Page 151 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

homogenize cultural experience rather than recognizing the hybridity inherent to
contemporary cultural identities.

Links Cultural policy, cultural politics, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, postcolonial theory,
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race

Multimedia corporation A multimedia corporation is a communications-oriented
organization that operates across a range of media outlets. It is widely held that the
ownership of communications by private capital is subject to a general process of
concentration via conglomeration. This produces multimedia corporations which
are part of a wider process of capital conglomeration. Three basic kinds of
conglomerate operating in the communications field can be identified: industrial
conglomerates, service conglomerates and communications conglomerates. These
operate in the context of changes in the communications industries centred on the
processes of synergy, convergence and deregulation.
Diversification by financial, computer and data processing companies into
telecommunications has created multimedia giants that dominate sectors of the
market. For example, between April 1997 and March 1998 there were at least 333
mergers involving media and communications companies world-wide. Of these, 133
were identified as 100 per cent acquisitions and 106 involved ‘foreign’ investors.
Corporations based in the United States (139) and the United Kingdom (42) were
responsible for the largest part of the mergers and acquisitions noted (Screen Digest,
April 1998). For example, in 2000 the major Internet company America On-Line (AOL)
took over Time Warner which was already the world’s largest media group having itself
emerged from the merger of Time and Warner and the subsequent acquisition of
Turner Broadcasting (CNN). Other multimedia corporations operating on a global scale
include Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann and Paramount–Viacom.
Links Capitalism, convergence, deregulation, mass media, synergy, television

Multiple identities This idea refers to the assumption of different and potentially
contradictory identities at different times and places and which do not form a
unified coherent self. That is, persons are best understood as being composed not
of one but of several identities that are not integrated into a cohesive ‘self’. In so far
as we feel that we have a consistent identity from birth to death this is because we
construct a unifying story or narrative of the self.
Here identity does not involve an essence of the self but rather a set of
continually shifting subject positions where the points of difference around which
cultural identities could form are multiple and proliferating. They include, to name
but a few, identifications of class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality,
political position (on numerous issues), morality, religion etc. and each of these
discursive positions are themselves unstable. No single identity can, it is argued, act
as an overarching organizing identity, rather, identities shift according to how
subjects are addressed or represented. Thus we are constituted as fractured, with
multiple identities articulated into a new unity.
Multiple narratives of the self are arguably not the outcome of the shifting