Page 166 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

electronic medium, not only as an entertainment apparatus which connects so
well with individual and collective feelings but as a conveyor of particular
codes and conventions – a televisual aesthetic which supports and delivers
the culturally rich melodramas to audiences. The telenovela draws from the
collective cultural memory for its subject matter. Through the narrative of the
telenovela, the romance and nostalgia of the imagined past are recontextualized
into the romance and uncertainty of the imagined present. In the process
images that make up the collective memory, long-term and short-term,
become cultural resources which are interpreted and used in complex ways, all
the while functioning to help construct a sense of national identity. In Mexico,
for instance, viewers from Baja California to the Yucatan Peninsula, from the
elite highrises of the Federal District to the tiny adobe homes in the villages of
Chiapas, all participate in national cultural rituals via the telenovela.
The examples presented above indicate how communications media per-
petuate political-economic-cultural systems by displaying cultural themes and
discourses that touch and join people emotionally. In this way, the very con-
cept of ‘nation’ serves as a crucial discursive stratagem for constructing mean-
ing and identity.
Media are never ideologically or culturally seamless or coherent, however,
and in capitalist countries at least they certainly do not always function to
maintain national unity. Today’s media are driven far more by the demands of
the market than by the diatribes of government bureaucrats. And media don’t
respect political borders. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iranian revolu-
tion, and the disturbances in China are prime examples of the media’s capacity
to destabilize nations. Media content – especially scandals – can generate par-
ticularly potent challenges to the dominant culture in even the most stable and
powerful nations (Lull & Hinerman 1997).
Symbolic forms of any kind do not serve but one purpose and they are never
used up. It is exactly their abstract, infinite, symbolic qualities that make nations,
civilizations, and universal values useful as discursive resources for collective
political and cultural purposes, as well as for personal use as essential elements
of customized supercultures. Having discussed four of the cultural spheres
in the previous pages, we now turn our attention again to how the superculture
functions as a contemporary cultural modality.

Superculture as cultural performance

Documenting the ‘merger of globalized, customized mass media and
computer-mediated communication’, and noting how electronic communica-
tion now extends into ‘the whole domain of life, from home to work, from
schools to hospitals, from entertainment to travel’, Manuel Castells worries
about how ‘our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar oppos-
ition between the Net and the Self’ (Castells 1996: 364, 3). His concerns are
well founded. Statistics provided by Castells and many others clearly show that

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