Page 144 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Global media/local meaning 135
the global. As Miller usefully concludes, ‘authenticity’, if we still want to retain that
word, ‘has increasingly to be judged a posteriori not a priori, according to local
consequences not local origins’ (1992:181).
As with the case of the popularity of Hollywood videos among the Warlpiri, however,
this isn’t to suggest that the power of the transnational media industry is in any sense
diminished. It is, however, to at least entertain the possibility that at the level of culture,
meaning and identity, ‘the interplay of center and periphery could go on and on, never
settling into a fixed form precisely because of the openness of the global whole’ (Hannerz
1992:266).
In the end, however, we do need to return to the persistent asymmetry between centre
and periphery, and to the very substantial Americanness of much of ‘global’ media, not
only in terms of corporate ownership and working principles, but also, more flagrantly, in
terms of symbolic content: images, sounds, stories, names. No amount of transformative
interpretation will change this. And even though CNN implicated all of us into vicarious
participation in the supposedly global Gulf War, the experiential disjuncture between
‘here’ and ‘there’ remains, as McKenzie Wark narrates:

It was difficult, as an Australian, not to experience the war as something
that happened in America, performed, acted, and sponsored by
Americans, for Americans. On television, most voices were American. All
the images looked American. Even Saddam seemed to be an American.
As American as Lon Chancy or Bela Lugosi. Iraq seemed to be a place in
America. A place like Wounded Knee or Kent State or the Big Muddy.
(Wark 1994:13)

Australia—Wark’s Australia, not that of the Warlpiri—can hardly be called a periphery
in the same way as Trinidad; like the Netherlands or Sweden, it is better described as part
of the ‘semi-periphery’, a part of ‘the West’ but relatively marginal within it.
Nevertheless, as Wark astutely observes, every (white) Australian who grew up after the
Second World War knows ‘the feeling of growing up in a simulated America’, resulting
in ‘a perverse intimacy with the language and cultural reference points which
nevertheless takes place elsewhere’ (1994:14). And not only in Australia. Although this
experience of decentredness in an imaginary geography—a paradox which might quite
appropriately be called ‘postmodern’—has become a rather common one throughout the
globe, its cultural consequences in particular localities have hardly begun to be
understood.
Perhaps it is precisely because of this paradox, this dominant Americanness which
presents itself as global and universal, that my Dutch students quickly lost interest in
CNN’s representation of the ‘War in the Gulf’, and why this first truly ‘living room war’
did not become ‘authenticized’ in the local experience of those who, from a ‘global’
perspective, would be reduced to the status of ‘silent majority’ (Baudrillard 1983).