Reception, Identity, and the Global Village
Authors: Pack Sam 
Published: October 2020

Introduction
Media scholars operating within a Marxist framework view the penetration
of mass media into Fourth World cultures as a form of oppression enacting
a colonialist agenda upon helpless spectators. Proponents of cultural
studies, however, argue that television audiences actively and creatively
construct their own meanings rather than passively absorb pre-packaged
meanings imposed upon them (Ang 243).
In this article, I will posit an alternative approach. I will argue that
Fourth World people are forced to ask not only "Who are 'we'?" but also
"Who are 'they'?" The answer to the second question shapes and informs
the answer to the first question, as Fourth World people are forced to
negotiate their identity upon exposure to First World television. The
result is a transformative process whereby Fourth World viewers reassign
the roles of "self" and "other" in order to defend, preserve, and re-
construct their own selfhood.
An Anthropology of Television
Studies on audience reception have been virtually ignored within
anthropology. Spitulnik bemoans the fact that there is as yet no
"anthropology of mass media" as anthropologists have largely managed to
neglect the centrality of mass media in 20th-century life (293).
Anthropologists in industrial countries have paid scant systematic
attention to the production, distribution, and consumption of mass media
in their own societies and even less to mass media in non-industrial
societies (A. Lyons 432). While there are emerging wide-scale debates on
the subject of anthropology and film current within the field of visual
anthropology, discussions concerning anthropology and television are
scarce (Weicker 273).
The glaring lack of reception studies reflects the unacknowledged
assumption that all viewers process information in the same manner.
Studies have shown, however, that there is an intrinsic link between
culture and communication and that each culture socialises its members in
its own viewing habits and interpretive strategies. Simply stated, the
media do not affect all equally or in the same fashion. The dynamics of
image interpretation are magnified when the producer of the image and the
consumer of the image come from different cultures. Messages encoded in
the First World may be aberrantly decoded wholly or partially in Fourth
World countries, or they may not be fully acceptable (A. Lyons 442).
Although television attracts a tremendous amount of popular interest,
serious criticism is relegated to the margins of film or communication
studies if it enters into academia at all (Joyrich 21). Anthropologists
are only beginning to consider the rich cultural forms of television that
are so pivotal in the development of national sentiments (Abu-Lughod 493).
Most TV impact studies done so far are generally limited to the First
World and tend to focus on a limited target group (i.e., children) and
range of effects (i.e., violence) (Kottak 11).
This is unfortunate considering television's huge cultural significance
as one of the most important parts in society's mass communication. In
many parts of the world, television is the most popular and ubiquitous
public medium, offering a diversity and availablity unmatched by the print
media (Abu-Lughod 509). Mass media, and television in particular, are
forces which provide audiences with ways of seeing and interpreting the
world -- ways which ultimately shape their very existence and
participation within society.
Television must be viewed with a wider lens. Framed by the discourses of
television, contemporary formations of identity have shifted in ways that
radically alter the epistemological, aesthetic, and ideological space of
cultures (Joyrich 22). Television is the site of convergence that joins
the private world of the home with the larger public worlds beyond the
front door (Moores 9).
The "Global Village"
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan prophesied the worldwide
coalescence of human awareness into a single community that he would
ultimately call the "global village". According to McLuhan, the developed
world is experiencing a transformative convergence of computing and
communications technology whose impact will rival that of the replacement
of muscle power by machines (Wright 84).
Over 30 years later, Hillary Rodham Clinton remarked on the "frantic and
fragmented" lifestyle brought about by this new technology. She echoes
the African proverb (which is also the title of her bestselling book) that
"it takes a village to raise a child" (13). The "village" she refers to
can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list of people or
organisations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of
values and relationships that support and affect our lives (Clinton 13).
Although the American President's wife uses the concept of a "village"
differently from her unwitting predecessor, the notion of
interconnectedness remains the same.
The Threat of Homogenisation
Amid the social, territorial, and cultural developments of the 20th
century, the landscapes of cultural identity -- "ethnoscapes" -- around
the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as
groups are no longer tightly territorialised or spatially bounded
(Appadurai 191). In this culture-play of diaspora, the familiar line of
demarcation separating "self" from "other" has become increasingly
blurred. According to Meyrowitz, the media have created new "communities
across spaces of transmission, bringing together otherwise disparate
grounds around the common experience of television, thereby resulting in
the cultural 'homogenization of here and there'" (cited in Morley 12).
As electronic tools have proliferated, Halleck & Magnan argue, the
variety of views has lessened in mainstream media: "Coca-Cola says they
need not make commercials for specific national markets anymore: everyone
likes the same music, understands the same images and yes, everyone drinks
Coca-Cola" (155). The global popularity of American transnational culture
has made it impossible to get a tabula rasa, if one ever existed. This
"westernisation" of the entire world has serious repercussions for how
people in non-Western countries, and the Fourth World in particular,
grapple to preserve their ethnic and cultural identity amidst a whirlwind
of McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Pamela Lee.
When McLuhan first coined the term "global village" in the 1960s, his
view of such a world was optimistic. As years passed, however, he grew
increasingly wary of the communications "implosion" (Wright 89). In The
Global Village, which his friend and collaborator Bruce Powers published
posthumously, the authors devote nine pages to the "satisfactions" of
"Global Robotism" and 38 pages to its "dissatisfactions". They claim that
the salient issue of the information age will be the need to exclude
information as the average global villager will be bombarded by an
onslaught of media messages.
In 1984, George Orwell warned that society would be controlled by an
externally imposed oppression. In Alduous Huxley's vision, presented in
Brave New World, people will come to love their oppression and to adore
the technologies that undo their capacities to think (Postman vii;
emphasis added). In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argues that there
are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the
first -- the Orwellian -- culture becomes a prison, whereas in the second -
- the Huxleyan -- culture becomes a burlesque:
In the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely
to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance
exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does
not
watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. (Postman 155)
By ushering in the Age of Television, Postman contends that America has
brought the Huxleyan prophecy to fruition.
The Cultural Imperialism Thesis
Media scholars operating in a Marxist theoretical framework like Postman
have deplored the consequences for cultural autonomy of the global reach
of First World television programs. Electronic media can potentially
color, distort, and even degrade an entire cultural world view, they
argue, by presenting images of the world suited to the agenda of the media
(Funkhouser & Shaw 86). This theory is generally referred to as "cultural
imperialism", which Sarmela defines as
the economic, technological, and cultural hegemony of the industrialized
nations which determines the direction of both economic and social
progress, defines cultural values and standardizes the civilization and
cultural environment throughout the world. (13)
In Make-Believe Media, Parenti portrays the media as an insidious
juggernaut controlling every thought of a mass of mindless zombies. He
contends that films and television programmes have propagated images and
ideologies that perpetuate the "isms": imperialism, anti-communism,
capitalism, racism, sexism, militarism, and vigilantism, to name but a few
(2). Prolonged exposure results in the surrender of a critical capacity.
In fact, consumers of mass media "become active accomplices in [their] own
indoctrination" (6). This is the only thing viewers actively do, because
in Parenti's estimations, media render their victims little more than
passive spectators.
Herbert Schiller is perhaps most closely associated with the cultural
imperialism thesis. In Mass Communications and American Empire, he claims
that American television exports are part of a general effort by the
American military industrial complex to subject the world to military
control, electronic surveillance, and homogenised American commercial
culture (cited in Tunstall 38). The export of cheap American television
programs, Schiller speculates, was deliberately undertaken by American
political interests in order to convert subaltern populations to American
cultural and political values, thereby maintaining American political
dominance and securing a market for American products (A. Lyons 441).
Schiller may get a bit carried away but the impact of television on
Fourth World cultures is irrefutable. In their article, "Why Do The
Indians Wear Adidas?", Arnould & Wilk describe the influence of
globalisation upon subaltern cultures:
Peruvian Indians carry around small, rectangular rocks painted to look
like transistor radios ... Bana tribesmen in Kako, Ethiopia pay a hefty
price to look through a view-master at 'Pluto Tries to Become a Circus
Dog' ... When a Swazi princess weds a Zulu king, she wears red touraco
wing feathers around her forehead and a cape of windowbird feathers and
oxtails. He wears a leopard skin cloak. Yet all is recorded with a Kodak
movie camera, and the band plays 'The Sound of Music' ... Veiled noble
Tuareg men carry swords modelled after the Crusaders' weapons and sport
mirrored sunglasses with tiny hearts etched into the lenses. (748)
Every culture in which television appeared has experienced a reduction in
the diversity of activities. Kent found that Navajo families without
television, for example, performed a wide array of activities such as
family discussions, butchering, weaving baskets and blankets, jewelry
making -- which were generally absent in Navajo households with television
(124). Similarly, in a rural city in Nigeria, H. Lyons discovered that
the introduction of the new and highly popular evening activity, conducted
largely within private family quarters, has markedly reduced evening
social life by "keeping them indoors" (413). This same pattern of
disrupting and monopolising leisure activity appears everywhere television
penetrates Fourth World cultures.
For this reason, cultural imperialism theorists have decried the
"contamination" of traditional culture by mass media, recognising a clear
difference between those with access and those without (Aufderheide;
Mankekur). The logical conclusion to be drawn is that Western media are
fundamentally incompatible with notions of cultural autonomy and
diversity.
The Active Audience
Proponents of cultural studies see the cultural imperialism thesis as
problematic. In their view, cultural imperialists reduce societies
penetrated by electronic media to a simple juxtaposition of two worlds: a
pristine "before" and a degenerate "after". Television thus becomes a
cultural and historical watershed allowing people to create a mythical
past (Wilk 237). While there have certainly been changes since the
introduction of television, there have always been changes. Cultural
studies advocates argue that the media constitute only part of the process
of actual and alleged cultural loss.
Rather than creating massive cultural homogeneity on a global scale,
societies who have recently gained access to television are replacing one
diversity with another (Hannerz 555). The popular perception among
cultural imperialism theorists that globalisation threatens cultural
identity is, according to Ang, a misnomer (252). The desire to keep
national identity and culture wholesome and pristine is not only
unrealistic but oblivious to the contradictions condensed in the very
concept of national identity. Defining identity in static terms ignores
the fact that identity is a site of struggle -- a fundamentally dynamic,
complex, and unstable phenomenon.
Cultural studies scholars have responded by portraying people of the
Fourth World not as passive objects to be dominated at will but as active
subjects capable of making their own decisions. Katz & Liebes, for
example, argue that television viewing is a negotiation process involving
the story on the screen, the culture of the viewers, and the interpersonal
exchanges among the viewers (101). The audience is not a "sponge" which
will automatically soak in Western culture for good or evil. Rather, it
picks and chooses what it likes and interprets what it chooses.
TV viewing is, first and foremost for cultural studies scholars, an
active and social process. Television audiences actively and creatively
construct their own meanings rather than passively absorbing pre-packaged
meanings imposed upon them (Ang 243). In fact, Lembo & Tucker argue that
audiences engage with television images and interpret them in accordance
with their life situations, struggling to redefine meanings of media
objects in ways consistent with their own cultural values (98). Viewers'
active interaction with television texts turns reception into a site of
struggle and not simply a site of domination.
This argument is repeated ad nauseam in cultural studies. I agree with
Silverstone that there is a danger in pursuing the active audience too far
(177). While cultural studies properly emphasises the significance of
understanding audience decodings, it neglects the contexts and pressure
that influence those interpretations (Carragee 87). More specifically, it
has failed to examine how media content expresses dominant ideological
meanings.
Here, I posit an alternative approach to television reception among
Fourth World audiences. Television is neither homogenising, as cultural
imperialism theorists advocate, nor simply a terrain for active
interpretation, as proponents of cultural studies argue, but revolves
around the negotiation for identity rooted in a negotiation of power
relations.
Negotiation for Identity
As the world becomes increasingly mass-mediated, the study of how
audiences manage contradictions between the specificities of their own
lives and the imposed generalities of a homogenised mass culture becomes
central (Silverstone 173). Institutions of mass cultural dissemination
provide the cultural field on which fragmented identities are formed and
reformed (Garnham 253). Television, in particular, plays a crucial role
in the formation and maintenance of cultural and social identities.
Recent trends in anthropology reflect a growing acknowledgment of the
significance of mass media to processes of identity construction
(Mankekar). Viewers' interpretations are profoundly influenced by broader
social discourses in which they are interpellated. In an increasingly
integrated world system, there is no such thing as an independent cultural
identity; rather, every identity must define and position itself in
relation to the cultural frames affirmed by the world system (Ang 253). In
this way, the global and local are inextricably linked in a dialectical
relationship: what people watch is mediated by, and simultaneously helps
illuminate, developments in their lives. More specifically, I contend that
the question "Who are 'they'?" directly shapes and informs the question
"Who are 'we'?"
Who Are "They"?
According to Katz & Dayan, the viewing of television is a liminal
activity in which masses of people routinely -- even ritualistically --
disconnect themselves from their everyday concerns, enter into a protected
"time out", and allow themselves to be transported symbolically elsewhere
(305). This liminal phase exists between the real world and an imaginary
world or what Funkhouser & Shaw term "real experience" and "synthetic
experience" (80).
Until the advent of electronic media, for most people actual experience
was limited to events within reality. But with the emergence of the
"global village", people gain access to an information environment of
unreal and synthetic events -- an experience akin to "viewing life through
a one-way mirror" (Funkhouser & Shaw 79) As Postman writes: "there is no
more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than
this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not
bizarre" (79).
Horton & Wohl argue that media and media performers deliberately create
an illusion which they call a "para-social relationship" -- the implicit
agreement between performer and viewer of an interpersonal relationship
(33). The pattern and structure of the television medium breeds a comfort
and familiarity which foster a close, social relationship between the
viewer and viewed. Caughey calls the intimate involvement with large
numbers of unmet media figures through media consumption "synthetic social
relations" (33). Despite the lack of actual contact, viewers tend to feel
strongly about media figures.
The question "Who are 'they'"? consists of an individual's "real social
world" -- the people with whom he or she actually interacts -- and
"artificial social world" -- all beings known through the media (usually
numbering several times more "persons"). The television viewer becomes
familiar with a throng of other beings with whom he or she never engages
in actual contact. In the developed world, people devote considerably
more time to artificial rather than real relationships. At the time of
Caughey's writing, mass media consumption occupied 50% of leisure time
(Caughey 73). With the advent of the Internet, I estimate that figure to
be much higher today.
The situation is different, however, for Fourth World viewers. While
direct interaction can correct or disprove media stereotypes for American
viewers, this is less likely for Fourth World viewers who are more apt to
believe what they see on television because they generally lack any frame
of reference to think otherwise. Because they rarely, if ever, come into
actual physical contact with the types of people represented on the
screen, their experience is limited to synthetic representations. If
television consumption determines how one perceives the world and, in
particular, how one views "others", this power is amplified for Fourth
World audiences.
Who Are "We"?
Notions of "who are 'they'"? directly shape and inform an understanding
of "who are 'we'?" because of the tendency to apply what viewers see on
screen to their own personal experiences. In his article "Fiction as
Truth: Viewer Use of Fiction Films as Data About the 'Real' World", Custen
investigated the ways viewers in peer groups discussed a feature film
after its screening and found that events or objects within the cinematic
frame are discussed in terms of their congruence not with the auteur's
world, but with the extra-cinematic world of the viewer (29). In other
words, the fictive material is used as data or evidence in discourses
concerning the world outside the film frame.
The real social world and the artificial social world seem to overlap.
The verbal responses to the film are constructed using data from the "real
life" of viewers rather than the fictive world defined by the film and
filmmaker. Custen's findings indicate that viewers tend to discuss how
the film is meaningful to them in some real life context by employing
markers from their own lives: "viewers organize the symbolic world in
terms that are 'common' to them through a selection process that holds the
film up to a mirror of their shared, familiar realities" (35). In this
way, "who are 'they'?" mirrors "who are 'we'?"
This phenomenon is not limited to film, as it is also evident in Reid's
study of the television viewing habits of black women in London. Reid
found that criticisms voiced about the portrayal of blacks on British
television revolved around how far such representations were from their
own experiences. As an example, the black women largely disparaged The
Cosby Show for depicting an idealised and thus unrealistic portrayal of
blacks while similarly condemning documentaries because they reinforced
negative images of blacks.
Likewise, Seiter et al. discovered that soap opera viewers tended to
permit the fiction of the shows to spill over into their real lives and
social worlds (235). All of the informants in one study felt so connected
to the characters on the shows that they viewed the soaps as relevant to
their own social reality. As one informant stated: "they [the soap
operas] do set moral standards" (Seiter et al. 236). The relationship is,
in fact, reciprocal: viewers evaluate the characters according to their
own values while, at the same time, learning values from the characters.
In other words, "Who are 'they'?" informs "Who are 'we'?" and vice versa.
Despite the recognition that the characters are fictional, all informants
treated the characters as social beings. Viewers in these studies
interacted with media figures because they are part of the same social
world. What if the characters are a part of a different social world, as
in the case of Fourth World viewers?
Negotiation of Power Relations
Identity formation is embedded in the negotiation of perceived power
relations. Most audience studies ignore the fact that discourses of
individual viewers and those of television have different levels of power
(Carragee 92). The capacity of viewers to negotiate meanings does not
match the power of a centralised storytelling institution such as
television. For Fourth World viewers watching First World television, the
answer to "Who are 'they'?" is always more powerful than the answer to
"Who are 'we'?"
Idealising the "Self"
When the Fourth World ("other") views the First World ("self") through
the medium of television, it is exposed to a strange world most know very
little about. Initially, Fourth World viewers are overwhelmed by the
disparity of the two worlds and struck by what they do not have in
comparison. Television generally provides Fourth World viewers with an
elaborately extended sense of "otherness". As a result, the admiration of
the represented First World "selfhood", and the concomitant inadequacy of
their own "otherness", are magnified.
For example, in "The 'Other' as Viewer", Adra records and describes the
initial audience reactions to television in a small rural community in
Yemen. What happens when Western filmic representations are shown to
people whose assumptions about human nature, intentionality, and the
nature of society are almost exactly opposite to those in the West? (Adra
263). Predictably, perceptions of the nature of the world outside Yemen
altered radically. Before television, they were justly proud of their
civilisation. However, after seeing images ranging from skyscrapers and
factories to blenders and the daily operation of a bank, some began to
question the adequacy of their own lifestyle (Adra 260).
Disparaging the "Other"
After this initial phase of idealisation, envy evolves into disparagement
as Fourth World peoples are forced to assert their own identity. Kuehnast
describes this phenomenon as "the export of prejudice", by which she
refers to the dissemination of a dominant ideology which results in the
perpetuation of myths, prejudices, or limited understandings about other
peoples (184). In Kuehnast's estimation, the "export of prejudice"
results when the "self" views the "other". I contend that this also
happens when the "other" views the "self".
The "export of prejudice" is essentially another name for ethnocentrism,
which Segall et al. define as "the view of things in which one's own group
and customs are unconsciously used as the standard for all judgments, as
the center of everything, with all other peoples and customs scaled and
rated accordingly" (9-10). I agree with Crawford that television "is
intrinsically ethnocentric" because, as a mass audience medium, it must
always try to relate "their" societies to "ours" (75).
Among television audiences, ethnocentrism usually takes the form of a
"love/hate" relationship with media figures. In Seiter et al.'s soap
opera study, for example, the relationship between viewer and character
typically oscillated between hostility and admiration (237). In the case
of Erica Kane, a popular soap opera villain, one of the informants envied
her but (or as a result) also felt the need to disparage her (Seiter et
al. 238). Perhaps fuelled by the recognition of gaping class differences
between the extravagant lifestyles of the characters and the more domestic
lifestyles of most of the informants, viewers put the characters "down" so
they could feel "up".
The export of prejudice goes hand in hand with the import of pride. Many
members of the Benin audiences in Nigeria, for example, criticise the lack
of filial piety displayed by children on American television (H. Lyons).
This strong opposition is predictable in a society that prides itself on
having retained more reliable family values than the perceived norm in
Europe or North America (H. Lyong 419). The Benin audience highlights the
negatives of the television representation in relation to their own
positives. This interpretation is based on ethnocentrism.
Transformative Process
Viewers can rearrange the textual encodings of ideology without
necessarily articulating an oppositional ideological stance (Lembo &
Tucker 111). The homogeneity of television is never complete because
people interpret what they see in ways different from, and often opposed
to, the ideological encoding preferred by élites (Fiske 61). The Fourth
World audience rearranges the textual encodings in television by
reconstructing its sense of "self" and "other".
In dialogism, the very capacity to have consciousness is based on
otherness (Holquist 18). "Self" can never be a self-sufficient construct
but is dialogic, or defined in relation, to the "other":
I get my self from the other; it is only from the other's categories that
will let me be an object for my own perception ... In order to forge a
self, I must do so from outside. In other words, I author myself.
(Bahktin cited in Hoquist 28; emphasis added)
Dialogism argues that all meaning is relative in that it is the result of
a relation between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space.
Reality is always experienced from a particular position.
Thus, I contend that the Fourth World television audience undertakes a
transformative process whereby it reassigns the roles from the "other"
viewing the "self" to the "self" viewing the "other". After initially
idealising the First World, Fourth World viewers embark on the process of
"otherising" the First World through an export of prejudice and import of
pride. "Otherising" is not negative, as is commonly perceived. In fact,
in the context of Fourth World viewers of First World television, it is
necessary for self-defence, self-preservation, and self-construction.
Conclusion
Depending on who you ask, awareness of the outside world through
television can lead to anything from enlightenment to damnation. But
above all, images on the electronic box radically transform not only an
understanding of the outside world but also the way Fourth World peoples
define themselves and their relationship to each other. By presenting
subaltern audiences with an objectified "other", television prompts the
emergence of an objectified "self".
People who are heavily exposed to the media use it as their main raw
material for perceiving and understanding the outside world. In this way,
television determines how Fourth World peoples see and interact with
others. In Brazil, for example, television trains villagers in national
norms and teaches them how to deal with non-Brazilians (Kottak). As a
facilitator of social interaction, television plays an integrative role in
creating a pan-Brazilian identity. Thus, television also determines how
Fourth World peoples see themselves.
The intimate awareness of otherness, presented by television images, has
led Fourth World peoples to create a new concept of culture. In Fourth
World cultures after television, people talk about "culture" in ways that
were not possible before its arrival (Wilk 240). "Who are 'we'?" would
not have been asked, or asked in the same way, were it not for the "Who
are 'they'?" necessitated by the introduction of television.
Paradoxically, contrary to most fears, television actually serves to
create rather than destroy a national identity by forcing Fourth World
peoples to re-define themselves.

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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Sam Pack. "Reception, Identity, and the Global Village: Television in the
Fourth World." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date
of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/fourth.php>.
Chicago style:

Sam Pack, "Reception, Identity, and the Global Village: Television in the
Fourth World," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000),
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/fourth.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

Sam Pack. (2000) Reception, Identity, and the Global Village: Television
in the Fourth World. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1).
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/fourth.php> ([your date of access]).