Page 132 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 123
case glaringly elucidates the precariousness of a cultural politics that depends on the
concept of national identity for its rhetorics and assumptions.
The second example describes a more spontaneously popular case of cultural
nationalism. In the Philippines, English, brought by the American colonizers at the turn
of the century, has been the official language for nearly thirty years after the nation’s
independence in 1946. English was the language that served to linguistically unify a
country inhabited by peoples who speak more than seventy regional languages and
dialects. After the downfall of President Marcos in 1986, however, the country has seen
the spectacular and spontaneous (i.e. unplanned) emergence of one of the native
languages, Tagalog, as a popular national language. Tagalog, not English, was the
language of street rallies and demonstrations and it became an emblem of national self-
esteem. Now, most popular TV shows and comic books are in Tagalog, TV newscasts in
Tagalog are drawing far larger audiences than those in English, and there is even a
‘serious’ newspaper in Tagalog, breaking the previous English-language monopoly in
this market. Politicians can no longer rely upon delivering their speeches in English only
(President Aquino’s command of the indigenous language was said to have improved
tremendously) (Branegan 1989). If this turn of events would stir some optimism in the
hearts of principled nationalists, it also has more contradictory consequences: it may lead,
for example, to new, linguistically based inequalities and social divisions. It is not
unlikely that the use and command of English will gradually decline among the less
privileged, while the upper and middle classes will continue to speak both languages.
After all, on a global scale English is the language that gives access to economic success
and social mobility.
These two examples reinforce Schlesinger’s claim that it is important for us
communication researchers

not to start with communication and its supposed effects on national
identity and culture, but rather to begin by posing the problem of national
identity itself, to ask how it might be analyzed and what importance
communication practices might have in its constitution.
(Schlesinger 1987:234)

Furthermore, we can see how the cultural constitution of national identity, as articulated
in both official policies and informal popular practices, is a precarious project that can
never be isolated from the global, transnational relations in which it takes shape. At a
more general level, these cases give us a hint at the multiple contradictions that are at
play in any local response to global forces.
There is also an opposite tack to take. While the transnational communications system
tends to disrupt existing forms of national identification, it also offers opportunities of
new forms of bonding and solidarity, new ways of forging cultural communities. The use
of video by groups of migrants all over the world (Indians, Chinese, Turks, and so on) is
a telling case. The circulation and consumption of ethnically specific information and
entertainment on video serves to construct and maintain cross-national ‘electronic
communities’ of geographically dispersed peoples who would otherwise lose their ties
with tradition and its active perpetuation (Gillespie 1989; Naficy 1993; Kolar-Panov
1994) Thus, while official, national(ist) policies against further dissemination of the