Cultural diversity and global media studies

- Divina Frau-Meigs

  
Media studies are under pressure to internationalize because the area of media itself is subject to massive transformations due to ICT changes, population fluxes and power struggles. Under the pressure of cultural studies and anthropology, the recent tendency has been to place culture, especially via diasporas and hybrid identities, at the centre of international media studies. In this context, the issue of cultural diversity is a good entry to examine the new ways media studies can and could internationalize because it also places culture at the crux of the debates, but with added political, legal and economic dimensions.
Since the 1970s, three crises – or moments of intense international controversy and negotiation – have shaken the world system of media control: the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO, 1980), the Cultural Exception Debate (GATS, 1993), and finally Cultural Diversity (UNESCO Convention, 2005 and WSIS, 2005). They all share the notion of cultural diversity as a core value or a sore value (according to the point of view considered). The evolution of these three crises shows that the old system of legal control by national governments has subsided under the shock of ICT-driven globalization. A new system of transnational governance or co-regulation has emerged, trying to solve problems by convening a variety of actors (state and non-state) around the resolution of a specific issue. The most recent of the media crises, with its two strands (the Cultural Diversity Convention and action line C8 of WSIS), shows clearly the ascendancy of this new system over the world order. But this new order of governance is hardly understood and its relation to the old one needs to be clarified.
Cultural diversity is the litmus test of this transition phase between government and governance, as internationally binding instruments like treaties, arguably obsolete, evolve together with multi-partnership platforms. The stakes are not only the meaning of national sovereignty or state control but also the organization of a field that recombines old and new actors and networks with transnational policies and post-national rights. The tension between the two contains a definite risk of the bifurcation of political cultures as co-regulation vies with regulation (state) and self-regulation (industry). There is also a risk of the bifurcation of media models as information providers (industry) vie with public services (state) and free and open uses (civil society). Where is the locus of control of the media? There are two sets of contradictory interests at work: the US and the corporate world on one side, other interests (European, Canadian, developing countries and civil society entities) on the other side. In this power struggle, one side stands to win, the other to lose. However, closer analysis shows that the dividing lines are not that clear. In the case of the cultural diversity treaty, the US lost the rhetorical battle, but maybe not the economic one. Conversely the European Union won the rhetorical battle but not necessarily the commercial one. The temptation of some researchers is to apply a political linear perspective on the issue, reinforcing a nationalist reading and minimizing the transnationalist changes. Such is the fate of ‘globalization’ of media as seen by French researchers like Alain Touraine or Armand Mattelart. They consider it as an economic means for corporations to continue doing business as usual and maintain their power. This perspective, important as it is, only partly encompasses the breadth of the issue. New notions have entered the field, like the idea of the network society (Manuel Castells), the idea of flows (Arjun Appadurai), not to mention post-colonial and post-feminist views on identity formation and deconstruction. There seems to be the need for a ‘cosmopolitical’ perspective as Ulrich Beck would say in his distinction between ‘globalization’ and ‘globalism’, globalization being a reticular, process-oriented multipolar approach.
Such a perspective makes it possible to consider the new actors, the new networks and the new political strategies beyond the frontiers of traditional states and nations. The policies and strategies used by different countries or regions of the world as regards media and ICTs bring to the fore the different interpretations of cultural diversity that co-exist today: a shift toward an economy of culture (Europe and Asia); a form of indigenous expression (Africa and the Arab world); and a tool for sustainable development and peace (Latin America). The instrumentalization of media and ICTs appears as subject to different temporalities, power dynamics and forms of embedded uses, despite the pressure of globalization and convergence. Global media studies should take advantage of the notions proposed by other fields of research like political sciences (with its special focus on post-colonial and post-communist transformations), anthropology (with its focus on population movements and diasporas), or even urban studies (with its focus on networks and infrastructures). Ultimately it seems that the approaches by Giddens, Appadurai and Castells are too optimistic and celebratory of dynamic transnational cultures, whereas those by Mattelart and Touraine are too pessimistic and bound to alienation due to circulation and flux. Interesting as they are, these perspectives do not place media, communication and information per se at the basis of their analysis. They relate culture to spatial relationships, immigration fluxes and identity, not to specifically communicative processes in a transnational dimension.
What can media studies contribute? They can contribute a double focus, both at national level and at transnational level. Researchers in the field of information and communication sciences – which for me, as for many French people, is wider and more encompassing than ‘media studies’ – are ideally placed to use a multidisciplinary approach and claim that space as an investigative territory. They need to focus the locus of media control on the specificity of the information-communication paradigm around notions of representation and reception, taking into account the production of semiotic resources (sound, image, script, etc.) and its regulation.
These notions appear in the cultural diversity debate, dominated as it is by questions of national sovereignty and independence, ownership and control, personal identity and community participation. These notions need to be analysed in the light of the tension between government and governance, as it is partly fuelled by the fight for media control. New international actors have emerged, like NGOs and dynamic partnerships, global corporate alliances, lobbying coalitions and alliances mobilized both online and off-line. These new actors offer a variety of perspectives on the conduct of foreign policy focused on the control of access and production of cultural industries (and, increasingly, knowledge industries). They stand for the various publics involved in the process (national, transnational, indigenous, diasporic, etc.). Some of them are concerned by the implications of international economic integration for global governance in the audiovisual and ICT sectors and their impact on the representation of their values and contents.
Beyond these specific notions, information and communication sciences can also contribute to a better understanding of the cosmopolitical processes that are at work in mediation by the media. There is the need to elaborate a complex understanding of how our cognitive and semiotic resources have elaborated media representations, receptions and regulations within a given culture. In this dynamic systemic perspective, the locus of media control places representation and reception in an open-ended process of distributed intelligence and exchange with the environment. Plasticity, portability, responsiveness, connectivity – such are the new keywords attached to these cognitive advances. They have been associated with forms of mediation characterized by virtuality, disembeddedness and disembodiment, with online/off-line circulation and reception that shift perceptions of reality, community and identity, as Don Slater and others would say.
In this phase of cosmopolitical transition, there is a strange bistability that takes place, in terms of representation and reception, as much as in terms of government and governance. In physics, bi-stability is ‘an attribute of certain optical devices where two resonant transmission states are possible and stable, dependent on the input’ (Wikipedia).
In media, the current socio-cognitive configuration is characterized by the bi-stability of two types of communication means in relation to the environment and reality: ‘Eye-Nature’ and ‘Brain-Information’, in Gilles Deleuze’s terms. The first relation refers to representation as analogical and mimetic (audiovisual communication), with the sense that history is an irreversible experience, that social relations are objective and the result of the presence of the other, and that government is located in the nation-state. The second relation refers to representation as digital and poietic (computer information), with the sense that temporality (if not history) is reversible, that social relations can be made of multiple, temporary, non-territorial, long-distance loyalties, in co-presence with the other, and that governance transcends the nation state. The new communications means, around information networks, have permitted new means of symbolic negotiation with reality and its politics. These do not eliminate past ones, they are superimposed on to them (though Deleuze sees the latter as progressively eliminating the former). Globalization via media is none other than the result of these two resonant transmission states in contact, in relative dependence, where they are in mutual dynamics and change each other.
In cultural diversity, this bi-stability is played out in the defence of the cultural industries of audiovisual and cinematographic representation (Eye-Nature) and the emerging need to monitor the internet strands of representation and the emerging knowledge-industries (Brain-Information). The defence of analogical representation is resonant with notions of history, memory, patrimony and identity so important to the cultural exception debate in GATS. The need to monitor digital networks is resonant with notions of multiple loyalties and diffracted identities, so present in WSIS (especially through civil society entities). Such bi stability modifies the lens with which we should analyse globalization, away from the dialectics between the global and the local, that prevent us from embracing a more systemic view, towards what I call a ‘logic of situations’, context-specific and focused on figuring out the right scale for interaction and sustainability, where connectedness (more than connectivity) can become a shared, common purpose of universal value.
This bi-stability is an additive process that is especially visible in the sphere of media reception. The public of the Eye-Nature relation is a public of citizens and consumers; the public of the Brain-Information relation is a public of players and designers. The same person can be any of these personas in his/her own experience, as is visible in newly-coined words like ‘spectactor’ or ‘avastar’ whose hybrid nature tries to connote the multimodality of use. I follow Michel Foucault in this, who thought that the object of study is constructed from singular practices and their connection to the discourse that conforms them. It is a process in which the individuals take charge of the discourse they use and build the mental space that allows them to participate in culture. In that sense they can’t escape the socio-cognitive space in which they evolve. Bi stability is thus achieved, performed by the users themselves. In cultural diversity, it redefines the notion of culture, not to be comprehended any more (if it ever was) as an organic and bounded relationship to others, but as a distributed, multi-modal and highly mediated process. Cultural diversity takes place in the shaping of both online and off-line social relationships.
This bi-stability accounts for the new transfrontier spatiality and temporality of governance, in co-presence with the old geography and history of government. It also accounts for a sense of dispersion in the locus of media control: it can be reticular and immaterial, with other forms of power besides the nation state, whose capacities for resistance are yet quite present and not to be underestimated. Maintaining a national perspective makes it possible to take into account the pressure of infrastructures and economics on the individual, whose capacity for empowerment by singular practices is thus constrained. To forms of mediation such as disembodiment and disembeddedness, one must add the dematerialization and disintermediation of economic relations and flows. The political economy of such processes and its powerful regulatory forces (that are not all nation-based) needs to be re-injected in the analysis. Access, ICT and media skills and competence, the material and symbolic power that enables participation, all structure the forms of sociability that are possible and the cultural diversity that follows.
Hence the necessity, in this ‘logics of situations’, to analyse acculturation phenomena in the material conditions of their production, keeping in mind the attendant mental space they generate. Two levels of interaction need to be considered, as suggested by Gavriel Salomon: 1st order interaction (international media affect national culture) and 2nd order interaction (national and international media are affected in return). Their combined analysis then shows the reality of dissymmetric power relations, in its context-specificity and conditions of media use. They preserve the researcher from the naive thought that flows and diasporas are subversive and capable of transforming national power structures on their own.
Acculturation is thus tightly connected to cultural diversity as it examines what happens when two or more cultures are in contact. The action of gate-keepers in acculturation then needs to be monitored as such filters are key to the evolution of cosmopolitical processes. Some are technological (search engines, rating systems, etc.); some are human (buyers, corporate managers, translators, web moderators, etc.); some are legal and institutional (IP rights, treaties, recommendations, etc.). The action of these filters is intensified by information capacity and social connectivity as social software (emails, weblogs, wikis, etc.) and tools that can connect several collective intelligence pools (knowledge networks, free software communities, etc.) expand and interrelate on the web (databases, webfiles, semantic search, etc.). These filters of cosmopolitical processes should place cultural diversity and acculturation at the centre of international media studies. Such studies need to monitor these evolutions to propose scenarios for the future, to identify the new seats of power in the 21st century, as well as the new nodes of resistance, in this phase of cosmopolitical transition.
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