LECTURE 9 COMM 2920

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LECTURE 9 - COMM 2920 Transnational
Communications III Diasporic Communities and the
Media 23 November 2006
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TODAYs FOCUS Impact of COMMUNICATIONS on
TRANSNATIONAL DISPERSED COMMUNITIES

• What is DIASPORA?
• How does it help us understanding IC?

2. Communications and IDENTITY
3. MEDIA AND DIASPORAS THE CHALLENGE TO THE STATE
4. MEDIA AND DIASPORAS THE CHALLENGE TO
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
5. PUTTING ALL INTO PERSPECTIVE
6. CONCLUSIONS
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1. WHAT IS DIASPORA?
Transnationalism multiple ties and interactions
linking people or institutions across the borders
of nation states. New technologies,
especially involving telecommunications, serve to
connect such networks In some instances
transnational forms and processes serve to speed
up or exacerbate historical patterns of activity,
in others they represent arguably new forms of
human interaction. Transnational practices and
their consequent configurations of power are
shaping the world of the twenty-first century
(Vertovec 2003)
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1. WHAT IS DIASPORA?
Diaspora from the Greek diaspeirein
scattering of seeds
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1. WHAT IS DIASPORA?
There are many definitions
Cohen (1997 ) where one dreamt of home but
lived in exile
Safran (1991) Diaspora as a metaphoric
designation to describe different categories of
people expatriates, expellees, political
refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic
and racial minorities tout court
Durham Peters (1999) real or imagined relations
between scattered people who sustain a sense of
community, across and beyond localities, through
various forms of communication and contact and
who do not necessarily depend on returning to a
distant homeland
Karim (2003)A transnational groups non-dominant
position in global cultural contexts generally
remains a key indicator of its status as a
diaspora
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1. WHAT IS DIASPORA?
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1. WHAT IS DIASPORA?
Why does the study of diasporic communities
contribute to our understanding of IC?
- Globalization from below
- Diasporic communications are not on the
receiving side of international communication
systems but rather they actively participate in
their shaping
- Diasporic communications remind us of the
diversity, the changing character of IC and the
struggles within international communications
- Essential role of communications in the
creation and strengthening of these communities,
and their impact on politics and cultural
production
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2. Communications and IDENTITY
- Diaspora is NOT new / Communications have
always played a role
Q What difference do the telephone, satellite
TV, the Internet make?
- immediate and direct communications
- affecting sense of space
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2. Communications and IDENTITY
Q Who are you? How do you define yourself?
Identity construction always relies on
representations. Representations begin in the use
of common language, in signs and symbols that
allow us to build up shared understandings and
common codes for interpreting the world
Representations begin with language the primary
medium- but they extend into all other sorts of
communication practices, including what is
commonly called the media the press, television,
radio, the Internet. Media become important as
systems of representation, but also as socially
relevant cultural references in their political
economy, their content, their symbolic relevance
for particular social groups (Georgiou 2006)
Identity is CONSTRUCTED ? the media has a role
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2. Communications and IDENTITY
Diasporas are frequently described as imagined
communities
Benedict Anderson (1983)
Q Who used this term?
Instead of being unproblematic given, merely
factual- a diaspora is always an intellectual
construction tied to a given narrative. Like
other types of communities, but more so than
most, they can be imagined in a number of
sometimes conflicting- ways. Thus their
maintenance, far from being a technical problem,
involves a constant activity of reinvention
(Daniel Dayan 1999)
Or re-imagined communities? Although
diasporic populations are affiliated with the
homeland and although they consume its media,
their interpretation and their appropriation of
images , information and ethics comes with a
critical distanciation. They relate to the
original homeland in the context of a hybrid
imagined community. They know that they do not
belong to the country of origin and they usually
have no desire to do so (Georgiou 2006)
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3. MEDIA AND DIASPORAS THE CHALLENGE TO POLITICS
- Empowerment of minorities
The global commons defines and is defined by
the availability in media and cyberspace of
spectrum or network free of direct control by the
forces of capital or the state (Silverstone 2001)
- Visibility
- The counter-point
EXAMPLE RomNews
- Information about Services and Rights
EXAMPLE London Greek Radio
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3. MEDIA AND DIASPORAS THE CHALLENGE TO POLITICS
- Diasporic communities as new players in
international affairs?
- Multiple loyalties (no more one nation one
people)
An Egyptian immigrant in Britain might think of
herself as a Glaswegian when she watches her
local Scottish channel, a British resident when
she switches over to the BBC, an Islamic Arab
expatriate in Europe when she tunes into the
satellite service from the Middle East, and a
world citizen when she channel-surfs on to CNN
(Sinclair, Jacka, Cunningham 1996)
- Dahlgren (1994) diasporic media as micro
public spheres
- Karim (2003) a new cosmopolitan citizenship
EXAMPLE Radio MultiKulti
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4. MEDIA AND DIASPORAS THE CHALLENGE TO
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Categories of diasporic media
EXAMPLE BBC Asian Network

• ethnic produced locally

• transnational
• produced by homeland
• and exported

• exilic produced outside homeland

EXAMPLE Iran Star
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4. MEDIA AND DIASPORAS THE CHALLENGE TO
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Hong Kong movies genre becoming the mainstream?
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5. PUTTING ALL INTO PERSPECTIVE
- Further isolation/parallel lives

• Nationalism (and terrorism!)

• Participation to intra-national conflict (Demmers
  2002)

-Different media/different uses
- diasporic communities are not all the same

• Diasporic media can reproduce social inequalities

• Havent we all got multiple identities anyway?

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6. CONCLUSIONS
- The way we define the problem to be studied
affects the results of our research
- Media representations shape our understanding
of reality (shape our identity), but we also
contribute to reshaping these representations

• Importance of communications lies in the
  PRACTICES associated to them and their USES

COMMUNICATION is Who (says) What (to) Whom (in)
What Channel (with) What Effect (H.Lasswell) we
could add WHERE and WHEN, WITH WHAT PURPOSE