Core Post #5 Kiera

 Semiotics and the Global Media Discourse

A point once made to me in my first screenwriting class what that all (American) film and television writers should seek to communicate their narratives on the level of the universal. Find a story and a point which any given audience can relate to and value. Or else create a world and establish a system of relations that allows audiences to value the narrative. The underlying assumption on this latter being that there is already a recognizable set of communicable universal laws of the human experience that can be hit upon like a piano key to get the same note in every corner of the world.

The point, and a quite relevant one, that our authors variously make this week is that to relegate any analysis of televisual media and/or audience spectatorship and participation to any singular global social position is an incalculable misstep. However any dismissal of a global cultural study as being self-negating is just as great a miscalculation.

David Morley’s nuanced article on the “third option” between localized and geopolitical analysis of cultural TV studies as being one of careful, acknowledged balance between these supposed opposites acknowledges the obvious: that while the discipline may have floundered in its conception, the current world lives a reality of this carefully navigated and self-determined politics of both immediate and global identity.

Put simply, if Korea, Nigeria, and Britain can figure out how to watch American television and still retain both an understanding of their independent cultural identity and their sociopolitical position in the world, surely highly educated scholars can learn how too.

From a purely personal perspective I can be aware of both my personal taste in television genres (crime shows), recognize the ethically questionable practices of these commercial products (as in “ripped from the headlines” episodes, inherent hegemonic nationalism), and also understand that the reason this season was shorter than others was because the writers are on strike as they have the right to unionize in order to protect their personal quality of life, a right backed by the federal government (if grudgingly.)

That this understanding has value seems to me to be the next step in a holistic examination of spectatorship and audience studies. At this point, the structure of production is changing rapidly, the dominance of streaming places revenue power in the hands of the audience directly. Seeking international audiences expands your consumer base and therefore your profit margin, and taking advantage of multi-national partnerships and country-specific tax incentives or other subsidies all helps to alleviate costs and bring in returns. Whether we academics like it or not, American studios at least are globalizing commercially, and the effect this new structure has might be worth studying. The nature of TV is in flux and where it ends up and how it ends up there has a very real chance of upheaving social formation centered around media worldwide.

That said, Kumar makes a fair point in the fallibility of the ethnographer. Since there remains for the foreseeable future an irreducible bias in the skew of media studies towards Western practice, any attempt at global perspective will be lacking the perspective of interiority. However, contrary to Kumar’s conclusion – or perhaps only reopening the subject – I wonder if we should not meet this reasonable criticism with the same solution Morley uses. Active recognition of one’s own predetermined place in a system of constructed world powers with a traceable and visible history can alleviate some of the unconscious bias – though reasonably not all of it. That said, the point of research is constant review and revision. Every reading this week at some point countered or refuted the author of another. Dissent has, perhaps paradoxically, allowed for more diversity of opinion and inspired further research. Despite what victors have languished to have us believe, we can, in fact, take it back – and have, over millennia.

“Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”  - Babe Ruth