Page 136 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Global media/local meaning 127
those images once they arrive in specific locations. At this cultural level, at once more
mundane and more fluid local realities can themselves present an unpredictable
interpretive screen through which the intruding electronic screen images are filtered. At
the level of the day-to-day, space cannot be annihilated because the social specificity of
any locality is inevitably marked by its characteristics as a place. In other words, global
media do affect, but cannot control local meanings.
Two weeks after the launch of Operation Desert Storm on 15 January 1991, I asked
my students at the University of Amsterdam to write down how they experienced the
event that seemed to preoccupy and usurp all public discourse in those cold winter days
(winter, that is, in the Northern hemisphere only). It should be noted that CNN is
available as a regular 24-hour-a-day cable channel to Dutch television audiences and that
about 90 per cent of Dutch homes are cabled, making the American news network into a
virtually omnipresent, ready service in that country, which is by no means the case in
many other parts of the world—a reminder that the presumably ‘global’ is by no means
‘universal’. From my students’ responses, a rather consistent pattern emerged. During the
first few days after the war broke out, there was an obsessive fascination with its minute-
to-minute goings-on which CNN purported to inform us about. Any spare time was spent
in front of the TV set, motivated by a haunting sense of involvement which was soon
superseded by a desire to detach: after less than a week or so, fascination was replaced by
indifference and, to some, resentment about the excessive nature of the media’s coverage
of the war. The initial interest gave way to a more routine form of (dis)engagement. In
other words, what gradually but inevitably occurred was a kind of ‘resistance’ against the
imposed complicity created by the news media, a quiet revolt against the position of well-
informed powerlessness induced by the media’s insistence on keeping us continuously
posted. As one student exclaimed: ‘It’s as if nothing else happened anymore!’ What these
students articulated, then, was a clear determination to defy the global media’s
orchestrated colonization of their attention and interest. For most of them, the war
remained a limited media reality which did not succeed in totally encroaching on the
intimate texture of their local, everyday concerns.
I invoke this small case-study here in order to raise some questions about a
particularly pressing cultural and political problematic on the verge of the twenty-first
century: the consequences of the increasing scale and rapidity of global flows of media
products and technologies as a result of the growing economic power of the transnational
communications corporations, and the construction of global media markets that go with
their activities. The case-study suggests that by considering the perspective of media
audiences in our analysis, we can avoid mistaking ‘world polities’ as constructed by CNN
and other news media for ‘the whole story’. Media reality has not completely erased
social reality, as is often claimed by radical postmodernists, counterposed as it is by the
centrifugal forces of the local micro-circumstances in which people live out their
everyday lives, where different concerns take on priority. At the same time, Wark (1994)
is right to stress that even if we get bored with the CNN coverage, we are still, willy-
nilly, implicated in it. We can switch off the TV set, but as its images pervade the texture
of our everyday worlds, the distinction between media reality and social reality becomes
blurred. What needs to be addressed, then, is the complicated relationship between global
media and local meanings, their intricate interconnections as well as disjunctions
(Appadurai 1990; Morley 1992: chapter 13).