Lull 1991;

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