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ICOM201-

SEMESTER 2 2014

summary paper Due Date: 27th August

Weight: 10%

This assesses your understanding of unit readings and lectures up to Week 4. Choose one question from each week’s tutorial activities in Weeks 2, 3 & 4 and write short answers to these questions (150-200 words each). Make sure you list which 3 questions you are answering and include your full name, student number and tutor's name.

Week 3

1. What are the characteristics of transnational television?

According to Chalaby, J. K. (2005) the characteristics of transnational television are

The rise of transnational television lies at the heart of the current regional and global reshaping of media industries and cultres.

Over the years, they have grown in diversity-including some of the most innovative and influential channels of recent times- and quantity. A crop of trans-border TV channels, has played a determining role in the transformations of media cultures in their region.

Accompanying transnational television is sweeping cultural change and radical transformations in the television industry.

The first matter that this book brings to light is the sheer variety of existing cross-border TV channels. These channels are usually grouped under the single ‘transnational’ category, which is useful only when distinguishing them from those that remain within national boundaries, masking extraordinary diversity.

International channels cover every possible television niche market, ranging from sport to movies to religion to adult entertainment.

Above all, they present several types of trans nationality and differ in terms of ownership, objectives, reach, cross-border strategy, resources and audience.

Television executives progressively discovered that audiences preferred to watch, when available, home-made television programmes, and underestimated local companies’ ability to copy international TV channel formats. This promoted them to adapt their international feeds to local tastes, leading to the emergence of practices of localization.

Practices of adaption include an array of methods ranging from multilingual services (dubbing or subtitling), local programming inserts and local opt-outs. The need for localization has led to the formation of international TV networks.

Joesph Chan shows that transnational television must not only adapt to local cultures and languages but also take into account recalcitrant governments that remain wary of foreign cultural influences. Similarly, Page and Crawley observe that transnational broadcasters ‘need to be on good terms with governments in their key markets’.

Both Sinclair and Straubhaar have argued that this market has acquired a multilayered structure that involves up to four dimensions: the local, national, world-regional and global levels.

Josh Sinclair explains that a region is not defined solely by its geographical contours but also by commonalities of language and culture.

The development of transnational television fully reflects this process of regionalization and its complex relationship with globalization. The geocultural region plays a pivotal role in the worldwide development of transnational TV.

Above all, the majority of cross-border TV channels are pan-regional in scope, serving a geocultural region and its diasporic groups living beyond its geographical contours.

The global outlook of this book enables us to draw observations from the comparison of transnational television in different regional settings. It emerges that the size of the reception universe, largely determined by audience access to cable and satellite services, is crucial to the development of cross-border channels.

The importance of regional cultural and linguistics homogeneity is demonstrated by Africa, where linguistic boundaries delineate the reach of trans-border channels. The Middle East and Latin America are culturally and linguistically the most homogeneous regions, while Europe remain a mosaic of cultures, language and lifestyles.

Transnational Television poses a limit to their political and cultural impact

Al-Jazeer has flourished in the Middle East because its residents share a language and an interest in many social, cultural and political issues.

Share the same musical culture

In fact, the successful expansion but modest influence of cross-border channels stands in stark contrast to the pioneering development of transnational democracy in the region.

Several media conglomerates have developed a presence in all key geocultural regions besides or even without global channels. They have been operating regional channels and/or disturbing international channels on an entirely regional basis, usually by forging alliances with local partners.

The concept of deterritorialization can provide some help with the puzzling complex relationships between transnational TV and space. The most commonly used definition of the notion is that of Nestor Garcia Canclini, who explains it as ‘the lost of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories’.

Anthony Giddens calls this phenomenon ‘displacement’, which he defines as ‘our insertion into globalised cultural and information settings, which means that familiarity and place are much less consistently connected that hitherto’. Detterritorialization is also increasingly evoked in the context of migratory groups, where the disconnection between place and culture is most apparent. Displaced populations use several media, and especially satellite television, to (re)create a culture that draws from several locales.

Transnational TV channels are not entirely free from geographical impediment because most markets are local by definition and they must abide by national and regional regulations. To a certain extent, the practices of localization reterritorialize international feeds by adapting them to local audiences, but these channels are no longer defined by a specific place as national television used to be. Place ceases to be a ‘container’ to become a ‘content’ of corporate strategies: it can be redefined and accommodated to resources and commercial objectives.

Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy argue that the nation-centric discourse can no longer account for the global restructuring of the media industries and the ‘complex forms of cultural experience’ created by transnational media.

Robins and Aksoy discard concept that still draw from the national imaginary, such as ‘ethnic minority’, ‘diaspora’, ‘identity’ or ‘transnational imagined community’. They proceed to create a new conceptual space, borrowing categories from John Dewey’s pragmatist social philosophy and Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology.

Urlch Beck defines the cosmopolitan thesis as an attempt ‘to overcome methodological nationalism and […] build a frame of reference to analyse the new social conflicts, dynamics, and structures of Second Modernity.

Robins and Aksoy write, the new transnational media order will not materialize automatically, but ‘we will have to think it into existence’ against the ‘gravity field of the national imaginary’.

This article identifies four types of localization: local advertising, dubbing or subtitling, local programming and the local opt-out.

A campaign on transnational television gives them instant international exposure.

Localization facilitates its development, allowing cross- border channels to remain competitive in a multinational environment and transnational corporations to finance their international growth.

Localization can be seen as evidence of the vast differences that persist between national cultures. However, I have argued that localization facilitates the process of globalization because it allows transnational media players to over- come cultural diversity and operate efficiently in a multinational environment. 􏱉

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