Page 142 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Global media/local meaning 133
where postmodernity—in the sense of an always-already ‘disintegrated’ modernity, a
modernity whose completion has failed from the start (see Ang and Stratton 1996)—is
most manifestly palpable as a ‘condition’ of daily life.
Therefore, let me finish with three stories in order to illuminate the profound
incoherence of the current global cultural (dis)order, that of the ‘modern world-system’,
three stories located in three very differently positioned global peripheries (for not
all.peripheries are the same). What they do have in common is the fact that they all have
to grapple with the unsolicited ‘invasion’ of global media from a centre which is
undeniably American. But, as Hannerz observes: ‘Anglo culture, the culture of the
WASPs, may have provided the metropolis, the Standard, the mainstream, but as it
reaches out toward every corner of society, it becomes creolized itself’ (1992:226).
This is certainly what happened when Hollywood videos first entered the lived reality
of the Warlpiri people, an isolated Aboriginal community in the Australian Central
Desert, in the early 1980s. There is a lot of concern about the ability of traditional
cultures to survive this new electronic invasion but, as the late anthropologist Eric
Michaels, who spent three years among the Warlpiri, notes, this concern is all too often
cast within the long tradition of a Western racist paternalism intent on ‘protecting’ these
‘primitive’, ‘preliterate’, ‘prehistorical’ people from the ravages of ‘modernity’.
Ironically, such a stance only serves to monopolize the ‘modern’ to the West, forever
relegating indigenous Australians to the realm of an ahistorical ‘non-modern’. Such a
stance also disavows the very historical fact that the current plight of Aboriginal
people—dispossessed from their own land, living forever in a colonized state—was
precipitated precisely by the globalizing force of European modernity. That many of
these communities still survive after two hundred years of forced contact is an indication
of their cultural strength, not their helplessness, in managing and accommodating the
brute and powerful impositions from outside. Michaels noticed that electronic media
were remarkably attractive and accessible to the Warlpiri, in contrast with print and
literacy. This, according to Michaels, is not because audiovisual images do not need
active interpretation and ‘reading’ to be made sense of; on the contrary:

It could prove promising that the most popular genres appear to be
action/adventure, soaps, musicals, and slapstick. […] As the least
character-motivated, most formulaic fictions, they may encourage active
interpretation and cross-culturally varied readings [where] culture-specific
references are either minimal or unnecessary for the viewer’s enjoyment.
From this perspective, it would seem difficult to see in the introduction of
imported video and television programs the destruction of Aboriginal
culture. Such a claim can only be made in ignorance of the strong
traditions and preferences in graphics, the selectivity of media and
contents, and the strength of interpretation of the Warlpiri.
(Michaels 1994 [1987]:96)

This is not to indiscriminately celebrate or congratulate the Warlpiri on their ingenious
resilience, for what Michaels is interested in is not so much such a ‘romanticism of the
oppressed’, but rather the more complicated idea that video might be relatively
compatible with traditional Warlpiri culture (which Michaels contrasts with the great