Locating Television: Zones of Consumption 9780415509787, 0415509785

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Locating Television

Locating Television: Zones of Consumption takes an important next step for television studies: it acknowledges the growing diversity of the international experience of television today in order to address the question of ‘what is television now?’ The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways:

 by situating the consumption of television within the full range of structures, patterns and practices of everyday life; and  by retrieving the importance of location as fundamental to these structures, patterns and practices – and, consequently, to the experience of television. This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television in particular, the use of the notion of ‘zones of consumption’ as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts. Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba and the Chinese language markets in Asia Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo American television studies are highlighted. Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field. Anna Cristina Pertierra is an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. With interests in media anthropology, material culture and consumption studies, she is the author of Cuba: The Struggle for Consumption (2011) and co editor of Consumer Culture in Latin America (2013), as well as a number of articles and book chapters. Graeme Turner is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. A leading international figure in cultural and media studies, his most recent books include Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-broadcast Era (2009); Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (2010); and What’s Become of Cultural Studies? (2011).

Locating Television Zones of Consumption

Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner The right of Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pertierra, Anna Cristina. Locating television: zones of consumption / Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Foreign television programs History and criticism. 2. Television broadcasting Social aspects. 3. Television broadcasting Influence. 4. Mass media and culture. I. Turner, Graeme, 1947 II. Title. PN1992.8.F67P47 2012 791.45 dc23 2012025186 ISBN: 978-0-415-50978-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-50979-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-09677-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

1

2

3

4

vii viii

Introduction Two stories about television 1 The end of television as we know it? 9 Television in Mexico: a brief overview 12 Television in the digital era 15

1

Understanding television today Locating television 21 Cultural studies, the media and anthropology Browsing for televisions 35

21 27

Television and the nation The nation in the era of plenty 42 Approaching the nation through Mexican TV 48 Mexican media and the production of national subjects Conclusion 59

42

53

Television and community Constructing communities 61 Sharedness, liveness and community 66 Managing choice 75 New communities, diluted communities or zones of consumption? Television, domestic space and the moral economy of the family What television does in Chetumal 84 What is the Mexican middle class? 89 Watching television in Mexican middle class homes 92 Fear and violence, safety and freedom 102 Conclusion 106

61

77 83

vi

Contents

5

Television and the desire for modernity Modernity and the West 109 Competing modernities 118 Conclusion 123

6

Putting television in its place Anthropology, cultural studies and television: a conversation Zones of consumption 130 Conclusion 133 Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

108

124 125

138 140 144 152

List of illustrations

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 and 1.4 4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5

The Plaza Las Américas shopping mall in Chetumal, Mexico A major public plaza in Chetumal

38 38

In store displays of televisions in the Plaza Las Américas mall A street in Kukulcan A newly built neighbourhood in Chetumal in 2012, marketed to working class and emerging middle class households. Despite a lack of street life one sees clear evidence of satellite television subscriptions which continue to accelerate in Mexico A working class family’s sole television set, in the bedroom area of their two room house The second television of a lower middle class family’s house, in the parents’ bedroom One of two televisions in a middle class household, in the living room

39 84

85 98 99 99

Tables A.1 A.2

A.3

Household televisions in Mexico, 2009 An example of weekday television schedules on Televisa Channel 2, 8:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Week commencing Monday 18 June 2012 Approximate percentage of households owning major technologies in municipality of Othón P. Blanco, 2010

138

138 139

Acknowledgements

The project from which this book is drawn was funded by the Australian Research Council through its Federation Fellowship programme. The generosity of that funding has made the comparative and transnational dimensions of this project possible and we wish to express our appreciation of this support. The project ran over six years, and this book is drawn from research conducted over the last four of those years. It is important that we acknowledge the contribution made over the first three years of the project by Jinna Tay, who worked with us as a postdoctoral research fellow on the first phase, and who dealt with a group of locations in Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. While Jinna’s published work is of course referenced in what follows, her personal contribution to framing the project and developing its formative debates was substantial, and this demands our grateful recognition as a preliminary to presenting the work which comes from the second phase of the project. Two further postdoctoral research fellows – Ben Goldsmith and Hari Harindranath – also worked on the project for varying periods of time, but their part of the project involves material not directly related to the work presented in this book. Finally, our current colleague, Sukhmani Khorana, who is working with us now on contemporary shifts in Indian television, completes the community of talented and stimulating researchers who have all contributed in important ways to the Federation Fellowship project over the last six years. This book was written while both of us were working in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Queensland. We would like to thank our wonderful group of colleagues there for their friendship and support, and in particular for their contribution to the development of our ideas through the regular work in progress sessions in the Centre. We are particularly grateful for the assistance of Mark Andrejevic and Zala Volcˇ icˇ , whose research interests have usefully overlapped with ours in a number of areas. Toby Miller, who visited us at the CCCS to work on the project on a regular basis between 2007 and 2010 has been an excellent source of advice and ideas throughout, while Heather Horst’s CCCS visit of June 2011 was espe cially useful for Anna in developing ideas about media studies and anthropology. Fergus Grealy assisted with the translation of interview notes compiled from the Mexican fieldwork. Graeme spent a semester in the United States in 2010,

Acknowledgements

ix

during which he was able to conduct research on US television; he would like to thank the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania for the invitation to be a guest of their Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. He is also grateful for the many generous and productive conversations he had about this project while at the Annenberg School; in particular, he would like to thank Michael Delli Carpini, Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz, Marwan Kraidy, Monroe Price, Paddy Scannell, Katherine Sender, Joe Turow and Barbie Zelizer. Early versions of material destined for this book were presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress of 2009 in Rio de Janeiro, at a workshop on consumption and television in the post broadcast era at the Universidad de Quintana Roo, Mexico, in 2009, in a public lecture and a symposium on the end of television at the Annenberg School in 2010, at the annual conference of the ICA in Singapore in 2010, at the ACS Crossroads Conference of 2010 in Hong Kong, at the Association for the Study of Ethnicities and Nationalism at the London School of Economics in 2011, at a research workshop on ‘Markets, Materialities and Consumer Practices’ at the University of Queensland in 2011, to members of the School of Journalism and Communications at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, at the ‘What is Television?’ conference at the University of Oregon in Portland, both in early 2012, to the European Association of Social Anthropologists 2012 conference in Nanterre, at the ACS Crossroads 2012 conference in Paris, the 54th International Congress of Americanists in Vienna 2012, the Australian Anthropological Society 2012 Conference in Brisbane, and to the ‘Transfor mations in Broadcasting’ conference at Leeds in 2012. Graeme would like to thank Anthony Fung and Eric Ma for their invitation to present our work in Hong Kong, to Janet Wasko for her invitation to contribute to the conference in Portland, and to Dave Hesmondhalgh for his invitation to present at Leeds. Anna wishes to thank Fanny Palomo Flores for extensive research assistance and good friendship in Chetumal, and colleagues at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad de Quintana Roo for their support and advice during Anna’s fieldwork period in Mexico, with particular thanks to Mtra Xochitl Ballesteros Pérez. Although they cannot be named to preserve their anonymity, Anna is grateful to the many neighbours, research participants and interviewees in Chetumal who made her research there possible. Anna also thanks Karel Reyes Gonzalez Rodiles and Ana Maria Reyes Pertierra, who turned two in Mexico, for accompanying her on ‘family’ fieldwork. Laura Irene Aguayo’s care and support during that period was also essential to making such fieldwork possible. Finally, thanks to Natalie Foster, our always supportive editor at Routledge, and to Ruth Moody, who handled the book’s production and effortlessly found for us what we think is the perfect cover image. Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner Brisbane, June 2012

Introduction

Two stories about television First, a story from Graeme In January 2011, the suburb where I live (and also the neighbouring suburb where Anna lives) became, officially, a disaster zone. The state of Queensland in Australia is large; it is bigger than Texas, and seven times larger than the United Kingdom. Over the first two weeks of January, one third of Queensland went underwater. At various times during that period, a total of 75 per cent of the state was declared to be in a state of emergency: tens of thousands of homes and businesses were inundated, hundreds of thousands lost power, and 20 people were swept to their deaths in a couple of hours during a flash flood the news media called an ‘inland tsunami’. My house in Brisbane was not directly affected by floodwaters; they stopped rising when they were one block away. There were some minor consequences for us: we lost power for a day or so, and the phone and internet were down for about five days. The continual sound of media choppers overhead set your teeth on edge, emergency services sirens sounded through the night and, down the hill from our house, in a light industrial area under two metres of water, two alarm systems rang non stop for five days. Compared to what happened to those who really were affected, of course, this was nothing. When the power was off, all I wanted to do was turn on the television. Two of the commercial broadcasters as well as the national public broadcaster had gone into full time continuous news mode. Using local reporters as well as staff flown in from Sydney, they established multiple live crosses around the city of Brisbane, into the neighbouring satellite city of Ipswich, and into the small town of Grantham where the most deaths had occurred. The Premier of Queensland gave media updates every couple of hours, the mayor of Brisbane did the same, hydrologists came on to tell us where and when the flood would move next, and there was a long line of flood affected locals wanting to tell their stories. Initially addressing a national audience – filling the stories with interviews with Aussie heroes of all descriptions – the broadcasts became more and more local in content and address. During one live cross, the anchorwoman asked

2

Introduction

the reporter to move aside and let the cameraman perform a slow 360 degree pan so the audience could see everything there was to see in that particular place, without any commentary. When our power failed and the television went blank, it was the loss of this continual monitoring of my situation and the richness of the vision that was most keenly felt. (Radio tried, but it doesn’t come close to the amount of information television can put on screen when it has the time.) I had a professional as well as personal interest in this experience. I have been concerned for some time with a closer examination of what really happens when broadcast television loses some of its purchase on the culture – when it ceases to colonize chunks of the day and when it ceases to convincingly address a mass audience. Also, I have been interested in investigating the evidence that might suggest television’s address to its audience is significantly mutating; it is not unusual for television studies to suggest the medium is becoming increasingly transnational and ‘un located’ on the one hand, seeking ways to reach a frag menting audience on the other. An argument against such suggestions, of course, is that broadcast television still retains the capacity on occasion to gather its mass audience in pretty much the way it used to do – for high profile sporting events such as the Olympic Games, or major news events such as the one of which I was a tiny part. What that argument does, however, is frame this dimension of the performance of television as something of an exception – a slightly recidivistic return to an earlier modality that is sufficient only to remind us that this capacity still, on balance, exists. There is the implication that this is not a capacity that matters any longer; television now addresses a floating aggregation of individuals, not a community (it is online where we find our communities). I have two responses to this. One is to draw attention to the way that all the logics of this performance of television – no matter how often it drew upon national mythologies to frame its story – worked to make it ever more local. Speaking as the viewer, this was palpable. The attraction for me was to experience the local via television because there was no other way to experi ence it; we couldn’t go anywhere until the water went down and the most likely way to find out about that was to see it happen on television. The more detailed, the more located, and the more deeply embedded in the community, the better it was; that is how other viewers talk about it too, not just those who were worried about being in the path of the floodwaters. The other response is to say that this provoked in me the recognition that this is what television was meant to do: it did it really well, it held my attention for hour upon hour without remission, and it merged seamlessly into the experience of everyday life. Far from being a throwback to an earlier mode of media programming, this performance of television left me thinking – maybe this is the kind of thing television wants to do, but can’t, the rest of the time (instead, it has to run Two and a Half Men or The Bachelor or Sixteen and Pregnant). A slightly heretical speculation? Or, rather, a glimpse into the underlying social function of television, a function that still seems to fit the medium like a glove but which, we have been frequently told, belongs to a bygone era.1

Introduction

3

And second, a story from Anna In April 2009, Mexico saw a worrying outbreak of a new kind of influenza. The H1N1 virus – or ‘swine flu’ as it became popularly known – was feared to be fatal in a small percentage of cases, and for a number of days, as the World Health Organization struggled to prevent panic among the world’s population while containing the virus as much as possible, the whole nation of Mexico seemingly ground to a halt. During this time, I had been doing fieldwork in southeastern Mexico for the project that became this book. Living in Mexico with my partner and small daughter, in late April along with everyone else there, I had to put my daily business on hold for a week or so – no more interviews about television practices, no more idle trips to the shopping mall, and plans for my daughter’s birthday party were temporarily suspended – while we waited to see whether this pandemic would turn out to be an overblown health scare, or a genuinely terrifying threat to our wellbeing. Some notes from my diary at the time suggest how problems small and large seemed to take on a real uncertainty in the possible presence of a deadly disease: 1 May 2009 The small city of Chetumal, on the Mexico–Belize border, is about as far away from Mexico City as you can get while still being in Mexico. But even here, many aspects of daily life have ground to a halt in the face of the swine flu pandemic. To date there have been no cases of swine flu confirmed in this state, Quintana Roo, but people are staying at home, avoiding the shopping mall, and avoiding crowded places. It is a strange feeling, to be in the midst of a public emergency, yet waiting for something to actually happen. In the absence of much real news, rumours abound and people are relying on informal networks to make sense of what’s going on. On Monday, my neighbour tells me that her son’s friend’s father works for the government, and he knew 10 people had already died in Chetumal from swine flu. But my taxi driver has a client who works at the hospital, and she said that the media reports of no deaths in Chetumal have been accurate. On Tuesday, my two year old daughter has a runny nose, so I decide to stay home. In any case, the local University where I have an office, is like a ghost town, as classes have been cancelled until 6 May and the library is shut. Since two year olds don’t take well to being inside all day, I take her to the local park, vainly trying to keep her away from other kids while pretending not to, since I don’t want to be rude. When I see a friend, I kiss her hello on the cheek, again not wanting to be rude, and I wonder how public health officials could possibly hope to win out against the social imperative to be polite? By Wednesday, my two year old is running a fever, so my husband and I stop down playing our worries, and take her off to a doctor. I shut away my thoughts that a doctor’s waiting room is likely more dangerous than her having a bad cold at home, but am relieved when we get to the clinic and

4

Introduction find it quite empty. All the staff at the clinic wear face masks, but none of the patients have them – and no wonder, since we have visited three different chemists and none had masks in stock. Some chemists have taken to putting up signs saying ‘no facemasks’. My daughter is diagnosed with a mild infection, but our doctor emphasises the importance of continuing to wash our hands, not to touch our faces, and to throw away tissues in sealed plastic bags. He also takes pity on us and gives us some free face masks, but it is hard to convince a two year old to wear something over her face in tropical heat. My daughter is recovering from her infection, so worry is mostly turning to boredom as we have spent almost a week without going to the mall, to the movies, or even to the supermarket. But we are lucky only to be bored, as people are starting to calculate the economic problems they face with the city shut down. Street vendors, taxi drivers, shop owners and casual workers, all need their income to survive from week to week, and although nobody is complaining about the need for Mexico to take such drastic measures, people do worry what the consequences might be if life doesn’t return to normal soon.

As we now know, life did return to normal fairly quickly. Within a couple of weeks, by mid May, travel in and out of Mexico was resumed, people were back at work and at school, and face masks and Tamiflu medication receded from the popular imagination. But what was very striking at the time, and remains fascinating to me, is the central role that television played in partly whipping up, and partly allaying the fears of the general public, as well as quite possibly preventing the further spread of the pandemic. While many of us heard the gossip and speculation of taxi drivers and friends of friends, it was through the continuous news updates and public service announcements of broadcast television that we received our official information. Many found this information unsatisfying, leading to further rumour and speculation, yet everyone continued to watch television in the hope of further glimpses of ‘truth’ upon which we could retain a sense of control over our lives. I know I am not the only person who had the television on all day during the peak of the crisis; in fact, the three days of 2009 in which the highest number of televisions were switched on in Mexico were during the peak of the H1N1 influenza scare (27, 28, 29 April). On each of these days more people had turned on their television sets than on the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, or during any football World Cup match in which Mexico was playing for the past decade. The health publicity campaign to advise Mexicans about precautions against the influenza virus was massive, with 605 advertisements paid for by the Secretary of Health during May 2009. The average viewer saw them 14 times over a three week campaign period (IBOPE 2010: 73). The viewing figures for television during the pandemic were significant enough to warrant a special section in the annual report of Mexico’s main ratings organization, IBOPE. So while there is no doubt that television can be many things to many people, and that it can be ignored, critiqued, and mistrusted

Introduction

5

as a source of information, in moments of national crisis it remains the centre around which one’s focus is located both in terms of everyday practice, and in terms of understanding the wider world of which we often struggle to make sense.

*** We start this Introduction with these two particular stories because they seem to exemplify in an extreme and obvious way the starting point from which our collaborative research into television began: our view that, contrary to previous speculation in television studies, television’s moment as a mass medium is far from over, and in certain contexts remains absolutely predominant. In moments of national (or international) crisis, people turn to the television set to participate in a common experience in real time, and to interpret events that take place on a scale beyond the grasp of individual perception. These two stories were also meaningful to us because we both happened to be personally involved in them during the period that we were researching this book; we both lived in suburbs badly affected by the Brisbane floods of 2010, and in the previous year Graeme was just leaving the Chetumal research site in Mexico as the swine flu scare broke out, while Anna remained in Mexico for several months afterwards. Of course, Australia and Mexico are extremely different places. But it was interesting to note that in a context of public crisis, television performed a largely similar role in these two events. If we locate television in the study of such kinds of moments or events, then we can see that it acts quite consistently (or rather, that people and organizations put it to quite consistent uses). Yet, in many other examples across this book, we will see that television can mean quite different things, or be incorporated into life in different ways, and certainly can be studied from very different perspectives, according to the contexts in which television is located. We argue that it is impossible to study television that is not somehow located in specific times and places; drawing from research in anthropology (although anthropologists are just one group who have argued this), we suggest that television – like any other set of cultural practices, tech nologies and markets – can only ever be studied as located. There is no ‘text’ of television without a context, and it has no meaning to be defined without understanding the social circumstances in which television exists. This is a fairly obvious point, well known to many in media and cultural studies, and across the humanities and social sciences. But the next step in developing our collaborative approach to understanding television, in what has often been called the post broadcast era, was more difficult for us; how do we locate television beyond listing the different countries or markets, cultures or subcultures, in which television is found? How can we also think about what television does across spaces and places, at particular times or during certain kinds of events? How can we try to account for the different levels at which television could be analysed?

6

Introduction

In response to this problem, across the chapters of this book, we consider the role of television in people’s lives at a number of different scales, or what we call ‘zones’, of consumption. We should make clear that our intentions for this phrase are relatively modest. We are not setting out to theorize the idea of the zone to the point that it becomes some sort of master metaphor that will go on to drive analysis. Our intentions are more limited and more pragmatic than that. But describing the various contexts and scales in which television can be located as a ‘zone’ is a means of acknowledging, in practice, the diversity of experience we wish to retrieve: the usefulness of zones of consumption as a concept is derived from its inclusiveness and flexibility. That is, the zone resists the notion that the appropriate location within which to examine television rests with any one formation – be it the home, the local community or the nation state; a zone of consumption can be any one, some, or all of these. It is not helpful to categorically locate television within any one kind of media system either, or within any one kind of cultural, political, material or geo linguistic space. However, the boundary implied in the phrase also resists the temptation to see the location as utterly arbitrary, or without definition; while it does not deny the necessity of putting limits to the contexts we consider in order to focus on the location, it suggests that precisely what these limits might be, and how that location might most usefully be defined, will be contingent on the relevant aspects of the particular instance. That means there is quite a range of possibilities to consider here. Think, for instance, of the most constrained of these zones – that of domestic space – and how differently it works as a location for television in, say, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan or Mexico. If the US model of the evolu tion of television takes for granted a certain amount of personal space available to individuals in the family home – such as in their own bedroom – relevant considerations include the purchase of multiple televisions, the convergence of television with the computer and other digital devices, and the establishment of this portion of domestic space as the location where these technologies are most actively accessed, used and personalized. In a related development, it has become commonplace in many Western countries to note the gradual decline of the custom of watching television in the lounge room at home as a family activity. Morley (2007) is one of many to describe the shift from ‘family viewing’ to more ‘individualised modes of media consumption’. In the United Kingdom, he reports, the multi screen household is now the norm, and this does affect household life in profound ways. More than 50 per cent of children in the UK between the ages of four and nine now have a separate television and frequently also a games console in their bedroom. (210)2 Similarly, in Mexico today (and we will have more to say about this later in the book3), more households have a television in the master bedroom than in the

Introduction

7

living room (IBOPE 2010: 9). In Japan, however, where substantial individualized personal space is a less common component of the arrangement of the home, the online environment is accessed more often outside the home through mobile technologies – the mobile phone. Consequently, Japan has one of the most developed markets for video produced for mobiles, particularly among young people (that is, precisely those who are denied personal space in the home). There are, of course, all kinds of variations which challenge whatever generalization one comes up with to describe the patterns of contemporary media consumption. That, simply, is our point. So, while in some markets we may be seeing the decline of family viewing in the lounge room as well as a shift towards viewing television programming via the computer, in many of these same markets we are also seeing the lounge room morph into the home theatre as flat screen televisions and the marketing of television programming through boxed sets encourage what Brunsdon (2010) calls ‘binge viewing’ (watching more than one, and often very many, consecutive episodes from a DVD collection of a television series in one sitting). In Australia, where we both live, this development has not been constrained by the availability of space for the average house, so it is already beginning to exert an influence on the design of new suburban homes (the introduction of the ‘media room’ or the ‘home theatre’ as a defined space). Specific factors driving this development in Australia include the relatively limited choices offered to the television consumer even by the cable networks and the response from the video rental sector to seize that opportunity and raise the profile of boxset DVDs of imported television such as The Wire, 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm. At the other end of the scale from domestic spaces, one could equally consider the benefits of locating television research within specific political, economic or geo linguistic regions. In some regions, viewers access a complex mix of local, national and regional programming, with some transnational regions functioning like a single geo linguistic market; Arab television is a case in point, even though it is riddled with its own commercial, political and regulatory paradoxes and contradictions (Sakr 2007). The Arab television market has become thoroughly commercialized, but it is also particularly subject to occasional and unpredictable political intervention from the state and the clerisy. Indivi dual Arab states exert influence over television in their own ways and for their own purposes, so national regulatory structures continue to operate within their own territory. Nonetheless, since the early 1990s when satellite technology was introduced, Arab television has also become a genuinely ‘transnational field’ (Kraidy and Khalil 2009: 2). Kraidy and Khalil argue that today the ‘pan Arab television industries appear … to be … [an] integrated single market, under the influence of the shared Arab language, cultural and religious factors’ which is distinct from the more conventional national system that had preceded it as well as from ‘the contemporary global media system’ (2). This raises again the continuing importance of the zone of the nation – the issue we take up more fully in Chapter 2. Notwithstanding all the rhetoric

8

Introduction

about the increasing globalization of media and the influence of Hollywood, there are examples even from highly developed countries (some of them filled with early adopters), which run against the grain of a trend that is so commonly held to demonstrate the increasing irrelevance of the nation in constituting media markets. Japan, for instance, produces more than 90 per cent of its own television programming, and exports vigorously into the East Asian region, where Japanese content, even more than that of Hollywood, is regarded as among the benchmarks for modernity (something we also note in Chapter 5). The United States also produces the vast majority of its own television, even as it describes its massive export of content into other markets as contributing to the process of globalization. In perhaps the most categorical refutation of the mythology of the disappearing state, the role of the state in regulating and controlling television content remains active, alert and fundamental in the largest television market in the world, the People’s Republic of China (Sun and Zhao 2009). China demonstrates that the widely welcomed rise of commer cialization in nation states transitioning from socialism to a market economy does not necessarily imply the state’s withdrawal from the market; indeed, in some cases it exposes operators to an additional set of commercial imperatives while the old political imperatives remain very much in force (Fung 2008). So, investigating the zone of consumption demands a close consideration of how that zone is actually constructed: the zones can be located in the smallest domestic space – the bedroom – or the most extensive transnational commercial space – the regional market – and just about anywhere in between. What is important is to maintain a sense of the social, historical and cultural contingency of that zone, rather than approach it as merely an effect of technology, geography, politics or the market. Also, and this is a lesson that needs to be learnt by those following the convergence culture orthodoxies, the arrangement of these varying features cannot be assumed to be predictive. The same configuration of provision or of domestic arrangements will not necessarily produce the same outcomes everywhere they occur: in another variation of the contest between subscription TV and broadcasting, in Korea 90 per cent of the audience has access to cable or subscription, but broadcast channels still dominate the ratings. That is, most of the Korean audience are consistently using their cable subscription to access broadcast television! This brings up another factor which will contribute to the formation of the zone of consumption: the structure of the commercial and public service television environment in each location. In Australia, broadcast television still rules, cable is relatively expensive, subscriptions are bundled in unattractive ways and the subscription base is subject to considerable ‘churn’. There are two publicly funded broadcasting networks, both of which are hybridizing in their relation to commercial funding in various ways; each has three free to air digital channels. Although it is growing relatively quickly, the use of personal video recorders (PVRs) for time shifting does not yet occur in the majority of homes. This mix of factors facilitates particular kinds of possibilities and precludes others. It would be true to say that, in general, Western television

Introduction

9

studies has underplayed how wide are the variations in the precise mix of public and commercial services, as well as the commercial strategies of the broadcast, satellite and cable networks across national and regional markets. Of course, the initial establishment of this mix of services as an industrial structure is always a political exercise, and so it is not surprising that their shape and effects will vary widely. Consequently, while broadcast free to air is steadily losing market share in the United States, the aggregation of free to air digital services in Australia and the United Kingdom through the Freeview system is generating what to some is a surprising resilience in the free to air audience. In a similar scenario to the one we outline shortly in our overview of Mexican television, cable penetration is still only around 30 per cent in Australia, broadcast networks still easily dominate the ratings and there have been many weeks in the last year when the ratings performance of the cable networks as a whole has scored well below their penetration rate. What makes up the zone of consumption, then, demands close attention to the range of contingencies in play by understanding them as constitutive of the fundamental diversity in the ways television now operates around the world. Ours is not an attempt to radically re theorize the location of television; rather, it is an attempt to recover its importance. More generally, it is an argument for a greater degree of attention to the specifics of how television operates in particular locations as a means of counteracting what have become almost unstoppable popular mythologies influencing what should be a more nuanced and differ entiated research agenda. By making this argument, we are adding our voices to the swelling chorus of calls for a stronger empirical and evidential base for research into the present state of television and new media.

The end of television as we know it? In the next section of this introduction, although we will need to return to this to provide a more developed discussion in Chapter 1, we need to make some introductory remarks about the context for our work in television studies. Given the current pace of technological and structural change in the media industries globally, it is not surprising that there is a small but growing genre of essays or chapters in books which address a question that is variously framed as ‘what is television?’ (Gripsrud 2010b), ‘what was television?’ (Lotz 2007) or ‘is this the end of television?’ (Katz and Scannell 2009). Provoked by such basic questions as Joshua Green’s (2008) ‘Why do they call it TV when it is not on the box?’, typically these pieces address, for instance, the problem of finding a way to properly categorize what is actually going on in a convergent mediascape when we watch ‘television’4 online. This particular question is more relevant in some locations than others: it is especially pertinent to the US industry, but it is still far from being the global phenomenon that the hype around convergence culture has suggested. While such questions have become major preoccupations in Western media studies, there is no accepted answer so far. The fact that the question continues to be raised, however, flags the existence of a nagging

10

Introduction

suspicion, even among those who celebrate the rising tide of convergence culture, that the specific technology used to transmit and consume video content is in some way definitive: if it isn’t ‘on the box’, how can it be television? On the other hand, there isn’t a clear dividing line between content that is produced ‘for the box’, and content that is produced for other platforms. Most of what is consumed online has been produced for and screened on television in the first place. Among the paradoxes inherent in both the academic and the industry discussions of convergent media is the fact that while they celebrate the merging and interaction of once discrete technologies and distribution platforms, they have nonetheless been endlessly preoccupied with differentiating between each successive platform, the categories of content they distribute, and their projected modes of consumption. So far, there has been limited interest in examining the similarities, to the same extent as the differences, between the viewers’ experience of consuming television via the box and via the computer. Our approach in this book is to step back from mapping the technological shifts in order to return to what was once, and we argue must be still, a core question for television studies: the understanding of television’s functions as a social and cultural practice. It has become commonplace in contemporary stu dies of television to observe that the multichannel environment and the rise of online platforms for the delivery of television programming has radically chan ged how we access and choose what we watch on television. Understandably, given the massive potential immanent in these changes, television studies has been dominated in recent years by discussions of what the changes might mean for the future of the industries concerned. Largely, these discussions have concentrated on examining the likely commercial prospects for the various delivery systems (broadcast, satellite, cable, internet), the business models for online aggregators seeking ways to monetize audience demand, the futures of the various production strategies involved, and the possible dismantling of the consumer/producer binary and its effect on content and the power of the audience. What television now does – how it is imbricated into the practices of everyday life, what kinds of social and cultural function it can perform, and how it participates in the construction of communities – has been much less explored. These questions have been approached before, of course, sometimes within accounts adopting disciplinary perspectives related to those we will use in this book. The most significant instance is Dayan and Katz’s pioneering work on media events (Dayan and Katz 1992), which built on anthropological theories of the function of ritual to explain what was then regarded as a critical com ponent of what television did. Recently, Daniel Dayan has published a detailed discussion of the industrial and structural changes to television which have, in a sense, made that work obsolete: the media event, he argues, can no longer serve as a pivotal and revealing location for the study of the social function of television (Dayan 2010a). Crucial here has been the fragmentation of the audience as well as, we argue, a proliferation of differently located television

Introduction

11

‘cultures’. The former has been widely noticed and discussed, but the latter less so. In the field of television studies as a whole, the focus on industrial and technological change has been accompanied by a high level of futurist speculation that has been fuelled by industry projections as well as by the influence of headline grabbing popular predictions of the social effects of technological change (Shirky 2008). Apart from the journalistic anecdotes which populate many of these accounts, there is little direct examination of what is actually happening in specific contexts or among specific communities. Although this situation is slowly turning around now, it is still the case that there has been a relative disinterest in acknowledging the diverse ways in which television has developed in various parts of the world; this disinterest is accompanied, perhaps explained, by a tendency towards thinking about the development of television as a linear, evolutionary process with only a single point of destination. As Turner and Tay (2009) have argued, the evidence tells us that we are definitely not watching one evolutionary process; television and new media compete for their audiences in significantly different ways and in significantly varied conditions – of production, consumption and regulation – around the world. As we noted earlier, although in some markets broadcast television is declining in importance, in other markets national governments still invest heavily in broadcast television, or maintain an active regime of control over its content, precisely because of its importance. Turner and Tay argued that understanding television today requires an active recognition of the con tingency of its formation in each of its locations. In this book, we take up that challenge and extend it by acknowledging that television is many different things at once; to be understood in its complexity, television has to be studied from a range of research approaches and in a diversity of regional and historical contexts. Television is a set of changing technologies, and a global network of industries, both commercial and state sponsored; but it is also a regime of practices – of production, of consumption and of everyday life. The combina tion of approaches from cultural studies and sociocultural anthropology employed in this book is one means of addressing these various aspects of television’s function; the particular value of the approach we have chosen, for our purposes here, is that it helps us to move beyond a narrow focus on the particularity of television’s function as a technology, and towards a broader inquiry into its more extensive participation within the cultural construction of everyday life. Not to downplay the consequences of technological change upon the things we study, however, it is clear that these changes are directly implicated in the fact that some of the foundational attempts to understand the function of television are now undeniably dated. Accounts such as Fiske and Hartley’s (1978) Reading Television were developed in the broadcast era, when television more routinely addressed a mass audience which enjoyed free universal access to a system that operated within a national commercial and regulatory envir onment. Outlining their core idea, that television served a ‘bardic function’ for

12 Introduction the culture it helped to construct, Fiske and Hartley advanced a number of propositions about what that function entailed. Overall, they argued that ‘the bardic mediator’ tends to articulate the negotiated central concerns of its culture, with only limited and often over mediated references to the ideologies, beliefs, habits of thought and definitions of the situation which obtain in groups which are for one reason or another peripheral. (89) This remains a classic articulation of the cultural studies explanation of the television/ culture relation for the broadcast era. Their book served to popularize what was at the time an emerging orthodoxy that was widely regarded as a major theoretical advance on the traditional empirical, communications studies, accounts of media influence; significantly, Reading Television remains in print more than 30 years after it was first published. However, once we move from the broadcast era to the post broadcast era, or what Milly Buonanno (2008) usefully describes as the ‘narrow cast’ era – with its niche markets, fragmented audiences and specific taste cultures – the ‘bardic function’ idea no longer works so well. Some would argue that there have been significant changes outside the mediascape that also play a part in this. We referred earlier to Daniel Dayan’s recent reflections on his media events research where he makes that point: ‘social and political polarization and its effect on media’, he says, speaking from his experience in France, simply ‘means that it is harder to achieve a broad consensus about the importance of particular events’ (Dayan 2010a: 27). While these models from previous formations of television studies have lost their purchase, we have yet to develop much in the way of an alternative that might update our understanding of the relationship between television, cultural practice and everyday life – or even provide us with an agreed upon model for what now constitutes ‘television’ or, perhaps, ‘televisions’. To be fair, that is far from an easy task these days, given the rate of change and the apparently endless search for new platforms, new genres of content and new markets in what was once a relatively simple mediascape. Importantly, too, whereas the task for Fiske and Hartley was to explain how television texts offered their audiences motivated versions of everyday life and thus participated in the construction of culture, the task for us now is not only one of teasing out the specific details of a much more complicated mediascape, but also a much broader one: to generate a contemporary, more instantiated and observed account of how the current formations of television – as technology, text, cultural practice and material object – are embedded within everyday life.

Television in Mexico: a brief overview Since the premise of our book is that television must always be understood as located, and that such locations can be understood as zones of consumption

Introduction

13

constituted in various ways across time and space, we would like to take the time here to present an initial overview of how television consumption operates in the research site from which we draw the ethnographic material that informs this book: Mexico. While this book has a wide range of reference in terms of the many locations it investigates – it draws on primary research from Australia, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Singapore, and Cuba, and our dominant mode of discussion throughout the book is transnational and com parative – Mexico was the location for the most extended research and will be the focus of the most detailed case studies, particularly in Chapters 2 and 4. Although much of the rest of the book will consider ways in which television should be studied that go beyond simple ideas of a national audience, it is also useful to bear in mind that such national audiences emerge in response to a variety of regulatory, industrial and technological conditions. The choice of Mexico as a major research site for this project provides some useful counter points to the two countries that are most often represented in English language television studies, those of the United States and the United Kingdom. When juxtaposed against them, the analysis of the consumption of television in Mexico allows us to make a gentle correction to certain assumptions about television that we continue (perhaps surprisingly) to find prevalent in popular and scholarly discussions (and we will focus more fully on these in Chapter 2). Although Mexico has a national television system, it plays an important indus trial role in the Latin American geo linguistic television market. Mexico itself is one of the world’s biggest television markets, and it is a net exporter of pro gramming, including the export to and co production with companies in the United States. The penetration of pay television is at relatively low levels (around 30 per cent), although it is growing steadily. While the Mexican tele vision system is overwhelmingly commercial in terms of most watched chan nels, the extreme dominance of one television company, and the close relations between this company and government offices, have made Mexican commer cial television a better example of the nationalist power of the medium than many other countries with stronger public broadcasting histories. The Mexican broadcast television system is well known for being dominated by a small group of influential family businesses, and in particular is known for the powerful Televisa conglomerate, run by the Azcárraga family and comprising free to air channels, television and music production houses, pay television concessions and other multimedia and entertainment ventures. Although in recent years a rival commercial empire, TV Azteca, has made some headway into the Mexican television ratings, it remains the case that Televisa’s main televi sion channel dominates the other 4–5 channels typically on offer to viewers, in every sector of television ratings across genres and timeslots in all regions of the country. In 2009, for instance, of the 15 highest rating programmes in Mexico, 13 were broadcast on Televisa’s Channel 2 (IBOPE 2010: 25). Mexicans have long been avid consumers of television, and television sets are commonplace possessions even in low income households. Research suggests that, on average, Mexicans spend more time during the week watching broadcast

14 Introduction television than working, doing household duties or caring for children!5 In comparison to other forms of media consumption, broadcast television indis putably continues to reign supreme, with 64 per cent of men and 69 per cent of women likely to have watched it on an average weekday. The next closest category of media consumption, pay television, lags behind at 24 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively. (After television, the media consumed in descending order of popularity are radio, internet, newspapers, reading books, reading magazines and going to the cinema) (IBOPE 2010: 82). Such figures remind us that the popularity of television has not in any way declined with the multi plication of viewing platforms that has characterized this period.6 The amount of time the typical Mexican spends watching television has steadily increased over the past decade, such that by 2009 he or she was spending 4 hours and 41 minutes each day watching television, while the average Mexican household has a television switched on for over nine hours each day. Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of Mexican television viewing is the heavy predictability of television schedules, and the role that telenovelas in particular play in comprising a large proportion of high rating content (Chapter 2 includes a discussion of the role of the telenovela). Ten of the 15 most watched programmes in 2009 were episodes of telenovelas; the other shows on the list comprised three football broadcasts, one competition finale and one reality show (IBOPE 2010: 25). As Florence Toussaint has argued (Barrera 2010; see also Jara Elías and Garnica Andrade 2007), television programming is so tightly controlled because Televisa acts not only as a broadcaster, but also as the dominant telenovela producer. Consequently, Televisa can fill the schedule with cycles of telenovelas that, while each differs in terms of plot and structure, all fulfil the same sort of role within a television schedule. Thus, the times at which television is most watched are very closely linked to the sorts of programmes that are known to be on at that time. The number of televisions switched on across Mexico increases steadily as the afternoon progresses into the evening, mostly watching telenovelas, and peaking between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., by which time 29.07 per cent of the nation’s televisions are switched on to watch the most heavily promoted telenovela of the evening. Bearing in mind that the average household has two televisions, it seems reasonable to guess that there are many more than 30 per cent of households with at least one television on during the 9 p.m. primetime slot (IBOPE 2010: 22–3). This slot is followed by the 10:30 p.m. news broadcast, also highly watched, after which viewing figures rapidly drop. Nevertheless, even by midnight, more than 20 per cent of televisions are still in use across the country. The account of domestic consumption that we lay out in Chapter 4, then, needs to be understood against this kind of background. This is a very profitable television system, dominated by one major provider who owns both broadcast and cable channels, with strong – not to say inflexible – scheduling protocols producing quite clear patterns of audience behaviours. While largely overlooked in most Anglophone accounts of international television, Mexico is a major international player in the trade in television content as well as a significant

Introduction

15

investor in the media in the United States. As we shall see, however, Mexican television operates in the manner of a relatively discrete national system, addressing an audience of citizens and apparently disinterested in developing a more cosmopolitan or transnational schedule of content. As Chapters 2 and 4, in particular, will demonstrate, Mexico proves a very useful location for our case studies on at least two very different scales: for the examination of how the discourses and structures of the nation still operate as powerful and significant forces within the current media era; and for the examination of the embedding of television consumption into the practices of daily domestic life.

Television in the digital era To pick up that last issue, it is possible to argue that we know even less about the consumption of television and its role in everyday life today than we did during the broadcast era: the mass audience is so often fragmented into smaller taste communities, the process of navigating media choices has become so individua lized, and there has been such an overwhelming focus on following the changes in technologies, platforms and delivery that understanding what actually makes up our experience of television has been put on hold. We see Locating Television as a contribution to the project of bringing our understanding of that experience up to date by providing evidence of the diverse conditions which shape the consumption of television in varied locations around the globe. It has been widely noticed that there is a strong tendency within media and cultural studies which responds to the decline of broadcast television in some markets, and the rise of online platforms more broadly, by concluding that television as we know it is, effectively, ‘over’ (Katz and Scannell 2009). There is also a growing resistance to this tendency. A recent book co edited by one of the authors, Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post broadcast Era (Turner and Tay 2009), is one of the earliest instances of this resistance; it challenged that conclusion by insisting on the diversity of media systems around the world, including those affecting television. Television Studies after TV argued that television was far from dead; rather, its industrial structure and cultural function is becoming more contingent – hence the answer to the question ‘what is television?’, now more than ever, depends on where you are. A second tendency within media and cultural studies, which has responded to the growth of the internet and a putatively ‘global’ online culture, is to suggest that the nation is also ‘over’. That is, the argument goes, since the internet resists national regulatory structures and addresses an audience that is both global and individualized, our examinations of the media should now focus upon the transnational, at one level, and the consuming individual, at another. A corollary to this suggestion is that the role television was once held to have played in building communities – typically, national communities – is over too. In its place, it is said, the interactive and individualizing capacities of digital media are enabling new forms of community to develop. Characteristically, such communities are thought to be displacing those based on location or on

16 Introduction collective political identities – the local, regional or national – with virtual cul tural identities such as those constructed around taste subcultures, fan cultures or online social networks (Hartley 2009). Locating Television contests the compre hensiveness of that proposition as well by demonstrating the importance of detailed, grounded studies of what television does in specific regional and national contexts. The fieldwork on consumption which informs much of this book7 demonstrates the importance of taking television’s locations seriously: not only its geographic or political location within the region or the nation, but also, even more crucially, its location within the patterns of everyday life which shape the cultures of use that develop around the medium in particular domestic environments and historical conjunctures. Locating Television takes an important ‘next step’ for television studies: it addresses the question of ‘what is television now?’ by focusing on specific locations through an interdisciplinary collaboration between cultural studies and cultural anthropology. Despite the well documented ‘ethnographic turn’ in media and cultural studies, and despite the potentials implicit in earlier empirical work such as Morley’s Family Television, it is still the case that there is very little in our field which has taken the time to properly investigate the contemporary uses of television within the context of the practices of everyday life. There are short, or highly specific, ethnographic studies focused on particular issues (the role of gender, for instance), or upon particular technologies (e.g. video recorders); but there is almost nothing which attempts to locate television within the more extensive contexts of consumption and material culture. This book addresses this gap within cultural studies by employing the approaches of cultural anthropology in order to better understand how television is located in the practices of everyday life. While anthropology has fed into television studies in the past, the most substantial examples have involved the application of theories of ritual to understand television’s part in the establishment of social life. As noted earlier, that ceases to be such a crucial consideration for post broadcast television, although the use of anthropology to enable the work on ritual and media events to be developed still constitutes an important legacy (Rothenbuhler 2010: 63). Our project extends that legacy by connecting cultural studies to studies of consumption and material culture. The particular distinction of this book, then, is twofold: methodologically, the collaboration between cultural studies and cultural anthropology offers new ways of studying the consumption of television; and, in terms of the argument it outlines, it retrieves the local experience of television – including a local that is subject to the global and the national – in order to better map and understand television as a set of practices that are complexly determined by the structures and patterns in the lives of those who watch it. The first chapter of this book, ‘Understanding television today’, builds on the introductory remarks we have made here by situating our approach, in a more elaborated way, within the primary coordinates for television, cultural and media studies’ understandings of television at the moment. These include developments such as critical industry studies, production studies, new media

Introduction

17

studies, and digital media studies. Since our approach does run against the grain of much contemporary television studies, we outline what seem to us to be the limitations to the orthodox considerations of television’s possible futures and its competition with digital media. These are the relevant coordinates for television and media studies, but there is, of course, also the other disciplinary context for our approach in this project which is just as important: studies of consumption and material culture that have come from media and cultural anthropology. Without underplaying each of our own disciplinary perspectives, Locating Television sets out to benefit from their combination. There are two significant aspects to this collaboration. The first comes from the commitment to find ways of better understanding the diversity of the performance and consumption of television. We come at this from different disciplinary perspectives but share the view that there is a strong argument to be made for the usefulness of transnational and comparative analysis, not only of the media industries but also of the social and cultural practices which develop around them. This leads us to the second aspect of the approach, which places television in a context which is not solely that of the media. Rather, television is considered as one, admittedly complex, component making up the particular formations of everyday life within the locations we examine. In this chapter we present a brief example of what such an approach looks like through the account of the practices of ‘browsing’ for television in shopping centres. Chapter 2, ‘Television and the nation’, engages with what is now a complicated set of debates about the relationship between the media, the nation state and a national audience or public. There is a long history of discussions of television and the nation within media and cultural studies, much of it focused on questions of nationalism within Western nation states. Much of that work, particularly early on, involved textual analysis, unravelling how particular texts or groups of texts discursively shape the nation for an audience of citizens. However, as we sug gested earlier, the nation dropped off the agenda of television studies, media studies and cultural studies in the West as the rise of the internet was held to challenge its relevance. It has become commonplace to read arguments which depict the processes of globalization and deregulation elbowing the nation out of the way and opening up the mediascape to other, more transnational, more localized and more market based influences. As a result, the relation between television and the nation has attracted less and less attention from media scholars in the West. There are other traditions, however, including media studies written in languages other than English, and these can tell very different stories (for example, Sun and Zhao 2009). In many countries outside the Anglo American West, the relation between television and the nation has continued to be crucial even as it has been reconstituted in new and highly adaptive ways. There is a significant literature on this relation in Mexico, for instance, and we will draw on this in some detail in Chapter 2 to inform our case study of Mexican tele vision. Outside the boundaries of our own research sites, however, there are many more examples: Zala Volcˇ icˇ , for instance, has written about the partner ship between the state and commercial television programming in the former

18

Introduction

Yugoslavia (Volcˇ icˇ 2012; Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic 2011); Marwan Kraidy has described how reality television operates as a site of political contention between audiences and the state over competing versions of modernity within certain Arab states (Kraidy 2010). With these kinds of debates in mind, then, we argue that the nation and nationalism remain as pertinent as ever – even in an era of increased transnationalism. Drawing upon the fieldwork in Mexico, and thus upon our observations of how television and the nation are articulated within the patterns of everyday life within this space, this chapter raises questions (and suggests some answers) about how we need to approach this relation now. Of course, the nation is not the only kind of community in which television plays a role. Indeed, many would suggest that television these days more com monly constructs much smaller, more focused communities – fan communities, for instance. The ‘shared’ nature of the experience of television (Dayan 2010b) remains, in our view, fundamental – not only to television but also to its online competitors. Even in a context where the television audience is highly targeted – as is the case where the choices offered, typically by subscription television platforms, have proliferated – television depends upon its capacity to construct its audience as a community for it to succeed. Chapter 3, ‘Television and community’, argues that this may well be one of the areas where it makes sense to focus on the continuities and similarities between the experience of broadcast television and that provided by the various platforms of the digital era. Even the expansion of choice which is thought to directly fuel the individualization of television consumption raises the question of how this choice is operated: that is, what kinds of communities develop to mediate and contextualize it. After a more general discussion of the notion of community, and its role in the theorizing of television, this chapter investigates some of the longstanding claims about what constitute the definitive components of the experience of television, and tests them against the current range of platforms – broadcast, subscription and online. Underpinning the approach taken in this book is the assumption that it is no longer acceptable to work with a unilateral paradigmatic model of what television does. Rather, the analysis of the function of television must be located and grounded in particular circumstances. These are not just the circumstances of the media’s operating environment in a particular market or regulatory jurisdic tion. Although these are of course crucial considerations, we suggest that they have disproportionately dominated the literature which has mapped the course of television in the digital era. What the prominence of these considerations has displaced, we suggest, are considerations that are at least as important: the practices, routines and affordances which structure everyday life in each location. Chapter 4, ‘Television, domestic space and the moral economy of the family’, takes on the task of demonstrating what we might learn from retrieving the importance of these considerations by situating our discussion of television within the specific research location of Chetumal, a regional city in the southeast of Mexico. This city, and this country, have their own national, regional and local histories; the people who live there have patterns of custom and ritual, as

Introduction

19

well as formal domestic structures which organize their lives, how their daily activities over space and time are structured and regulated, and so on. In this chapter, through an ethnographic study of television and everyday life in this particular location, we demonstrate how that broad framework of analysis allows us to narrow our focus from the space of the nation to the space of the street and then into the home in order to explain what function television serves for its audiences on a daily basis. The approach we take to our topic in Chapter 5 is quite different to that taken in the rest of the book. Rather than zooming in further upon a specific location, this chapter pulls back to focus upon an overarching discursive frame work that plays an important role in how television is understood in all its various locations. Our starting point is the observation that television, for most of its history, has operated as a powerful vehicle for the discourses of modernity. In the beginning it was the key signifier of the power of modern technology; later on, it offered the capacity for modern societies to construct community in new, transnational and despatialized, ways. Most recently, the modernity of television has taken on some new dimensions, particularly in its enhanced capacity to shrink distance and connect us to other locations, other nations, in real time. As the media anthropologist Richard Wilk’s (2002) work has shown, the introduc tion of live transnational television into developing countries in Latin America has had an interesting temporal effect, connecting the local audience with what he calls ‘TV time’, breaking the links between geographic distance and what is perceived as a cultural time lag. Breaking these links appears to connect these communities to a desired modernity. Modernity is not always desired, however, or at least not necessarily in the form in which it is most easily acquired; for instance, in those cases where the discourse of modernity seems to be a vehicle for political and cultural assumptions identified with the West. So, in countries where there is concern about the political and cultural influence of the West, television can become a key site for a battle between competing modernities. This can be a battle of considerable cultural significance, with much at stake. Of particular interest here is the recent expansion of the global trade in television formats: while on the one hand this trade might imply an increasing acceptance of transnationalism, on the other hand their importation almost always involves negotiation aimed at balancing the degree of indigenizing adaptation against the control exercised by the foreign owners of the format. There has been consider able academic discussion of the global trade in reality television formats and the politics of their adaptation outside the West (Fung 2008; Moran 2009b). Chapter 5, ‘Television and the desire for modernity’, responds to this work by examining more broadly how the consumption of television has been articu lated to (or perhaps disarticulated from) these discourses of modernity, and consequently how the battle between competing modernities has affected the role that television has played, particularly in non Western contexts. This book raises a broad range of issues, tracked across a large number of very different locations. As the conclusion, Chapter 6 will gather the insights and find ings that have emerged from each of the perspectives taken in the earlier chapters

20 Introduction through reviewing the usefulness of the concept of the zones of consumption as a means of more accurately and contingently locating television within time, space and the practices of everyday life. In addition, this concluding chapter provides an opportunity for us to reflect on what the interdisciplinary collaboration between cultural studies and cultural anthropology has taught us. We have no doubt that this is a collaboration which has enabled each of us to put our name to a book that neither of us could have written alone; simply, it has extended our intellectual, analytic and empirical reach. It is also worth noting that our collaboration was something of an act of faith; as we suggest in Chapter 1, while there are fundamentally persuasive reasons why the perspec tives of cultural studies and anthropology should complement and enrich each other, there are very few examples of collaborations where such a possibility has been tested. Consequently, in addition to presenting the argument for such a collaboration in the first chapter of this book, we also make use of the conclusion to discuss what, in practice, we have found to be the benefits and the disadvantages of this approach – both from the perspective of our respective disciplines and from the perspective of the project as a whole.

1

Understanding television today

Locating television Towards the end of our Introduction, we suggested that television studies may actually know less about the consumption of television and its role in every day life today than it did during the ‘broadcast era’.1 That may seem like a slightly surprising statement, given the level of activity in publishing and research on television and new media over the last decade or so. Debate about the functions and futures of new technologies, new platforms, new global trade economies, and new sites of production has been vigorous and extensive. Much of this work, however, has been dominated by consideration of the possible or likely futures of television rather than by detailed examinations of present practices around television. What we mean to highlight through that comment is the disparity between the confidence that accompanied cultural studies’ accounts of the relation between television and culture in such key texts of the 1980s as John Fiske’s Television Culture (Fiske 1987) or Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas (Ang 1985), and the confidence we might have in the authority and comprehensiveness of more contemporary accounts. As we noted in the Introduction, both the industrial and the academic context for these accounts have seen dramatic changes. The earlier texts addressed a relatively standardized environment in which broadcasting reigned supreme, network schedules gathered a mass audience nightly and regulatory structures positioned television as a national system. As a result, the pioneers of television studies assumed, perhaps legitimately, a general applicability for much of what they said about television within the English speaking world and across most of the West. Hence, the clustering of debates about television audiences which focused on the formation of the citizen, the construction of consensus or variations on the model of the ‘bardic function’ of television as the voice of a largely national community. At roughly the same time, early anthropological accounts of television’s introduction into groups that had previously only loosely identified with national communities approached televi sion from a complementary nationalist focus – such as in Kottak’s ground breaking 19892 study of television in rural Brazil. Such literature suggested that television’s potential to create national communities in newly formed nations,

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Understanding television today

or to bring marginal groups into developing nations, could be as powerful outside the West as within it (Kottak 2009; Foster 2002). The situation and the debates are significantly different now; it is undeniable that there have been major and widespread shifts in what is variously described as the post broadcast, post network, multichannel or post digital environment. Some of these shifts have been so dramatic, and their possible implications so interesting, that contemporary scholarship has been dominated by the task of coming to terms with them. Much of the resulting work, however, is relatively unreflective about the highly contingent and diverse character and effects of these changes in different locations. In particular, there has been a marked con centration upon the US environment – both because it is the default location for analysis by US American scholars and because it has been (in our view, mistakenly) assumed as a likely model for the evolution of television elsewhere.3 As a result, there is still a great deal for contemporary television studies to learn about what is actually happening elsewhere. That said, it is important to acknowledge that, of course, we do know quite a lot about certain aspects of television today: in particular, research, debate and analysis has concentrated on mapping the changing technologies, and the shifts in programme content, format and provision as the multichannel environment developed, expanded and, unevenly, globalized. In terms of mapping the changes in technology, there is now an enormous literature on the digital, on new media, and on television’s convergence with the online environment. Much of this work is necessarily and usefully descriptive, as it struggles to keep up with an industry which is mutating and innovating at an extraordinary pace. Some of it is also highly speculative. A relatively common strategy in both the academic literature and in media commentary is to draw on particular instances of new media’s take up in order to predict what kinds of futures this new development might generate right across the media. There are limits to what such a strategy can tell us. Nonetheless, the interest in new possibilities has helped to open up new areas of exploration. The attention paid to the prolifera tion of digital platforms of delivery has contributed to a climate which is very receptive to new work on the industrial and commercial structures behind these emerging platforms. The writing of political economies of global media has been revitalized through such studies as Michael Curtin’s work on ‘media capitals’ (Curtin 2004) and on the emergence of the Chinese market for television (Curtin 2007). There is a relation between this kind of interest and the new forms of critical industry analysis developed by, among others, Tim Havens, Amanda Lotz and Serra Tinic (Havens et al. 2009). Furthermore, while we might be sceptical about the actual scale and provenance of the much vaunted blurring of the consumption/production divide enabled by digital media (Bruns 2008; Hartley 2009), that development has contributed to a new burst of interest in studying the mutating processes of production for television and its related platforms, which has in turn contributed to a climate in which the relatively new enterprise of production studies (Caldwell 2008; Mayer et al. 2009a) has prospered.

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Slightly less influential than the ‘digital turn’, so far, but still worth noting, is the ongoing internationalization of television studies. Dating back to at least the beginning of this century, there has been a steady growth in the amount of published work in English that deals with non Western media in general (Curran and Park 2000; Thussu 2007), and television has been a major part of that development. Much of the resulting discussion has dealt with particular programming formats – reality TV in particular – but there has also been a significant increase in the resources available to those interested in a more comparative transnational view of the contemporary state of television. Work on Asian and Arab television (Thomas 2005; Keane et al. 2007; Sakr 2007; Kraidy and Khalil 2009), for instance, has been particularly useful in troubling some of the master narratives in Western cultural, media and television studies mentioned in our Introduction. As we will discuss later in this chapter, from the 1980s onwards parallel developments were occurring in anthropology as that discipline became consumed, and to some degree transformed, by an increasing necessity to come to terms with theorizing culture in contexts that included an array of mass media forms. There is reason to believe that the emphasis upon studying the new platforms for delivery, on the one hand, and recent transnational trends in programming and formats, on the other, has resulted in a certain de contextualization, perhaps even a de territorialization, of television: disconnecting it from the specific locations and communities in which it functions. This may not be too much of a problem for those wanting to focus on shifts in technology, nor perhaps for those who are interested primarily in examining a particular genre of television texts, but it does constrain our capacity to talk about what television does as a sociocultural form, as a cultural institution, as a material object and as a multi faceted component of our everyday domestic lives. Talking about these aspects of what television does, a conversation that was for many years effectively the default setting for television studies is now less common because it is now much more difficult. For instance, the extent to which television, in many locations, has mutated in ways that no longer make it entirely appropriate to think of it as a national institution, plays an important role in increasing the degree of difficulty. As a result, as Charlotte Brunsdon has said, it is much less clear what stories will be told about television, what contexts are relevant and how we should interpret and understand its own stories, when those constitutive connections between medium and nation are more attenuated, when the noise has been stripped away, and the stories have been repackaged to travel the world. (Brunsdon 2010: 73) Television studies is still in the process of responding to this situation as it transitions from the broadcast era to a much more complicated present. Brunsdon’s comment reminds us that one of the things that television’s institutional origins did was to thoroughly anchor the medium in its location,

24 Understanding television today necessitating close attention to the rationales used to justify the nation’s investment in television’s definition, development, industrial structure and regulation. Such rationales were based on specific claims about television’s social and cultural function, as well as the proposition of its importance as a part of the nation state’s communications and information infrastructure. Deregulation, commercialization and a redefinition of television that emphasized its function as a medium of entertainment have combined with the massive expansion of provision in many locations to pull up this anchor. Where this has occurred (and there is still much work to be done to establish just how widespread this pattern actually is), questions about television’s location and sociocultural function have become less prominent. Nonetheless, the argument we make in this book is that the question of location remains fundamental. This is not only in relation to the project of understanding television today, but it is increasingly evident in the concerns that have influenced the theore tical development of a number of humanities and social science disciplines. The theorization of space and place is one of the growth areas in cultural studies, cultural geography, anthropology and sociology in recent years. Among the earliest to apply these developments to the examination of the media is David Morley’s Home Territories (Morley 2000), which took up the challenge of properly investigating, through media, what had happened to the idea of the home in the era of postmodernity when so much attention was focused on forms of mobility. We are entirely sympathetic to his response to that challenge: If the transformations in communications and transport networks char acteristic of our period, involving various forms of mediation, displacement and de territorialization are generally held to have transformed our sense of place, their theorization has often proceeded at a highly abstract level, towards a generalized account of nomadology. Recent critiques of the ‘EurAmcentric’ nature of most postmodern theory point to the dangers of such inappropriately universalized frameworks of analysis. My aim here is to open up the analysis of the varieties of rootedness, exile, diaspora, dis placement, connectedness and/or mobility, experienced by members of groups in a range of socio geographical positions. (3) Morley goes on to ground his examination of national and transnational iden tities in the domestic micro processes through which ‘the smaller units which make up that larger community [i.e. the nation] are themselves constituted’. He argues that ‘the articulation of the domestic household into the “symbolic family” of the nation (or wider group) can best be understood by focusing on the role of media and communications technologies’ (3). In his study, then, the home and the family (variously defined) provide the starting points for examining both the construction of place and the function of the media. Morley’s study remains relatively unusual, even though Elanda Levine has recently suggested that ‘as scholars of media and culture continue to explore the significance of

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place, of geographies – both virtual and actual – of communities and identities in a globalized world, questions of location have become increasingly significant to media studies’ (Levine 2009: 154). We agree that questions of location are of fundamental importance, but we would suggest that they are still minor considerations in most accounts of television today. In the opening chapter of his edited collection, Re Locating Television: Television in the Digital Context, Jostein Gripsrud (2010a) presents one response to this situation. While recognizing that there is no longer an agreed basis for understanding the political, social and cultural role of television today, Gripsrud’s collection investigates some options for generating that under standing. Resisting the more speculative possibilities advanced by the digital media enthusiasts, while nonetheless acknowledging the significance of the changes that are continuing to occur, Gripsrud argues that there is still a point to thinking about how even a thoroughly transformed television might be located within the public sphere. It would be a very different public sphere, though, to the one we experienced under an earlier formation of the media. In the truly multichannel markets, television viewers are spread across hundreds of channels, while also watching TV off schedule through time shifting technologies; in such a context, even where there are large audiences, they are not necessarily experiencing anything like old fashioned ‘mass’ consumption. Although, Gripsrud acknowledges, this may be a problem for advertisers, it may be less of a problem for those whose primary interest is to maintain a functioning public sphere, towards which all weak publics and all subaltern counterpublics gravitate in order to effectively critique or influence decisions affecting all society. (21) Even when an expanded menu of choices is available, Gripsrud argues that, in practice, the audience is not quite so diverse, nor their choices so numerous, as the expanded provision might imply. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, audiences ‘flock regularly to a quite limited number of channels’, but ‘only rarely visit the many dozens of others’ (21). Drawing on a comparison with the diverse national publics which make up the European community, he argues that even within that context there is a political and discursive space in which an ensemble of publics can discuss common concerns within ‘a shared frame of relevance’ (21). Similarly, he says, ‘the coherence of multi channel national public spheres, in multi ethnic societies, can arguably be maintained along similar lines’. Downplaying the dangers of what Sunstein describes as ‘cyber balkanization’ – the accelerating fragmentation of online publics – Gripsrud argues that there are grounds for some confidence in the ‘continued existence of a relatively centralized and uniting broadcast television system … together with a degree of centralization on the internet’ (21). Gripsrud has been consistently sceptical about the apocalyptic predictions that come from those who see the digital era ‘changing everything’ (Shirky 2008).

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Also, he has been an advocate of what is effectively the public service mission of the media (Gripsrud 2004), the core benefits of the broadcast era: universal, free access to information and to a public conversation. In this essay, though, he also acknowledges that the effective functioning of the public sphere depends on much more than simply the provision of an accessible television service. He refers to Couldry, Livingstone and Markham’s research on ‘public connection’ (Couldry et al. 2007), a large study which maps its subjects’ media consumption against their engagement with public social and political issues, and which finds a ‘weakening connection’ to the political public sphere: On the basis of national empirical research, Nick Couldry, Sonia Living stone and Tim Markham (2007) have expressed concern about a lack of ‘public connection’ in an increasing proportion of the population. Public connection is the minimal precondition of at least periodical attention to what goes on in the central processes of democracy, in the political public sphere. There are many signs that such a connection may be lacking among increasing numbers of people in the Western world. (22) To understand this requires more than just an examination of the media. Accordingly, Gripsrud suggests that what is needed to grasp the real significance of today’s media developments, with a view to the functioning of a democratic public sphere, is to start by situating ourselves and our media within a wider socio historical context and study our chosen area of special interest against that background. (23) To some extent, the essays which make up the rest of his collection respond to that suggestion but overall they still conform to the dominant patterns of approaches and interests we described at the beginning of this chapter. Gripsrud’s proposal for rethinking how television might be located within a diversifying post digital public sphere is important, however, and remains an active question for the future agenda of television studies. While our titles may seem similar, our project in this book differs significantly from that which motivates Re Locating Television. The location Gripsrud addresses is a public media space – what he talks of as a public sphere – whereas we are also looking at actual physical places. At the broadest level these are spaces that are geo politically and physically defined but they are not necessarily nation states: the home, the locality or the region may be just as relevant as a means of delineating the location we wish to examine. Our approach emphasizes the necessity, though, of locating television within particular political, cultural, historical or geographic spaces. The point of using a notion such as ‘zones of consumption’ is to recognize that the actual construction of the location within which the consumption of television occurs is itself contingent, conjunctural and instantiated.

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Our emphasis on consumption constitutes another difference between the approach taken in this book and that taken in Grisprud’s collection. We argue that the uses of television and new media need to be understood within the structure of everyday life. Not only does this involve attention to the domestic micro processes of habit and behaviour that make up our performance of every day life, but it also involves, for instance, considering television as a component of material culture as well as a medium of representation. Also, in Chapter 4, we locate the consumption of television within what, following Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley (1992), we describe as the domestic moral economy – the rules and structures and understandings that regulate and organize domestic life. In our view, these are important dimensions of experience that are missing from the dominant concerns of contemporary television studies but which are highlighted by a ‘non mediacentric form of media studies’; the result is a better understanding of ‘the variety of ways in which old and new media accommodate to each other and coexist in symbolic forms and also how … we live with them as parts of our personal or household “media ensemble”’ (Morley 2007: 200). That household ‘media ensemble’ is just one of a number of zones of consumption upon which we focus our attention in this book as a means of accounting for television’s imbrication into everyday life, for the kinds of social and cultural function it performs, and the kinds of social spaces it inhabits or generates.

Cultural studies, the media and anthropology Much recent discussion of what has been called, after Henry Jenkins (2006), ‘convergence culture’, has pointed to the need for a greater ‘sociological’ or ‘anthropological’ dimension to the accounts of contemporary media in general. In 2011, Nick Couldry and James Hay co edited a special issue of Cultural Studies (4–5) which included a number of articles putting this case. Couldry’s own article (Couldry 2011) argued that the standard accounts of the convergence between television, online and telecommunications media had blurred ‘important processes of differentiation and stratification’, and that this had effectively blocked our ‘understanding of the politics of convergence’. If we are going to develop a more informed understanding of this situation, Couldry says, we require ‘a better sociological and cultural analysis of what people are doing with and around media’ (498). Media anthropologist, S. Elizabeth Bird (2012), in her contribution to this issue, makes a similar point when criticizing how the more optimistic Western models of consumption – emphasizing audience empower ment and the democratization of media systems – are normatized in what purport to be ‘global’ accounts of media convergence. Without more detailed research of the kind Couldry is suggesting, Bird argues, the promotion of convergence culture is in danger of misunderstanding ‘not only … the importance of non web based audience practices, especially in non Western countries, but also of the continuing power of media industries’ (502). Bird is particularly critical of the narrow focus on online versions of convergence culture. Reminding us of Anna Cristina Pertierra’s study of the use of mobile hard drives for the

28 Understanding television today unofficial circulation of television in Cuba (Pertierra 2012), Bird emphasizes that the ‘online environment is not the only form of evolving digital technology that facilitates creative, even subversive, media practices’ (510). Most importantly, for our purposes in designing our own project, Bird recommends the use of multi and cross disciplinary methodological approaches to understanding contemporary media that give due regard to the gathering of independent empirical data as well as to media theory and industry opinion: ‘today, audience scholarship needs to be informed by critical analyses of media economy, as well as rich, ethnographic studies that explore the complexity of interrelated online and offline practices in specific global circumstances’ (518), she says. These are among the issues that have influenced our choice of research approach. The main basis for our decision to collaborate in writing this book was our understanding that media today necessarily involved the close consideration of specific case studies. Such case studies would generate detailed information about how that particular zone of consumption was structured, composed and operated; that pro cess would involve, as we indicated earlier, the informed selection of relevant considerations ranging from the domestic moral economy, to the structure of the media industries, to the manner in which television consumption was articulated to the locality or the state. In order for the selection of the relevant considerations to be neither routine nor arbitrary, ethnographic fieldwork seemed necessary to complement the standard consultation of the related academic and popular literature, if we wanted to properly understand how television was imbricated into the practices of everyday life within that zone of consumption. As is often the case for anthropological fieldwork, the scale of the task – and its historical reliance upon the participant observation of one or very few researchers at a time – prompted us to privilege the benefits of doing in depth research in just one place over the alternative strategy of, say, sampling a wider array of settings. In choosing the location for the case study, we believed that it was important to select a developed media market that was not one of the ‘usual suspects’ – that is, we wanted a location that had not featured promi nently in the Western accounts of television in recent years. Effectively, that meant seeking a market that was not English speaking, and that was not British, US American, European or Australian. It also meant seeking a market that was, in a sense, relatively unremarkable within its own national or regional context – not especially known for its cosmopolitanism or for idiosyncratic conditions of either consumption or production. We did not want an undeveloped or immature media market because we did not want our conclusions to be about a process of development. The choice of Mexico as our fieldwork site has, then, been a very considered one. It is a large and well developed media market, with a thriving production industry that exerts some dominance in the Latin American region. Its placement within that geo linguistic region meant that we might expect the role of the nation and of nationalism to be mediated or at least complicated by regional factors; consequently, it seemed a likely location through which we might learn about the processes of media globalization. The choice of the small regional city of Chetumal as our specific site, rather

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than the metropolis of Mexico City, was related to our interest in the mundane and the everyday rather than in either the cosmopolitan or the iconically national. This book draws on a large range of locations from our broader project, not only that of Chetumal, but none of these have been the subject of such an immersive research process as the nine months of participant observation that Anna undertook in Chetumal in 2008/9.4 Although the non ethnographic approach to other locations discussed in this book produced their own kinds of valuable insights, we believe that the depth of the Mexican fieldwork provides us with a baseline of research data that informs more than just the arguments one might make specifically about that location; the case study also produces more broadly applicable insights into how we can learn about the locatedness of television – insights from which the whole research field might benefit. The issues we wanted to address in our attempts to ‘locate’ television – the need for empirical research, a holistic understanding of the sociohistorical context in which television is consumed, a focus on experiences of the everyday, and the central concern with location and community – are precisely the sorts of topics upon which the field of anthropology, and its traditional methodological cornerstone of long term ethnographic fieldwork, has so much to offer. Cultural studies has had a long and complicated relationship with anthropology, although it will only rarely have been expressed in terms of a collaboration between disciplines. The beginnings of cultural studies, embedded as they are in the structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, are heavily indebted to Lévi Strauss (The Raw and the Cooked is one of the standard sources of cultural studies’ early theorizing of culture), and a little later on to Barthes’ semiotic analyses of material culture. The model of culture that cultural studies developed can easily be seen as an appro priation or modification of the anthropological concept of culture, even though Raymond Williams (1983: 87–93), in Keywords, suggests that it is conventional to distinguish between them by presenting anthropology as dealing with material culture and cultural studies as dealing with signifying systems or the symbolic. That distinction, if it ever really existed, has been thoroughly dissolved now as both disciplines have mutated. A more substantive distinction between the respective disciplines’ characteristic subject matter – between cultural studies’ focus on contemporary Western metropolitan culture, and anthropology’s focus on supposedly pre modern, non Western traditional, cultures – has now also dissolved. The influence upon both fields from increasingly interdisciplinary areas of research such as consumption studies, among other examples, has con tributed to a situation where Daniel Miller’s 1995 description of an anthropological version of culture that had moved beyond what he called its ‘latent primitivism’ could as easily be a description of certain kinds of cultural studies: culture itself will no longer be regarded as an attribute to be lost or gained, but rather as a process or struggle by which all peoples of the world attempt to make sense of the world and make claims to social and material forms and institutions integral to the process by which we make ourselves. (Miller 1995a: 269)

30 Understanding television today Consequently, there is considerable overlap between the territories explored by the two disciplinary approaches even while there remain equally considerable methodological differences. This apparent commonality is not necessarily welcomed by either discipline, of course; it is perhaps precisely this overlap of intellectual territory that has led anthropologists and cultural studies scholars to work more often in parallel, or in debate, than in collaboration. Cultural studies is renowned for raiding other disciplines for their methodologies, and anthro pology has understandably felt, from time to time, that the cuckoo in its nest has acquired a higher profile and greater recognition than it deserves. None theless, it is true that cultural studies’ exploration of territory that anthropology had initially eschewed may have influenced anthropology to take more ser iously the possibility that their discipline should pay greater attention to understanding contemporary metropolitan Western cultures. As the new humanities developed over the 1980s and 1990s, and as dis ciplinary boundaries generally became more porous in the humanities and social sciences, the influences exerted upon the broad field of cultural theory by key figures in anthropology (among them Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz and George Marcus) became quite pervasive. Occasionally that influence becomes explicit and direct. The so called ‘ethnographic turn’ in media and cultural studies is the most obvious of these, where television audience studies embraced the concept, if not always the practice, of ‘thick description’. There is also the long running interest in the ‘practice of everyday life’ which informs both disciplines. In cultural studies, the key theoretical models are drawn from Lefebvre and de Certeau; they enter the mainstream of cultural studies through John Fiske’s (1989) ‘readings’ of popular culture and the subsequent fashion for theorizing consumption as a mode of resistance (which, in turn, prepares the ground for cultural studies’ interest in consumption studies). A more anthro pological version of the analysis of everyday life directly informs the approach of a contemporary cultural studies scholar such as Ben Highmore (2011), although in Joe Moran’s (2005) work the cultural studies tendency is to tex tualize everyday life in order to ‘read’ it. That said, Moran has very different objectives in mind to a predecessor such as John Fiske; it is the routine, not the resistant that interests Moran: as he puts it, this is ‘a vast area of social life whose very “boringness” makes it a significant arena for an unacknowledged cultural politics’ (11). These are, then, explicit connections, but it is also relatively common for researchers from each of these disciplines to simply visit each other’s bibliographies from time to time when research interests coincide. In general, however, the anthropological influence on cultural studies’ approaches to media and television in particular remains patchy and sporadic. In media studies, as noted in our introduction, one of the most substantial contributions is Dayan and Katz’s classic study of media events (Dayan and Katz 1992). The insights from this study have now been superseded by changes to the media industries and their relation to the state. Rather than operating as a medium of national integration, Dayan acknowledged recently, ‘as new media technology multiplies the number of channels, television has become a medium

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of segmentation and television as we knew it continues to disappear’ (Dayan 2010a: 25). Media events, he suggests, now offer less of a ‘communal experi ence’, in a context where the very notion of ‘a shared social experience’ has waned (28). So, while it has lost a great deal of its relevance now, anthropology was important to Dayan and Katz’s original enterprise (Rothenbuhler 2010: 63). A more recent example comes from the development of the new field of production studies. Here, ethnomethodology is used extensively – not in the slightly haphazard manner often identified with the ethnographic turn in audience studies, but in a manner that is more thoroughly grounded in the actual experience of those studied (Mayer 2009: 19). Among the benefits of such an approach is its capacity to recover the diversity and contingency of that experience: The cultural turn in the social sciences and the ethnographic turn in the humanities over the past three decades have pushed researchers to look at cultural production with new eyes. … Ethnomethodologies, while multiplying the possible stories about how people make meaning in societies, have also complicated the generalizing claims that scholars used to make about the unique role of media in the world. What seemed like the mass appropria tion of media technologies and their contents was actually distributed unequally through societies and communities organized along fault lines of class, gender, race and host of other cultural distinctions. (Mayer et al. 2009b: 3) A similar point – but in this case more specifically aimed at connecting the discussion of contemporary changes in media institutions and practices with the broader field of cultural consumption – is made by Maxwell and Miller, quoting the anthropologist Néstor García Canclini: The fusion of multimedia and concentrated media ownership in cultural production correlate[s] with changes in cultural consumption. Therefore macrosociological approaches which seek to understand the integration of radio, television, music, news, books, and the internet in the fusion of multimedia and business, also need an anthropological gaze, a more qualitative perspective, to comprehend how modes of access, cultural goods, and forms of communication are being reorganized. (Maxwell and Miller 2011: 586) In recent decades, that ‘anthropological gaze’ has indeed been productively directed at the media, although this has gone largely unnoticed by some working in media studies. While in 1993 anthropologist Debra Spitulnik was able to surmise that ‘There is as yet no “anthropology of mass media”’ (Spitulnik 1993: 293), over the course of the following decade a steady growth in the number of anthropologists whose attention turned specifically to the production, consumption, appropriation and implications of media in various cultural

32 Understanding television today contexts means that a significant body of work can now be described as ‘media anthropology’. Such work connects with, and often specifically addresses or intervenes in, debates in cultural and media studies. Thus, a frequent approach adopted by a number of anthropologists who published anthropological research on television in the 1990s was to review what was then the current state of play in media and cultural studies debates about the political sig nificance of popular culture, and the active (and at times resistant) capacities of audiences, before proceeding to outline how such debates could be enriched by anthropologists. In her ethnography of North Indian television viewers, Purnima Mankekar takes up questions posed by Stuart Hall and David Morley and extends them by situating such debates over television within the specific sociohistorical context of India: I wish to highlight the fact that the viewer is positioned not simply by the text but also by a whole range of other discourses, with those of gender and nationalism being dominant in Indian television. And by studying the different ways in which viewers actively engage with what they watch, we can break away from theories of popular culture that foreclose the process of interpretation in the production of meaning, … or analyses in which the subject’s position is dictated by the text. (Mankekar 1993: 557) Similarly, Lisa Rofel’s study of the Chinese television melodrama Yearnings argues for the value of ethnographic research to answer important questions that had been discussed, but with unsatisfying limitations, within media and cultural studies: By defining popular culture as a site, one can acknowledge the power of the aesthetic while also tracing a television soap opera as a place where audiences, producers, and critics shape a variety of potentially conflicting ideas. To capture this intertwined existence, one needs to proceed through ethnographic endeavour. By ethnographic endeavour, however, I mean attention to the contingent way in which all social categories emerge, become naturalized, and intersect in people’s conception of themselves and their world, and further, an emphasis on how these categories are produced through everyday practice. (Rofel 1994: 703) As earlier discussion in this chapter has indicated – and as we will consider in Chapter 2 with reference to television and the nation – while television studies research in the 1990s may have taken only limited notice of such contributions from anthropologists, as part of a broader ‘ethnographic turn’ across media and cultural studies, more recently many television scholars have come to similar sorts of conclusions themselves about the benefits of conjunctural and contextually specific research. That said, the primary audience to whom such anthropologists

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as Mankekar and Rofel were addressing their interventions was that of other anthropologists, great numbers of whom still seemed determined at that stage to limit their engagement with the cultural consequences of mass media, even while mainstream cultural anthropology was in the grips of quite transformative debates about the nature of (post)modern ethnographic research and writing (see, for example, Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rosaldo 1993). However, even though groups of anthropologists and their conferences and publications had marked out a recognizable subfield of ‘media anthropology’ by the early 2000s, such media anthropologists have continued to write to these two parallel audiences; on the one hand, trying to argue for a richer and deeper con textualization of media practices than they typically see in media studies’ approaches, while on the other hand remaining deeply involved in mainstream anthropological debates by advocating for the acknowledgement of media related artefacts and practices as important and authentic points from which one can theorize culture. It should be acknowledged that in certain institutions and among certain networks of researchers, in the United Kingdom in particular, the inter disciplinary collaborations and exchanges between cultural and media studies and anthropologists working in such areas as consumption and material culture has meant that media anthropology, and anthropological literature more broadly, has long been incorporated into studies of television. Perhaps the best example of this was the work of Roger Silverstone and David Morley with anthropologist Eric Hirsch on domestic media technologies (Silverstone et al. 1992) and the contribution of anthropologist Daniel Miller to interdisciplinary research on consumption, material culture, media and new media technologies (Miller 1995a; Miller and Slater 2003, 2009). Just as importantly, in Latin America, unlike most of the English speaking world, anthropologists have been among the leading researchers of mass media and everyday life, including (and especially) within contexts of large urban metropoles. In many ways, these Latin American researchers have been well ahead of more recent developments in both anthropology and cultural studies in the Anglo American academy as they have been, since the 1980s, coming to terms with the cultural con sequences of neoliberalism and globalization with work that does not shy away from making large theoretical pronouncements, but which is also very expli citly grounded in empirical and/or ethnographic research. In particular, the work of Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín Barbero, based in Mexico and Colombia, respectively, has been acknowledged both within and beyond Latin American scholarship, providing as they do (in their own ways) studies that document the increasing importance of mass media and visual culture – television in particular, but also cinema, literature, art and new media – in a world that is increasingly mediated. While García Canclini, Martín Barbero and their colleagues are explicitly interested in using their work to address national and regional debates and problems, their approaches have also become increasingly used in media anthropology and media studies that do not deal specifically with Latin America.

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The comparatively recent emergence of media anthropology has been an important example of how the ‘appropriate’ subjects of anthropology have moved on from earlier traditions of the discipline; in contemporary anthro pological scholarship, media is no longer ‘almost a taboo topic’, ‘too redolent of Western modernity for a field identified with tradition, the non Western, and the vitality of the local’ (Ginsberg et al. 2002: 3). Of course, many media anthropologists draw from such traditional strengths of anthropological research as its tendency to examine sites outside of the mainstream of media and cultural studies accounts of media systems: cross cultural trade between the First and Third World, for instance, or the strategies for preserving the local in ‘out of the way places’. In a context where, as we have noted, there is far too strong a centrifugal pull towards the model of media development in the United States, this has meant that media anthropology has come up with very different kinds of insights to those produced by other traditions of media studies. The media uses they examine may be ‘off the map of dominant media cartographies’ but, Ginsberg et al. argue, they are no less important for that. As we have found ourselves in our collaboration on this project: [anthropologists’] documentation of local uses and meanings of media and of comparative political economies of media production and consumption (including the constraints posed by the unreliability of electricity and the vicissitudes of poverty) suggests the persistence of difference and the importance of locality while highlighting the forms of inequality that continue to structure our world. (Ginsberg et al. 2002: 24–5) But anthropological insights into the role of media in the contemporary world are by no means limited to studies of small or marginal communities in seemingly exotic locales – although all anthropologists would of course argue that such studies should be seen as necessary rather than peripheral to a genuinely developed field of media studies. Ethnographies of media production and consumption are as likely to include urban dwellers, shoppers in middle class malls or coders and hackers as they are to focus on tribal communities, peasant households or indigenous peoples. Notwithstanding these positive developments, it remains common for television studies in the West to draw upon a relatively narrow evidential base for its conclusions; the simple narrative line that shapes so many of the future pro jections in this field is at least partly a product of the selection of the locations from which the analysis is drawn. Indeed, it is still the case that much of the work to come from the heartlands of television studies – the United States, United Kingdom and Europe – tends to spend very little time acknowledging the specificity of the context for the situation under examination. That media anthropologists have let such an oversight go largely unchallenged is perhaps due to the massively increased focus within media anthropology – much as for their counterparts in media and cultural studies – upon the rise of new media

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technologies, social networks and digital media practices (Coleman 2010). Such a focus, while important, has led to anthropology, as much as any other discipline, neglecting the continuing, complex and transforming importance of television in everyday life. A greater trade between what these studies produce and those produced within the mainstream of media and cultural studies would have a positively de centring effect at a time when that is precisely what is needed.

Browsing for televisions Earlier on, we referred to Raymond Williams’ distinction between an anthro pological and a cultural studies version of culture: the first focused on material culture, the second on representation and the symbolic. While we refuse that distinction, we realize that to take up the perspectives of the study of material culture in our examination of the function of television constitutes a relatively novel step. There are precursors, of course – most significantly in Anglophone media studies, Lynn Spigel’s (1992) landmark cultural history of television’s insertion into domestic space in the US family, and Silverstone and Hirsch’s (1992) interdisciplinary edited collection on the moral economy of domestic media technologies. In anthropology, too, a number of scholars have suggested that it is worthwhile exploring the physical and aesthetic properties of media technologies – to treat them as material objects; Ondina Fachel Leal (1990), for example, develops Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of consumption as an assertion of class distinction by examining the selection and placement of domestic fur nishings around the television set in working class and middle class homes in Brazil. In quite another way, Rudi Colloredo Mansfield (2003) takes instances of the television set’s presence in Andean households as a starting point to consider how the consumption of material goods manifests much deeper understandings of the interactions between the human and the non human in the natural world. But more typically, when the role of television as a material object in the home is discussed, it is often in a context of people’s first or ear liest experiences of introducing television sets into a house; Spigel’s history certainly looks at the early years of television in the US home, while many of the anthropological accounts also consider the impact of television’s introduc tion to a pre television culture, whether in impoverished, remote or marginal communities. Perhaps television as a material presence in the home becomes much harder to analyse once it has quite literally become ‘part of the furniture’; generations of families, not only in middle class or Western cultural contexts, have no experience of the household without a television in it. The entry point of television sets into our lives therefore may not seem remarkable, and yet figures show that at least in terms of purchasing decisions, television sets are an extraordinarily important and prioritized ‘piece of the furniture’ in most households, whether among the urban poor of low income countries or the middle classes of the world’s richest economies. So, although a more detailed examination of the material presence of televisions in households will be

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explored in Chapter 4, we would like to make a short excursion into the electronics stores, supermarkets and shopping malls of southeastern Mexico, to consider one of many social practices that to us must be understood to really start locating television in everyday life; that of browsing for televisions. In considering what browsing for televisions involves, and how it links consumption practices to the everyday experience of media in the home, we also hope that this approach, which draws from consumption and material culture studies, will be an effective way of demonstrating what some of the outcomes of our cross disciplinary collaboration can look like. In the small city of Chetumal, near the Mexican border with Belize, the opening of the Plaza Las Américas shopping mall in 2004 was a significant event.5 Although Chetumal had a commercial precinct in the older part of the city centre, as well as a number of supermarkets, electronics and medium sized retail outlets, the Plaza Las Américas was the first true shopping mall, comprising a large supermarket, upscale department store, a food court, local, national and international fast food and family restaurant chains and a cinema complex, alongside numerous smaller retail operations. The mall is air conditioned and has ample parking; it is built on the major highway into Chetumal, on what was in 2004 the outer perimeter of the city, but has since been surrounded with new housing developments. Put simply, the arrival of the Plaza Las Américas changed the shopping practices and social lives of many of the 140,000 residents of Chetumal, as well as people in the surrounding areas of southern Quintana Roo in Mexico, and northern Belize. Locally referred to as ‘the Plaza’ – although there are numerous public plazas and parks in Chetumal, the Plaza Las Américas has quite literally become the Plaza in which belonging to the Americas is materialized – on Saturdays and Sundays the mall bustles with activity. In the mornings, visitors from Belize fill shopping carts with groceries that are cheaper, fresher and more varied than they can buy at home. After packing their goods in the boot of their car, these families will often stay for lunch at McDonalds and watch a Hollywood movie in the cinema (English language movies at this branch are typically subtitled rather than dubbed, to cater to the linguistically mixed audience it serves). In the afternoons, the mall starts to fill with young families who walk around; little girls, hair neatly tied and frilly dresses on, look through the stationery and jewellery displays while their brothers play in the amusement arcade, before joining the parents for a snack in the food court. By evening the Plaza has become the domain of young teenagers; old enough to go out at night, but too young to get into clubs, many secondary school students dress up to hang out at the mall and watch a movie with groups of friends, or just sit around and watch other teenagers. The city’s population is small enough that many locals know one another, so it is impossible for them to enter the Plaza without running into various acquaintances. But at the same time, multiple groups of consumers share this space before returning to their parallel social worlds – in addition to Belizean shoppers one regularly also finds expatriate US Americans or tourists en route to Central America, killing time or stocking up on supplies before continuing

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their journey, and even Mennonites, of whom there is a large community not far from the city, who occasionally venture to the shops and supermarkets to supplement their more traditionally frugal consumption practices. Although Chetumal is not a big city, its status as the administrative capital of the state of Quintana Roo means that it is the provider of many services that bring people to town from the surrounding region; while it is quite clearly a transnational space for the consumption of goods and services (in addition to the Plaza people come to Chetumal for educational and medical services, or to do busi ness in the nearby free trade zone at the Belize border), Chetumal is also an explicitly national space, dedicated to the demarcation and administration of the Mexican state, which will be relevant to our discussions in Chapter 2. The Plaza Las Américas is the place in Chetumal in which a truly Mexican metro politan lifestyle can be acquired and maintained; before 2004 one had to travel to Mérida, Cancún or Mexico City to enjoy the specific brands and goods most typically seen on television programmes.6 It is therefore fitting that the Plaza is not only the place in which those brands and products seen on television are bought; it is also increasingly the space in which television sets themselves are acquired. Although malls are by no means the only place in which televisions are bought in Chetumal – census data suggests that in 2009 there were more than 3,000 retail outlets for appli ances and domestic equipment in Chetumal area (INEGI Censo económico) – the opening of the Plaza Las Américas mall offered new kinds of spaces in which Chetumal residents could both browse and shop for large consumer goods such as television sets. Whereas in previous years, televisions were bought from independently operated mobile vendors or local small businesses, the increasing presence of national or regional chain stores, with instalment schemes and store cards, has enabled members of the burgeoning middle class to acquire newer, larger television sets – and more of them – than was pre viously possible. Within the Plaza alone, there are five different stores selling television sets, and all of them offer a range of payment schemes and store card memberships in addition to accepting cash and credit card purchases. While most of the older electronics stores in other parts of Chetumal are local or small scale regional chains, in the Plaza these five stores belong to national or multi national chains. Some, such as the upmarket Liverpool department store, cater to the upper middle classes, while others, such as Coppel, are more associated with the emerging or lower middle class market. For the latter group especially, making the shift from buying electronics from mobile vendors and independent operators to stores in the Plaza has become more attractive due to store card schemes which include interest free periods. The prices of television sets in these stores in 2012 ranged from approximately US$100 for a basic set in the Chedraui supermarket or Coppel department store, to US$4,000 for large new flat screen models in the Liverpool store, with mid range models in the mall typically costing around US$600. In all cases, from the least to most expensive models, instalment scheme prices are advertised alongside the discounted cash prices, as such a purchase can rarely be made with a one off cash payment.

38 Understanding television today

Figure 1.1 The Plaza Las Américas shopping mall in Chetumal, Mexico.

Figure 1.2 A major public plaza in Chetumal.

Television sets are an important feature of in store displays, as they almost always sit next to the store entrance with screens alight and children’s films or DVDs of famous musicians playing. At Chedraui supermarket, for example, upon entering the store, in addition to the television sets located right at the entrance, one immediately passes a 20 foot high wall display of 24 flat screen

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Figures 1.3 and 1.4 In store displays of televisions in the Plaza Las Américas mall.

televisions in varying shapes and sizes, as well as three smaller non flat screen models at more modest prices. On a typical morning, between five and 15 shoppers, mostly adult men, will be waiting there for companions to finish groceries and other errands in other sections of the enormous supermarket. Although hundreds of shoppers pass such screens every day in Chedraui and

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other stores of the Plaza Las Américas, and many (mostly men) actively watch the screens, comparing prices and technologies, such activity is browsing rather than active shopping. Although (as will be mentioned in Chapter 4) most Chetumal households have a television that is less than five years old, television purchases do remain a rare event; but browsing in itself is an enjoyable leisure practice that brings shoppers into stores, often en route to making the smaller purchases and store card payments that originally brought them to the mall. Most of these shoppers are not seriously looking to buy a television, at least not that day – and yet, there is something noteworthy about this common practice that should be included among a wide range of social practices that, we would argue, make up understanding television’s role in making life meaningful. We propose that television sets play a role in the mall that is not very different to the role that they play in the home, to be discussed in Chapter 4; they are present in growing numbers, and prominently placed. They attract attention not only due to the programming played on them, but also by virtue of their changing sizes and shapes; they offer consumers aspirational models of new technologies while also offering affordable models for use in everyday life such that while few people go to the mall in search of televisions, all would notice that the mall was completely different if television screens were to be taken away. In writing about television in public spaces, and especially in waiting rooms, Anna McCarthy argues for television’s particular usefulness in marking and filling up the in between times of waiting. In direct opposition to the liveness that televi sion can temporally produce in the sorts of dramatic moments with which this book opened, McCarthy focuses on the equally important televisual time that marks forms of deadness: routine, boredom, and repetition, the unremarkable, taken for granted continuousness of the TV schedule. … Outside the home as well as within it the rhythms of reception produced by the cycles and patterns of broadcasting overlap with the rhythms of social life. (McCarthy 2001: 494) Although the people browsing television sets in the Plaza Las Américas may often be waiting, the deadness of which McCarthy writes is not reflected in the pleasure and willingness with which many Chetumal people seek out the televi sion sets of the Plaza. Far from being trapped in a waiting room, most of these browsers have actively moved towards the areas of the mall in which televisions can be found, and indeed see the Plaza in general as a hub of sociality in which browsing as a pastime is an end in itself.7 But McCarthy’s focus on how tele visions are used in public spaces does show us the complicated and interwoven connections between the different kinds of objects televisions can be, affording different kinds of cultural practices and interactions across the public and private spaces of everyday routine. As people in Chetumal move across the spaces of their day – from bedrooms to kitchens, from workplaces to leisure spaces – what often connects these places is not only the people within them, their neighbours and fellow citizens, but also television sets and their programming.

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In addition to all the ways in which the contents broadcast (or replayed, or downloaded) on televisions shape the everyday life of people in Chetumal (and elsewhere), the television set is also important as a material object that trans forms the spaces in which it is put. In Mexican malls, as in many other places in the world today, the television set is no longer a source of wonder, but it is still an object that attracts great attention and affords particular practices beyond merely watching, of which browsing is only one (others might be purchasing, dusting, placing, repairing or replacing). While the simple act of browsing the display of television sets while waiting for one’s wife in the supermarket may seem a minor moment upon which to hinge a discussion about the need for considerations of materiality in television studies, it is precisely the mundane nature of this task that shows how television sets as objects are deeply impli cated into even the least meaningful seeming moments of everyday life. In the mall, as in other places, television sets are everywhere and seemingly unnoticed, yet they attract attention and inspire people to commit to months of payments; they contribute to the many sounds and images that make up the mall’s chaotic ambience, and in doing so seem to be especially rich symbols of the modernity to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. In this opening chapter it has been necessary to do a little more than the usual scene setting. We have tried to contextualize our work in ways that indicate its significance in terms of the substantive contribution it sets out to make to television studies, while also outlining the rationale for the interdisciplinary colla boration in which we are engaged, and for the methodological consequences (and benefits) of that collaboration. In the following chapter, we turn to the exam ination of what remains one of the most fundamental zones of consumption, the geo political space of the nation, by way of a discussion of the relation between Mexican television and the nation. This, too, requires contextualization within the broader debates about such a relationship in television studies more generally, and that is where we will begin the next part of our discussion.

2

Television and the nation

The nation in the era of plenty The larger research project from which this book derives initially set out to investigate whether the nation was still a relevant concept for television research. Focused on the post broadcast era, our research1 was aimed at finding out what kinds of roles television and new media were actually playing in the construction of specific communities – local and regional as well as national. At the institutional or industrial level, we found that what constitutes the experience of television ‘depends on where you are’ (Turner and Tay 2009: 8); and we found that the relation between television and the nation was highly con tingent as well. This book responds to these observations and explores them further – and, we believe, in new ways. Our focus upon the practices of everyday life effectively dislodges what had become quite familiar and conventional patterns in media and cultural studies’ approaches to television and the nation: in place of the privileging of texts, or of industrial structures, this necessitates attention to, for example, the use of domestic space; to the daily practices which struc ture the consumption of television; to the intersections between television, the nation, and shifting ideas of modernity; and to the way that television, even when it is at its most commercial and industrial, can still be understood by its audiences as a form of national institution. While Chapter 4 will take up the task of presenting the ethnographic account of everyday television practices in the city of Chetumal, our approach in this chapter is to draw upon the work of researchers from Mexico and Latin America more broadly, who have, in many ways, been ahead of Anglophone scholars in working between the approaches and theories of cultural studies and anthropology. In Mexican universities, departments of anthropology have been, for some time now and among other things, centres of media research that is empirical in method yet seeks to address national and regional concerns and debates in a manner similar to that of cultural studies: that is, there is a critical and political imperative motivating the analysis. In this chapter, then, we present an argument about what these accounts of the relation between television and the nation can tell us – not only about the particular instance of Mexico (although obviously that is in the foreground of our discussion), but

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also about how media research on nationalism in that country can enrich television and cultural studies’ understandings of television and the national more broadly. Over the last decade or so, it had become almost customary for those working in Anglophone television studies to regard the discussion of the relation between television and the nation as an approach that was hopelessly rooted in the era of broadcast television, or what John Ellis calls the era of ‘scarcity’ (Ellis 2002: 39–61). The development of multichannel environments (for Ellis, the era of ‘plenty’ (Ellis 2002: 162–78)), the withdrawal from public broadcasting, particularly in Europe, the globalization of media formats and, most influentially, the rise of the internet, effectively relegated this relation to the background. In its place, as we described in our Introduction, was a narrative of the decline of broadcasting, of ‘the end of television as we know it’; and of ‘old’ media’s gradual displacement by the evolution of a new media environment that was potentially global in its reach and definitively individualizing in its address. This was an environment, it seemed, in which national borders were far less important or, in the case of the internet, perhaps even irrelevant; the production, distribution and consumption of television, it was widely agreed, was now far less grounded in the national than ever before. As the national audience gave way to the transnational audience, as television became more commercialized and as its markets ‘globalized’, those who clung to an interest in examining the relation between television and the nation looked decidedly old fashioned. Most recently, there has been some dilution of that orthodoxy. Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay’s Television Studies after TV: Understanding Post broadcast Television (Turner and Tay 2009) played a part in contesting it by pointing out that Anglo American and European accounts of television had acquired the habit of thinking of their own particular contexts as both normative and as implicitly ‘global’, despite the demonstrable inaccuracy of both assumptions. Such a way of thinking about television, they argued, has had the effect of masking the diversity of the ways in which media systems around the world were responding to new technologies, new platforms of delivery and new patterns of production and circulation for media formats and programming. As a means of contesting the effective invisibility of other media systems, Turner and Tay argued, Western studies of the media must look more systematically beyond their own location, in order to confront ‘a much more complex environment in which change has been vigorous but uneven, and where local and national conditions vary significantly’: The similarity of many of the factors influencing the discussion of changes in the West has perhaps encouraged Western scholars to underestimate the contingency of their effects in other locations. While it was always true that what individual communities consumed as television was highly specific to the national, regional or transnational environment in which the media systems operated, much academic work on television was happy to over look that. Now it is absolutely clear that we can no longer talk about ‘TV’ as if it were a singular entity, if we have any chance of adequately

44 Television and the nation understanding the contemporary social, cultural and political functions of the media. (Turner and Tay 2009: 3) There are now a number of studies of contemporary media which take such a view (Gripsrud 2010a, for instance), and it is becoming far more common to encounter the more nuanced and located view of the function of television taken in this book. Of course, the pattern of analysis we are referring to here is grounded in more than just the history of television studies. There is a similar story to tell about how cultural studies, indeed how many of the humanities and social science disciplines, had approached the idea of ‘the nation’ more generally – that is, by regarding it as an inherently regressive political formation. As David Morley has noted, the privileging of the desire for cosmopolitanism formed a partnership with what was a longstanding left tradition, in the humanities and social sciences, of political critique of the uses of nationalism, resulting in the default assumption that virtually any mobilization of the idea of the nation – or even ‘a sense of place’ – carried with it a regressive or reactionary politics (Morley 2004: 317). There was no need, therefore, to pay much attention to the nation because we knew, already, what might be said about it. That, too, has come under review as studies of national media systems outside the West have introduced new evidence and considerations which significantly complicate the treatment of the category of the nation state. For a start, in postcolonial settler societies, nationalism is most likely connected to a radical, rather than a conservative, politics. As Turner (2009) suggests in his chapter in Television Studies after TV, we need to more thoroughly develop a much more contingent and conjunctural account of both television and the nation: The nation state … is not so much a fixed ideological category as a historical construction that needs to be examined conjuncturally rather than simply allocated its predetermined politics. If that principle were applied more widely in television studies, we might benefit from analyses of particular television systems within a wider range of national or regional locations than we have at present. This would not run against the grain of the ideal of cosmopolitanism, but it would certainly complicate our synoptic accounts of the global relation between television and the nation. (Turner 2009: 59) Over the last few years, the range of national or regional locations to feature within television studies has expanded significantly. There is now a growing literature on television in the Middle East (for example, Abu Lughod (2005); Sakr (2007); Kraidy and Khalil (2009); Kraidy (2010)), and on a number of key states in Asia – Japan and China, for instance (Iwabuchi 2002; Curtin 2007; Fung 2008) – as well as the East Asian region (Keane et al. 2007). This is not just in the context of ‘internationalizing’ media studies in order to make it

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more inclusive by revealing interesting exceptions to the US model of the evolution of television which has preoccupied television studies for so much of the last two decades. Rather, these are offered as important studies in their own right – contributing to a broader, more instantiated understanding of the social functions of the media that rejects a single developmental trajectory in order to emphasize television’s operation as a social practice within specific historical contexts, rather than merely as a technology driving a predictable set of social and cultural outcomes. As a consequence of such work, and while we acknowledge Michael Curtin’s important demonstration that, by itself, the nation is no longer a sufficient site for media analysis (Curtin 2004), television studies’ understanding of the diversity and contingency of the relation between television and the nation, and the importance of the specific conditions under which that relation has developed in each case, has returned to the foreground of our interests. One of the assumptions which contributed to the downgrading of cultural and media studies’ attention to the nation was a view that the structural role of the state in the emerging media environment had declined significantly in importance, and would continue to do so. A key factor here, of course, is the related view that the internet was a global media development that disregarded national boundaries and was resistant to any unilateral action by nation states that might wish to regulate it. Some even argued that the internet had made the nation state irrelevant ( Jenkins 2006). Welcomed as a move towards a more open and even a more democratic media, the rise of the internet was initially seen as shifting the balance of power away from the state, and away from the big media conglomerates, but towards the individual consumer. More recent developments, such as the dispute between Google and the Chinese govern ment, have revealed that this is a little premature. More generally, though, among the complications that the more contingent and conjunctural analysis of the media has revealed is the recognition that the state is by no means irrelevant. While there may be strong provocations for such suggestions within a Western context – with the widespread withdrawal from state funding of national public broadcasting systems and their replacement by transnational commercial subscription television (as has happened in much of Europe, for example) – there is very limited evidence of this once we widen our hor izons. The most obvious counter examples are those found in the increasing volume of work focused on the relation between the media and the state in non democratic societies. There are now many accounts of the role of the state in the development of television content in, for instance, mainland China (Keane et al. 2007; Fung 2008; Sun and Zhao 2009). Anthony Fung (2008) has described how Western formats such as Survivor have been made over to better align their narratives with the interests of the state – the challenges and outcomes built into the format have been redesigned to reinforce notions of community and collectivism, for example, rather than the individualism so central to the original US version. In their discussion of Chinese television, Sun and Zhao (2009) appropriated a

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neologism – ‘democratainment’ – from television scholar John Hartley who coined it in order to describe the empowered (and implicitly Western) consumer’s use of television entertainment as a mode of constructing what Hartley (1999) describes as ‘DIY citizenship’. Sun and Zhao’s version – ‘indoctritainment’ – is coined in order to describe how the state has successfully aligned its political objectives with those of the providers of commercial entertainment, thus pre empting the exercise of anything like ‘DIY citizenship’. Anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod (2005) has described a similar process in her investigation of the consumption of soap opera in Egypt: In Egypt, the culture industry seems to be in the business of producing not just art or entertainment but national pedagogy. … Such works that appear on state controlled television are inevitably tied up with the nation state, which, despite pronouncements in the western academy about its demise and the very real economic and political forces threatening its sovereignty, integrity and legitimacy in Egypt as elsewhere, it is still a dominant matrix of social and political life for most intellectuals and communities. (159) In a recent example, Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic provide an analysis of a reality TV programme, That’s Me, produced in Macedonia and screened on commercial television in a number of the former Yugoslav republics, including Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia. The programme has a Big Brother format, and put cast members from a number of these nation states into a communal house in Skopje. Its ‘goal’ was to ‘symbolically negotiate the tensions that still dominate the region’, fostering ‘peace and harmony in a region still recovering from the 1990s wars’ (Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic 2011: 120). On one level, the producers saw the show as providing an opportunity for these various nationalities to recognize common ground, and to be ‘unified by their desire to enjoy the benefits of the new consumerism’ (120). At another level, however, the authors argue that the show ‘served as a catalyst for nationalist sentiments centred around reaffirming individual nation states at the expense of pan Slavic/pan Balkan solidarity’ (120). According to Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic’s account, while the show’s participants did their best to avoid overtly confrontational nationalist statements in their performance onscreen, the online response from the audience was very different, enthusiastically resuscitating old ethnic stereotypes and nationalist prejudices in an unrepentantly regressive expression of Hartley’s ‘DIY citizenship’ (not at all what he had in mind). What happened over the bulletin boards connected to the programme, the authors argue, ‘might be described as an empathic and vigorous exercise in defying political correctness by venting nationalist, racist and religionist sentiments’ (124) that were ‘banished from the public sphere proper’ (125). What they describe, then, is how a commercial entertainment effectively licensed the expression of aggressive forms of nationalism simply as a means of ‘attracting and mobilizing audiences’ (125).

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Traditional accounts of television and the nation focused on a process whereby television mediated between the state and the national citizen in order to serve the interests of the state. What Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic (2011) describe as ‘commercial nationalism’ is significantly different: We invoke the term ‘commercial nationalism’ to designate transformations in the ideological forms which enable the reproduction of a concept of nation. Specifically, commercial nationalism refers to the way in which nationalist appeals migrate from the realm of political propaganda to com mercial appeal: that is, the appeal to nationalism as a means of increasing ratings, popularity and sales. (114–15) Rather than the appropriation of entertainment by politics, the traditional method, this represents the appropriation of politics by entertainment. They note the similarity between the uses of this strategy in the Balkans, a region of emerging nation states, and in China, in response to the process of marketization. In both locations, they argue, ‘commercial nationalism represents the process whereby the commercial sector comes to adopt or embrace nationalist impera tives, thereby distributing the responsibility for their reproduction in ways that are no longer fully under the control of the state’ (Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic 2011: 115). In consuming these programmes, citizens are positioned as ‘nationalist(ic) consumers’: They are socialized in new forms of national belonging that rely upon the dynamic of consumption: national belonging is not just the locus of a particular form of imagined identification but of reiterated practices of consumption. (116) While much of the discussion of the analogous situation in China foregrounds the direct ideological intervention of the state, it is worth emphasizing that this is also in the context of what in fact appears to be an expansive liberalization of access to transnational forms of entertainment; so it, too, is connected to the development of new fields and practices of consumption – and thus to the expansion of the commercial sector of the public sphere. It would be a mistake, however, to see this counter narrative about the resilience of the state as an actor in the media sector, and about the persistence of discourses of the national, as something which is simply confined to transitional, emerging or non democratic societies. In the West, the link between commercial success and the invocation of specific forms of national belonging is still active. Those textual critics who spent so much time in the 1970s and 1980s unpacking the ideologies discursively structured into mainstream televi sion productions from the United Kingdom, United States and Australia would be just as richly rewarded if they were to investigate discourses of the national

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in mainstream contemporary television programming in the democratic West today. To choose the most watched programme in the world as one example, we might want to think of the activity of nationalist discourses in a programme such as Top Gear (Bonner 2010). Or we might want to look at the national branding of the various iterations of the Idol format in all kinds of societies around the world; a particularly interesting example is Asian Idol, set up as a regional, almost ‘pan Asian’ television event, but ultimately becoming a hotly contested competition between national representatives (Tay 2011). Watching his television in the heartland of the ‘era of plenty’, the multichannel universe of US commercial television in 2010, Graeme observed that the least populist of the US broadcast network news bulletins, that of CBS, sought to hold onto its ever diminishing share of the audience for broadcast news by, among other strategies, carrying a regular segment in its evening news which focused upon a local hero of one kind or another and was called ‘The American Spirit’. Television studies may have lost interest in dealing with this kind of stuff, but it hasn’t gone away. Finally, it is important to note that even in the context of local media production, we need to be cautious about narratives of national decline under the influence of globalization and the transnational trade in media formats. On the one hand there are new ‘media capitals’ (Curtin 2004) emerging to service what are definitively transnational geo linguistic media markets – Miami and Shanghai would be examples of these – for whose operation national bound aries are relatively unimportant unless they happen to align with the boundaries of a market. On the other hand, there is the complicated story emerging from precisely these shifts in the changing structure of the production industries in nation states with the capacity to find export markets for their content; Albert Moran (2009a) has demonstrated that, in many of these locations, transnational media trade has actually contributed to the expansion and development of national industries – at times with government subvention, but at other times in a purely commercial context.

Approaching the nation through Mexican TV How, then, might we want to consider the relation between television and the nation as it operates today, in all its locatedness and contingency? We don’t want to dismiss the more traditional accounts – television as the location for the construction of the nation in the interests of the state, or television as the location through which citizenship is directly discursively shaped – but there are other ways open to us as well which may help us to acknowledge that a whole variety of positionings are now in play, sometimes simultaneously: in addition to nationalism we have an active transnationalism, for instance, which is neither necessarily post national nor anti national. Our research has sought to examine such options in response to what are widely perceived as significant shifts in the delivery and consumption of television, and of its competition with other media platforms.

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At first glance, Mexico may seem an ideal place in which to argue against the influence of national governments or national cultural identities upon television viewers; it constitutes the biggest market within a world of pan Latin commercial networks and, along with the Hispanic United States, Mexican television production has created a highly visible transnational media sector of what is now known as ‘Latino’ media. Far from being merely a satellite market for US based Latino programming, Mexico is itself a major exporter of programming for the region, and a significant player in the global media economy. The transnational origins of what Mexicans see on television is rooted in a longer history of Mexican media – especially radio – as part of a Spanish speaking geo linguistic region (Sinclair 2004). Key genres of pro gramming, most notably the telenovela, first on radio and then on television, have been inherently regional rather than national forms, since their inception produced by media professionals who moved between Latin American cities and were closely connected to US media industries (Sinclair 1999: 65; Rivero 2009). Latin American television, from the perspective of its producers and investors, is a fundamentally international commercial endeavour, even though it has often worked in close cooperation with particular national governments to meet mutual interests. Against such a backdrop, and given recent decades of deregulation, multinational commerce and globalized new media economies, our initial research project might have predicted that Mexico would be one of the places in which national identities were least at play. Indeed, our original interest in Mexico as a research location lay in the comparative possibilities likely to come from examining a media market that was fundamentally geo linguistic in character – that is, a media market that was more regional than national. But what we found from the ethnographic research challenged our expec tations. While there is a strong tradition of Mexican media research in larger metropolitan areas – not only Mexico City, but also Guadalajara, Monterrey and other metropolitan areas such as Torreón have been sites of sociological analyses of television use in the past decade (cf. Rosas Mantecón 2002; Lozano 2003; Chong López et al. 2009) – selecting the small city of Chetumal (in Mexico’s southeast corner and the capital of Mexico’s newest state2) for Anna’s ethnographic fieldwork provided a distinctive perspective from which we could examine the relationship between Mexican viewing practices and the con struction of a national community. Given our brief to reconsider whether the national still has a role in shaping what television does, choosing a place which was definitely at the periphery of the nation (and not at the northern periphery which has received tremendous attention in Latin American cultural studies) offered the opportunity to gain some different insights into the relevance of Mexico – as a nation state, as an economy, or as an imagined community – for its people in their use of television. The broader geo linguistic or regional nature of the television market was clearly evident in the list of the television programmes people were watching but, for its audience in Chetumal, television strongly retained a role as a conveyor of a national popular culture, while at the

50 Television and the nation same time serving as the key facilitator of people’s participation in an imagined community of metropolitan cultural consumption. What we have learnt from this research has forced us to return to the conclusion that television continues to perform the function of constructing an imagined national community, notwithstanding its transnationalism, fragmentation and so called globalization.3 We understand national identity as being realized not only through political participation or citizenship, but also through taken for granted participation in everyday consumption practices that connect local life to a media culture that is, in turn, taken for granted in its ‘Mexican ness’. In the words of anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz: The fundamental thing about nationalism is that it is a productive discourse that allows subjects to rework various connections between social institutions and other social organizational forms. As such, the power of nationalism lies not so much in its hold on the souls of individuals (though this is not insignificant) as in the fact that it provides interactive frames in which the relationship between state institutions and various and diverse social rela tionships (family relationships, the organization of work, the definition of forms of property and the regulation of public space) can be negotiated. (Lomnitz 2001: 13) While Benedict Anderson’s formulation of national communities emphasized fraternal ties of solidarity between perceived (masculine) equals, Lomnitz suggests that vertical ties produced by hierarchical relationships can also be an important dimension of national loyalties and obligations (Lomnitz 2001: 11–12). This is worth mentioning in relation to a society such as Mexico in which economic and social inequalities are among some of the most extreme in the world; even in such circumstances, this argument proposes, the dispossessed may feel a part of the nation by identifying ‘upwards’ with sources of power. We suggest that residents of Chetumal, in watching television as an integral part of daily practice, understand themselves as participants in an imagined national community in at least three ways. The first way in which we argue that national boundaries continue to define what television is in a specific location is very simple. In Chetumal, 10 km from the border with Belize, only one of 53 people included in our interviews reported ever having watched a television programme from Belize – and the one who suggested he had was referring to a Discovery Channel documentary on Belizean nature. Although in practical terms the border between Belize and Mexico was often traversed by locals from either side – chiefly for business and shopping, but occasionally to visit relatives – the flow of cultural products between these two countries was virtually one way, especially in the case of television programming. Many resi dents of northern Belize watch Mexican television channels, which they can receive free to air, and also via satellite subscriptions. But in Chetumal, the most watched television programming is Mexican: specifically news, telenovelas, chat shows and the Mexican football league.

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Secondly, we found that when people do watch television programmes that are transnationally produced and distributed from outside Mexico or even outside the region, they were typically understood as Mexican television con tent. Of course, many viewers did watch television that is produced for ‘Latino’ markets, and as likely to have been produced in Miami as in Mexico City; the most common examples of this included transnational telenovelas such as La Reina del Sur – co produced by US network Telemundo with Spanish and Colombian partners – and football matches and football commentary shows broadcast on satellite channels such as ESPN Deportes. However, in conversa tions, very few viewers could immediately identify which of their favourite programmes were internationally produced (or co produced) – even though several of them were. It seems that the prominence of Mexican and Mexican American audiences within Latino television markets allows viewers in places like Chetumal – far removed geographically and economically from the metropolitan media industries of Mexico City and Miami – to unproblematically regard Latino television content as being part of their national culture. This was reinforced through their sense of Mexico’s power and importance as a media centre and production hub. Far from experiencing the aesthetics and politics of their popular television shows as being a form of cultural imperialism from the commercialized United States, Mexico City is understood by viewers as itself constituting the media centre to which others – including Mexican Americans – will come, seeking to ‘make it big’. Participants in Mexican competition reality shows (such as La Academia) will often come from the United States, Central or South America, while well known media celebrities, including Cuban born Niurka Marcos and Peruvian Laura Bozzo, work within the Mexican television industry as often as in Miami. For viewers in Chetumal, all these sorts of people and programmes counted, at least before deeper introspection, as constituting ‘Mexican’ television culture. Writing from an Australian context – like Mexico, Australia is a nation with a colonial history and thus fertile soil for the development of nationalisms – this finding is especially striking. In Australia, the issue of ‘local content’ has probably been the most important and long running regulatory debate since television began there. To some extent, this is enclosed within a history of a television system in which broadcasting has always been (and continues to be) the major player; nonetheless, it would be unlikely to find an Australian community which was not extremely watchful about the national origins of the productions screened on Australian television. Even the use of advertising from elsewhere (usually the United States) provokes both popular and regulatory concerns. For the differences to be elided in any way would be unthinkable. The Mexican case study, then, carries a useful message, which is about the highly variable ways in which discourses of the nation are encoded, enacted and understood in different national systems. There is a third way in which we argue that a national imagined community remains important in understanding television. This third approach is less focused on what people watch, and considers instead the role of television

52 Television and the nation technologies as symbolic and material enablers of participation in a modern Mexican consumer culture. Television consumption practices – not only watching television programmes, but also buying new television sets (as we saw in Chapter 1), reading television related magazines, talking about television, subscribing to cable and satellite television and buying products advertised on television – are fundamental components in the processes through which Mexican consumers participate in commercial nationalism. Given the propensity for Mexican audiences to see television as unquestionably a national medium, such forms of participation enact on a daily basis a layered and continually iterative mode of engagement with a national culture. We need to acknowledge that there are specific reasons why Chetumal may be a case study in which the importance of the national popular culture is unusually pronounced. Chetumal is a city with a prospering economy, as the administrative capital of the state of Quintana Roo, where much tourism and new urban development has transformed the region. This is a city to which people move for a better, safer life, with a lower cost of living than other metropolitan areas and more opportunities for advancement than the rural Mayan communities that surround it. The city was founded in 1898 – a recent city by Mexican standards – specifically to secure the border of the Republic from both Mayan insurgents and British interests in the Honduras (Vallarta Vélez 2001). Thus, it has two centuries of history of being an enclave in which modern Mexico might be realized, and in which no one pre existing ethnic or linguistic heritage dominates. Television fits perfectly into this trajectory, with its close technological identification with the process of modernization connecting the consumption of the national to regimes of transnational and contemporary sophistication. These are not small points, and understanding the specific characteristics of local contexts is exactly how we set about trying to ‘locate television’ in its zones of consumption. However, rather than limiting our argument to out lining such specific historical and local factors, we also see Chetumal as a pivotal case study through which broader points about contemporary Mexican nationalism can be highlighted. Just as the northern borderlands of the Mexican nation have inspired a whole wave of theorists to write about transnationalism, we use our experience of watching television in Chetumal to refigure the importance of the national as an element in understanding contemporary media practices. It reinforces the need to acknowledge the resilience and persistence of the national even within highly commercialized media environments, and even within markets that might be seen as more fundamentally regional than national in character. It is easy to underestimate, and this has occurred widely in television and media studies, how seamlessly and fluently the local and the national can blend with the discourses of transnational modernity that have shaped the post broadcast era. Among the conclusions to come from our ethnographic research was both a confirmation of the national character of the consumption of television within this community, and a sense of the unremarkable – that is, thoroughly

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naturalized – status of this behaviour. The platforms used have changed, and the structure and viability of the nation state has changed, but there remains a strong, if altered, relationship between television and national identity. While the impact of governments upon the production of national culture clearly receded in Mexico (and many other places) across the last decades of the twentieth century, in many cases we can see that commercial organizations – including media empires – have stepped in to lead the way forwards to renewed, if not new, forms of national culture. We will return to the com mercialization of that relation again in the conclusion of this chapter, but at this point we want to turn to a tradition of work within Mexican anthropology and Mexican studies of the media, a tradition which focuses particularly on the pro duction of national subjects through cultural institutions, as a means of further investigating the relationship between television and the nation.

Mexican media and the production of national subjects In his account of Mexican nationalism, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, the esteemed US based Mexican anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz notes that ‘Great National Problems’ have long been necessary subjects of study for Mexican intellectuals. The history of early Mexican anthropology, certainly, was a history of mediating relations between the Mexican state and indigenous peoples (Nahmad Sittón 2008), but also of asserting visions of a Mexican republic in which urban cosmopolites, elite landowners, poor peasants and remote indigenous groups all had some part to play. After the Mexican revolution of the early twentieth century, Mexican intellectuals were at the forefront of a flourishing revolutionary nationalism, justly described by Lomnitz as ‘epic’ in style. From the 1929 consolidation of the National Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico experienced several decades of a strongly nationalist state, with protectionist policies overseen by successive PRI governments in which most voters identified their political experience of nationalism not only with their local PRI politi cians, but also upwards through them to the culmination of the Mexican nation in the capital city. Even before the PRI lost their grip on national power in the elections of 2000, from the 1980s onwards a number of events sig nificantly shook the authority of such stable expressions of nationalist power through the PRI led government (cf. Lomnitz 2001: 58–124). In 1982, a severe financial crisis bankrupted the Mexican government, leading to structural adjustment from the International Monetary Fund. A further financial crisis in 1994 also occurred at a time of political upheaval, with the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the beginnings of the Zapatista resistance movement in the state of Chiapas. The rise of multi party democracy that brought about the PRI’s ousting in 2000 also triggered the dissolving of traditional ties of political loyalty and a decentralizing of the dispersal of money and favours through which politics had traditionally been constituted. This decentralization of political power occurred con currently with a relative weakening of Mexico City’s status as the unquestioned

54 Television and the nation urban centre of the nation. While rapidly growing cities along the northern frontier of Mexico have most often been cited as examples of urban development that challenges the economic and cultural dominance of the Federal District, Cancún and the Mayan Riviera, within the southeastern region, have also become places that are not only economically important, but also contribute increasingly to changes in the urban Mexican national imaginary. This period of transition, across the 1980s and 1990s – also the period in which broadcast television had completed its penetration of even the most remote areas of the Mexican nation – became a moment in which other organizations, institutions and networks could increasingly step into the nation building vacuum left by a weakened state. Not least among such organizations was the dominant media consortium of Televisa (Murphy 1995). In addition to their near total domination of Mexican (indeed, of Latin American) television, during this period Televisa actively invested across a range of cultural, commercial and political domains to maintain and increase not only their commercial might but also their cultural influence. Among other things, Televisa became a key funder and supporter of intellectual and artistic work, constructed a museum of modern art, and funded a well known periodical journal associated with a group of eminent public intellectuals (Lomnitz 2001: 116). With these excellent examples of commercial national ism, the cultural reach of Televisa was extended not only through the political and cultural power of the media they long dominated (such as television), but also through such direct collaborations with intellectuals engaged in the cultural project of solving ‘Great National Problems’. Mexico was not alone in marking out these new forms of national culture, but rather was engaged in a transition that occurred in similar ways across much of Latin America during the late twentieth century. As George Yúdice explains: what characterized countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico was a pact between state aligned elites who promoted import substitution industrialization, and an equally state aligned popular nationalism that sought state welfare, delivered in corporatist forms since the 1920s and 1930s. The origins of ‘popular culture’ in Latin America can be traced to this paradoxical state, which re created those institutions most responsible for supporting that culture: education, radio, film, museums, and anthro pological institutions. It is through these institutions that a good deal of ‘people’s culture’ was disseminated, not outside of the market but squarely within the culture industries. (Yúdice 2001a: xxi) One quite extreme example of how directly connected television, politics and public intellectuals became in post 1980s Mexico is a telenovela aired on Televisa in 1994 called El vuelo del águila (The Flight of the Eagle). The context and content of this telenovela, which narrates the life history of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, has been criticized by historian Francie Chassen López for its historical

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inaccuracy and its depiction of racial, gendered and class based stereotypes. As Porfirio Díaz was overthrown in the Mexican revolution of 1911, he had pre viously been understood as entirely unfit for romantic portrayal as a telenovela hero. But, as Chassen López observes, the telenovela was launched in 1994 to coincide with the commencement of NAFTA, precisely the moment at which the protectionist policies of the Mexican revolution were being overturned in favour of neoliberal policies. The telenovela was co written by Televisa writers and Enrique Krauze, a national historian and former editor of the journal associated with Televisa. Krauze’s biography of Porfirio Díaz, published by a Televisa owned publishing house, was launched at the same time as the telenovela (Chassen López 2008: 110–11). Even when the interconnections of national history, media commerce and political life are not quite so obvious, the ways in which Mexico is portrayed on many of the highest rating telenovelas broadcast nightly on Televisa produce a very clear, and very selective, vision of the values and aesthetics of the Mexican nation. The key role that telenovelas play in Latin American television as the space in which both (selective) Latin American identities and various differentiated (selective) national identities are portrayed, has been the topic of considerable research within Latin American media studies (cf. Porto 2011: 54–6; see also Leal and Oliven 1988; Hamburger 2000; López 1995; Martín Barbero 1995; Mayer 2003; Beck 2010; Waisbord 1998). Telenovelas are not only important economically, as reflected in their high ratings and their occupation of prime timeslots, but they are also acknowledged by producers, consumers and intellectuals as having a particular purchase upon the formation of a popular culture that is often – but not exclusively – constituted within a framework of the nation. In the words of Ana López: ‘the telenovela has become a privileged site for the translation of cultural, geographical, economic, and even political differences into the discourse of nationness’ (López 1995: 262). Paradoxically, the transnational nature of Latin American television markets – in which producers often recoup their production costs with local advertising, but generate their larger profits from exporting telenovelas – has led to a stronger tendency to reproduce images and narratives that are explicitly (and simplistically) national. Ana López notes that what is most intriguing about the telenovela genre today is precisely how the melodramatic works with, on the one hand, the nation and its cultural characteristics, and, on the other, a self consciousness about other markets and other Latin American cultures. (López 1995: 261) Each major country in which telenovelas are produced (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and the United States) is commonly associated with a specific repertoire of narrative styles, visual aesthetics and characterizations. While melodrama forms the basis of all telenovelas, Mexican telenovelas are ‘notorious for their weepiness, extraordinarily Manichean vision of the world’

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(López 1995: 261; see also Martín Barbero 1995: 280), their richly dressed sets, heavily styled actors and their romantic but non specific historical and geo graphical references. Most storylines revolve around complicated family issues (illegitimate children, multiple wives, warring relatives) and would be lovers (separated by tragic circumstances, caught in love triangles, being deceived by ill willed outsiders). Mexican telenovelas frequently contrast cosmopolitan urban settings (in offices, shopping malls and apartments) with nostalgic visions of rural or regional life (in haciendas or open countryside with minimal presence of modern technologies). While the former setting is typically the domain of middle class characters, the latter gives space for cross class interactions between working class characters (who are often honest, hard working and simple) and elite characters (of whom many are spoilt, capricious, haughty and vengeful). Within such portrayals, the politics of sex and gender intersects with the representation of class divisions in stereotypical ways, so that a poor man who sleeps with a rich woman is often ‘bad’, ambitious and unconcerned with propriety, while a poor woman who falls in love with a rich man must offset her class ascension by also being innocent, honest and sweet.4 Scriptwriters and television producers, the most successful of whom can themselves be as venerated as the stars of telenovelas, are deeply aware of the role that their telenovelas play in representing versions of national culture (Acosta Alzuru 2010), and while the telenovela remains a form that is inher ently ‘popular’ or ‘for the masses’, writers and performers of telenovelas often combine this work with more artistically valued work in film and theatre. Little wonder, then, that the telenovela genre has attracted so much scholarly attention, as it has served to flesh out successive waves of Latin American cultural theory: being seen more as an ‘alienating poacher’ of US cultural imperialism, then a ‘national saviour’ against such imperialism, and more recently as a ‘welcomed guest’ among academics and public intellectuals in discussions of nation and modernity (López 1995: 257). What has attracted less attention to date, though, is an aspect we noted in our Introduction: the extraordinary stability of scheduling that characterizes Mexican television, and how such stability of scheduling allows the telenovela to maintain its firm identity as a definable genre. Mexican television programming – specifically on the commercial broadcast channels of Televisa and Azteca – maintain firm divisions of television genres in key timeslots to a degree that has been lost in many other broadcast environments. Televisa’s leading ‘Channel of the Stars’, each day from Monday to Friday, repeats the same programming (see Table A.2 in the Appendix), with morning chat shows leading into long running dramas or series repeats, and a 2:30 p.m. news bulletin which is followed by a high rating chat show and series of telenovelas running from 4:15 p.m. until 10:30 p.m., at which time the nightly news bulletin commences.5 This evening series of telenovelas gradually builds its audience numbers, with the final tele novela of the night typically being the highest rating programme in Mexico. Virtually everyone in Mexico therefore knows, even if they do not watch them, which kinds of programmes are on at any given time of the day. The

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impact of such stable scheduling upon everyday television practices is sub stantial, as viewers are required to make very little effort to integrate television consumption into their daily lives. People who enjoy telenovelas will always know when to watch them, and if a particular series is not capturing their imagination, they know that in a few months a similar series, perhaps more to their liking, will take its place. The standard production of television content that runs across five days of the week clearly lends itself to particular genres of programming; while the power of the telenovela as a genre may have actually created the stability of Televisa schedules, one can also see that Televisa executives would value programming that enables them to retain such an effective business model. Jesús Martín Barbero’s influential work on telenovelas certainly recognizes the importance of genre as the element which provides the predictability that is appealing both to producers and consumers; for him, genre is what mediates the distinct logics of television production and organizes its reception (Sunkel 2002: 290; see also Orozco Gómez 1996: 81). Knowing what to expect when the television is turned on for the evening, recognizing the genre with its repetitions, traditions and aesthetics, is an integral part of the telenovela experience, in which innovation can often take place, but a core stability is also deeply appreciated. However, the structural importance of genre – not only for telenovelas, but also for other genres such as talent competitions, morning chat shows, sports broadcasts and weekend variety shows – is also clearly enhanced by the broader stability of a broadcast channel’s schedules, around which leisure and family practices in Mexico are tightly woven. One reason that Televisa is especially well equipped to maintain week long, year round consistency in scheduling is that almost all their television content is produced by Televisa owned companies. While this has been widely noted and consequently much attention has been given to Televisa’s dominance of Mexican broadcasting, there remains much scope for a closer examination of the many ways in which distinct programmes across the schedule work in concert with one another for the overall promotion of the channel as a suite of programmes packaged for a national audience. For example, a much watched half hour segment of the Televisa morning programme Hoy, officially described as a ‘morning magazine show for housewives’, is a preview of developments in that evening’s episodes of each Televisa telenovela. Hoy broadcasts for three hours every weekday morning, and is often switched on as background to morning activities in households, restaurants and waiting rooms across Mexico. Ten hosts work in ensemble to present various segments of the show, from interviewing celebrities (usually associated with Televisa products) to hosting musical per formances (by artists contracted to Televisa’s music division). Many of the hosts of Hoy, perhaps most famously Galilea Montijo, have themselves made their name in showbusiness through other Televisa programmes; Montijo has appeared in telenovelas as well as reality shows, and hosts high rating weekend variety shows for Televisa, making her a sort of living cross promotional vehicle for the channel. The tight connections between magazine programmes like

58 Television and the nation Hoy and evening telenovelas is made especially clear during the period at which one telenovela is drawing to a close; in the final weeks or days of a high rating telenovela, hosts engage in extensive speculation about how the series will end, while also commencing the heavy promotion of its upcoming replacement. The stars of new telenovelas – who are usually already very famous for their previous roles – appear on Hoy and other Televisa programmes to talk about their new characters, and introduce the key themes from or share stories about the production and their co stars. Heavy cross promotion of Televisa products is by no means restricted to the contents of its programmes; it is also a common feature of the advertising breaks. In addition to the heavy rotation of simple advertisements for current or upcoming telenovelas in each advertising break, other companies work toge ther with Televisa to mount regular competitions that offer cars or even houses as prizes; to enter, contestants typically have to telephone or text a number and offer an answer that is related to the plot of the telenovela being promoted. Such competitions are promoted in almost every advertising break on prime time television, so that when added to station identifications, not only the cross promotion of Televisa products, but also the promotion of Televisa as an overarching brand, appears on screen scores of times across a one hour timeslot. When such repetition of advertising and cross promotion is added to standard commercial television advertising, it is not surprising that television commercial breaks in prime time hours frequently last for eight minutes. One might conclude that, with such dominance of Mexican media, Televisa as a brand is rather more supranational than merely national in scope, its influ ence extending well beyond Mexico’s actual national borders. Its commercial dominance, however, as well as its transnational reach, are no impediments to its function of producing national subjects. Indeed, as is the case with the versions of commercial nationalism Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic examine in the Balkans, it is important to emphasize that the financial profit Televisa accrues through their dominance of Mexican cultural production does not make its television any less effective a vehicle for the production of Mexican national identities. Televisa has a great deal of political clout, particularly in a neoliberal era that so enthu siastically welcomes a globalizing media enterprise; however, that alone is not a sufficient explanation for how the average Mexican viewer’s practices around television connect them to various experiences of Mexican ness. The important and acknowledged role that television companies play in Mexico’s ongoing national culture is far more complex than merely applying pressure to political and legislative processes, although they do that too: as some of the biggest economic players in the Latin American region (along with Mexican telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helú), television companies’ support of particular candidates and parties can be essential to their electoral success. Those same television companies, of course, are major conveyors of political information to the voting population, both through news broadcasts (which continue to be among the highest rating programmes in Mexico) and through extensive political advertising. Such deep interactions between Televisa and the political classes are

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well known to the Mexican populace and are by no means entirely accepted; at the time of writing, a serious scandal is unfolding due to the alleged selling by Televisa of favourable television coverage for the 2012 presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. The student led movement YoSoy132 is leading an online and grassroots campaign to protest collusion between media networks and political candidates, and the focus of such protests has been the Televisa empire as much as the politicians in question; at rallies and on social network ing sites Mexican protestors describe their country as a ‘teledictatorship’ (SDP Noticias 2012), with such catchphrases as ‘not even my mother manipulates me like Televisa’ (Guardian 2012). In late May 2012 the movement called for a weekend of ‘turning off the telly and turning on your mind’ by boycotting television for 48 hours.6 There are, therefore, quite unsubtle expressions of the role that television, and Televisa in particular, plays in shaping the Mexican nation politically as well as culturally. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, to understand that role in ways that are less direct than outright corruption or interference in political process requires close attention to the practices that construct the cultures of con sumption within which television must find its place. What we can learn from our study of Mexican television is just how evidently, still, television performs the task of constructing national subjects; how many are the varied ways it finds to achieve this task; and how necessary it is to examine television’s imbrication within the specific and located practices of consumption as well as within industrial structures and technological affordances.

Conclusion The central point we want to demonstrate through our discussion in this chapter is that television still works towards the construction of a national community, notwithstanding (and sometimes precisely thanks to) the significant shifts that have occurred in television and its relation to the state. Among such shifts, as we have noted earlier, are the rise of new media, increasing commercia lization and a decline in television’s public remit, the emergence of multiple platforms of delivery, and the increasing importance of transnational markets. However, even while television commercializes and as its audiences fragment, and therefore, one might think, its current platforms have become disarticulated from the classic functions of the broadcast era, the evidence from Mexico as well as other research from around the world suggests otherwise. Indeed, it is through developments in commercial nationalism, among other strategies, that television as a medium demonstrates that it possesses characteristics which privilege it as a vehicle for building community within (and not always across) the national space. Of course, and as our argument in this chapter should reinforce, how and why this happens can often best be understood not only by examining how television industries are changing, but also by examining how such changes are imbricated within other patterns of national political, economic and cultural transformations.

60 Television and the nation Speculation about the radical decline of television as a national medium seems therefore to be an exaggeration, or at best it may only be supported in certain circumstances or in certain markets. Reaching a similar conclusion to ours, Gripsrud explains how the fundamental social conditions which made broadcasting so socially relevant and valuable generally remain in place: We still have centralized political and economic power on the one hand and seemingly ever more mobile, privatized people on the other. There is still a need for a focus, a limited set of central arenas in a comprehensive, general public sphere, if such people and their opinions on public matters are to influence political decision making. Mobile and privatized people also need a sense of community that broadcasting and its ‘currency’ can provide – something to talk about, shared rituals and major events, shared frames of reference, shared knowledge. And nation states are not at all dead, even if in some respects they are quite different and weaker than they used to be. (Gripsrud 2010b: 20) But, as Gripsrud then goes on to say, television ‘does not remain the same’. Although it is perhaps true that the fragmentation of the television audience may be both patchy and exaggerated, there is genuine change under way as a result of the competition from the internet and the different kinds of communities it is generating, the rise of entertainment as the dominant programming form and the economies that this trend is generating. Yet as far as the nation is concerned, something of a paradox has emerged: as television mutates away from being a mediating mechanism for the state into becoming more like an autonomous commercial industry in terms of the interests it serves, it does not entirely shed the attributes of an institution in the way it behaves and how its products are consumed.7 We have the account of commercial nationalism as an example of this, where attracting a market through the deployment of nationalisms is aimed at commercial rather than political ends, but where the commercial point of the tactic does not rob it of its political effectiveness. To say this, however, is not to deny that television today creates communities other than the national and that the new platforms for delivery, in particular, may have found ways to construct very different kinds of community. The manner in which television, in all its current formations, constructs communities other than the national, then, is what we examine in the following chapter.

3

Television and community

Constructing communities Historically, what we have just finished dealing with – the role that television plays in the construction of the nation – has been one of the major concentrations of research, theory and debate for television studies. But the nation is not the only kind of community in which television plays such a role. Indeed, as a consequence of the kinds of industrial shifts we have outlined earlier in this book – the rising commercialization of the media, the increase in global media flows, and the expansion of content as well as the new modes of interactivity enabled by the multichannel and online environment – many have argued that we are now witnessing the emergence of new kinds of media generated communities. In recent years, much of the industry and academic discussion of the changing formations of television and online media has focused on precisely this: the differences proposed between the new forms of community enabled by the multichannel and online environments (virtual, transnational, vernacular, cus tomized to the consumer’s preferences) and those more familiar and traditional communities constructed by a national broadcaster (national, geo politically located, institutionalized and centralized). Typically and crucially, these new communities locate themselves in a media, rather than in a geo political, space. There are indeed important differences (but also, as we shall see, under examined similarities) between the capacities or affordances of broadcast and digital media, but this chapter will argue that it is by no means clear that they have led to the development of new forms of community. In this regard, the chapter does something quite different to most of the other chapters in this book; whereas elsewhere we have argued for the importance of television in creating social spaces for consumption – at the level of the nation, or within the family household, for example – in this chapter we are instead arguing against the assumed value of the term ‘community’ as the best way to understand how and why people continue to consume television in digital environments. The parti cular digital environments referred to in this chapter – unless otherwise indicated – are those of the United States and, to a lesser degree, Australia, as two places in which television has been documented as moving into (somewhat different) post broadcast, multiplatform digital contexts. In this regard, too, this chapter is

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different to others in the book as it turns away from the Mexican research site for the moment in order to deal with recent developments in Anglophone media and cultural studies that are directly relevant to our objective of exploring the concept of zones of consumption. The fact that digital media has so frequently been championed as a creator of new communities, and new kinds of communities, probably reflects the relatively undisciplined manner in which the term ‘community’ is often used in media and cultural studies. Sometimes, the term community is, in effect, offered as a form of analogy – suggesting that what is being described works a bit like a community rather than arguing it really is a community – in order to emphasize particular aspects of its proposed function. Even though Anglophone media and cultural studies in general, and television studies in particular, have spent very little time developing or theorizing the idea of community – the comparison with this field of debate in the social sciences, where the term ‘community’ has been more contested, is revealing – they share the common assumption that community is ‘a good thing’. Consequently, there is every reason to embrace an association with it; Raymond Williams, in Keywords, describes the situation this way: Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike other terms of social organization (state, nation, society etc.) it never seems to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term. (Williams 1983: 76) In the discussions of digital media we have in mind here, community is put to work as a means of advancing the claims for grassroots democratic empowerment that are so frequently connected to analyses of the politics of new media forms. In precisely the manner Williams suggests, community is used as a means of recommending an alternative set of relationships in which the power of the consumer to control their media consumption (and to a lesser degree to pro duce their own media content) is held to have been dramatically enhanced by the shift to digital technologies and the expansion of choice that comes with the multichannel environment for television. Community is an important component in the more optimistic readings of the political potential of the new media landscape; if the new media create new kinds of community, it seems, then clearly they are pro social technologies. Whatever other commercial or political objectives they might pursue can consequently be overlooked. More to the point, these new communities exhibit particular characteristics that allow them to be regarded as preferred alternatives to top down, institutionally driven communities such as those of the state or the nation. As noted above, while media and cultural studies have only had an incidental interest in understanding communities rather than cultures, the idea of

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community has a long and complex history within the social sciences, and especially anthropology. On the one hand, the term is frequently used but, at the same time, and as with many of anthropology’s most frequent keywords (among them culture and identity), the term ‘community’ has been extremely hard to define. While groups of people described unproblematically as commu nities were traditionally conceived of as living in a physically defined location with a relatively small number of people, such as a village or neighbourhood, in recent decades community has increasingly been used to describe a form of con sciousness, a focus of belonging and identity, that may transcend geographical space (Appadurai 1996). Such a form of consciousness is privileged; that is, it carries an implication of organicity that allows the community it generates to be regarded as an unquestionably ‘authentic’ and natural set of social relations. Notwithstanding the ‘warmth’ of the term that Williams describes, anthropologists have since at least the mid twentieth century also acknowledged the romanti cism (at best) or ethnocentrism (at worst) with which the term ‘community’ is often applied to marginal or non Western groups of people to suggest a boundedness that rarely actually exists, such that community can also be seen as inherently ‘pre modern’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Consequently, when community is applied to unequivocally ‘modern’ groups such as online audi ences, it is often laced with some degree of nostalgia. Community can be invoked as a residual but nonetheless vital formation that has been displaced by the instrumental sets of relations that come from a more abstracted, modernizing, mode of social organization. Given anthropology’s own misgivings about the very history of community as a term, it is unsurprising that some of the dis cipline’s earliest responses to internet and online research were sceptical about the degree to which community was being celebrated as a product of new media technologies (Wilson and Peterson 2002). Using the term community, with these attendant connotations of nostalgia or authenticity, aligns nicely with some of the longstanding liberal views found in media and cultural studies about what is wrong with the traditional mass media – its unresponsiveness to its audiences, its top down inflexibility, political exclusivity, commercial concentration and enlistment in serving the interests of large scale institutional structures such as those of the nation state. It is con sistent with such attitudes that what have been defined as the ‘bottom up’ and user generated communities constructed via digital media have been proposed as a welcome corrective to the less participatory models that preceded them. Advocates of convergence culture in the United States, for instance, argue that as television loses much of its capacity to construct the national community, convergent media forms have emerged to reclaim that capacity – while also diversifying its benefits by directing it more accurately to the needs of the indivi dual ( Jenkins 2006). This leaves us with the curious paradox that the revival of community is located in a highly individualized practice of consumption. Nonetheless, this is among the reasons why the move away from ‘mass media’ or broadcasting to niche markets and ‘narrowcasting’ (Buonanno 2008), in which individual consumers have more choice, is so widely seen as a positive

64 Television and community development. Multichannel television and digital media generally are more customizable, less prescriptive, more responsive to individual preferences, and importantly they offer a capacity that was previously the sole property of the media organizations themselves – the ability to circulate and to produce media content. And even though these changes may have had little effect on the political economy of the media – on who actually controls the media industries and the symbolic economy they regulate – it is common (and understandable) for them to be hailed as signifying the diminution of the power of large media organizations. The idea of community, then, opens up one of the paradoxes about how these highly sophisticated, ultra modern technologies have been connected to alternative, pre modern ideologies of social relations in media studies literature. In James Hay’s discussion of the media and communitarianism he reminds us of Tonnies’ famous distinction between gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (society), in which community is a ‘pre modern and extra urban’ set of relations, while the development of society serves the modernizing, urban rationalities of industry and commerce. Hay suggests that ‘community remains an unattainable ideal in modern societies’, even while it still lurks in the background, ‘pro blematizing the climate of self interest’ (Hay 2007: 265) fostered there. Connect ing new media developments to the retrieval of a more organic, authentic mode of living may seem a little counter intuitive, but that is precisely how the idea of community has been embedded within the critique of the mass media, and of mass culture generally, that has its post war roots in the Frankfurt School in Europe and in liberal critics such as Dwight MacDonald in the United States. These roots are clearly visible in the book which coined the term ‘virtual communities’ in the first place, Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Rheingold 2000, originally published 1993), which tells the story of the development of WELL (the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a computer conferencing system which carried early versions of chat and email. The book’s title, with its harking back to an agrarian past, implicitly invokes the view that community is something that has been lost to modern societies. Far from being responsible for this situation, or perhaps even complicit with it, the communications technologies espoused by Rheingold offer a means of correcting it. Rheingold proposes the virtual community as a solution to the problem of social isolation and alienation: cyber space becomes the place ‘where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall’ (Rheingold 2000: 26). As Hay describes it, this problem ‘presumably resulted from an earlier reorganization of social space through media/communications technology (eg feeling cut off from the world at home)’, but in Rheingold’s book it is addressed ‘through an emerging regime of computer communication located within a new domestic sphere’ (Hay 2007: 267). There is a clear narrative organizing Rheingold’s diagnosis of what has gone wrong with modern society; within that narrative, the media are both the problem and the solution. The concept of community is entangled with Western conceptions of mod ernity in complex and contradictory ways (Hay 2007: 260). Indeed, it is remarkable

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how tightly community’s meanings have been tethered to modernity despite the threat that modernity poses to it; what is notable is how the adaptability of community as a discourse has enabled what must now be thought of as community’s increasing commodification. Hay argues that discourses of com munitarianism have become embedded in ‘US policy and its state sponsored programmes of government’, while becoming a key ‘term and technology of corporate management’ (Hay 2007: 260). Community’s power as a discourse has certainly made it attractive to a wide range of regimes of representation. Many of us will have noticed how some businesses no longer have clients or markets; they have communities of users. Harriet Sawney is one of several to have noted that ‘community has lately become a sexy word in the business world’ (Sawney 2009: 111). Not only does the term imply a less commercial, more organic and alternative means of describing the market segment from which a business earns its income, but it has also been turned into a means of organizing how that income is generated. ‘User communities, when nurtured properly’, Sawney says, ‘offer the prospect of harvesting free user inputs with regard to product design and marketing at a minimal cost. From a business point of view’, she goes on, drawing on her research into the development of mobile media, ‘the community is best described as an organization where consumers participate in costless asset formation by playing with a product’ (Sawney 2009: 111). The extent to which community has now been captured for commercial exploitation is visible in the large gap between this description of business’ version of community and Rheingold’s rural cyberfantasy of the electronic homestead. There are, though, some central and continuing assumptions about what comprises community: even as the term’s usage mutates within academic disciplines such as anthropology; and even as it is appropriated as a means of either neutralizing criticism or recommending policy, products and modes of participation. In his contribution to an updated version of Williams’ Keywords, Bennett, Grossberg and Morris’ (2005) New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, George Yúdice describes the general use of the term as implying a connection – such as kinship, cultural heritage, shared values or goals – felt to be more ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ and therefore stronger and deeper, than a rational or contractual association of individuals, such as the market or the state. (Yúdice 2005: 51) His account argues that community is an idea that has always been ambivalent about prioritizing the individual even while recognizing their rights. Describing the emergence of democratic political communities within the context of the industrial revolution, Yúdice explains that while writers such as De Toqueville feared that ‘the liberal protection of individual political and civil rights would orient society towards self interest’, others believed that ‘the mutual assistance characteristic of communities on a smaller scale, such as religious associations,

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would serve as an antidote to individualism’ (Yúdice 2005: 51). Already, then, in the early nineteenth century, even as community was entering its residual phase, it was nonetheless being seen as in some way a countervailing force to a modernizing, rationalizing and commercial society. Its emphasis upon located, everyday, reciprocal and ‘lived’ relationships through which the common good (of a group, a culture, a space or place) is prioritized and protected, and the assumption that unmediated, natural and face to face relationships provide insurance against the more abstract rationalities of a modern society, means that it still generates the possibility that community can continue to serve ‘the restorative function of its traditional opposition to the market and (neo)liberal individualism’ (Yúdice 2005: 53). That certainly is the claim which implicitly underlies its current appropriation in discussions of the media’s construction of community and which paradoxically aligns it with the very things that many regard as threats – new communications systems, new economies, increased migration flows, and globalizing markets. Just as Raymond Williams noted in 1983, community remains a ‘warmly persuasive’ term: it still names modes of relations that enable us to recognize diversity and defend commonalities, and a form of shared consciousness which produces the most highly valued, holistic and least instrumental modes of attachment, belonging and identity.

Sharedness, liveness and community In this section we turn to consider how television, in its various forms and across its many platforms, now participates in the construction of community; our focus is largely on testing the claims made about the emergence of new kinds of community in the United Kingdom and the United States (although such arguments are also made about other places), and assessing just what kinds of roles television (broadcast, subscription and online) now plays in this process. In order to do this we need to consider what it is about television that provides it with such capacities; we then discuss to what extent we can see these capa cities in the major platforms of delivery found in the United Kingdom and United States – broadcasting, subscription and online. There are some reasonably standard views1 on what attributes are fundamental to television’s participation in the construction of communities. Television’s ‘everydayness’ is one of these attributes: that is, the manner in which the tele vision schedule is still embedded into the patterns of everyday life – this, as we have seen in the previous chapter, even at a time when many audience members choose to timeshift or seek other alternatives to ‘appointment television’. Ellis (2002: 32) also highlights the importance of the perception of a co present, national audience: the sense of ‘togetherness in separation’ that accompanies consumption. Even as the industries globalize and audiences personalize their consumption, television seems designed, no matter what its platform of delivery, to generate new ways of being together while apart. Most typically, however, these are the attributes of broadcast television, what Dayan calls ‘television of the centre’ or ‘central televisions’: that is, television systems that are state institutions,

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used to manage the communication between the socio political centre and its peripheries (Dayan 2010b: 20). Attributes of central television which also con tribute to the construction of community, and which we will discuss first, are what Dayan calls ‘sharedness’ and what is customarily described in the television literature as ‘liveness’. Through its deployment of these capacities and mod alities, television of the centre established its ability to focus the attention of those in the peripheries on certain events, situations and so on. What the national audience ‘shared’ through broadcasting, in the first instance then, is a form of collective attention (Dayan 2010b: 20) which is made immanent in the audience member’s sense of that national audience’s co presence – which is, in turn, enabled by the sharing of ‘common consumption practices’ and ‘common understandings of time and space’ (Pertierra 2011: 231). There is, of course, a practical and political benefit from this focusing of collective attention, as it enables access to ‘socially essential information’, and provides ‘a socio cultural form suitable for democracy’ that is as useful to the citizen as it is to ‘Government or Capital’ (Gripsrud 2010b: 7). Speaking about this aspect of the function of what she calls ‘generalist’ television in Italy, Milly Buonanno emphasizes the direct cultural benefits to flow from this ‘sharedness’: Television … has helped to construct [the national] collectivity symbolically, offering it a non physical meeting place where participants may experience mutual visibility and recognition. Generalist television has served to forge a shared ‘imagination’ of the national community, with considerably more impact and above all to a far greater extent compared to the press; in Italy its effect has been among other things a primary force in linguistic unification, anticipating the process of universal schooling. (Buonanno 2008: 24) There is some blurring of ‘liveness’ and ‘immediacy’ in the television studies literature and so the uses and meanings of these two terms overlap; it might be helpful if we opt to regard liveness as the command category here, and to regard immediacy as among the discursive properties of that liveness. Of course, neither of these can be reduced to a simple equation with ‘real time’ transmission. While ‘real time’ or simultaneous transmission is certainly crucial, and particu larly in relation to events such as major sporting competitions, ‘liveness’ has a broader pervasiveness as a discursive feature of more than just those programmes that are transmitted live. Even ‘recorded programs are able to claim the status of liveness for themselves simply because the act of transmission attaches them to a particular moment’, says Ellis (2002: 31). Also, television adopts a generic dis cursive modality that Ellis describes as a form of ‘currency’: hence, ‘TV shows may not be live, but they are current’ (Ellis 2007: 154). As Gripsrud explains: TV channels address their audiences, even when airing pre recorded material, in ways that imitate liveness: eg in all the instances of direct address both inside and between programmes. References are constantly

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In the first of our two stories about television which opened the Introduction to this book, Graeme reflected on his experience of continuous live television from within a disaster zone during the Queensland floods of 2011: its ‘liveness’ seemed absolutely fundamental. Graeme originally published part of that story as a column published in the online television journal, Flow. A number of comments were posted which responded in interesting ways to the column, and they suggest that an appreciation of liveness is more than just the recognition of simultaneity: the consumption of live television generates a particular kind of engagement and pleasure. The post from Joshua (24 March 2011) invoked the coverage of the 9/11 attacks, in order to describe how the live coverage served ‘as a catalyst to unite its viewing audience’, and how ‘absolutely captivated’ he was as he watched. He was also reminded of other capacities for television, that changed its function from just serving as a ‘picture frame, something to be looked at distantly on occasion’ to something to be ‘intently watched with curiosity and wonder’. C. Peiper’s post is an even stronger demonstration of the qualitatively different mode of engagement generated by a strong sense of liveness; describing her response to what were then recent protests in the Middle East, she says: There is something undeniable about these events. For myself, living in an environment in which the media I consume daily is – typically – so tightly controlled, scheduled, programmed, spun, biased, re clipped, re reported, and then satirized nightly (a la John Stewart or Bill Maher), watching a true televisual event, be it a natural disaster or the protests in Egypt, which disallows canning and prepackaging by virtue of its unpredictable and uncontrolled nature – well, it absolutely mesmerizes me. (29 January 2011)2 Liveness provides a particular kind of connectedness that is intrinsically exciting. It is not only simply about the pleasures of access to the experiences depicted, nor only about linking up with transnational time (Wilk 2002). It is also about sharing an experience that is unpredictable, apparently unmediated and therefore one which shrinks the gap between oneself and the rest of the world. It is this sense of immediacy that is involved when sports fans insist on live rather than delayed coverage of their favourite event; their strong preference underlines the importance of gaining actual immediate access, not just its simulation. All of this, though, has been thoroughly canvassed in the literature on traditional platforms for television; what is needed now is an analysis of how television’s

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participation in the construction of community changes once we move past the standard models of the broadcast era and examine the patterns of difference and similarity that shape television in the multichannel and online era. We can commence by picking up a point that we made earlier, about the fundamental importance of television’s everydayness: the embedding of the schedule into everyday life. This is still an essential characteristic of much of broadcast television; where broadcasting is still dominant, such as in the United Kingdom and Australia, television remains closely aligned with the rhythms and structures of the daily lives of their audiences. As we saw in the previous chapter, in Mexico such rhythms and structures are even more tightly aligned. So, in those markets, we can see television ratings dominated by the evening news or by breakfast television as well as the major television events such as key sporting contests (the Superbowl, the FA Cup or the Olympics), or large interactive entertainment spectaculars such as the finals of Idol. The multichannel environment does not have to work like that. As choices are organized around narrow taste fractions and as the mass market fragments in response to these new opportunities, the connection to prior forms of everydayness and their resulting patterns of consumption is weakened. Of course, liveness and sharedness do survive the transition from the broadcast to the multichannel environment; they are still crucial to, for instance, 24 hour news channels such as CNN, much sports coverage, reality TV and ‘event television’ in particular, even though they will often do so in the context of a much reduced sense of the co presence of the national audience. Everydayness, however, is a different story. While broadcast, or so called ‘appointment’ television, employed set protocols of scheduling that did embed the television schedule into our daily lives, the multichannel environment seems to change all that. What we have instead in the contemporary United States is the customization of consumption: this may involve literally hundreds of channels to choose from, a favourites menu on the television receiver to organize one’s many possible choices and a highly individualized experience of television in which digital delivery and personal DVRs enable the routinization of time shifting and a personalized regime of consumption that separates the programme viewed from the transmission schedule in order to provide greater convenience for the consumer. The protocols of choosing are still tailored to the demands and patterns of everyday life, but this is not necessarily a shared everyday life; indeed, what makes this regime of choices attractive is precisely its capacity to be tailored to a highly personalized practice of everyday life. As Milly Buonnano points out, we now have the capacity to dis embed our choices from the time and space of others (Buonnano 2008: 69). So what happens to an audience that has become used to consuming only that programming which is attached to their own taste fraction? Amanda Lotz suggests one possible outcome is that audiences might grow suspicious of pro gramming that did not appear to address them, or as she puts it, ‘do not feature people who looked like them, or whom they might emulate’: ‘This situation has fuelled a retreat of the audience into enclaves of self interest, where, despite

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the medium’s enhanced commercial ability to tell a broader range of stories, few of us allow those different from ourselves into our television world’ (Lotz 2007: 240). Lotz goes on to suggest that some viewers may well be reacting against this tendency, with the result that there is a countervailing desire for community as a means of re establishing ‘some of the shared cultural experience that had once been more typical of the medium’. Even though customization has come to seem essential for viewers in the United States, she argues, ‘community remains a crucial part of the media experience’ (Lotz 2007: 245). The practice of developing online ancillary platforms around television programmes – programme related fan sites with interactive dimensions, for instance, creating what Jennifer Gillan (2011) calls ‘must click TV’ – is, of course, a means of strengthening the market demand for that programme. But it also responds to, and indeed commercializes, the desire for community – or perhaps, more accurately, the desire to share the experience of consuming this particular performance of television. Gillan has argued that while the commercial development of these ancillary platforms (their use for promoting merchandise or generating market data, for instance) may seem to be exploiting those she describes as ‘viewsers’ (a combination of viewer and user), the ‘viewsers’ themselves ‘are well aware’ that they are being ‘targeted as consumers’. In her opinion, many see this as a reasonable trade off: ‘while producers are banking on’ creating platforms that will generate an ‘emotional investment leading to consumer investment, some groups of fans … use their mutual participation in consumer culture as a way to create emotional connections with each other’ (Gillan 2011: 59). Like earlier iterations of the fan community, these groups are created by gathering people with shared interests and providing them with a platform which enables them to interact with each other; this is very different from the community created in the broadcast era by watching ‘common shows at a common time’ (Lotz 2007: 245). The ancillary platforms developed around programmes do provide a mode of sharing and their interactivity generates a sense of immediacy – possibly the key genre where this has operated as a fundamental feature is reality TV – but their primary objective is still to extend and enhance the individual consumer’s commitment to the selected programme. The development of what is effectively a franchise around high profile drama pro grammes such as Lost – linked platforms that include a chat room, a fan site, interactive dimensions including comments and interviews with personnel associated with the programme, exclusive off air content and so on – makes use of the affordances of digital media in order to construct a stronger and deeper association with the programme. As they interact via such platforms, viewers are able to feel as if they are active participants in relation to television content (and may even feel they can influence aspects of the production of that content), even while they remain aware of the commercial objective motivating the provision of the opportunity for this participation (Gillan 2011: 29–35). Indeed, Gillan suggests that it is possible to demonstrate that fans who participate in this extension of programming into what they suggest are effectively online fan

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communities, have moved beyond watching TV for ‘entertainment, education or social issues, or fantasy fulfilment’, and rather have come to see the activity of watching and talking about TV as an ‘emotional investment in an individual and communal understanding of their identity’ (Gillan 2011: 59). This is one of the key arguments used by Gillan, among others, to represent those changes to television, which come from the development of new modes of marketing tele vision content to include online and mobile as well as on air, as an intervention into the construction of community. There are two countervailing tendencies, then, in the commercial development of the multichannel environment as seen in the United States. In the pro liferation of choice that comes with the expansion of content provision, the individual consumer has the opportunity to create an unprecedentedly specific and customized menu of preferences. This fragments the television audience to the point where, in some markets, cable or subscription television no longer really works like a mass medium: it is far too targeted, too niche directed to be usefully thought of in that way. While the attributes of liveness will still play out in a large range of the programming content that is available through these multichannel systems, and while there is certainly clear evidence that consumers are interested in sharing the pleasures of their customization through online social networks, it is also clear that the construction of the kind of community we might identify with broadcast television is not a primary effect of multi channel systems. They are more likely to atomize the mass audience, slicing them into many distinct taste segments. On the other hand, it is not really in the interests of subscription television to entirely privatize the consumption of their content; their potential market is, after all, still a mass market even if they only attract these small segments to any one channel at any one time. Hence the development of domains of interactivity, and menus of associated but online exclusive content as a means of enhancing the level of engagement, the capacity for sharing that engagement and the simula tion of a form of community for those who commit sufficiently to the pro gramme to make repeat visits, to offer comments and so on. As we noted above, even if the objective of this simulation of community is commercial, that does not prevent it serving the needs of its participants, and generating pleasures that are both new to, as well as helpful to, television. This latter consideration is why broadcasters have adopted such strategies for promoting their programming as well, and so it is fast becoming standard practice for high profile television across both modes of delivery. For most of the multichannels, though, it is mostly through making use of this strategy that they can construct even their limited sense of community. Before we leave this aspect of our topic, it is also worth mentioning the growing phenomenon, mentioned briefly in our Introduction, of ‘binge viewing’ boxsets of DVDs for high profile programming – that is, the ‘domestic viewing of multiple episodes sequentially’ (Brunsdon 2010: 65) of ‘quality’ television such as The Wire, 30 Rock, Boardwalk Empire and so on. This, too, is a form of ‘new’ television that is disaggregated from the institution of

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television, but not from the television industry. As a practice, perhaps, it is still emerging – and will emerge in variously located ways as does any other tele vision practice – but it does shift some of the meanings of television. As a product of the partnership between high definition formats for home viewing and DVD distribution of the high quality end of television drama, television is widely described as becoming more cinematic (or, as Brunsdon (2010: 65) puts it, ‘less televisual’), and therefore ‘good’ for a whole section of the market which may once have thought about television in other ways: This new ‘good’ television in contrast to old, bad, addictive television is not broadcast network television, but television which one either pays to see, or watches on DVD. Instead of being associated with housebound women, this new television is young, smart, and on the move, downloaded or purchased to watch at will. (Brunsdon 2010: 65) This opens up a whole other dimension of thinking about the current situation of television that we don’t want to go into here, but which is related to the growth of the home theatre, the take up of high definition transmission and distribution formats and changes in the cultural location of certain kinds of television content.3 This is another dimension to the contemporary experience of watching television which takes us away from everydayness; Brunsdon notes the replacement of the metaphor of addiction (an earlier pathology of television viewing) with the metaphor of ‘bingeing’ as a means of describing audiences’ habits of consumption. This, she says, is a shift ‘from something which is rationed temporally (broadcast television), and which you must therefore get a fix from regularly, to something more like a box of chocolates which you purchase and consume in your own time’ (Brunsdon 2010: 65). The boxset is a form of special event television, in one way, but its disconnection from a sense of co presence must also work against that effect – making it an experience that is more like the cinema. ‘Liveness’, though, may be another matter. Interestingly, one of the posts responding to Graeme Turner’s column on liveness and sharedness in Flow mentioned earlier argues that binge viewing actually creates its own version of ‘liveness’: I know in my own experience being at college, I don’t have regular access to a TV or even have the time to catch up on shows weekly on the internet. I watch TV programmes in large clumps all at once. For example, with Mad Men I can watch an entire season in one sitting on my computer during my summer break. That instant gratification that I experience while watching a live programme is not so far off from what I feel when I watch a series. As long as no one spoils the season for me, it is like I am experi encing a continuous chain of events on a show for as long as I would like to watch. (Annais, 1 June 2011)

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Significantly, Annais here is engaged in binge viewing of television but she is doing this on her computer. Accessing television through catch up or time shifting capacities on network or channel websites, through online video libraries such as Hulu or Netflix or through the massive video aggregation of YouTube, is the most rapidly growing practice in this media environment. It varies enormously from place to place, of course; Hulu is a frequently cited example of the capacities of online delivery for television, but it is only available as a free service in the United States at the time of writing.4 The access to DVRs for recording and timeshifting is also highly variable; and projections that tele vision may end up as primarily viewed on computers does presume a world in which access to the home computer is more or less universal. Nonetheless, in locations such as the United States, there is evidence that for many young people, the laptop and the mobile phone are more essential and indeed more common possessions than a television. As both of these technologies also enable access to social networking capabilities, and some other platforms for the distribution of television do not, it is not surprising that it is primarily in relation to the online consumption of television that we hear claims about the construction of new kinds of communities. One obvious thing that needs to be said about the content for online television is that it is massively dependent upon resources that were developed for the other distribution platforms; largely, it aggregates what is already out there and circulates it among its audiences. We know that the vast majority of what gets watched on YouTube comes from mainstream television; according to Burgess and Green’s survey, while the total number of videos on YouTube is skewed towards user generated content, ‘traditional’ television content is viewed more than twice as often (Burgess and Green 2009: 42). These categories can blur, though. Once the user generated YouTube clip reaches a certain level of notoriety or visibility as a result of the number of those who have accessed it, then it moves out of the online domain and into broadcast and multichannel television. Typically, it turns up as the last story on broadcast network news (‘And, finally … ’) but there are also many broadcast and subscription television magazine formats (entertainment and celebrity news/gossip programmes, breakfast programmes or clip shows) which now routinely include a survey of the most watched YouTube clips. All of that said, Burgess and Green have no doubt about the importance of sharedness to the appeal of YouTube: While it would eventually seek premium content distribution deals and, once utilized, a tiered access programme that provided paying users with the ability to upload longer videos, YouTube has always oriented its services toward content sharing, including the sharing of mundane and amateur content, rather than the provision of high quality video. (Burgess and Green 2009: 5) Burgess and Green talk about viewers’ participation in this process as a form of ‘vernacular creativity’, presumably to stress the difference between what YouTube

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does for its users, and what the more institutionalized top down media institutions can do. They suggest that ‘various forms of cultural, social, and economic values are collectively produced by users en masse, via their consumption, evaluation and entrepreneurial activities’, and point to the ‘cultural generativity’ that comes from the site’s multiple roles: ‘as a high volume website, a broadcast platform, a media archive, and a social network’ (Burgess and Green 2009: 5). While much of the discussion of the relation between old and new forms of television tends to emphasize the differences between broadcast and online, it is important not to overlook the similarities. We have already seen, in Annais’ comment, that it is possible to argue for a kind of ‘liveness’ even in her binge viewing on the computer; it is even easier to demonstrate the liveness of the chatroom conversation or the sharing of favourite texts via Facebook. At least some of the interactions online involve production rather than consumption; what is, in effect, the instantaneous publication of a user generated video. Burgess and Green (2009: 6) also suggest that YouTube operates with a similar quotidian frequency or ‘everydayness’ to television, although they don’t elaborate their case for this. More significantly, and as noted above, the social network dimension of YouTube is based on nothing but ‘sharedness’. Online media in general produce multiple moments of co presence through the sharing of media experiences and media texts in real time via social networks. It is arguable that the co presence this creates has a feedback loop that is potentially more immediate, extensive and direct even than the old fashioned ‘water cooler’ conversation generated by broadcast television. It also relies far less upon the imagined presence of other users than does, for instance, the simultaneous consumption of broadcast content. In these respects, it is easy to nominate ways in which the online media may actually create a more palpable sense of community and engagement than is available through traditional television platforms.5 All of that said, it is also easy (and indeed common) to overstate the case. While from the producer’s view there are certainly community like aspects of the interac tions concerned, this is still primarily about enhancing the individual’s experience of consumption rather than about building a community. As for the consumer, the online capacities are usually explored by an individual alone at their keyboard, and although interactivity is possible, it is not a common feature of most people’s media consumption. On the other hand, even if the online consumer never posts a comment and never uploads their user generated content onto YouTube, their mode of consumption is more personalized, individualized, and perhaps even more committed than most of their engagement with traditional television. However, in the end, we would argue that this mode of consumption is more about the construction of identity than about the construction of community. It is significant that when Howard Rheingold prepared his 2000 revision of The Virtual Community, he acknowledged that his original use of the idea of commu nity was ill informed: ‘if I had encountered sociologist Barry Wellman and learned about social network analysis when I first wrote about cyberspace cultures, I could have saved us all a decade of debate by calling them “online social networks” instead of “virtual communities”’ (Rheingold 2000: 359).

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Managing choice The most obvious point of difference between broadcast television and sub scription and online television is the number of choices available. While the Freeview platform developed in the United Kingdom and also deployed in Australia aggregates broadcast free to air digital channels in a way that provides a competitive alternative to subscription television – offering free access to around 40 channels in the United Kingdom, and 16 so far in Australia – the extent of the choices the other platforms provide, and the level of control and customization possible, remains difficult to match. It is not just the larger number of channels or the volume of content available, however: we know that no matter how many channels consumers have access to, the number of channels from which they actually regularly choose is between 8 and 15 (Buonanno 2008: 69). More important than the total number of choices available, however, is the capacity to customize one’s menu of choices. In the United States, there is considerable pressure on cable channels to move to an ‘a la carte’ mode of selecting which channels the consumer subscribes to, rather than the current practice of providing a set package which includes many unwanted and ultimately unwatched channels. This is a direct response to the expectations of customization and control raised by the increased choice and it is likely to become a more widespread strategy, particularly in markets where broadcasting has proven to be a resilient competitor to pay TV. The expansion of choice is what produces the ‘narrowcasting’ effect – the addressing of specific taste cultures rather than the mass audience. Largely this has been seen as a positive development (although Buonanno draws unfavour able comparisons between the politics of this trend and those of the broad casting era that preceded it (Buonanno 2008: 20–6)). As we have noted at a number of points earlier in this book, implicit in much of the theorizing of convergence culture is the proposition that the expansion of choice directly enables a new level of empowerment for the individual consumer, as if the answer to the power of the media industries lies in technical diversification. It would be helpful to know more about how that consumer power is actually used across and within various locations. John Ellis has suggested that the pro liferation of what are often relatively insignificant choices is as likely to become a burden as a benefit; the consequence is what he calls ‘choice fatigue’: ‘the feeling that choices are simply too difficult’ resulting in a ‘nostalgia for pattern, habit and an era when choices were few’ (Ellis 2002: 171). It is also worth noting that the expansion of choice in modern societies is often a means of transferring the cost of a service from the provider to the consumer; in most cases, broadcast television is free, but access to cable or an internet service is not. There is good reason, then, to be sceptical about such a ready identification between the expansion of choice and consumer empowerment (Turner 2010a). In terms of the specific concerns of this chapter, however, we still know very little about how consumers manage their choices in an era of media abundance. Elsewhere, Graeme Turner has written about his experience of working in the

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United States and dealing with a genuinely multichannel environment for the first time: Watching television in the US, then, was a novel experience – with hundreds of channels available through my television as well as many more options online, in a context where it is simply impossible to have all the options listed in other media or, alternatively, where the uninitiated can spend hours scrolling through the list on the TV’s channel guide. As a television scholar, I knew what I wanted to see but once I had satisfied those preferences and began to explore other possibilities, I was lost in what is, overall, a relatively featureless landscape of choice. Individualizing one’s media consumption sounds like a great idea, but as an outsider to this media culture, I needed help to do it. (Turner 2010b) When he approached his students for advice on how they navigated their way through this sea of choices, their response was interesting. Most did not watch network television, at least not without time shifting, and most used their laptops rather than a television set. In such respects, they ‘epitomized the highly individualized, finely customized, twenty first century mode of consuming media’. However, the list of what each of them actually chose to watch was very similar. There was a great deal of overlap across the items on their personal ‘playlists’ (Rizzo 2007), which meant that they shared a loose repertoire of choices. Clearly, there was some kind of taste community in operation. The paradox about the individualization of choice on this scale is that it seems you need something like a community to help you manage it. No matter how much assistance the electronic in TV guide provides for you, the assistance from those who share your tastes is going to do it better. However, as we noted earlier, the logic of customization and control actually works against the construction of community. This is particularly so in the case of the online environment. In the United States alone, 40 billion videos are viewed online each month, each of them the result of an individual choice. There have been many attempts to help consumers make these choices. Clicker, for instance, launched in 2009, is a video guide which helps its users find programming around the Web, such as Hulu and YouTube; in addition to free content, it also indexes movies and TV shows available as pay per view through Amazon or Netflix. But what Clicker can’t do is what is now called ‘discovery’ – the use of some kind of preference engine to tell users what shows are available that they might like. There have been many attempts to solve the problem of discovery; Digitalsmith, for instance, have introduced a platform for pay TV called ‘Seamless Discovery’, which draws on social channels, guide listings and recommendations to create more personalized recommendations for their users (Whitney 2011). This is a response to the absence of a community which would help structure the choices; but it is a response which tries to deal with this absence by more closely managing the processes of consumption.

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New communities, diluted communities or zones of consumption? At the end of the first section of this chapter, we described what seemed to be among the constant elements in the gradually evolving use of the idea of community, despite the complexities of the term’s history. We pointed to the invocation of an organic, ‘natural’, shared experience of everyday life that is loca ted in a specific place or space. There is also a continuing sense that community is something to be protected and preserved by its members, and this in turn suggests that our participation in a community carries rights and obligations that implicitly acknowledge the community’s benefit as a primary goal. Finally, we noted how the maintenance of community involved the potentially contra dictory tasks of supporting the rights of the individual while also deferring to an inclusive and consensual conception of the common good. There can be little doubt that the traditional, national, broadcast model has worked very effectively as a mechanism for constructing a national community that contains all of these elements; in many locations today that remains more or less unchanged. Even in locations where there is a strong market for sub scription television, this can be the case; the previous chapter demonstrates that in relation to Mexico. Many argue that this is not a good thing: that the national community is in effect constructed by the state, and that even com paratively benign iterations of a national television system such as the BBC can be accused of paternalism, of normalizing particular formations of class and taste and of operating in the manner of what used to be called an ‘ideological state apparatus’. As Anna Cristina Pertierra has observed in relation to her research on television in Cuba, state television ‘has proved as useful to socialist states as to liberal democracies in constructing national communities’ (Pertierra 2011: 231), and there are plenty of examples of far less than benign applications of the medium: much of the work on television in China (Sun and Zhao 2009; Fung 2008) is concerned with the manner in which those working in the industry, even as it marketizes, are required to meet both political and commercial objectives. However, in Europe, the United States and Australia, most would agree, the once dominant institution of television – Dayan’s ‘television of the centre’ – is declining in influence. Its capacity to focus collective attention is less quotidian, and now tends to be concentrated on particular moments – big sporting events, for instance, or news of exceptional national importance. In some of the key countries for those who watch media developments – the United States is the obvious example here – broadcast television has lost the majority of its national audience to its competitors. It is reasonable to expect that this will impact on television’s influence on the structure and practice of everyday life, and perhaps eventually also upon the cogency of a sense of national community. On the other hand, there is also reason to see this situation as one which returns a considerable amount of power to the consumer. As we suggested earlier in this chapter, longstanding critiques of the media as centralized, top down,

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exploitative and self interested have created an environment within which the introduction of alternative models of media consumption and production are enthusiastically welcomed. When media proprietors appear to have relin quished some of their control over the audience’s consumption, and returned that control to consumers through the provision of greater choice and other modes of customization, it is easy to see why such a development might be described as a move towards consumer empowerment. We have already expressed our reservations about such a reading of the situation, but it is certainly true that many will experience this greater sense of control as a major improvement in their experience of television. A further benefit is the increasingly transnational character of the experience of subscription television; in certain regions – Asia, the Middle East – this is a highly significant element. Many have applauded the loosening of the control of the national institutions of television as leading to a relocation of cultural and regulatory boundaries, producing a form of action cosmopolitanism that weakens the purchase of the nation state and domesticates multiple iterations of difference. For those who propose such formulations, these are substantial positive outcomes of the multichannel environment. In locations where these outcomes have also been accompanied by a major decline in the role of traditional television, however, they may have come at a cost – something socially useful may have been lost as well. Dayan suggests that ‘new media … are never directed to the whole galaxies of audiences that form national publics’, and so even though ‘sharing exists here’, it ‘involves relatively narrow publics’: This restricted sharing results in a significant loss. What is shown on the new media is not truly public. Rather than displaying an authoritative status that once belonged to royal historiographers, images shown on new media tend to circulate along personal networks without ever being ascertained by a gate keeping institution. Travelling within the periphery, short circuiting centers, they tend to function like rumour. (Dayan 2009: 24) Dayan goes on to raise questions about the effect of this, as new media displace what he describes as central television’s function of operating as a vast public bulletin board, a location for ‘an imagination of the collective’: The role of television as bulletin board seems endangered today. Will it survive? And will it survive as central television? Can a certain type of collectively focused attention disappear altogether? It seems difficult to imagine a society without some common factuality, without an institution in charge of displaying the selected facts. Will centralized television maintain its role as provider of this common factuality? Will new media inherit television’s sceptre? (Dayan 2009: 25) At this point, of course, there can be no answers to these questions. But Dayan is among many who suggest, in one way or another, that it is reasonable to

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believe that modern societies do need a universally accessible means of sharing information, of constructing community identities, and of establishing the dis courses of a common framework of rights and responsibilities that structure everyday life. For much of its history, television has played a major part in such a process. The decline of broadcasting and the rise of narrowcasting would seem to significantly change the scale and influence of that role. Indeed, the current alternatives – subscription and online – don’t claim to perform it; rather, they see the importance of what they do as residing in the provision of choice, control, customization and convenience to the individual consumer. Within that context, as we suggested before, the claim to be constructing communities in new ways is of great strategic importance – both to those making that argument, and to those who wish to assess the legitimacy of that claim. It raises the question of whether the benefits may be had without incurring any net cost. While we recognize the benefits it brings, the shift to a multichannel envir onment, in our view, does create a deficit in the area of community. There are residual formations that possess some of the attributes of a community – fans’ multiplatform, sometimes interactive, engagement with particular programmes, for instance – but the key target of subscription television is the individual, and they are reached through their personal tastes and interests. The construction of a community, when it occurs, is at best an accidental by product of a range of promotional or marketing strategies aimed at maximizing the consumer’s engagement with their television choices. The countervailing point – made often by those working in television studies in the United States – is of course that the multichannel environment liberates the consumer from the top down, paternalistic regimen of ‘appointment television’ and better recognizes the diversity of interests television should serve. That this is achieved by way of a fragmentation of the market is thus seen as relatively unproblematic: if that fragmentation is actively differentiating between consumers to better serve their interests, what could be wrong with that? It is a fair question. A possible answer, dealing specifically with news, can be found in Andrejevic’s (2011) discussion of the cultural and political effect of a fragmented media audience, which he compares with the more traditional modes of presenting news and information objectively and comprehensively, producing what Cass Sunstein describes as a ‘shared public understanding of current events underwritten by common reference points provided by the news media’ (Andrejevic 2011: 605). Andrejevic uses Sunstein to outline the dangers of a thoroughly fragmented mediascape: As consumers choose to cut through the commercial media clutter by selecting information and media outlets that reflect their political persua sions and preferences, catering to them by reinforcing both a particular understanding of the world and an impassioned reaction to the day’s events, audiences run the danger of insulating themselves from information and perspectives that might challenge their own. The result, Sunstein

80 Television and community argues, is the prospect of a greater divergence of opinion rather than an information driven consensus. (605) Andrejevic goes on to talk of the ‘balkanization’ of opinion as ‘group members move one another toward more extreme points in line with their initial tendencies’. There is a further point, as well, which relates to the enclosure of news and information within the entertainment menus constructed by the multichannel environment, something which is again a particular feature of US television. This is not just a matter of changing technologies; Andrejevic also notes a significant shift in the ontological status of news and information, ‘the background understanding on the part of viewers that facts, information and news have become a personal choice’: ‘The willingness to choose one’s own news depends not just on the multiplication of available choices, but also upon a reconceptualization of news as a customizable commodity subject to the vagaries of taste that govern other forms of consumption’ (605). This, then, is the kind of argument that has to be placed against the more positive accounts. Once that is done, it is hard to support an argument that sees subscription television as, by and large, doing more than creating market fractions from its audiences while using ancillary platforms as a means of enhancing and reinforcing the choices its audiences make. There are exceptions to this, of course: HBO’s success with high profile long form drama has generated an extensive public through its DVD distribution as well as through its initial transmission, and the Comedy Channel’s satiric news programmes The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have generated national conversations about politics. In general, however, any claims for subscription television’s substantial participation in the construction of communities can only be supported if we adopt a diluted and reduced sense of what we understand by community. We would not make quite the same argument in relation to the still developing online platforms for television. As we said earlier in this chapter, some of the core attributes which shape television’s participation in the construction of community – sharedness, liveness, immediacy – are also core components for much of what happens online. There are clear parallels for the fabled ‘water cooler’ conversations; the capacity to share favourite content is dramatically enhanced in the digital environment generally, but this is particularly the case online. And real time interaction is one of the fundamental capacities provided online. We see much stronger evidence in this context for the proposition that the new platforms of delivery have found new ways to construct something like a community. That said, it is also the case that the communities in question are quite tightly focused – for instance, they might be de facto personal networks, or they might be concentrated almost exclusively on media consumption. Also, there seems to be little in the way of a framework of community driven rights and responsibilities aimed at serving the common good rather than personal interests. There are protocols of online behaviour which the participants col lectively observe, of course, but this stops well short of the extensive patterns of

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obligations we noted at the beginning of this section as structuring the practices of everyday life. So, although something interesting and new is clearly happening, it is debatable if that is, in fact and at this point, properly described as a community. Rheingold’s recanting of his ‘virtual communities’ label seems apposite here; it is easy to accept that the new platforms for television have enabled its enclosure within what clearly are new ways of building social net works, but it is harder to accept that these amount to new kinds of community without, once again, accepting a dilution of the idea of community itself. In conclusion, then, our view is that although we are comfortable with thinking of the nation as an imagined community, we should be more circumspect about accepting the idea that what is constructed around (say) an online fan discussion site similarly constitutes a community. We have seen that there are important similarities between the functions of these two locations, but there are also significant differences. The mass mediated national community is externally structured but it has the potential to affect all aspects of one’s daily life – even if it only sporadically enters one’s consciousness and even if each of us has reservations about how thoroughly we seek to belong. As a community, the nation is managed by extensive lines of association, entitlement and obligation, but they vary significantly in intensity and between individual subjects. The typical online fan community, on the other hand, is marked by strong lines of affinity organized around shared tastes and knowledges, but for most of those who belong to such a community its imbrication into the full range of practices of everyday life will be limited. The specific connections between members may be stronger, more focused and perhaps even more in the foreground of their everyday lives, but their sphere of activities will be more narrow than those constructed via national institutions. As we used to say about broadcast television audiences, we are only fans of our favourite programme for a very small part of our daily lives. There is evidence that new media have helped us to find new ways to build social networks. We don’t think there is strong evidence yet that they have helped us to find new ways to build communities. Even if we define community as a form of consciousness rather than as a physical space, the model of the online community still involves a relatively narrow range of activity and a limited set of responsibilities and obligations. What is mostly shared among their members – and sharing is the key activity in the construction of community – is either content itself or recommendations about or responses to media content. As a result of digital media’s provision of interactivity, the proliferation of choices and the varying playlists of preferences with which we can now interact, the niches into which we can now direct consumption have become more densely populated and far noisier. However, rather than describe these niches as communities, we think it is more useful to describe them as zones of consumption. These are locations that possess certain capabilities – sharing and networking, for instance – some of which have the capacity to work like mechanisms of community. But, in the end, the television channel or the online video aggregator

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is a location for the performance of consumption, and a location that is complexly and individually framed. As is the case more generally in our use of this term throughout the book, the adoption of the ‘zones of consumption’ label here avoids a loose appropriation of some of the longstanding assumptions associated with community while usefully ensuring an emphasis on examining more thoroughly where consumption occurs and how that location is actually framed by its own specific determinants – such as patterns of cultural affinity, industrial and regulatory structures, as well as the particulars of place. That kind of examination does seem to be necessary before we rush too readily into attaching the label of community onto an emerging media formation.

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Television, domestic space and the moral economy of the family

Having examined now, in various ways, the nation and the community as zones of consumption, we use this chapter to zoom in much closer on what remains the core territory for any discussion of the location of television – the domestic space of the family home. Attention to television’s function within the home is especially imperative in a project that has nominated as one of its key objectives the situating of television within the practices of everyday life. We have chosen to employ the kind of ethnographic methods that are identified with anthropology rather than with cultural studies: that is, immersive periods of fieldwork, the development of case studies of informants and participants and a contextualization of the research within larger patterns of social organi zation than merely those connected to the uses of media.1 Hence, as we outline the particular zone of consumption under examination here – the families and households in Chetumal that comprise our research site – we find that on the one hand, it is the amassing of what may seem like the banal detail of everyday lives that is most important to our understanding of the function of television there, but also, on the other hand, that many of the significant elements which go to make up the specificity of that zone are not necessarily closely related to television itself, or indeed to the particular circumstances of the families in question. While the case studies of our informants still constitute our primary research materials, and remain the primary focus of our interest, our investiga tion into the practices of their everyday lives leads us into other territory as well. The demographic trajectory of the Mexican middle class, the physical structure of the suburban home in Chetumal, and the meanings given to the world of the street in Mexican popular culture, for instance, all turn out to be sig nificant factors which contribute towards the framing of the function of television within these households. The period Anna spent doing the fieldwork for this book totalled around nine months between 2008 and 2009, and so what we have managed to fit into this book is, inevitably, only a small part of what has been learnt. This chapter, nonetheless, constitutes Locating Television’s most sustained account of that work, and of what we want most to say about the function of television within these homes. Furthermore, it is also the chapter in which the ethnographic methods employed are most visible and where the manner of their writing up

84 TV, domestic space and the family is least compromised by the demands of cross disciplinary collaboration. Con sequently, we hope that it demonstrates in interesting ways the kinds of insights these methods can generate as well as presenting a very clear demonstration of the need to seriously acknowledge the importance of the specificities that go to make up the varied locations in which television is consumed.

What television does in Chetumal Latin American cities are typically imagined to be raucous places with a bustling street life. The density of urban populations leads many citizens, especially the poorer ones, to spend hours socializing in plazas and on street corners in addi tion to the errands and businesses that bring people onto the street. Indeed, the social space of the street has inspired many cultural researchers working on Latin America, for whom the city street is a space of danger, excitement and freedom that lies in opposition to the comfort, security and obligation of the house. But in the city of Chetumal, on the southeastern border of Mexico, very little of such street life exists. The city’s population has been booming in recent decades, benefiting from the tourism economy of the state of Quintana Roo; but as newer housing developments have spread away from the hurricane prone bay along which the older parts of the city were built, less and less street life can be observed. One such development is the neighbourhood of Kukulcan, built in 2002 in what had then been an outer area of the city.2 The neigh bourhood consists of a grid; lines of cul de sacs each have an automatic security gate enclosing the identical white townhouses that line the streets. While they

Figure 4.1 A street in Kukulcan.

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Figure 4.2 A newly built neighbourhood in Chetumal in 2012, marketed to working class and emerging middle class households. Despite a lack of street life one sees clear evidence of satellite television subscriptions which continue to accelerate in Mexico.

may not classify as a gated community, the gates certainly indicate a degree of security and exclusivity that has an appeal for buyers and renters in Kukulcan. Although the gates did not seem to provide very high levels of genuine security – they were often left unopened, and could very easily be climbed over – they seem more significant as a sort of architectural shorthand for ‘middle class’, and an example of what Teresa Caldeira has described as an ‘aesthetics of security’ in urban Latin America (Caldeira 2000: 292–6). When Anna first arrived in 2008 to start the Chetumal research by living in Kukulcan, she was sorry to note that there were no children on the street for her young daughter to start playing with. The cul de sac was lined with parked cars, but the front doors of each house were almost always closed, and in the early days of her stay Anna did not notice any children milling on the street. As the months progressed, though, she began to realize that in fact the majority of houses in her street did contain at least one child; they could be glimpsed jumping in and out of cars as they were ferried to school or leisure activities. Occasionally a toddler would be walked up and down the street by an adult, although only for a short period and rarely beyond the gates. Young teenagers might sit on the benches at one end of the street while talking to boyfriends and girlfriends, but only in small groups of two or three, for intimate chats. Children or young people yelling, playing music, kicking balls or generally being a presence was an extremely rare event.

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This, then, was a very different picture of street life in a Latin American city; one in which adults and children seemed to move as quickly as possible through the street from one enclosed destination to another. Some neighbours were friends, and some weren’t, but for the most part this was not the sort of community in which residents of the same street spent time together or kept up with each others’ lives. While this seeming isolation of adults was not entirely surprising, the similar isolation of children seemed more so: if the children of Kukulcan are not on the street, where are they and what are they doing to seem so hidden from view? Much of the time, along with many other Mexican children, and especially those of the middle classes, they were inside their houses watching television. The goal of this chapter is to unpack some of the ways in which television produces, or at least enables, a kind of lifestyle in which family life and socializing is increasingly pulled away from the street and into the house. Although this chapter is about television, it is more exactly about how television operates within the specific cultural context of Chetumal to reproduce everyday practices in house holds and families. While it will draw in equal measure from anthropological theories of street life and from media studies approaches to television in the house hold, the central objective is really to capture just what it is that people are doing with television, and why they might be doing it, in this largely inconsequential city in a remote area of Mexico. The inconsequential nature of Chetumal – it is not spectacular or remarkable in any way – makes it rather like television as an object of study; for the most part there is nothing extraordinary about the kinds of practices that root television in everyday life, so it seems entirely appropriate to study this very taken for granted non spectacular medium in a city that is often dismissed by outsiders as ‘having nothing’ or being ‘without culture’. One resident of Kukulcan whose household became an important part of this study was Patricia. Patricia’s family routines typify the sorts of leisure practices that characterized domestic life among the middle classes of Chetumal:

Patricia Patricia is a housewife who lives in an upper middle class condominium with her husband (who has a construction business) and their son and daughter who are in primary school. Patricia’s mother Susi also spends extended periods staying with them. There are four televisions in their three bedroom house; one in each of the bedrooms and another in the sewing room, which is effectively Susi’s room. They have Sky cable connected to each television, costing approximately 600 Mexican pesos monthly (about A$50). All of the televisions were bought in the previous five years; as Patricia bought almost all of her home furnishings at once when they moved into the house, the first television was purchased four years previous, while the other televisions were bought in cash at the Liverpool department store.

TV, domestic space and the family Patricia enjoys watching the Discovery Home and Health Channels. She regularly watches plastic surgery shows, Super Nanny and other parenting shows. The programmes are all dubbed into Spanish. Susi mostly watches the ‘Channel of the Stars’ (Televisa); she watches telenovelas mostly in the mornings (these are older novelas repeated). In the evenings from 6:30 p.m. each person sits in their own rooms watching television. Like many men in Chetumal, Patricia’s husband enjoys watching the History Channel and Discovery Channel. Since her husband hates telenovelas and variety shows, Patricia says it is rare to find a show that the whole household will watch, apart from the 10:30 p.m. Mexican news. For her part, Patricia says she gets to watch television only when other people will let her, but if her mother is watching something she enjoys, sometimes a telenovela, she watches it with her. When Patricia’s husband isn’t home she watches the television in their bedroom – when he comes home if she is halfway through she asks him to let her finish her show before he takes over to watch the History Channel, which she then also watches with him. The family doesn’t watch as much television over the weekend; her kids watch some television in the morning, but the family goes out for a late lunch and family activities, going to the movies, to the mall or to visit friends. But from Monday to Friday the children spend most of their free time (apart from organized activities like guitar or dance classes) in their rooms watching television. Patricia’s son has grown out of the kids’ shows like Teletubbies, and watches Animal Planet and Discovery. Her daughter enjoys Animal Planet as well and watches the music channels. Patricia doesn’t restrict the types of television watched, nor the quantities, and she has no problem with the idea of everyone spending their evenings at home separately watching television: From around 6:30 in the evening onwards, that’s when each one is in their own room watching telly, and we don’t see one another. Because my son, for example, in a little while he will come home from school and shut himself up in his room. He stays at school until the afternoon, and then if he doesn’t have activities after school he comes home and disappears into his room. My daughter, she arrived home a while ago, she gets in early, watches television, then goes to her activities, then we come back and she goes back up to her room. Patricia’s son in particular is a real homebody, and rarely wants to leave the house. He likes playing computer games, watching television and practising his guitar in his room, and even objects to going out to parties and other events on the weekends.

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Far from worrying about her son’s introverted disposition, Patricia spoke quite positively about how she liked having both him and his sister indoors for most of their leisure time. Her attitude was generally that having the children at home kept them out of harm’s way, and entertained in a harmless manner. As with most people Anna talked to about television for this research, Patricia tended to emphasize the positive value of educational television and documentary genres, and talked about the information as well as the enjoyment that her children gained from watching Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel, among other things. Whether or not people actually watch as many documentaries or as much ‘quality’ programming as they stress in interviews, what is interesting in Patricia’s case, as in many of the other people interviewed in Chetumal, is this tendency to highlight the positive aspects of watching television, which is a marked contrast to the moral critiques that tend to mark discussions of television viewing in Anglo American settings. This contrast is especially noticeable in conversations regarding children; whereas in global research on children’s media consumption, children watching large quantities of television is typically framed as a cause for concern, whether by researchers or their respondents, among the research participants of Chetumal children were very unproblematically reported as being great watchers of television. This is not to say that debates about television consumption by children are absent from the Mexican public discourse; among Mexican television scholars, the work of Guillermo Orozco Gómez has been especially comprehensive with regards to children’s television viewing. His empirical research based on three sociological studies of the 1980s and 1990s found that within households mothers were typically invested in their children’s television habits in ways that fathers were not (Orozco Gómez 1996: 75–80). Regardless of their class posi tion, the television habits of children were a recurring theme in the interactions of mothers and children, and mothers often exerted their authority within the household via negotiations of television. However, this is not to say that mothers were always worried about their children watching television per se; on the contrary, several interview excerpts from Orozco’s study present mothers who, like Patricia, preferred their children to be at home watching television than out on the street (Orozco Gómez 1996: 78). What is clear from the work of Orozco and his colleagues, though, is that the television has, for several decades at least, been understood as central to Mexican domestic family dynamics, and that women in particular invest heavily in seeing domestic media and leisure practices as closely related to family wellbeing. It is a central aim of this chapter, then, to explore this largely positive attitude towards watching television that seems to dominate the interviews and practices of people in Chetumal, and to suggest some of the reasons why con cerns about the moral dangers of television do not appear here in the same way as they do in the United States, for example.3 Patricia and her family are, in many cases, watching the same television programmes that people are watching in other countries – in this sense their heavy use of cable television sits in contrast to the more typical reliance upon broadcast television that was

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discussed in Chapter 2 – but the purpose of this chapter will be to show that what they engage in, the sorts of ideas that they have about their television watching, is a specifically local phenomenon, which needs unpacking through being located both in local issues that shape the city of Chetumal, and also in national issues that are shaping Mexican society. They also need to be located in understandings of family, and aspirations for material prosperity, two main themes that shape what it means to be middle class in contemporary Mexico, and especially in Chetumal. In other words, to understand how and why Patricia views having her children inside watching television as a good thing, we need to expand the remit of our investigation way beyond television itself, and at the very least explore: what houses are like; what kind of family household Patricia wants to have; why staying inside is a good thing in urban Mexico; and what life outside the house is felt to be. We need to understand the history of urban planning in Chetumal, the development of consumer culture in southeastern Mexico and the economic growth of this region, but also the political and civil crises that have marked neoliberal Mexico. Emotions and intentions that give meaning to television related practices include aspiration, comfort and love, while also living in the midst of interiorization, segmentation and fear. Such a swathe of ideas can only be touched upon in brief within the scope of this chapter, but they work in concert to approach understanding just how television practices may be located in these homes, in this era, in this region of Mexico.

What is the Mexican middle class? Chetumal is a place to which people migrate to achieve a particular kind of middle class lifestyle that has been perceived as increasingly under threat in neoliberal Mexico. When asked about life in Chetumal, people invariably describe it as tranquilo, or quiet. Usually this descriptor is used positively; although Chetumal is known to be boring and ‘without culture’, it is also known to be safe, affordable and to have decent work opportunities. In Chetumal it is possible to find work, pay one’s bills, buy a house and raise children in relative safety. The tranquillity of Chetumal is contrasted against bigger, more dangerous cities such as Mexico City, and older cities in southeastern Mexico with slower economic growth such as Campeche and Villahermosa.4 Migrants are willing to leave the cultural life and familial support of these older cities to move to Chetumal in search of better work opportunities and a safer, cheaper lifestyle. In this sense, Chetumal is part of a broader development of the state of Quintana Roo, whose main industry is that of tourism and urban development in the area surrounding Cancun. For middle class migrants, Chetumal, Cancun and Playa del Carmen – which have consistently been among the fastest growing cities in Mexico over the past decade – offer possibilities of new businesses or professional work that would require elite connections in older parts of the country. Not only people working in government services, but also medical, education and construction industry professionals frequently

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move to Chetumal as the result of a job offer with a nationally competitive salary. In many ways, Chetumal represents the kind of modern metropolitan Mexico that middle class and aspiring middle class citizens seek, which is rooted in the twin possibilities of safety and access to particular forms of consumption. Sociologists have acknowledged that the concept of a ‘middle class’ is often a problematic one; the term seems either to be used too liberally in banding together large and diverse sectors of populations, or with too many qualifications, rendering the concept in itself redundant. Anthropologists have also noted the methodological difficulties of finding a ‘middle class’; even when communities are found who might fit such a demographic description, it can be very hard to join their social networks and develop research relationships. Notwithstanding these problems of definition and method, over the past 20 years there has been a growing body of literature on the Mexican middle classes, partially in acknowledgement of the growing group of Mexican citizens who identify themselves culturally and politically as members of a middle class. The 1960s and 1970s saw a considerable growth of middle class sectors in Mexico, and although financial crisis in the 1980s and again in the 1990s led to considerably more precarity for such sectors, and some emerging distinction between a ‘precarious’ lower middle classes and more established upper middle class, there remained a distinctive group of Mexicans identifiable as ‘middle class’ if not by their income alone, then by their ways of managing and spending such income (Escobar Latapí and Pedraza Espinoza 2010). The work of sociologist Dennis Gilbert provides an instructive model of what the middle class in Mexico looks like demographically and statistically: I conceive of the Mexican middle class as consisting of families headed by individuals with non routine, non manual occupations, living on incomes comfortably above the popular average but below the peak of the national pyramid. I particularly have in mind independent and salaried professionals, managers, teachers, technicians, bureaucrats, and merchants (but not low level office workers or retail clerks), with household incomes at least 50 percent higher than the median household income. (Gilbert 2007: 13) Gilbert measures households rather than individuals, and understands living standards as relative rather than absolute; he argues that about 20 per cent of the Mexican population can identify as middle class, and that the vast majority of such households are urban, concentrated in Mexico City and the cities of northern Mexico (Gilbert 2007: 15–16, 19). Gilbert echoes the measures used in Mexican census data and suggests that typically middle class households have ‘good sized homes, built of substantial materials’ and telephones, computers and cars (2007: 6). They go on regular holidays nationally or internationally, another indication of the role that consumption and leisure play as markers of distinction in what might be called a ‘middle class culture’. Education is a very

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high priority for middle class Mexicans, for whom private schooling for their children is regarded as almost essential even when other spending must be reduced (cf. Escobar Latapí and Pedraza Espinoza 2010: 22–30). Debates flourish among Mexican scholars and in the press about whether the Mexican middle class is growing; a recent study by Luis de la Calle and Luis Rubio, Clasemedieros; attracted strong attention for its arguments that, notwithstanding a continuing poor sector of its population, Mexico is fast becoming a middle class society (de la Calle and Rubio 2010).5 In addition to governmental and economic changes, and a growing female participation in the formal workforce, much of de la Calle and Rubio’s argument is grounded in the growth of consumption among the emerging middle class of Mexico. The Clasemedieros thesis received a fairly critical response from sociologists and political scientists in Mexico, who argue that poverty has, overall, increased during the past decade. However, there are data to suggest that consumption is rising considerably among the poor, much more quickly than among the middle classes, allowing some degree of social mobility. In part this is funded by expanded availability of credit, and by some government initiatives which may be leaving the lower classes with more money in their pockets despite an overall plateau or decline in economic indicators (Escobar Latapí 2012). Evidence to support this transformation, by which an emerging lower middle class seems to more easily attain some consumption practices that are more typically associated with the upper middle class, can be clearly seen in Chetumal. Although people living in the city of Chetumal are not wealthier than the Mexican average, our research suggests that a middle class lifestyle is more attainable there than in larger metropolitan areas, and that this represents the major reason that people choose to live there. Lower cost of living makes rental and home ownership less challenging, and the economy is more stable and income is more often salaried.6 While salaries in the state of Quintana Roo are actually slightly lower than the national average, employment is more plentiful there, and a large proportion of the workforce are in the tertiary sector, especially in accommodation and food services, and in governmental and international agencies, where bureaucracy has been traditionally accepted as the stronghold and creator of the Mexican middle class. Although low income workers in accom modation and food services often face precarious working conditions, skilled labour and professional labour in these industries is generally perceived to be stable in Quintana Roo, while working for state sector agencies is the most stable sort of employment one could achieve in Mexico, especially at lower middle class income levels. What this suggests, then, is that in Chetumal many households that might traditionally be categorized as working class can either achieve upward social mobility through stable wage earning prospects, or alternatively can engage in practices that are usually cultural and ideological markers of ‘middle class ness’ in other parts of Mexico. While such households may not be able to send their children to private schools, nor have internet connections at home, they may afford to support their children attending

92 TV, domestic space and the family further education such as technical colleges, and are likely to have multiple television sets and even cable television subscriptions.

Watching television in Mexican middle-class homes As in much of urban Mexico, people in Chetumal have access to five free to air television channels. There are two main commercial television empires, each operating two broadcast channels; Televisa, which until the 1990s was the indisputable market leader and, as we outlined in Chapter 2, continues to be dominant, and Azteca, whose recent challenge to Televisa reconfigured not only the television industry, but its relationship to politics and public life. A state government television station completes the typical array of free to air offerings, but in our research people almost never volunteered that they watch state television unless and until they were asked specifically about watching local news broadcasts. In Chetumal, many viewers also choose to subscribe to one of the two main pay television services available: the Cablemás cable tele vision service at a price of around US$35 per month; or the Sky satellite television service at a price of around US$50 per month.7 While cable television was only available in some neighbourhoods of the city, satellite ser vices could be installed (with a satellite dish) across the municipality and in the surrounding rural areas. Therefore, it was by no means always the case that only the wealthiest households chose the more expensive option of satellite television, and the wide availability of Sky made it appealing to many poorer households who lived beyond the limits of Cablemás provision. Pay television services are a relatively new phenomenon in Mexico; from 1998 to 2010 subscriptions to the various kinds of pay television services quadrupled such that across the nation today there is a penetration rate of approximately 30 per cent. It would be an understatement to suggest that televisions are a typical household object in a city such as Chetumal; census data from 2010 shows that in a total of nearly 42,000 households in Chetumal proper, 40,000 households have at least one television. In fact, most households have more, matching national statistics that show the majority of Mexican households have two or more televisions (see Table A.1 in the Appendix). In the municipal region of which Chetumal forms the major part, television sets are more common than any other appliance included in the census, more common even than radios or mobile phones, which are significantly lower in cost (see Table A.3 in the Appendix). As discussed in Chapter 1, television sets are very easy to purchase in a thriving city such as Chetumal. Whether bought second hand from a local business, or using store credit at a larger chain store, almost every household that was interviewed for this study had acquired a television within the previous five years. In short, televisions are common, they are new, and they are often multiplied within family households. To get a flavour of just how frequently television sets mark the practices and spaces of everyday life, we present below some more case studies of people in Chetumal who were included in this study.8

TV, domestic space and the family

Rebeca Rebeca is a housewife who lives with four other people in her household: her husband, a government employee; her two teenage sons studying at university and high school; and her one year old grandson. There are three televisions in the house; one in the living room, one in her sons’ bedroom and the last in her own bedroom. But Rebeca mentioned that only two of these televisions are regularly used – the ones in the living room and her sons’ bedroom. Rebeca explained that the television in her bedroom is only turned on by her husband in the evening to watch the news on Channel 13; once the news is finished he turns the television off and goes to sleep. All three televisions were purchased with cash. As they do not have Cablemás or Sky, they watch the five free to air channels, which are two commercial Televisa channels (2 and 5), two commercial channels from television Azteca (Channels 9 and 12), and the non profit educational broadcaster Once television, which shares programming with the local Channel 7. Of these channels, Rebeca most frequently watches Channel 9 and Once television. Rebeca only watches parts of the programmes while performing her household chores and looking after her grandson, who she says consumes much of her time and, as a result, she hardly watches what is on the television. When she has the opportunity she watches programmes on Once that interest her, which Rebeca explains report on social issues being faced by Mexicans, and include advice on how to deal with such problems. Rebeca is very interested in watching programming that delivers up to date reports on what is happening, as well as entertaining programming that allows her to relax and escape her routine. She emphasizes that telenovelas are not watched in the household by her or the rest of the family as they find them very obvious and boring; according to her they have always felt this way. Her favourite programmes are The Simpsons and TV De Mente (a popular music show); she also loves films that have elements of terror, action and suspense. Rebeca believes that her youngest son is the household member who watches the most television. Before he goes to school he turns on the television in his bedroom, but he uses it to play video games rather than watch any programmes. Her eldest son only watches football on television, because he spends more time on the internet on the computer in the house. Rebeca comments that because her eldest son studies in the afternoon, he spends the morning browsing the internet and chatting online, and perhaps doing some homework. Her grandson still does not pay any attention to cartoons; he prefers to play or go for a walk. The television is regularly turned off in the morning. When her husband has breakfast he turns it on to watch the news on the Azteca channel, but he turns it off as soon as he is finished eating, and leaves for work. In the

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94 TV, domestic space and the family afternoon she drops her son off at university and upon her return she has a rest with her grandson. It is between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. that the television in the living room is continually turned on, on a news channel like Televisa or television Azteca, watched only by her and her husband. At 12:00 a.m. the television is turned off and they go to sleep. In the household no conflicts arise in regards to the television since her eldest son does not watch it and, because they use two televisions, they can all watch whatever they prefer. But Rebeca explained that there is often such conflict in her mother’s house, which is the other place in which her family regularly watch television outside of their own home, since it is where they have family gatherings on weekends and special occasions. In Rebeca’s mother’s house there are five televisions spread throughout the rooms of the house, all turned on with different programmes according to the preferences of the family members. But conflicts arise when everyone gets together in front of one television to watch a movie, because no one can hear the television, someone suddenly changes the channel or because some people don’t like the movie, which they must watch even if they do not want to.

Victoria Victoria is a university student in her late teens who lives with her mother, a housewife, and her younger brother, a high school student. There are five televisions in their house; one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in her mother’s bedroom, one in her brother’s bedroom and one in her bedroom. The televisions in each of the three bedrooms have Cablemás cable subscriptions, but the televisions in the living room and dining room do not. They were all purchased with cash. The one in the living room was purchased from a store called Tele Bodega; the one in the living room was also purchased from a Tele Bodega store in Mérida, at the same time as the television in her room; the televisions in her brother’s and mother’s rooms were purchased from the Liverpool department store in the Plaza Las Américas. They all have mobile phones, internet access, a home phone and a DVD player, but they rent movies once every 1–2 months. On a typical day, Victoria gets out of bed at 9:00 a.m., tidies her bedroom and turns on the television to watch the programme called Hoy (Today) on Televisa, after which she watches cartoons, movies, Friends and Warner Brothers until she has to go to university at 4:00 p.m. At lunchtime all three family members eat together and watch a programme called La Niñera, a Mexican adaptation of The Nanny, on television Azteca (Channel 9). This is one programme that they all like to watch, along with Guerra de Chistes, a variety show literally translated as ‘Joke Wars’, which is broadcast in the evening on the youth oriented cable channel Tele Hit. Of the local channels, Victoria sometimes watches Channel 20 for a programme called

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Estrellados, which broadcasts the best videos circulating on the internet. She does not like to watch local news as much as national news programmes, although her mother does and relays the information to her. Victoria also dislikes watching telenovelas because she thinks they are ‘a little stupid’. Victoria also watches Warner Brothers cartoons, series on Channel 5, Friends and Animal Planet. She likes to watch these programmes because they interest her and they contain attractive men. She has been watching these programmes since they got Cablemás one year ago. Victoria’s brother likes to watch wrestling shows like Smack Down and Raw, and MTV. According to Victoria, he watches these programmes because they are popular and all his friends watch them. Her mother watches telenovelas, movies on HBO, Mexican movies and all types of series except those shown on Televisa. Victoria has had conflicts with her brother caused by the television, because her mother’s bedroom has air conditioning and everyone wants to watch television there. When her mother is watching television in her room, if they want to enjoy the air conditioning they must watch what ever she watches. When their mother is not in the room, the siblings fight over what programmes to watch. As the case studies suggest, not only broadcast television, but also pay tele vision, is often present, both in households that comfortably fit into typical definitions of the middle class, and in those who are working hard to attain or maintain the hallmarks of financial stability. Some households may have only one television, but do subscribe to pay television, while others who have not yet achieved financial stability could even go through stages in which they do not have a television at all. Others claim not to watch much television through choice, or because their work and housework prevents them from having much leisure time. But even in these cases, television remains an important part of daily life:

Tobias Tobias is a taxi driver in his late forties; he lives in a three bedroom house in a lower middle class neighbourhood with his wife (who is a house wife) and two teenaged children. They have Cablemás in the house for their only television set. Tobias enjoys watching sports (football); his wife watches the evening telenovelas; and they watch ‘family shows’ like comedy series or Animal Planet together with their children. Tobias likes to watch old black and white films on TNT or MGM, and mafia films, as well as old Mexican films. Tobias works long hours, usually from late morning until 2–3 a.m., so he doesn’t watch long bursts of television during the week. Yet the television remains a regular part of his nightly routine; he will always watch one hour of television when he gets home late at night,

96 TV, domestic space and the family after heating up the food his wife has cooked for his dinner, and before bathing and heading to bed. However, he spends much of his weekend watching football on television at home; he follows the Mexican football league and watches big matches of famous teams from Europe, like the Champions League, as well as the Argentinean football on Channel 11. Sometimes he gets annoyed by the bias that commentators have when reporting on Mexican matches, because teams that are owned by the same media company are often favoured, and Tobias says that some of the matches are also rigged for this reason.

Mirene Mirene is a 26 year old mother of two small girls, and also works part time as a cleaner and domestic helper. Her husband works at a tortilla bakery. Mirene and her husband and children live in a small house at the back of the lot of land belonging to Mirene’s mother in law. Their small house is built of wood with a corrugated iron roof, a style which is more associated with poverty than is a concrete house and roof, but her mother in law’s house at the front of the lot is more substantial and built of concrete. Because their houses are next to each other, Mirene tends to think of the extended family as one multi sited household, comprising her own immediate family, and her mother in law and sister in law and her child in the front house. In 2008, when Anna first knew Mirene, her brother in law had also lived in this house, but he died unexpectedly in 2009. For the seven members of this extended household (eight while her brother in law lived) there were two television sets, one of which the family have had since before Mirene moved in seven years ago, and another that was bought a couple of years ago with money sent by Mirene’s father in law, who lives in the United States and is rarely in contact with the family in Mexico. Mirene’s household live in a suburb slightly outside of Chetumal, where Cablemás is not available but Sky is. They did not have cable television at the time of Anna’s fieldwork, but in the previous year they had had Sky connected for several months, only to cancel the subscription when Mirene’s brother in law lost his job. However, several of her neighbours did subscribe to Sky; in this area some households with quite low income used this more expensive cable television as they lived beyond the perimeters of underground cable access which connected cheaper Cablemás services. Mirene watches television almost every night, but she doesn’t consider herself an avid follower of any show in particular; she mostly watches what other people have already switched on in the evenings, and inter sperses her watching with housework and childcare activities, like getting her daughters off to bed or preparing their lunches for the next day. The most frequent programmes on in her household were on Televisa’s ‘Channel of the Stars’; her mother in law watched the telenovelas each

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evening and on Sunday nights anyone who was in the house would watch the ‘Show of Dreams’ variety programme, in which celebrities team up with people in need to compete for a cash prize by singing and dancing (for example, people would compete to win money for their amputee relative to pay for a prosthesis). Mirene wakes up at 4:30 a.m. most days, so she often fell asleep halfway through watching a show. Soon after our Chetumal research began, the television set in Mirene’s smaller house at the back of her mother in law’s lot broke down. Over the course of several months, Mirene and her husband went without this second television, because they could not afford to pay the 500 pesos required to fix it at a local repair shop. During this time, however, Mirene’s daughters still watched television every day in their grand mother’s house next door, and even Mirene continued to watch some hours of television each day when she had finished her daily tasks or if she happened to be doing something in the front house.

Mirene’s case is a good example of how television permeates even the few houses that according to census figures would be without a television. Such rare households, at least in urban areas, see their lack of television as a tem porary situation, and still make regular use of the television sets around them. The case studies of Mirene and Patricia (whose family opened the chapter) seem very different in terms of economic circumstance; and yet they are consistent with one another in suggesting that television watching within households is strongly affected by lifecycles, so that young unmarried women can buy tele vision sets for their rooms and watch large amounts of television, and older women can follow telenovelas every night, but women with small children may be too involved with domestic reproductive labour to engage as actively in television consumption. These sorts of watching habits fit very neatly with much anthropological literature on the gendered politics of household prac tices, and on the vulnerability of daughters in law within extended households, since Mirene has little control over what television she watches, and even in much wealthier circumstances Patricia also sees her television preferences as being secondary to those of other family members. Even in these brief snap shots of people’s television viewing practices, we can see how individuals within the household must negotiate with one another over what is watched, when it is watched, and where within the house it is watched. But such negotiations are only rarely made explicit; even in households with children it was rarely the case that people reported any conflicts over television viewing choices, and interviewees themselves often noted that precisely by adding more television sets to a household such conflicts could be entirely avoided. Far from being a site of conscious negotiation, along with other domestic practices such as cooking, eating, childcare and cleaning, watching television actually seems to be a form of domestic reproduction; the household as a unit is partly sustained through the maintenance of a domestic material environment in which the

98 TV, domestic space and the family sights and sounds of television are an integral part. People’s home lives feel empty without it, even in households where people claim not to be especially enthusiastic about television. Such observations about the role of television within a family household are not new; the case studies of Chetumal suggest that households operate as what Silverstone et al. described as a ‘moral economy’, and that, as they also observed, television and other media technologies play a crucial role in the reproduction of such moral economies. Households are material and emotional spaces that are ‘dynamically involved in the public world of the production and exchange of commodities and meanings’, and in which everyday practices create and recreate value both for the individual household members, and of the household as a social unit (Silverstone et al. 1992: 19). It is through these daily practices – of which television is a key part – that household members can feel safe in the knowledge that their domestic environment is a comfortable and secure place in a way that the wider public world cannot always be. Media technologies – among which as we have seen, television plays by far the dominant role in contemporary Chetumal – bring the outside world into the family home. Many media scholars have focused on debates that see such a crossing of public and private boundaries as problematic, suggesting that the increased mediatization of everyday life leads to domestic unrest, a loss of local traditions or even moral decay. Lynn Spigel has illustrated the historical long evity of such concerns about television; in the post war era, US advertising

Figure 4.3 A working class family’s sole television set, in the bedroom area of their two room house.

Figure 4.4 The second television of a lower middle class family’s house, in the parents’ bedroom.

Figure 4.5 One of two televisions in a middle class household, in the living room.

100 TV, domestic space and the family and media commentary often discussed the problems of family divisions and disputes over television, and the psychological effects of family not interacting anymore due to the presence of new media (Spigel 1992: 66). Interestingly, in the United States then, as in Mexico today, the introduction of multiple television sets was often pitched as a resolution to such problems: Harmony gave way to a system of differences in which domestic space and family members in domestic space were divided along sexual and social lines. The ideal of family togetherness was achieved through the seemingly contradictory principle of separation; private rooms devoted to individual family members ensured peaceful relationships among residents. Thus, the social division of space was not simply the inverse of family unity; rather, it was a point on a continuum that stressed ideals of domestic cohesion. (Spigel 1992: 67) Ideals about housing in the 1950s United States built upon Victorian family aesthetics with an ‘ideology of divided space’ in which the larger size of an ideal house allowed for a greater division or segmentation within the family home, and Spigel’s research on television advertising demonstrates how televi sion purchase and placement was a central part of this ideological development, such that she argues ‘the contradiction between family unity and division’ was ‘a site of ideological tension, and not just a clear cut set of opposing choices’ (Spigel 1992: 66). In contrast to many of the more critical voices who have written about media penetration of domestic life as a negative development, Silverstone et al. are largely optimistic about the role that media play in households, arguing that families and households work with these technologies as much as they work with every other aspect of their daily lives, with greater or lesser degrees of success, control, competence and composure, depending on the resources they have to sustain their own moral economy. (Silverstone et al. 1992: 27) Within such a framework, it is the economic and emotional viability of the household that determines how well or how poorly media may integrate into everyday life, more than the inherent qualities of the media technology or even the political and industrial structures that shape what media is available. In later sections of this chapter, we will argue that in the specific case of Chetumal, the vast majority of media users are like Patricia, in that they entirely embrace the possibilities of television watching as a positive presence in their lives, and as a set of practices that enhance domesticity and perhaps even represent freedom. Following Silverstone et al., it would seem that the positivity with which tele vision is regarded is closely linked to the ease with which moral economies of the household can be maintained in the aspirational context of Chetumal.

TV, domestic space and the family 101 The common pattern for middle class households in Chetumal to contain multiple television sets clearly has an impact upon family dynamics. As we can see in the three case studies above, within many households individual members watch different programmes in different rooms on an almost daily basis. Viewing choices no longer need be negotiated and a considerable interiorization of everyday life takes place; not only are people brought in from the street to their houses, but increasingly within each house people are brought into specific rooms of the house away from other members. One might expect the con sequence of such an interiorization to be that families which were once united around a television set, are now fragmented, isolated and even anomic. Heather A. Horst’s research on media and technology practices among families living in Silicon Valley in the United States show how negotiations between children and their parents over their domestic media spaces and practices are frequently centred around issues of privacy, resistance, autonomy and the development of skills required as necessary in a competitive educational environment (Horst 2012). In cases examined by Horst, parents were deeply invested in ensuring that their children maximized their technological development but were also concerned about the moral dangers of exposing their child to uncontrolled media and online worlds through the multiplication of screens in both private and communal parts of the home. But as Patricia’s story at the beginning of this chapter indicates, the multiplication of television sets in Chetumal was not generally understood as a detriment to social life, nor as a sign of moral decay, nor even as what Horst describes as a process of ‘segmentation’ (Horst 2012: 71–2). As Patricia told Anna about the typical routine of each of her children retreating to their rooms to watch their own programmes almost non stop, there was no hint of concern or apology, nor any reference to the discussions about control and surveillance that so mark Horst’s findings among middle class families in California. In fact, throughout all of Anna’s nine months of participant observation in Chetumal there was a near total absence of moral panic or negative moral discourse surrounding television consumption and she only came across two cases in which any concern about watching ‘too much’ television, or seeing television as anti social, were raised.9 Far from being concerned or defensive about the multiplication of individual parallel viewing practices within family homes, both parents and young adults spoke in consistently positive ways about the comforts and conveniences (Shove 2003) of having multiple television sets, as they facilitate family harmony and allow for a maximum of leisure and family time to take place indoors, within the space of the home. In comparing the cases of Horst’s work in Silicon Valley and our own work in Chetumal, we see relatively similar media consumption practices happening, in the same year, among households that, within the spectrum of their own communities, identify as middle class and/or upwardly mobile. Yet the ways in which these similar practices are understood, and the political and moral debates which are mobilized in making sense of why people consume media, could not be more different. We can see that in these two places, watching

102 TV, domestic space and the family television in one’s bedroom can be viewed either positively or negatively with reference not only to the dynamics of families, or to the wellbeing of children, but also with reference to broader understandings of what being middle class means, or indeed how life is characterized in these two very different urban communities of North America. Whereas Horst outlines the ways in which Silicon Valley society emphasizes competition, individual excellence and a domestic process of segmentation, in Chetumal the enjoyment and freedom associated with leisure must also be understood as a counterpoint to prevailing discourses of fear and security. To understand why this is relevant to the watching of television, it is important to understand just how definitive these discourses of fear and security have become among the middle classes of Mexico, and indeed of other urban spaces in Latin America.

Fear and violence, safety and freedom In the late twentieth century, as the state of Quintana Roo began to prosper, family life in its capital city has moved from trying to catch a rare breeze in the patio, or keeping all windows and doors open, to bunkering down in hermetically sealed, air conditioned bedrooms, in which the noises of street life and neigh bours are unnoticed. In fact, the typical architecture of middle class Chetumal houses was described to Anna as being ‘bunker style’; the area’s vulnerability to hurricanes means that rather than looking out to the wide, flat Chetumal Bay, most city and domestic architecture aims rather to protect inhabitants from the elements and pull them inwards, behind high walls and under low, flat roofs. Over the course of the 1990s, as many Latin American cities struggled with rapid urbanization, high population growth, an increase in crime and in locals’ perception of crime, a number of scholars began to examine the new spatial for mations that were marking city life, ranging from informal shanty towns to exclusive private compounds. Not only in urban Mexico, but also in other Latin American cities, middle class areas have become increasingly segregated from poorer urban spaces through the development of gated communities, private security patrols, private schooling and middle class shopping precincts (Giglia 2008). As anthropologist Teresa Caldeira has argued in the case of Brazil, new middle class forms of housing which focus on separation or enclosure are not only functional, but also work at a symbolic level to aesthetically and politically represent to residents and to their neighbours certain ideals: Walls, fences and bars speak of taste, style, and distinction, but their aesthetic intentions cannot distract us from their main message of fear, suspicion and segregation. These elements, together with the valorization of isolation and enclosure and the new practices of classification and exclusion, are creating a city in which separateness comes to the forefront and in which the quality of public space and the possibility of social encounters have already changed considerably. (Caldeira 2000: 296)

TV, domestic space and the family 103 Caldeira’s argument is a critique of the consequences that the ideology of fear – expressed both through discourse and through material forms – has upon public life in Brazil. She sees a trend of interiorization as a retreat from the need to hold institutions and politicians accountable for the maintenance of a public sphere. Caldeira’s mission is to demonstrate the consequent decay of citizenship and democracy in allowing discourses of crime and fear to solidify categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the consequent lowering of interest or expectation in holding state institutions accountable for a good civic sensibility. In Mexico, similar arguments have also been made as state institutions have largely failed to live up to the expectations of citizens in keeping them safe. The point of picking up this argument in this chapter, however, is not so much to repeat such critiques of Latin American urban development, but rather to understand how individuals on the ground in a society that is perceived as chaotic may work to re instil plea sure and security, if only partially, in their urban experience. What does a ‘safe’ Latin American city look like? And what are the daily practices that constitute cultural life in such a city? It seems that for some middle class Mexicans, at least, the answer is that a safe city looks quite like Chetumal; perhaps lacking in ‘culture’, and certainly lacking in an active public life of the plaza, but a place that is stable, offers possibilities for aspiration, and is above all ‘tranquilo’. Chetumal offers residents a life that has the pleasures of enclosure, without such a present danger of violence or disorder – and the lure of enclosure is particu larly evident in Chetumal precisely because the dangers of the street there are more imagined than real, unlike many of the Mexican cities from which many middle class immigrants have arrived. While the consequences of urban segregation in Latin American cities is clearly exclusionary, the benefits of enclosure for Mexicans – as Caldeira herself recognizes for Brazilians – is that enclosure paradoxically enables freedom, at least a freedom to engage in leisure in peace and comfort: Security and control are the conditions for keeping the others out, for assuring not only seclusion but also ‘happiness’, ‘harmony’, and even ‘freedom’ … to relate security exclusively to crime is to overlook its other meanings. The new systems of security not only provide protection from crime but also create segregated spaces in which exclusion is carefully and rigorously practiced. (Caldeira 2000: 266) Caldeira’s informants, like our own research participants in Chetumal, never express much nostalgia for the more communal forms of living that marked family life in earlier periods, and that continue to be necessary for many low income Latin Americans. Rather, for the people interviewed by Caldeira: To live in isolation is considered best; they are doing what they want, and thus they have a feeling of freedom. Interestingly, the people I interviewed in Morumbi never use arguments of privacy, individuality, or intimacy to

104 TV, domestic space and the family justify their preferences. Morumbi residents seem to fear the spread of evil more than they value individualism. (289) To live within domestic retreat, in such a context, symbolizes not isolation or fragmentation, nor even segmentation as found in Silicon Valley, but rather protection, comfort and familial intimacy, and these dynamics of facilitating an interiorized urban life, in which television sets and air conditioners work to contain the family within the home, consolidate lifestyles and systems of social support that seem to fit the patterns generally understood by social scientists and by everyday Mexicans as being ‘middle class’. For many residents of Chetumal, this fear of urban violence not only shapes their interest in creating home spaces that enable leisure time to take place within the home, but was what motivated them to move to Chetumal in the first place. Further, middle class households rely less on interactions with people in their neighbourhood because they are sufficiently mobile to retain systems of social support across the city or even between regions of the country. To return to sociologist Dennis Gilbert, he notes that in response to crisis: middle class families in Cuernavaca seldom turn to friends, neighbours or other peers. In need, middle class families turn, almost exclusively, to close kin for help. Because they typically have telephones and automobiles and often have domestics to whom they can entrust their homes and children for at least short periods, middle class Mexicans are better able to maintain relationships with relatives who do not live in the immediate vicinity. They thus have little need or desire to enter into exchange relationships with neighbours. (Gilbert 2007: 55) This importance of mobility in facilitating middle class lifestyles returns us to the role that technologies, including television, but also telephones, computers and transportation, play in maintaining social networks across households and across cities and regions. While much of the literature on new media has emphasized, probably even romanticized, the importance of connectivity in producing sociability, television has more often been subject to the moralizing discourses that see it as detracting from rather than enhancing sociability. The positive attitudes of people in Chetumal towards the multiplication of televisions and the seeming retreat of their families, especially children, into the air conditioned bedroom, is especially interesting when one considers that in Latin America, the house is a realm that has frequently been seen in opposition to that of the street. This idea has attracted considerable attention in Latin American anthropology, and while Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta is perhaps the best known exponent of how house versus street forms an organizing principle of social life, the idea has been taken on by many others with reference to communities across Latin America. In the cosmological

TV, domestic space and the family 105 model of the house versus the street, the house is most typically associated with female life, while the street is the domain of men. But more precisely, homes are often places of hierarchy and control, whereas streets are considered places of freedom amidst chaos: The street is therefore both a place of excitement and danger. Although the street is a place where the egalitarian and individualistic principles of the marketplace or legal system are in operation, the idea of the ‘street’ in Brazil is a far cry from the idea of the ‘public’ in traditional English speaking cultures. In English speaking North America, the relationship between house and street is configured more as a relationship between private and public domains, or spaces that symbolize the relationship between indi vidual rights (home) and community responsibilities (the street). In Brazil, that dimension exists, but it is overlaid with the conflict between personal obligations (home) and personal freedom and individual anonymity (the street). (Hess and DaMatta 1995: 14–15) Such an account of street life emphasizes the freedoms that lie in the street as against the trappings of the home. But in recent decades, the dangers of the street have become so threatening that even men with the means to create a sociable retreat have moved away from the space of the street and into homes (or if not to socialize at home, then in other enclosed, air conditioned spaces). The danger of the street, and the fear of violence and disorder, seems to be outweighing even the fundamentals of gendered practice in everyday life, so that fathers and mothers of the Mexican middle class, such as Patricia, are raising their boys in the home rather than releasing them onto the street. Even in a city like Chetumal, whose urban growth is premised upon its relative safety and tranquillity, the ideology of middle class enclosure dictates the most intimate everyday practices and the (largely domestic) spaces in which such practices take place. Television plays a key role in holding such middle class practices together; the television set is a lynch pin that locates social life within the family home, while also allowing a constant interaction with the broader world. It is the technology that allows the very young and the very old to be entertained within the household, but just as importantly for many parents in Chetumal, it is also the technology that encourages those at more wayward stages of their lives, such as teenagers and adult men, to enclose more of their social lives within the domestic realm. Far from producing a fragmented society, people in Chetumal at least seem to feel that having access to television – or if possible, to multiple televisions – actually enhances sociality; it enhances sociality within the family unit and produces a visual and aural environment that reduces loneliness. In addition to enhancing sociality, television could be argued to enable civilization; watching television is a respectable leisure practice that shores up a positive moral economy within the household and provides a

106 TV, domestic space and the family positive alternative to the life of ‘the street’ which in urban Latin America sits as an imagined Other to respectable civilization. As we saw in Chapter 2, television brings into the homes of a relatively remote community the images and national debates that allow people in Chetumal to participate in an imagined metropolitan consumer community. Just as television content allows for specific representations of Mexican modernity to be brought into the homes of people in Chetumal, the presence and use of television sets, and the ongoing backdrop that their use creates in a household, allows for specific ideologies of an alternative Mexican middle class future to be attained, or at least seem achievable. But to understand any of these ways in which television can offer freedom and enhance sociality, civilization and communication in the specific case of Chetumal, measuring which television shows were the highest rated, or studying the most innovative television tech nologies available, is of much less importance than understanding how and why people have moved to Chetumal, what their hopes are for their children or why they have built their houses in a ‘bunker’ style with security gates and fences. Understanding television in everyday life does require this somewhat circuitous route through the study of regional economies, children’s activities, urban architecture, social mobility and class ideologies, as much as it requires a close attention to who is watching what, with whom, in which spaces.

Conclusion Excitement over the networking and interactive potentials of new media has perhaps displaced, or encouraged some forgetting, of the fundamentally social nature of television as a technology. As its platforms have multiplied – and therefore in some locations it has ceased to play such a singular social and community building role – there is the possibility that it is now, implicitly, being relegated to the role of, simply, a technology. Close enquiry into television’s social functions – something that occurred rather a lot during the broadcast era – has lost favour within our field in recent times; as we have said throughout this book, our aim is to retrieve the importance of understanding these functions. The evidence of this chapter demonstrates that this is certainly still worth doing. It also demonstrates the value of doing it in some of the less frequented locations – particularly in those outside the usual focus of Anglophone television studies. This is not merely to assist in developing a more inclusive palette for television studies. There are more specific benefits than that. What the research in Chetumal helps us to see is just how malleable are the contexts in which television performs its functions; the meanings given to television by our informant families are diametrically opposite to those we would expect from families in our own city. This strongly reinforces our view that we need to be very cautious about proposing any kind of universal function for television; the point of insisting upon due regard for the contingencies of television’s locations is that without such consideration we must inevitably fail to accurately recognize what television’s social function actually is, in that place, and at that time.

TV, domestic space and the family 107 That said, in the following chapter we turn to what may look like a return to some form of universalism because the chapter discusses what we describe as a common discursive frame that helps us to explain television as an object of desire – this, not just a desire for the content it screens or for the material object itself, but also for television’s capacity to signify modernity. Our argument, as we make clear in Chapter 5, is not that this is a universally determining discourse, but that it is an overarching one within which the uses of television, variously and contingently, must be situated.

5

Television and the desire for modernity

In this chapter we attempt to recover an aspect of the consumption of television which, in Anglo American television studies may, like the nation, seem passé, but which on closer and more culturally diverse inspection, turns out to remain important. That aspect is the relationship between television and modernity. What is it about television that makes it, as a medium, as a set of technologies, and as a set of practices, seem so inherently modern? Television has been securely located within Western discourses of modernity (although not only there, as we shall see) since its inception; in Australia, the introduction of television in 1956 was discursively linked to Australia’s entering ‘the Space Age’, and histories of the introduction of television into other nation states associated with the West provide us with endless iterations of this relationship. Of course, by achieving prominence in the mid twentieth century, early television secured its role in everyday life in Europe, North America and many other places in a period in which international political, economic and cultural debates were especially focused on competitive forms of modernizing, not least due to the rivalries of the Cold War. But the tight relationship between television and notions of modernity goes beyond the medium having developed during that time. Judging from the range of examples and discussions to be seen in this chapter, television seems to be both modern and modernizing with surprising consistency. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine television as being ‘pre modern’; its mere existence depends upon networks and infrastructure that can only exist in modern settings. When television appears, then, in places that are either recently inserted into, or are ambivalent about their relationship to, global modernity, the television set, the satellite dish, or the inclusion of popular television shows into everyday life, often become symbols for wider processes of cultural change. As a philosophy or an apparent condition of being, ‘modernity’ is expected to be a cohesive, singular state, thoroughly different to what came before it (the pre modern, primitive or traditional), and unidirectional in its movement away from non modernity and towards a particular kind of future that has often been imagined using such descriptors as Western, capitalist, European, American or developed. This chapter will argue that, while the idea of modernity may rest upon such ideas of homogeneity and unidirectionality, in practice, discourses

Television and the desire for modernity 109 of modernity – related to television, but also more broadly – are rather better understood as featuring competing models of modernity, and that when people seek to be modern, as they often seem to be when incorporating tele vision into their lives, they can be seeking multiple or competing forms of modernity. Modernity needs to be understood as historically and geo politically located even when it appears to be composed from a set repertoire of signs: industrialization, urbanization, secularization, globalization, marketization and, most recently, the rise of consumerism. In each historical or geo political instance, some parts of such a repertoire may be more important than others; the precise manner in which societies have, in effect, selected and combined items from this repertoire is itself an important area for analysis. Therefore, just as we have done with our discussion of television, among the things we do in this chapter is to emphasize the importance of locating modernity – and our analysis demonstrates television’s usefulness as a means of doing this. As a consequence, while our primary focus is still upon locating television, this chapter takes an approach that is slightly different to that taken in the previous chapters. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 – on the nation, the community and domestic space – have been designed to home in on ever more specific zones of consumption as a means of catching the particular mix of different cultural functions television performs at these various levels. As we have seen, these zones are constructed in all kinds of ways – through commercial and industrial structures, national regulatory regimes, the cultures of use that have developed in particular contexts around specific technologies, and so on. Each has had their discursive dimension, of course. In this chapter, however, we concentrate more closely on this aspect: on how a particular category of discourse – modernity – frames the function of television in ways that cut across – contingently and conjuncturally – the various spaces, contexts and strata of consumption we have examined earlier in the book.

Modernity and the West Approaching this topic of television and modernity from within the settings most common to Anglo American television studies could make it seem an axiomatic, maybe even banal, thing to talk about. As an established discourse, Western modernity brings with it a standardized history of those cultural, social and economic shifts that are seen to have shaped the character of (especially urban) experience, initially in western Europe and later, most influentially, in the United States. In these, its most familiar articulations for television studies, modernity embodies a specific agenda of social change; that is, it carries certain, relatively unquestioned assumptions about exactly what kinds of change might be counted as constituting a programme of modernization. While certainly presented as an account of history, the Western conception of modernity nonetheless tends to overlook the possibility that it is only one version of that history. So little sense of contingency is there that the process of modernization

110 Television and the desire for modernity proposed resembles that of evolution – what Giddens described some time ago as ‘social evolutionism’: According to evolutionism, ‘history’ can be told in terms of a ‘story line’ which imposes an orderly picture upon the jumble of human happenings. History ‘begins’ with small, isolated cultures of hunters and gatherers, moves through the development of crop growing and pastoral communities and from there to the formation of agrarian states, culminating in the emergence of modern societies in the West. (Giddens 1990: 5) As David Morley has pointed out, the ‘geographic equation of modernity with the West’ (Morley 2007: 157) does not stop it operating with a universalist logic; that is, we would be forgiven for assuming that we are not dealing with a specific form of ‘Western modernity’ with its own histories and determinants, but rather with a ‘universal template for mankind’ (158). It has to be said, then, that the grand narrative of progress that drives Western modernity does not accommodate much variation. Alternative versions of modernity that fail to faith fully reproduce the major tendencies found in the West can thus be discounted as incomplete or immature. Morley cites the example of India, arguing that India’s apparent failure to secularize as it modernizes has resulted in it being regarded by many in the West as in some ways pre modern (160).1 This is quite a significant player to excise from accounts of the contemporary global experience of modernization. However, not only does such universalism result in the misrecognition of what is actually accomplished in the way of social and cultural change outside the West, but it also implausibly homogenizes the experiences of modernity within the West: The further problem is that this schema, in reducing the category of the West to the status of a unitary geographical site, overlooks all the forms of heterogeneity that have always existed – within the West. Moreover, it leaves no room for any idea that there might be a multiplicity of modernities, some of them non Western in origin: that the Rest might be capable of generating their own forms of modernity. (Morley 2007: 158) As these passages by Giddens and Morley imply, the very idea of ‘the West’ is a historical construct that is, perhaps, even more pervasive than that of modernity. Commonly assumed ideas about what characterizes Western societies – that they are democratic, liberal, secular, economically developed – begin to unravel under any serious scrutiny, just as easily as assumptions that societies constituting ‘the Rest’ have very much in common with each other. In both cultural studies and anthropology, acknowledgement of the constructed nature of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ have become quite firmly established, yet as powerfully held ideas their consequences for actually existing social life remain important.

Television and the desire for modernity 111 When this chapter describes Western modernity or Western societies, then, it does so with this acknowledgement in mind. Further, there is no absolute consensus on who is or is not Western, as Latin American examples show very clearly. While some places described in this chapter – such as China or the Arab Middle East – may comfortably describe themselves as non Western, Latin Americans, for example, are more variable in their responses to East–West discourses. Latin America was, after all, the original newly discovered ‘West’ when Columbus mistook it for the ‘East’. Firmly ensconced in the Western hemisphere, with long historical ties to capitalist world economies and in the modern era to the United States, the sheer prevalence of making Western ness an organizing framework for discussions of modernity can be troubling for societies in Latin America (and elsewhere) that can claim to have been involved in the global unfolding of modernity for much longer than a country like our own Australia, for instance, whose citizens would unproblematically describe their society as Western (Dussel 1993; Hall 2007: 56–60; Eisenstadt 2000: 12–13). Put simply, while the discourse of modernity is extremely central to Latin American social theory, debates about television and everyday practices around television, the discourse of Western ness is less so. So, while our discussion will suggest that modernity is consistently invoked with reference to television, we make no such claim about the consistency of discourses about the West; modernity is, in other words, not always thought of as Western, even when it is thought of as Other. Yet it remains significant that in the self identified Western world, modernity is thought of as Western, as singular, and as tied up with particular characteristics. The imperatives of economic globalization, the seemingly unshakeable faith in the effectiveness of the market as a means of distributing resources and opportu nity, and even the rise of what might look like tolerant and progressive trans national cultural formations such as cosmopolitanism,2 all help to obscure the possibility that ‘the Rest’, as Morley says, might indeed be ‘capable of generating their own forms of modernity’. Underpinned by a narrative of marketization leading to prosperity through unfettered participation in a global economy, the rhetorics of globalization take the legitimacy of a Western model of modernity more or less for granted as they set out to colonize each new version of the future as soon as its embrace of modernization brings it into play. In non Western locations that do take up modernity as a discourse closely identified with Western ness, modernity can become a seriously contested idea. For a start, there are material, indeed structural, limits to its applicability in those low income countries ‘where people have uneven access to global com munications, travel and real lifestyle choices’ (Keane et al. 2007: 23). Further more, not only are modernizing processes seen in some of those countries as a convenient pretext for more powerful countries or companies to engage in economic and cultural colonization, but the ideological, political and cultural content of Western modernity is resisted as well. This not only reflects concern about the political implications embedded within that cultural content, but it may also reflect internal political and cultural conflicts within these states

112 Television and the desire for modernity themselves. In some nation states, and in many transnational regions, there is anything but a consensus on what modernity – in that location, at that time – should actually entail. Especially in those nation states whose populations are drawn from multiple ethnicities, religions or racial histories – such as in the federated nation states of Malaysia and Indonesia, for example – it is no simple matter to establish an agreed position on what elements of social change should be con sidered as part of a programme of modernization. Often, as in the Arab states, for example, there are questions about to what extent Western models of modernity are appropriate (or even conceivable) for adaptation (Kraidy 2010). And while for the West marketization has increasingly become a ready (and largely uncontested) synonym for modernization, we only need to look to China for an example of a modernizing economy that is extremely wary about the consequences of operating as if there is no important distinction between the implementation of the processes of modernization on the one hand and the full embrace of the ideologies of marketization on the other. All of that said, however, there can be no doubting the power generated by the desire for something called modernity. That desire, though, is complex and it, too, works differently depending on where you are. The basis of the particular formation of the desire for modernity experienced in ‘the developing world’, according to Eric Ma, is a perception of modernity’s ‘superiority’. The origin of this perception, he says, lies in ‘modernity’s ubiquitous materiality’. For Ma’s informants, mainland Chinese citizens remembering their attraction to the glittering image of modern Hong Kong during the 1970s and 1980s, moder nity came ‘from the West as commodities, gifts, advertising, and other media images’:3 The sheer materiality of modern culture can instantly be mapped onto a hierarchy of global cultural imagination, which ideologically regards the West as superior to the rest. The West becomes a simplified discursive category that embodies the modern utopian dream. Western material culture fuels the social desire of less developed communities to consume modernity from faraway places. These meanings transfers reconfigure cul tural boundaries, install new aspirations, and trigger complex ideological negotiations. (Ma 2012: 17) For the economically developing state, modernization is both a political necessity and an object of desire, but this is further complicated by the fact that deciding on the form that it should take is a matter for extensive political negotiation and strategic choices: While some developed cities (or more fashionably known as global cities) prosper at the cutting edge of high modernity, the developing world is still immersed in the dream of modernization. Some developing countries engage in political and economic mobilization to catch up with the

Television and the desire for modernity 113 discursively constructed West, while others continue to struggle with the spell of postcoloniality in realizing the seemingly unrealizable dream of modernity. (Ma 2012: 11) This is a highly aspirational dream, aimed in the first instance at material bet terment, an improvement in the quality of the material conditions in which people live. It does progress from that aspiration, however, as we ascend what Eric Ma describes as the hierarchy of cultural imagination so that material improvements also begin to carry with them an elevation in status; as he says, being modern is superior to the alternative and the acquisition of modern commodities is a means of achieving that superior status. It is probably impor tant to note here, though, the difference between such aspirations and those connected to cosmopolitanism: that is, cosmopolitanism is a form of desire that is an effect of an achieved modernity and proceeds from a position of privilege or relatively high social and economic status to address itself towards an elaboration of lifestyle choices motivated by a particular politics of consumption. Simply, there is far less at stake for those seeking the global identities of cosmopolitan ism than for those lower down the material ladder. As we shall see, in many other settings too, the desire for modernity has far reaching political, cultural, and material ramifications, even if for people in high income settings the con temporary experience of modernity seems mostly reducible to shifts in styles of cultural consumption. While it is not uncommon for the former to be mistaken for the latter, it is important to recognize the political and material differences between these aspirational formations even though they are each driven, one way or another, by the demand for enhanced opportunities for consumption. How does television fit into all of this? For a start, the connection between television and modernity is deep and longstanding. In the beginning, television offered ‘utopian dreams for technological solutions to distance’, as a means of bringing ‘the outside world’ into the home (Spigel 1992: 103). Once it was widely available, it also transformed how citizens experienced their participation in the nation state. The original promise that broadcast television offered to its audiences is among those we discussed in Chapter 2 – the capacity for the nation to communicate with itself in a manner that was, and through technologies that were, previously unavailable. The compression of space, the virtual elimina tion of physical distance, were quintessentially modern affordances – and not just for the West. Wanning Sun describes the ‘incorporation of television as an everyday object in most rural households’ in China during the 1990s as mark ing ‘the beginning of a new way of imagining the world, as well as one’s place in it’ (Sun 2002: 29) and that is probably even more the case today than it was when this was written. More recently, television has taken this one step further, transcending the space and time of the nation by connecting us, each as individual consumers, to the global. The multiplication of the platforms upon which this can now occur only reinforces television’s power, mobility and adaptability. There is competition,

114 Television and the desire for modernity of course, from the online environment in particular, but new capacities for time shifting and for personalizing one’s consumption have helped television maintain its dominance: even in the United States, where this competition is at its most intense, people are watching more television than ever before. Even while there is talk about television being superseded by the various capacities of digital media – as we have noted earlier in this book, such talk underestimates the vast differences in the performance of television around the world – TV still functions as an ‘icon of modernity’ (Ellis 2002: 42; Sun 2002: 33) performing its continuing role as ‘the great disseminator of the modern adventure’ (Hartley 2006). At the same time as it has established itself as ‘a mainstay of domestic life’ (Pertierra 2012: 203), television has become one of the primary means through which communities have satisfied their desire for modernity. It has done this not only as a technology but also as a commodity. Standing out even among the many commodities to have been used in this way, televi sion sets are recognized as uniquely ‘iconic signifiers of modernity’ (Ma 2012: 16). Eric Ma’s research examines Hong Kong’s history as an object of desire for those pursuing the ‘dream of modernity’ from within mainland China over the 1970s to the present. The perceived material superiority of Hong Kong culture during the 1970s and 1980s, he argues, was crucial to its idealized status; a key strategy that enabled the individual to gain access to that material superiority was the possession of a television set. Ma’s Chinese informants describe how a newly acquired television set would be proudly displayed to the neighbour hood, even to the extent where it ‘would be installed outdoors instead of indoors’: Informant A: In those days [1970s] nobody in my village had a TV set. Having a TV set was definitely an indication of having a Hong Kong relative. Informant B: I was very proud of our TV set. We put it in front of the main door. After dinner, people would bring a small chair and gather in front of our house waiting for the shows. (Ma 2012: 16–17) Here, and characteristic of the role it has played as a leading edge of modernity elsewhere, television’s materiality is almost as important as its content. John Ellis, in Seeing Things, discusses television as a ‘modernizing consumer object’ (Ellis 2002: 40–2) by making connections between the development of TV and the expansion of modern consumer society; what he calls the ‘era of scarcity’ – effectively the period during which broadcasting was introduced – ‘coincides with, and perhaps promotes the development of domestic consumption from its first phase of “universal provision” to a second phase of growing consumer choice’ (40). Within a context of increasing consumerism, the establishment of television services for the nation and the acquisition of the television set for the

Television and the desire for modernity 115 consumer become ‘key signs of growing affluence in the developed world after the Second World War’ (41): In Britain, televisions were acquired in their millions early in the 1950s under the twin impetus of the television coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 and the introduction in 1955 of a popular commercial service to rival the BBC. In other parts of Europe, the acquisition of televisions was the same. The television was one of the first capital items to be acquired, often ahead of a refrigerator or a washing machine. (Ellis 2002: 41) Anna Cristina Pertierra’s research in contemporary Cuba noted there, too, that the television set was ‘the most sought after commodity’ (Pertierra 2012: 205) in the communities she studied, despite its exorbitant cost and the complexities of the social, bureaucratic and commercial systems through which it could be acquired. It seems that the television set enjoys a similar status everywhere. The pattern of acquisition that, in effect, sees consumers prefer television over all other modernizing commodities was just as prominent in its take up in the United Kingdom and Europe during the 1950s as it was later on in developing non capitalist markets such as 1970s China and contemporary Cuba. At the level of the state, television operates similarly as a marker of progress and development. Rivero’s account of the early development of television in pre revolution Cuba maps this out; in the early 1950s, Cuba’s relatively advanced television industry helped to ‘reposition’ Cuba internationally; as it led Latin America in the development of television, the high levels of Cuban television expertise became ‘a signifier of Cuban modernity’ (Rivero 2007: 4). Of course, television is more than a material object or a signifier of status. The desirability of consumer society is also made visible in television pro grammes, as they display the lifestyles of those who exemplify a Western con sumerist model of modernity. Ellis highlights the part played by the situation comedies of the broadcast era which ‘showed how traditional characters acted when presented with ultra modern homes’ and depicted ‘a flow of conceptions of modern life’ (Ellis 2002: 42), but television’s influence on modernizing consumption was not only discursive but also structural: [T]he programmes themselves were surrounded by advertisements which showed the potential universe of purchases, the benefits of home mechan ization, and the superiority of mass produced items to the traditional and artisanal. The television was just one of the domestic appliances that was on the market in the post war period, but it was the crucial one that encouraged purchase of all the others. (Ellis 2002: 42) Eric Ma describes the transborder consumption of Hong Kong television pro gramming by viewers in China as a process of ‘learning to be modern’, with

116 Television and the desire for modernity the television drama series he examines serving to ‘visualize and dramatize’ the imagination of a ‘higher modernity’ (Ma 2012: 55). It is clear that television programming is one of the key resources for audiences wishing to learn about new styles of consumption – new fashions, modes of representation of the self and so on. In China today, an emerging and self consciously cosmo politan middle class seeks advice from lifestyle television as well as from the glossy consumer magazines as they develop ‘their newly acquired identities’ (Ma 2012: 102). Ishak (2012) has described how the consumption of global television among disadvantaged women in Malaysia not only provides them with models of Western fashion but also the adaptation of Western confessional talk formats enables them to work through personal and social problems that are not easily addressed within the traditional frameworks for public debate in their society. For the individual consumer, then, television is a stage upon which modern consumption practices are performed, where models can be found for emula tion, and upon which the cultural imagination can be put to work. Television provides an opportunity where the desire for modernity can be easily, and pleasingly, explored: the experience is relatively self contained and, once chosen, can be controlled by the consumer; it carries benefits for the individual as well as for the community; it has a pedagogic function as well as delivering pleasure; and the act of consumption actually embodies the engagement with the global and the modern. As a means of both stimulating and satisfying the desire for modernity, television is probably unrivalled. Of course, these satisfactions do not come without their downsides. The performances of modern consumption practices we refer to here mostly originate in the United States and western Europe. Even though the pattern of global flows in television programming and formats is no longer unidirectional, and even though in certain geo linguistic regions (East Asia, Latin America) imported television is most often used as ‘filler’ rather than as prime time pro gramming, there are still plenty of instances where the Western values of imported television (reality TV formats, especially) have generated concern or resistance from local communities (Keane et al. 2007; Maliki 2008; Turner 2010a). Theories of globalization and, before them, of media and cultural imperialism, have drawn attention to the power of transnational media conglomerates to exert a level of influence that can result in the unintended imposition of Western value systems onto traditional and/or non Western societies, leading to a perceived standardization of global culture.4 While this remains a legitimate concern and we have no interest in minimizing the need to give it serious attention, the shifts in media flows resulting from what has turned out to be the unexpected consequence of a globalizing and digitizing media – that is, the resurgence of local transnational production industries (Moran 2009a) and the development of new ‘media capitals’ (Curtin 2004) – have also produced significant countervailing forces. As an illustration of what we might learn from looking in some detail at the particular iteration of such a process in order to understand how the desire for

Television and the desire for modernity 117 modernity actually plays out, and also as a counterpoint to a simple global imperialism thesis, it is worth describing an aspect of anthropologist Richard Wilk’s study of the introduction of the live broadcasting of transnational television into the Central American and Caribbean nation of Belize. His concern is not so much with the content of television, even though he is examining what he describes as the development of the ‘new forms of consciousness’ (Wilk 2002: 172) that he argues result from the introduction of advanced satellite technology and thus new kinds of ‘live’ TV. Rather, he is interested in the cultural effect of the introduction of advanced television technologies to this small developing nation. Consequently, it draws upon fieldwork which responds to the ‘television invasion’ that occurred in Belize from the 1980s through the 1990s – the expansion in the provision of television services that enabled greatly improved levels of access to satellite broadcast technology (Wilk 2002: 173). That technol ogy, Wilk argues, changed the ‘fundamental relationship between time and distance’ for Belizeans, as they could watch real time broadcast television transmitted directly from the United States for much of the day: Why does direct broadcast transmission make such a difference? Because the programmes, especially the sports and news broadcasts, are immediate. There is no lag. Not only can the Belizean family in their rickety house in a swamp on the edge of Belize City watch the same programmes as their counterparts in urban North America; far more important, they can watch them at the same time. What the Belizeans watch is being broadcast at the same time they are watching it. (Wilk 2002: 179) They may still be physically distant from the United States, but through TV they now share the same time – what Wilk calls ‘TV time’. While he acknowledges the deployment of what could be called cultural imperialism here – the fact that ‘important kinds of power’ have been shifted from the local (albeit colonial) centre to the global ‘metropole’ (Wilk 2002: 181) – he also argues that, paradoxically, ‘television imperialism may do more to create a national culture and a national consciousness in Belize than forty years of nationalist politics’ (Wilk 2002: 184). He goes on to explain what he means: Fashions and products from outside the country have lost some of their magic – they are no longer gifts from the future that carry the message of inevitability. Local products are seeing something of a resurgence because they are no longer pale imitations of the real thing, mimics stuck ‘behind the times’. Now they may be inferior or superior, dear or a bargain, but they can be assessed qualitatively without the extra burden of acting as symbols of time and history. They are no longer things out of date in the metropole (the despised aspect of colonial goods) but can now be presented as objects that exist within their own distinct (usually national) identity in the legitimate present. (Wilk 2002: 182)

118 Television and the desire for modernity What television has done in this context, according to Wilk, is to deliver this nation from its colonial condition to something much closer to genuine cultural independence, slightly paradoxically, by connecting the nation to the globalized media environment. There is other excellent work which focuses on the function of television technologies in arranging our understandings of space and time (for example, Spigel 1992, 2001; Morley and Robins 1995) and that locates these shifting functions as demonstrations of the close connection between contemporary forms of modernity and the cultures of use around television, its technological affordances and its status and meaning as an object. As should be evident by now, our project is a more transnational and comparative enterprise than these, and we have deliberately turned our attention to examples of those locations that have tended not to figure much in Anglo American television studies – setting out to understand them as specific zones of consumption. Approaching these examples from the perspective of the desire for modernity, however, the differences between the familiar locations of Western television studies, and the locations that interest us here, are especially marked. The centrality of a contested, ongoing construction of a located or indigenized modernity is among the key points of difference.

Competing modernities One argument which runs contrary to a hegemonic Western version of modernity is the proposition that we can seek to describe ‘alternative’ or even ‘multiple’ modernities which better recognize ‘the uniqueness and specificities in each nation state’s encounter with modernity’ and which establish differ ences from and alternatives to ‘Eurocentric capitalist’ modernity (Liu 2005: 27). While this is a good starting point, the notion of ‘competing modernities’ that Kraidy (2010) uses is even more helpful; it emphasizes the contestedness of this formation and thereby forces us to pay attention to the contending forces which struggle to determine its character. It also helps to highlight some aspects of our research that might otherwise be obscured; the limits to a one size fits all modernity are very clear in the history of Mexican national identity we sketched out in Chapter 2, for example. The adaption of Western television formats in Asia has also become a crucial process for the negotiation between competing modernities and versions of cultural identity, not merely a strategy through which Western modernity is unproblematically imposed. In his book on reality TV and Arab politics, Marwan Kraidy (2010) focuses on a series of controversies within the Arab world, most notably within Saudi Arabia, that were generated by the adaptation of Western reality TV formats which were criticized for introducing inappropriate Western values to the society. There is nothing particularly unusual about this in the ‘non West’, as Kraidy acknowledges: debates about the embrace of modernity are common, and often heated and intense, in the non West because of what are perceived as Western modernity’s contradictory potentials. On the one hand, modernity

Television and the desire for modernity 119 offers the promise of ‘social progress, economic growth, individual emancipa tion’ while, on the other hand, it can just as easily result in ‘cultural decline, loss of authenticity, and economic dependency’ (Kraidy 2010: 8). Further exacerbating concern within non Western states is the ‘widespread belief that modernity is incapable of shedding its Western ethos’ (8), limiting the capacity for client states to quarantine the extent of its ideological and cultural influ ence. However, Kraidy is quick to point out that it would be wrong to assume that the debates he discusses, over the appropriateness of the imported reality TV formats’ versions of modernity for Arab cultures, were simply a ‘clash between tradition and modernity’. On the contrary, he argues, they are ‘symptomatic of a struggle between rival versions of modernity’. That is, the Saudi debate over the authenticity and acceptability of the identities promoted through these television programmes reflects a struggle to ‘accommodate change without relinquishing’ what are regarded as fundamental ‘attributes of their cultural identity’ (Kraidy 2010: 117) – rather than a reactionary resistance to change. The debate, then, is not simply about cultural colonization, but it is also an internal debate about cultural identities. There are two aspects of this notion of competing modernities we wish to canvass here. The first of these is to do with how ‘the incorporation, perception, and experiences of modernization’ can ‘vary within a particular nation’: These national internal disparities function through the redefinition, concilia tion, or ambivalent acceptance of non Western and Western cultural discourses – they respond to colonial and/or neo colonial economic capitalistic expansion into particular geographical areas, and are influenced by internal and external political processes. (Rivero 2007: 4) This field of negotiation is not a new development, something which can be attributed to the forces of globalization. Rather, it seems to be hardwired into the history of television’s discursive and technological imbrication into the formations of nation and modernity. Yeidy Rivero’s history of television in Cuba in the early 1950s, for instance, takes us through a detailed analysis of competing conceptions of how television could be put into the service of a preferred modernity for the nation – how television might broadcast a Cuban version of modernity: [W]hereas, television’s technology and the mastership of that technology symbolized Cuban progress a la the American way, the dialogues about television cultural representation, morality, commercialism and audiences generated multiple debates regarding the desired functions for television in early Cuban society. Between 1950 and 1953, broadcasting modernity not only signified technological advancement and excellent programming, it also conveyed what kind of culture and for whom that culture should be televised. (Rivero 2007: 5)

120 Television and the desire for modernity Debates about what kind of culture should be televised, and for whom, are precisely what the Saudi controversy was about as well. It was similar in the case of Jamilah Maliki’s (2008) study of the reception of the reality TV/talent show hybrid Akademi Fantasia in Malaysia. In both cases, the popular appeal of the imported format was based on its entertainment value and this in turn was related to its performance of a desired Western modernity. Public and political concern about the manifest strength of that popular appeal was provoked by questions about what might be the cultural effect of the influence of the Western values embedded within the format. Particularly in the case of non secular states, where religious traditions play a major role in preserving social harmony as well as in underpinning social structures, these are not trivial political questions to consider. It is understandable that they should lead to debates about what kind of consensus might be achieved within states that are politi cally and culturally divided. As David Morley puts it, the foreign influence of global television creates ‘both a reaction of desire and opportunity and, at the same time, a focus of fearfulness and anxiety’ (Morley 2007: 185). The result, in some cases, can be that the appeal of modernity is rejected; not everyone desires modernity once they can see what comes with it. It is also the case that not all nation states are interested in valorizing the achievement of a unitary cultural identity. Mexico, in common with a number of Latin American and Caribbean states, has long talked of the distinctiveness of its mestizo (mixed) national identity – its hybridized combination of multiple ethnicities and cultures (Lomnitz 2001: 50–3; Alonso 2004). Recent history embeds this characteristic within a politics of modernization in an increasingly globalized environment where the influence of – rather, more an interdependence with – the United States is both a benefit and a threat. The political commitment to the mestizo character of Mexican national identity recognizes it as a means of modernizing without surrendering to that influence. If mestizaje is seen as a path towards a future in which Mexico can hold its own against the United States, as we saw in Chapter 2, television is one of the relatively few economic arenas, so far, where that has clearly happened. Mexico is an example, then, of the second aspect of the idea of competing modernities – that is, to do with the construction of versions of the modern that are tailored to the cultures and histories of their particular location. While Mexico is not alone in taking a stance on the production of national identity that serves such an objective, there are other developments which come from the globalization of the media that are relevant here. Shifts in global flows have assisted the development of local and regional production and distribution markets in many locations outside the West; in television, this has been particularly marked in the trade in formats (Moran 2009b). Some of these new media production hubs (Curtin 2004) have become sufficiently identified with distinctive modes of representation and styles of consumption to mount a challenge to Western hegemony in this arena. There has been much written about the rise of East Asian cultural production in which a model of modernity that was previously derived largely from the United States has given way to a more located

Television and the desire for modernity 121 regional media culture that has effectively developed its own symbolic econ omy for an East Asian urban ‘cool’ and versions of cosmopolitanism. As the production of popular cultural forms and commodities expands in the region, the locations of ‘cool’ tend to be Japan, Korea and Taiwan rather than Hollywood: Cultural globalization does not just mean the spread of the same products of Western (mostly American) origin all over the world through these media conglomerates. Furthermore, the rise of media culture production capacity outside the US has become conspicuous, of which East Asia displays a most dynamic example. Advanced capacity in producing media cultures such as TV, films and popular music in East Asia has also activated regional co production, intraregional circulation and consumption of media cultures. Media cultures from other parts of East Asia are finding unprecedented acceptance in the region, leading to the formation of new connections among people as well as media culture industries. (Iwabuchi 2010: 198) The most commonly cited examples of this trend are the ‘Korean wave’ across media forms, the East Asian take up of Hong Kong Cantopop, Taiwanese soap opera and Japanese manga. Iwabuchi (2002) has argued that the success of, for instance, Japanese television in Taiwan is the result of cultural proximity – that is, this audience simply finds it easier to identify with cultural products imported from Japan than those from the United States – and the development of a highly active East Asian media market seems to have benefited from this. Transnational and regional, but clearly grounded in both the specificities and the commonalities of these East Asian locations, there are discernable East Asian modernities which generate similar levels of commercial appeal and equivalent expressions of desire to those elicited by the media products of the West. Whereas Ma argued that the desire for modernity came from its materiality, the desire for these competing modernities in these increasingly affluent societies is largely influenced by the discursive formations we discussed earlier that have to do with taste, fashion, status and lifestyle. Korea, Japan and other sites of East Asian modernity have developed the discursive tools to situate their representations of progress, cosmopolitanism, fashion and prosperity within proximate cultural locations that are now preferred by consumers in their own regions. That process has only emerged in the last decade or so as a result of changes in the production and distribution industries in the region, but it clearly demonstrates the capacity for generating new forms of modernity that are tailored or bespoke, rather than one size fits all. Important, too, is the recognition that what might look like the same material features of modernity do not necessarily carry the same meanings in every context in which they appear. So, in addition to the varying discursive content – the symbols and the values of these competing modernities carried within television programming, for instance – what are routinely regarded as the material markers of modernity can also be understood as historically and

122 Television and the desire for modernity culturally contingent. Wanning Sun makes the point specifically in relation to the access to television within rural communities in China, that it serves a ‘different purpose to people of different social contexts’: While Margaret Morse’s American urban modernity that features shopping malls, television and freeways is congruent with the idea of freedom to pursue individualism and pleasure, the Chinese villagers’ existence, which features television without freeways and shopping malls, is more about freedom from the stifling realities of village life. (Sun 2002: 28) Significantly, Sun is describing a process of translation, adaptation and modification that matters most at the point of consumption. This seems to be the process that informs Kraidy’s account of the role of reality television in Arab politics as well. He describes the controversies he examines as suggesting ‘various ways of being modern through the remaking of individual and social identities in a context of cultural translation focused on localising Western modernity’ (Kraidy 2010: 21). The process of translation becomes a means of indigenizing modernity. We can see this quite explicitly in the mapping of adaptations and remakes of imported television for local audiences. Kraidy’s examples include adaptations of the Idol format and talk shows. Fung and Zhang’s (2011) study of the adaptation of the telenovela Ugly Betty for a Chinese audience points to a range of modifications made to accommodate that market, in order to then argue for their importance in contributing to the formation of what they describe as local modernity. These days, it is increasingly common to encounter, in both media and academic writing about contemporary China, reference to the idea of a ‘Chinese moder nity’, particularly in relation to China’s negotiation of how it takes up Western models – and not just in television formats. The form of words most commonly used is that which is deployed to officially describe the modernization of the Chinese economy – that of a market economy with ‘Chinese characteristics’. It is important not to essentialize this indigenizing process, however, and crucial to resist the implicit assumption that each of these tailored modernities is in some sense truly autochthonous, organically connected to the character of the culture. As Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic’s (2011) research cited earlier demonstrates, both the state and the market have their own roles and interests in this. In the reality TV programmes Volcˇ icˇ and Andrejevic examine, the representation of competing constructions of nationalism in the former Yugoslav republics is driven as much by commercial as by cultural or political objectives. The indi genization of modernity is routinely subject to political influence as well, of course, and China provides many examples of this. Sun reminds us that, ‘unlike the equivalent process in many other places, modernization in China – a nationwide project ushered in by the Party – bears the imprint of the state at every juncture’ (Sun 2002: 39). Some of the work on Chinese television adaptations of Western formats demonstrates this quite clearly. Fung (2008)

Television and the desire for modernity 123 describes the task of converting a US American reality TV such as Survivor, driven by the values of individualism and competition, to something more acceptable to the Chinese state and its official values of collectivism and cooperation. The indigenization of modernity here is anything but an informal process.

Conclusion What we have been arguing in this chapter is that among the factors common to all the zones of consumption we have discussed in this book, and a factor which helps to shape the specific experience of television in each location, is how that experience is articulated to a located discourse of modernity. There would be some justice to a claim that since television is, in a sense, an instru ment of modernity, what television does within any one system is related to the formation of modernity it serves. In some cases, as we have seen, television winds up being caught in the middle, between competing versions of moder nity, at which point it can become the site of often quite serious struggle. In other cases, television seems to be satisfying the relatively uncomplicated desire for material improvement that Eric Ma finds in many of his informants. In each instance, it is important to acknowledge the local, national or regional factors which determine how this relationship will actually play out. That said, our focus on what is very much a cross cutting, transnational element in the experience of television also reminds us of the fact that our zones of consumption are not only geo spatially and temporally distinctive, but also to some extent discursively linked. The experience of television, while located and contingent, is also influenced in various ways by some overarching tendencies. The rise of entertainment, and its ascendancy over information as the premier regime of content for television (Turner 2010b), is one of these, for example. Our zones of consumption are affected by that tendency and must deal with it, each in their own ways. To take one of the more obvious and typical examples, those who wish to market a global entertainment format which foregrounds particularly individualistic modes of performing the self – such as Big Brother or Idol – have to find ways of translating that for local consumption in markets where these do not reflect dominant values. For their part, those who make up this market, and thus play their part in defining the limits of that zone of consumption, have to work out how they wish to negotiate this situation so as to balance, say, the competing claims of cultural maintenance or tradition against the desire for modernity. None of the possible outcomes – either way – are obvious or inscribed in advance. But the problem such an example encapsulates is not simply one of globalization or cultural imperialism; it is also a problem that comes from the close identification between television and the desire for modernity that plays such an important part in our experience of television wherever it occurs.

6

Putting television in its place

In this final chapter we want to do two things. One is to present a relatively conventional conclusion to this book, returning to our key idea of the zones of consumption in order to provide a summation of what we see as its usefulness, before reviewing and restating the key arguments we have made through the book. Before that, however, we want to do something a little less conventional: to present what is, in effect, a conversation between us about the cross disciplinary collaboration that has produced this book. As we noted right at the beginning, there have been surprisingly few collaborations between cultural studies and cultural anthropology, despite their disciplinary and theoretical proximity and the links between their bibliographies. Our collaboration therefore runs very much against the grain of the common experience of the relation between our two disciplines. What, on reflection, we have learned from that experience – about why such a collaboration was especially valuable for our purposes, about the difficulties as well as the benefits that emerged, and about our own and each other’s disciplines – seems to us to be worth discussing now, at the end of our book, as itself an outcome of the project. This book grew from a series of conversations. For nearly two years, the two of us have regularly met in Brisbane to discuss our ideas about television; mostly we would meet in Graeme’s office on a Friday afternoon, and talk about what we were writing, or more often about what we thought we might get around to writing one day. Little by little, these conversations developed into a number of ideas, from which the chapters and arguments of Locating Television eventually emerged. Although the book commenced with two separate stories that each of us told as individuals, for the rest of the book we made a conscious decision to write in a shared voice. While some chapters clearly leaned more heavily towards one or the other of us, as a whole the approaches, arguments and data in Locating Television, we believe, were genuinely collaborative, with each of us adding to each part of the work in substantial ways, even where one author took the lead in a particular area. However, in this first section of the final chapter, we would like to move back to the position from which we started, as two individuals in conversation, to reflect upon the collaborative research and writing process, upon the relationship of this work to our distinct disciplinary positions, and of course to consider how this collaboration has produced the work contained in this book.

Putting television in its place 125

Anthropology, cultural studies and television: a conversation Graeme This book derives from a larger long term project which investigated how the institutional and industrial structures of television were changing in the post broadcast environment. The first phase of the work, much of which took place in Asia, led to my view that what the field needed was more, and better, studies of consumption if we were going to properly understand just how television was experienced around the globe. I had the strong view that the way to do this properly was in partnership with a researcher who had a back ground in cultural anthropology, an interest in consumption studies and, since the research was to take place in Latin America, the capacity to work con fidently in Spanish. So, our collaboration did not just come out of the blue nor was it simply opportunistic: it was a deliberate choice intended to extend this programme of research beyond what I could properly do from my own back ground in Anglophone cultural studies. Readers will judge this for themselves, but from my point of view that choice has been thoroughly vindicated: this has been a genuine and successful collaborative experience. I am sure that neither of us could have (indeed, would have) written this book alone.

Anna The project that Graeme established offered a very unusual opportunity for a freshly minted PhD with expertise in Latin America; although there might be some perception among anthropologists that working in interdisciplinary research requires them to somehow ‘water down’ their preferred work methods and writing styles, when I came to the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies it was immediately clear that my own training and perspectives, which were largely ignorant of cultural studies, were exactly what I was being asked to bring to the table. Similarly, while I had expected that my research background in Latin America – not the most common fieldsite of choice for Australian anthropologists – would most likely be something I would have to work into my research sideways, in this project it was precisely that regional interest that Graeme was seeking. Although this sort of cross disciplinary goodwill is a necessary prerequisite for making collaborative research happen between anthropology and cultural studies, it is of course not enough in itself. The truth is, while many projects originally set out to be interdisciplinary and cross cultural, such lofty goals can only be accomplished with a lot of extra work and patience on behalf of those involved. Sometimes, just when one feels they have thought up some idea from his or her own disciplinary perspective, it immediately has to be re thought through the feedback of a colleague approaching your work from quite a dif ferent direction, which can as a result feel like twice as much effort for one idea to be realized. While writing this book has been very rewarding, the crafting of

126 Putting television in its place arguments and approaches that work for us both can often seem a more complicated path than just sticking to what we both already know, and that requires a patience and open mindedness that is not for everyone. Graeme What that has meant in practice, for me, has been exposure to a new kind of (and very welcome) scrutiny of my own work: regular challenges to define a key term, to clarify a first principle, to defend a comfortable assumption, to consider a more nuanced set of possibilities, or to otherwise confront the limits of my disciplinary orientation. That scrutiny is one of the real benefits of the complex mix of similarity and difference that shapes the relation between the two fields. Anthropology and cultural studies both share and are divided by a common theoretical language as well as common objects of interest. This is not something therefore that easily produces a common view. There must be quite a bit of disputation over that language – over the ownership and definition of key terms such as culture, for instance – which means that collaboration between these two disciplines might look easier and more natural than it actually turns out to be. The theoretical negotiation of such difficulties, how ever, produces what I would regard as among the primary intellectual benefits of the collaboration – both in terms of theoretical orientation and research outcomes. Anna Cultural studies and anthropology have come to the concept of culture in quite different ways, even though, as we discuss in several chapters, it has been the case for at least several decades that cultural studies and anthropology have taken parallel, at times intersecting, looks at how culture is manifested in the contemporary world. In some ways, the closer the fields appear to be, the more heated the disputes over territory have become, which is certainly the case with the term ‘ethnography’. While I frankly think that anthropologists can no longer expect the wider world to share their very specific standards about what ethnography looks like – that battle, I think, has been lost not only to cultural studies but also to sociology, social psychology and indeed within the various subfields of anthropology itself – the use of ‘ethnography’ to cover any kind of research in which a person does interviews or personally interacts with the subjects of their investigation can trigger some serious misunderstandings between disciplines like anthropology and cultural studies that should, in theory, be speaking almost the same language. Graeme I have always been comfortable with the more empirical end of cultural studies and I was very receptive to the disciplinary orientation Anna brought with her.

Putting television in its place 127 I was convinced of the need for in depth empirical work on what people actually did with television, what functions they attributed to it and what we might observe about how it was embedded in their daily lives. I was probably a little naive about what that actually entailed, though, and so I was staggered by the depth of the commitment to fieldwork that good anthropology demands. I visited Anna in the field in Chetumal and learned something of what was required of her to produce the results she has. I was extremely impressed by her personal commitment and by the intensity of the research process itself; I also understood that this scale of fieldwork – that is, months at a time spent in the field – was necessary to produce work of that quality. At the very least, and notwithstanding Anna’s sensible comment on its likely fate, this experience has certainly meant that I will be very careful about how I use the word ‘eth nography’ in the future! More important, perhaps, has been the confirmation of my original view that there are experiences upon which cultural studies can certainly claim to shed some light but that are in fact much more fully illuminated when subjected to this kind of approach. What I perhaps had not thought much about were the disciplinary differ ences that clicked in once we start to write up our research. These differences can be difficult to reconcile at the level of practice. The research practices in which Anna has been trained are detailed, extensive and observational; the outcomes are written up in a way that is evidence based while also being highly imaginative and theoretically sophisticated. You wouldn’t necessarily choose to describe most cultural studies research and writing in quite that way, and it is not how I would describe what I do either. But through this collaboration, I have come to see the value of the style of writing to which anthropology aspires: the careful and empathic recounting of case studies, the imaginative recreation of context through the knitting together of the researcher’s observation and the voices of informants. Nonetheless, I am also aware that the demands of our collaboration has restricted the opportunities for such writing within our book; it certainly dominates Chapters 2 and 4, but when one reads Anna’s study of consumption in Cuba (Pertierra 2011), it is clear that her participation in this collaboration has involved considerable accommodation to the writing practices of her partner. All of that granted, and to reassert the essential role played by consumption studies in this project, it should also be stressed that the whole ‘zones of consumption’ project has been fundamentally shaped by Anna’s disciplinary research agenda. At the end of the process, however, what might be my reservations about the usefulness of anthropology for a cultural studies scholar? In terms of what I have learned, and what I have been enabled to do as a result of this colla boration, I have none. This has been an exciting, innovative and productive way to research the social functions of television and I am delighted with what we have been able to achieve together. However, the experience has also caused me to reflect more generally about such collaborations. I am very much aware, for instance, that working across disciplines is far easier from a base in cultural studies than it is from a base in anthropology. Cultural studies may

128 Putting television in its place behave like a discipline in most ways now, but it still retains its original openness to other forms of knowledge production, and I am free to explore these without risking any kind of disciplinary penalty. I don’t think that is the case for Anna. One of the consequences of collaborating with someone from a field which takes its disciplinarity extremely seriously is that it brought me back into the sphere of influence of ‘the discipline’: where the price of rigour is the policing of boundaries and worrying about the integrity of the disciplinary enterprise. I can see that this has to be a consideration for my partner’s work, and I respect that, but it forms no part of my own considerations of what I might or can do. The conservatism of the disciplinary formation, then, con tains – as always – both enabling and disabling potentials. For someone with my long background of interdisciplinary work and resistance to the politics of disciplinarity, this has been an interesting reminder of what it means to work within such a formation. Anna I suspect that some of those limitations or constraints, which I agree I have cared about much more than Graeme, are as much to do with the differences in our stages of career as the differences in our disciplines. After all, many most eminent anthropologists happily produce very broad ranging work that may not be drawn from traditionally conceived ethnographic fieldwork. Often, an ethnographic ‘sensibility’ is more important than the nature of the methods employed in anthropology, but most within anthropology would, I think, agree that such a sensibility is hard to develop without having at least some longstanding experience of participant observation, if only earlier in one’s career. I think that, on the whole, there are clear benefits for early career researchers to constantly reflect upon their own involvement in one or more research traditions, if only to be able to do one thing with confidence as part of a wider endeavour to work across disciplines. In this book, I can see the payoff of such caution very clearly, because it has been precisely in doing our inter disciplinary work that I have been able to bring something specific – located, if you like – to the television research. Graeme Maybe the issue here is not so much about how anthropology manages its internal affairs but about its capacity to benefit from interdisciplinary work. A cultural studies view of that question would highlight how effortlessly disciplines can mobilize resistance to change. In the case of anthropology, we might note how slowly anthropology responded to calls for it to turn its attention to the contemporary and the urban, its continuing caution over internal innovations, and its tendency to prefer what I would see as the domain of the descriptive rather than the critical. That’s clearly an outsider’s view and I imagine there are significant countervailing trends; for instance, I have been

Putting television in its place 129 interested to learn how differently Mexican anthropologists see their work – as we noted in Chapter 2, much of their work is political and critical in a manner that I would identify with cultural studies elsewhere. And I should stress that none of the above criticisms are meant to apply to the work that Anna herself has done – both in her own right and together with me. But I believe that, in disciplinary terms, her choice to collaborate with someone who is not from anthropology is actually quite a brave thing to do; and it carries significant risks. Whatever other faults it might have, cultural studies, with its omnivorous appetite for other disciplines’ methods, does genuinely welcome such ventures. It should not be surprising, therefore, that I would see this still as the more enabling position: while it might (does!) allow work to be produced without sufficient preparation, it also provides a context of reception in which there are serious consequences for doing this. Anna I agree that anthropologists still have a lot to learn about working across disciplines, and there are particular issues that emerge between anthropologists working within cultural studies that are entirely different to the challenges experienced by anthropologists whose experience of interdisciplinary work is oriented towards, say, the biological sciences or quantitative social sciences. It is often the case that anthropologists are called upon to defend their interpretative writing and open ended research methods as being insufficiently scientific, but the differences between anthropology and cultural studies are obviously not of that order. In that relationship, anthropology suddenly becomes the conservative, traditional, empirical partner, reluctant to let go of the hard won gains that a century of self defining and self critique have achieved. As a result, I’m not sure our sort of collaboration would be seen as brave by my colleagues – most anthropologists would be delighted to enjoy the support and intellectual freedom that this project has brought me at an early stage in my research career. But there is a snobbish reflex within anthropology that could lead some to see working with cultural studies as constituting a ‘step down’ from the pure stance of the true anthropologist. An equally tedious assumption would be to see the only role for an anthropologist in this project as being to ‘teach’ cultural studies how research that acknowledges the contingency of social categories is really done. Both of these assumptions are quite wrong, and speak to a self important aloofness that may work well for certain kinds of anthropologists, but should not be regarded as the necessary way to position oneself as an anthropologist working in between, on the one hand, the humanities, and on the other, the social sciences. Our ethnographic work in Chetumal can and does say some interesting things about that specific place and time, and television is a great entry point through which I have been able to learn and think about people in Chetumal and their relationship to Mexico, modernity and economic progress. But that set of expansions, that anthro pologists often make from their close up fieldwork to broader theorization, is

130 Putting television in its place only one way in which ethnographic research can be broadened productively. In our book, rather than making the whole study a discussion of what humans do with television, or what Mexicans do in the twenty first century, it has been illuminating to see what that fieldwork looks like when cast against other, quite different, ways of studying the world, whether through theoretical critique, or political economy, or in other ways. Graeme That has been my experience too, and consequently while I have a clear sense of what I have learnt from anthropology, I am less clear about what anthropology might now learn from cultural studies. While I believe that anthropology could certainly benefit from a little of cultural studies’ disciplinary porousness and its critical edge, the most important things that cultural studies could teach anthro pology were probably learnt quite some time ago: I regard anthropology’s turn to the contemporary and the urban, and its growing interest in media, as in some measure a response to the development of cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s (and I would make similar claims in relation to sociology). I am aware, of course, that there are many in anthropology who would feel that cultural studies has never had anything to teach it and this kind of position can be put in terms that I would, if pressed, vigorously contest. However, I am not inclined to take this on here because, in the case of our joint project, the learning has been largely one way traffic: that is, from anthropology into cultural studies. While I certainly wouldn’t regard this as the inevitable outcome of all such collaborations, the fact is that this happens to be a cross disciplinary collaboration where cultural anthropology has substantially shaped what has been achieved and cultural studies occupies the role of the fortunate beneficiary.

Zones of consumption We want now to commence the process of bringing our book to a more conventional conclusion. In Locating Television, we set out to achieve a number of objectives. First of all, we have presented an argument for a renewed attention within television studies to the locatedness of television – reasserting the importance of contextualizing accounts of the experience of television in ways that recognized the diversity and contingency of that experience around the world. Second, we have suggested a means of dealing with that locatedness by introducing the concept of the zones of consumption: this is proposed as a flexible, instantiated and inclusive way of acknowledging the variety of factors involved in approaching the task of appropriately situating the analysis of television today. Third, we wanted to demonstrate the importance of understanding the experience of television within a context which was not only that of media use; in order to do this, we deliberately located television within a more extensive context of the practices of everyday life than has customarily between the case in most Western television studies. And, fourth, as we have just discussed

Putting television in its place 131 above, contextualizing media use within the practices of everyday life has necessitated an interdisciplinary collaboration which extends the analytic capa cities of television, media and cultural studies by adopting some of the approaches and methodologies available through sociocultural anthropology. As we noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, there are two parallel but contradictory contexts for the first of these objectives in television, media and cultural studies. On the one hand, there are the orthodox arguments that see the development of non terrestrial platforms for television, the rise of the internet as a strategy for distributing television and the apparent decline of national broadcasting systems, as contributing to the globalization of television and reducing the significance of geography and the nation state. On the other hand, the growing tendencies towards the internationalization and de Westernization of these academic fields that have emerged over the last decade or so have provided us with increasing access to the histories of television in non Western countries – which tell us very different stories about their experiences of tele vision. While Anglophone television studies may not have been deliberately universalist in the manner in which they have normatized the experience of television in the United States or the United Kingdom, it is certainly true that for quite some time the television systems in these countries have tended to operate as default settings for much of the international debates about the future of television. The simple corrective that has emerged, and the project to which this book belongs, is to insist on looking more rigorously at the specific factors – the geo political, cultural, regulatory, historical, economic attributes and so on – that overdetermine what television is, specifically, in the places where it is actually consumed. While we have noted that such a proposition is looking far less novel than it might have done a decade ago, there is also the question of how one might do this – that is, how do we go about doing a better job of locating television? For many years, of course, it had been customary and unproblematic to locate television within the nation and so such a question did not arise. However, the transnational spread of media systems, the multiplicity of platforms of delivery and the development of transnational as well as local media markets and distribution networks have complicated things significantly. Analysis has consequently moved away from focusing solely on the national and towards, variously, the platform based community, the regional and, in our view more problematically, the global as the preferred locations for the study of television. While we can see the point of each of these contexts being used in particular instances, we don’t see that any of them can provide, on their own, a suffi ciently flexible and inclusive – on the one hand – and sufficiently focused and detailed – on the other hand – means of understanding the diverse ways in which television works today. Consequently, the use of our concept of zones of consumption responds to the need for the located analysis of television to construct its object of study in a conjunctural manner that is alert to the dis tinctive as well as to the generic aspects of the consumption of the television that is under examination.

132 Putting television in its place We argue that a means of assuring that such an alertness is indeed maintained is to move away from a ‘media centric’ (Morley 2007: 200) account of television. While there have certainly been many close studies of the consumption of television which have included an ethnographic dimension, it is nonetheless rare to find studies which situate television as just one (albeit important and interesting) component within a more complex system of the practices of everyday life. It is most common for television to be situated within a delimited subset of these practices – for instance, as among the practices of media use within the home – or for the practices around television itself to be taken as the sole focus of investigation. This is not surprising, of course. This is work from within television, media or cultural studies and even the limited ethnographic research it has involved is probably stretching such researchers’ expertise significantly. While cultural studies has a longstanding theoretical interest in everyday life, it does not have a large recent1 literature of detailed empirical research on how everyday life is constituted as a set of practices; nor does it have a history of using methodological approaches that involve the embedded fieldwork research methods required to properly understand something as informal, pervasive, quotidian and taken for granted as the domestic practices of everyday life. Therefore, once it decides to place its interest in television within such a context, cultural studies needs help. Hence, the collaboration between cultural studies and cultural anthropology we developed for this project. Where we chose to put this collaboration to work is also important. In challenging conventional Anglophone television studies’ accounts of consum ing television, it became clear that we needed also to turn our attention away from the usual locations of television analysis – as we have noted, particularly the United States and United Kingdom – and direct it towards other large and developed television markets which work differently. From the outset, we believed it was crucial to look at markets that were not predominantly English speaking, that had well established and diverse media systems (and hence our conclusions would not be about ‘development’), and to which we had an appropriate level of cultural access through the relevant language skills. As a result, while this book certainly sees itself as contributing to international debates about television and while much of its content deals with an excep tionally broad range of national and regional locations, it draws substantially upon the body of evidence Anna gathered during her fieldwork in Mexico. It does this not only to tell us something about Mexico and Mexican television, but also to use what we have learned from Mexico to present new ways of looking at television more generally. Admittedly, the concept of zones of consumption was initially appealing because it seemed like a helpful metaphor: it got us away from the nation and the other conventional sites for understanding television, and seemed to offer a degree of flexibility that would be helpful in the process of tailoring the framework of the analysis to the needs of the particular location. As the book has developed, though, its usefulness as a strategy has become clearer to us.

Putting television in its place 133 There have been other useful strategies, of course, that do not automatically locate television within a national context: the category of the geo linguistic region, for instance, so often used to locate the Latin American and Spanish speaking market. However, that is still essentially a geo political descriptor and thus fixes analysis at a particular level and character of generality while leaving out some of the more significant details that might come from a closer cultural analysis – as well as setting aside the temporal factors that might otherwise be relevant (framing the consumption of television as it occurs at this point in time, for instance). As an analytic and framing strategy, however, we argue that what the zone of consumption enables us to do can be substantial. It can include, if required, the more standard notions of region, nation and locality, but it does not specify any of these either as necessary or sufficient in advance. Instead, the ‘zone’ offers a flexibility and adaptability that allows for a high degree of customization. There is no requirement that all zones of consumption should be constituted in precisely the same way: the implicit universalism or normati zation we have criticized in other accounts of television is no longer an implied imperative. It is not endlessly nor arbitrarily variable, however; the metaphor’s invocation of a definable space provides the category with an endpoint – the zone must constitute a particular ‘place’, with a proposed perimeter and its own body of empirical and cultural content. To elaborate this in relation to what the book achieves in effectively con structing Mexico as a zone of consumption, then, in Chapter 2 we attended to Mexico as a location for a certain kind of national and transnational television system, as a distinctive regime of scheduling and consumption, and as a historical formation within which television plays a culturally and politically significant role. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, the zone of consumption is also described by considering the domestic practices of media use into the cultural and political character of the town of Chetumal and the personal stories of our informants. The concept of the zone of consumption, open and inclusive though it is, serves as a means of enforcing the need to consider just what are the forces which make up the experience of television: in this space, at this time, in this cultural historical context and in these ways.

Conclusion These are the underlying objectives of this book, then, and hopefully by this stage the reader will feel equipped to recognize and accept them. The way we have gone about this task, however, probably requires some form of review here, as a means of finally pulling together the various themes and approaches we have taken. Approaches and thematics do vary across these chapters, and so although the perspective we have just described drives them all, they may not always take the expected route. This is a large canvas we have spread in front of the reader – with many locations and a variety of individual themes referenced and explored – and we are conscious of the usefulness of concluding the book with a retrospective account of what we have done.

134 Putting television in its place In Chapter 1, the theoretical and academic arguments which frame this study were outlined. We have returned to them in various ways from time to time, including here in this conclusion, and so we feel entitled to be confident that the reader will be in command of them. The key element to highlight from this first chapter, however, is its brief demonstration of how an anthropologist’s view of television might differ from what we would normally expect from television studies – and thus what there might be to gain from the inter disciplinary collaboration we proposed in this chapter. The decision to locate our analysis of television within the practices of everyday life means that we left aside most of the favoured topics of television studies – genre bending television texts, new platforms of delivery, television’s participation in major media cultural flashpoints and so on. Instead, we have chosen to follow the approach of media anthropology, in which television becomes just one part of the study of larger patterns of social life. This, in turn, requires us to recognize the importance of the mundane and the unremarkable: hence the concluding section in this chapter which described the practice of ‘browsing’ for televisions – with its core image of groups of men gathering in front of multi television wall displays while waiting for their wives to conclude their shopping in the supermarket in Chetumal. In such an instance, what the technology of television does is decidedly undra matic; even though it may perform as an object of idle desire, television may not necessarily be the key element in whatever these men are experiencing in front of it. Such a practice is nonetheless part of the story we need to tell about what television does in the location we have chosen to examine most closely. If television is not going to be located solely within the context of the nation – and we agree that it should not be – nonetheless we need to at least address what kind of role the nation is likely to play in the formation of our zones of consump tion. Chapter 2 commenced by arguing that the nation–television relationship has been written off prematurely. Drawing on a range of examples from Europe, Asia and elsewhere, it suggested that while this relationship is certainly mutating, it is highly variable and is now operating in ways that may have stronger commercial than political rationales. This makes it no less deserving of our attention. Consequently, we briefly reviewed the history of the relationship between the media and the state in Mexico before examining some aspects of Mexican television which are particularly important in understanding how it operates as a national system: the dominance of Televisa, the highly predictable daily pattern of scheduling, and the special cultural and commercial role played by the telenovela. Finally, drawing upon the insights made available through our ethnographic research, we outlined what this research tells us about the character of the relation between the Mexican consumer and what they still clearly see as their national television system. Utterly commercial though it is, dotted with imported programming though it is, this is still a system which is received, overwhelmingly, as a form of national institution: for our informants, whatever is on their television screens is unquestionably ‘Mexican television’. Our approach in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 was to focus each chapter on a parti cular kind of zone of consumption – respectively, the nation, the community

Putting television in its place 135 and the home – in order to explore the different functions television performs at these various levels of social organization. Moving from the examination of the nation to that of the community in Chapter 3 has taken us into a set of debates, however, that are not merely about how television might participate in the construction of community, in general – nor indeed about how this has played out in our primary research site. Our field of discussion in this chapter has been contextualized within the mainstream of Anglophone television studies, and our examples have been drawn from places other than Mexico. The task this chapter has undertaken is to correct some of the relatively widespread – and we suggest unexamined – assumptions in the international literature which have built up around television’s participation in the construction of community as its platforms and systems of delivery have proliferated. As the multichannel and online environments offer more and more choice, and as consumers avail themselves of these choices in order to customize and personalize their consump tion of television, one would think that the connection between television and the construction of community would have become more attenuated. How ever, as we have outlined in this chapter, these highly individualized platforms have been frequently nominated as locations where new kinds of community have been formed: typically, these include virtual fan communities built around the ancillary web presence of a programming franchise such as Lost, or those created by online interactions around, say, a video screened on YouTube and shared via social networks. Within such an argument, it has been claimed that the proliferation of choice, while providing expanded opportunities for the indi vidual, has also provided the opportunity for generating new kinds of virtually located communities. In Chapter 3, we tested that proposition by first looking more carefully at the way the label of community is being used; our view is that it is being deployed with an implausible liberality in many of the argu ments we have encountered. We then compared some aspects of how the three main platforms for the delivery of television today – broadcast, multi channel subscription and online – constructed community, as well as how they performed in delivering some of the key attributes of the television experience: sharedness, liveness and immediacy. What we found suggests that the claims made on behalf of the multichannel environment are hard to sustain: the community like experiences on offer via this platform are largely to do with enhancing the consumption of a particular programme rather than constructing anything that could legitimately be likened to a community. The online experience, however, while still limited to what we argue is a diluted rather than a new version of community, nonetheless demonstrates high levels of immediacy, liveness and sharedness in ways which suggest that this mode of delivery provides an experience which is actually closer to that of broadcast television than to that of multichannel subscription television. Nonetheless, as we noted in this chapter and as he has indicated himself, a more accurate term for what Rheingold originally described as ‘vir tual communities’ would have been ‘social networks’. From our point of view, in attempting to situate these formations in ways that would be most useful for

136 Putting television in its place the consideration of television, it would be even more helpful to think of them as zones of consumption. An important component of the collaborative project which makes up this book, and the richest single source of its insights, was the ethnographic work on television consumption in Mexico. This research has fed into a number of chapters, as we have seen, although up until this point in the book it had tended to be cited as an authority for the conclusions we have drawn rather than presented by way of the careful laying out of detailed observations that is more typical of the writing up of anthropological research. Chapter 4, then, is where we presented the most elaborated account of what we had learnt from our informants in Chetumal. The chapter included case studies of the media practices of individual informants as well as broader, more contextualizing, accounts of the structures of everyday life among these informants. This meant that, in order to achieve the objective of understanding the place of television within these everyday lives, we ended up discussing issues that go well beyond those solely to do with the media. As we said at the end of Chapter 4, the approaches we adopted there took us a long way from understanding the consumption of television as simply a matter of who is watching what, with whom and where. The use of television in the households we studied is embedded, we argued, within a particular formation of the domestic moral economy which not only structures the practices related to the technology, but which also gives them their meanings and significances. As an example of how culturally specific these meanings and significances can be, we explained how television’s implication in the physical segmentation of the household – as tel evisions multiply and household members retreat to watch their own set in their own bedrooms – is understood by these families: whereas in the United States, for instance, such a development is likely to be seen as a diminution of sociability and a shift to be examined and tempered, we found that it engen dered a sense of family security and enclosure for many of our Mexican infor mants. Indeed, a key aspect of our findings from this study is how positively television was viewed, and how marked were the differences between our Mexican informants’ perceptions of television’s social value and those we would encounter in our own country – Australia – and indeed in most other locations in the Anglophone West. This chapter, then, provides us with our most detailed and empirically grounded body of evidence and generated insights which, in their specificity and contingency, demonstrate the necessity of locating television within its appropriate zones of consumption before attributing to it any predetermined function, meaning or significance. In Chapter 5, we approached the zone of consumption in a very different way. Here our focus was not a particular domain of consumption, nor a parti cular level of social organization. Rather, here we focused on a key discursive formation that we argued is fundamental to our understandings of what tele vision does, and what the access to television promises to the consumer. One of the basic things we need to understand about the consumption of television is the aspiration to own a television in the first place. Our argument in this

Putting television in its place 137 chapter was that this aspiration is tightly articulated to the desire for modernity. What made this of particular interest to us within this project is that it carries special importance when we look at non Western2 countries and their experi ences of television. Connected as it is to discourses of modernity, and thus also in many locations to the ideologies of progress identified with the West, tele vision plays a complicated and often deeply contested role in developing and modernizing nation states who are uncomfortable about simply adopting the values of the West as a by product of their access to a globalizing television system – but who clearly desire such access nonetheless. Our discussion of the relation between discourses of modernity and television in these contexts approached the location of television from the opposite direction, as it were, to our earlier chapters. Where they focused upon the distinctiveness of location, and the specificity of the zone of consumption, this chapter picked up what can in fact form a cross cutting discourse: that is, it is a discourse that will be highly contingent in its local inflections and functions, but that nonetheless connects the desire for modernity to the medium of television virtually everywhere. This is not to retreat from our insistence on the importance of recognizing the diverse functions of television within its different locations, but it does also acknowledge that there are some common discursive frames which contribute to how television means, and what television does, within these locations. This chapter was a more thoroughly theoretical chapter than those which preceded it, and while our Mexican research informs this chapter as well, as does some of our earlier work on Asia, our discussion drew most extensively on an emerging body of published research which looks at the politics of television and modernity in non Western contexts such as the Middle East and Asia. What this work highlighted for us, and what ended up being the major issue discussed in this chapter, is how television – as an object of desire, and also as a carrier of Western modernity – becomes entangled within a contest between competing forms of modernity in many of these locations: that is, a contest between versions of modernity imbibed from the West, and those generated more directly from within the culture concerned. In the locations to which we have referred in this chapter, television becomes a site for major cultural and political debate about the process and politics of modernization; as a con sequence, the precise nature of that debate constitutes an important factor in how we understand the function of television within these locations. What we have attempted to do in this book, then, is to open up discussion about how television studies might think about the location of television in the current environment, and how we might move onto new ways of framing such a location around the particular factors which structure the practices of con sumption there. Furthermore, by including within our project a major com ponent of empirical research into the consumption of television outside the usual locations of Anglophone television studies, we have tried to bring new material into the debates, in order to frame new questions and to suggest some new answers.

Appendix

Table A.1 Household televisions in Mexico, 2009 Percentage of nationwide households Television permanently in the home One television in the home Two televisions in the home Three or more televisions in the home Television located in the master bedroom Television located in another bedroom Television located in the living room

95.8 36.7 40.2 23.1 37.4 20.3 33.6

Source: IBOPE 2010: 9.

Table A.2 An example of weekday television schedules on Televisa Channel 2, 8:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Week commencing Monday 18 June 2012 Monday Primero Noticias (news) 9:00 a.m. Hoy 10:00 a.m. (morning 11:00 a.m. magazine show) 12:00 p.m. Maria, la del Barrio (repeated telenovela) 1:00 p.m. El Chavo (repeated sitcom) 2:30 p.m. Noticiero (news) 8:00 a.m.

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Primero Noticias (news) Hoy (morning magazine show) Maria, la del Barrio (repeated telenovela) El Chavo (repeated sitcom) Noticiero (news)

Primero Noticias (news) Hoy (morning magazine show) Maria, la del Barrio (repeated telenovela) El Chavo (repeated sitcom) Noticiero (news)

Primero Noticias (news) Hoy (morning magazine show) Maria, la del Barrio (repeated telenovela) El Chavo (repeated sitcom) Noticiero (news)

Primero Noticias (news) Hoy (morning magazine show) Maria, la del Barrio (repeated telenovela) El Chavo (repeated sitcom) Noticiero (news)

Table A.2 (continued) Monday Laura (chat show) 4:15 p.m. Un refugio para el amor (telenovela) 5:15 p.m. La Rosa de Guadalupe (episodic series) 6:15 p.m. Cachito de Cielo (telenovela) 7:15 p.m. Amor Bravío (telenovela) 8:15 p.m. Por Ella Soy Eva (telenovela) 9:15 p.m. Abísmo de Pasión (telenovela) 10:30 p.m. Noticiero (news) 11:00 pm Deportes (sports) 3:00 p.m.

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Laura (chat show) Un refugio para el amor (telenovela) La Rosa de Guadalupe (episodic series) Cachito de Cielo (telenovela) Amor Bravío (telenovela) Por Ella Soy Eva (telenovela) Abísmo de Pasión (telenovela) Noticiero (news) Deportes (sports)

Laura (chat show) Un refugio para el amor (telenovela) La Rosa de Guadalupe (episodic series) Cachito de Cielo (telenovela) Amor Bravío (telenovela) Por Ella Soy Eva (telenovela) Abísmo de Pasión (telenovela) Noticiero (news) Deportes (sports)

Laura (chat show) Un refugio para el amor (telenovela) La Rosa de Guadalupe (episodic series) Cachito de Cielo (telenovela) Amor Bravío (telenovela) Por Ella Soy Eva (telenovela) Abísmo de Pasión (telenovela) Noticiero (news) Deportes (sports)

Laura (chat show) Un refugio para el amor (telenovela) La Rosa de Guadalupe (episodic series) Cachito de Cielo (telenovela) Amor Bravío (telenovela) Por Ella Soy Eva (telenovela) Abísmo de Pasión (telenovela) Noticiero (news) Deportes (sports)

Source: www.televisa.com/canal de las estrellas/horarios (accessed 16 June 2012).

Table A.3 Approximate percentage of households owning major technologies in municipality of Othón P. Blanco, 2010 Item

Number of households

Percentage of households (to nearest 0.1%)

Total number of households Television Refrigerators Washing machine Radio Mobile phone Car, van or wagon Landline telephone Internet access

65,534 58,673 53,986 49,164 48,896 48,676 27,400 20,060 13,516

100.0 89.5 82.3 75.0 74.6 74.2 41.8 30.6 20.6

Source: 2010 Mexican Census (CPyV).

Notes

Introduction 1 An earlier version of this section was published in the online journal Flow (Turner 2011a), under the title of ‘Disaster Zones and the Performance of Television’. 2 Current figures from May 2012 (Nielsen 2012) report that US teens now spend more time watching TV in their bedrooms (48 per cent) than they do watching in shared space in the living room (47 per cent). 3 Also see Table A.1 in the Appendix. 4 Here, ‘television’ includes the fullest possible range of material from broadcast TV to user generated video on YouTube. 5 On an average weekday in 2009, 67 per cent of Mexicans were likely to have watched broadcast television (while only 44 per cent were likely to have worked in paid employment, and only 59 per cent were likely to have had household or childcare duties) (IBOPE 2010: 81). 6 However, when such data are collected it is hard to differentiate between a television being on and a television being actively watched; attention rates to television have declined as people increasingly do other things at the same time as a television is switched on. 7 The bulk of the work referred to comes from Anna Cristina Pertierra’s research in Mexico and Cuba, but the authors also draw upon some of the earlier work on Asian television conducted by Jinna Tay, which fed into several joint publications with Graeme Turner (Tay and Turner 2008; Turner and Tay 2009).

1 Understanding television today 1 We use that term as a shorthand means of denoting an environment in which the capacities of the multichannel, satellite and digital were yet to make an impact. We acknowledge, of course (in fact we insist), that there are plenty of locations where the ‘broadcast era’ is still in full swing. 2 This study was updated in 2009, and this is the version which is referenced below. 3 This argument is made at some length by Turner and Tay (2009). 4 Anna Cristina Pertierra carried out nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chetumal, Quintana Roo between 2008 and 2009, with a one month follow up visit in 2012. Semi structured interviews with 53 residents of varying ages and socioeconomic levels supplemented the participant observation carried out by Anna with the assistance of Fanny Palomo Flores and José de Jesús Cruz Arjona. Our thanks to them and to the support of the Universidad de Quintana Roo in Chetumal. 5 Although the names of individuals and neighbourhoods described in Chapter 4 have been changed, the Plaza Las Américas is the real name of this shopping mall.

Notes 141 6 While pharmacies, supermarkets and small grocery stores in Chetumal have long stocked everyday goods that are advertised nationwide, many brands and chain stores that are envisaged as ‘middle class’ have only arrived with the building of the mall. Examples of such brands include the Liverpool store, Nine West shoes, Chedraui supermarkets and the Italian Coffee Company. 7 McCarthy herself acknowledges that to describe waiting times as deadness is not to say that television viewers in such contexts as waiting rooms are entirely passive; indeed, waiting rooms can valorize television watching, which may feel like an escape or refuge as much as an imposition to the average waiter viewer (McCarthy 2001: 496).

2 Television and the nation 1 This initial approach dates back to the beginning of the project in 2006 and to the period when Jinna Tay was collaborating with us, and during which the primary research focus was on television in Asia; the outcomes of that phase of the project were used to structure Turner and Tay (2009) and Tay and Turner (2008, 2010). 2 Along with Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo was declared a state in the Federal Republic of Mexico in 1974. 3 This larger argument about the role of television in realizing an imagined community of cultural consumers (perhaps even more than citizens) clearly takes as a starting point the work of Benedict Anderson, but refers as well to the growing body of anthropological work on Mexican nationalism and popular culture (Lomnitz 2001; Alonso 2004; García Canclini 2001). 4 Although these generalizations could be made of any number of telenovelas, the examples have been taken from content analysis by Anna Cristina Pertierra of the following telenovelas broadcast in Mexico: Fuego en la sangre (2008), Soy tu dueña (2011), La Que No Podía Amar (2012), Amorcito Corazón (2012). 5 On the importance of timeslots for telenovelas, see Martín Barbero (1995: 282). See also López (1995), Leal and Oliven (1988), Antola and Rogers (1984: 202). 6 Information about this and other protests against Televisa can be found at the YoSoy132 website: http://yosoy132.mx (accessed 15 June 2012). 7 Graeme Turner has taken this argument a little further elsewhere (Turner 2010), by suggesting it might even be worth thinking of the media generally as operating something like a state, itself, with its commercial interests producing a wide range of cultural and political effects.

3 Television and community 1 The summary of these which follows draws largely on the account presented in John Ellis’ Seeing Things (Ellis 2002). 2 Graeme Turner quoted this post in a subsequent column for Flow on liveness and sharedness; the result was over 45 comments, all aimed at exploring these attributes as fundamental to the experience of television. 3 There is also another body of argument which focuses on, for instance, online drama where, it is argued, there is a ‘small screen aesthetic’ that revives the ‘intimate screen’ of a much earlier version of television (Creeber 2011). The variations, it seems, are endless. 4 Hulu Plus the subscription service rather than the free service is available in Japan. 5 For a start, these things can change quite quickly, as business models mutate. YouTube’s current negotiations for the provision of premium content from networks and other providers have the capacity to move the site away from its ‘prosumer’, user generated heartland and into the territory of Hulu and Netflix. If and when that happens, its ethic of sharing will be much reduced in importance.

142 Notes

4 Television, domestic space and the moral economy of the family 1 In addition to participant observation, where Anna lived with her family in two neigh bourhoods of Chetumal for a total period of nine months in 2008/9, with the assistance of Fanny Palomo Flores and José de Jesús Cruz Arjona, she carried out semi structured interviews with 53 people residing in Chetumal’s greater metropolitan area. Respondents were roughly two thirds women and one third men, with ages ranging from late teens to late seventies. Although interviews were not explicitly restricted to discussing domestic television practices, respondents’ conversations typically centred upon home viewing and not viewing in other places. A follow up visit to Chetumal in January 2012 allowed Anna to do follow up interviews with eight of the 2008/9 informants, collect six television viewing diaries for a one week period with the assistance of Fanny Palomo Flores, and conduct content analysis of highest rating television programmes across a range of genres and timeslots. 2 The name of this neighbourhood, and the names of all research participants mentioned in this chapter, have been changed to preserve their anonymity. 3 The attitudes of Chetumal respondents to everyday television viewing are also very different to the attitudes voiced by the urban student movement discussed in Chapter 2. 4 Chetumal as an urban or suburban space of the mestizo is also contrasted to the rural areas of supposedly more indigenized Maya, and as a safe and developed city it also sits in opposition to the backwardness and violence of Belize and Guatemala to the south. Within this region a strong history of Mayan insurgency meant that it was the last area to be incorporated into the Mexican nation state, and to this day there are complex and contradictory politics of Mayan identity that have been discussed by other scholars (cf. Castañeda Quetzil). For the purposes of this chapter it is mostly relevant to know that Chetumal is a city that sits in contrast to this broader spectrum of indigenous identities, and is a place in which very few people are interested in identifying as Maya. 5 For press coverage of the Clasemedieros study, see the Wall Street Journal, ‘The Rise of Mexico’s Middle Class’ 5 March 2012; Washington Post, ‘Mexico’s Middle Class is Becoming its Majority’ 14 March 2012; Milenio, ‘Clasemedieros’ 26 March 2012. Our thanks to Agustín Escobar Latapí for bringing this debate to our attention. 6 As the Mexican average annual income is about A$5,000 per year (60,000 MXN), to qualify as entering the middle class would only take about A$10,000 per year (120,000 MXN). In a two income household, a bus driver and nurse would reach this level. In a one income household, an accountant or engineer would make around that amount. It is worth noting the gendered nature of these occupations; sociologists of the Mexican middle class argue that the disparity of income between male headed and female headed households is much wider in this group than among urban and rural working classes. For women, mobility in and out of the middle class is often dependent upon their relation ships to male ‘breadwinners’, while professions that enable one income households are typically male dominated (Gilbert 2007: 19). 7 By 2012 other cable television services were also becoming available in Chetumal. 8 Fanny Palomo Flores assisted in the original writing up of these case studies; our thanks to her. Thanks also to Fergus Grealy for the translation of interview notes related to these case studies. 9 The contrast here to Wilk’s (2002) discussion of television in Belize, which shares a frontier with Mexico just a few kilometres from Chetumal, is very interesting. There, the relatively late introduction of national television in the 1980s created considerable public debate.

5 Television and the desire for modernity 1 Of course, the centrality of secularization to modernity is far from established. As Morley puts it: ‘if modernity is usually understood as secular by definition and as Western by

Notes 143 implication, and if America is the most advanced country of the modern West, then, for the syllogism to hold, America should evidently be secular. … [However] not only does America have by far the most powerful fundamental religious movement of any advanced country, but that the US now enjoys, in many respects, a less secular regime than does, for example, contemporary Turkey’ (Morley 2007: 160 1). 2 See the discussion of this in Turner (2010, 61 6). 3 John Ellis notes that this is a pattern that was played out earlier in the West as well; he cites evidence that ‘television images of modern mechanized affluence were important in encouraging the migration of workers from poor areas in southern Italy towards the industrial north’ in the post war period (Ellis 2002: 42). 4 Anthropologists have been among those to question whether such a globalization of culture does in fact lead to a reduced or standardized repertoire of cultural practices. See, for example, the edited volumes of Miller (1995c), Howes (1996), Inda and Rosaldo (2008).

6 Putting television in its place 1 This is not to deny how important empirical and ethnographic work was at the beginning of the British cultural studies project the work of Paul Willis (1977) or Dorothy Hobson (1982), for example. There is still little, however, with which we might compare Learning to Labour, for instance, in recent or contemporary cultural studies. 2 We should remind readers here that we do problematize the usage of such a term at the beginning of Chapter 5.

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Index

Abu Lughod, L. 44, 46 Acosta Alzuru, C. 56 Akademi Fantasia 120 Alonso, A.M. 120 Amorcito Corazón 141n Anderson, B. 50, 141n Andrejevic, M. 79 80 Ang, I 21 Anglophone television studies 43 44, 106, 109, 131, 132, 135 Animal Planet 87, 95 anthropology: and community 63; and ethnographic method 83, 127 30 passim, 136; and interdisciplinarity 125 30; in Latin America 33, 42; in Mexico 42 43, 53 59 Antola, L. and Rogers, E.M. 141n Appadurai, A. 63 Asian Idol 48 Azcárraga family 13 Azteca 13, 56, 92, 93 Bachelor, The 2 Barrera, E. 13 Barthes, R. 29 Beck, C.T. 55 Belize 36 37, 50 51, 117, 142n Bennett, T., Morris, M. and Grossberg, L. 65 Big Brother 123 binge viewing 7, 71 72 Bird, S. E. 27 28 Bonner, F. 48 Bozzo, L. 51 Brisbane 2 Bruns, A. 22 Brunsdon, C. 7, 23, 71 72 Buonanno, M. 12, 63, 67, 69, 75 Burgess and Green, 73 74

Cablemás 92, 95, 93, 96 Caldeira, T. 85, 102 4 Caldwell, J. 22 CBS 48 Chassen López, F. 54 55 Chedraui supermarket 37, 38 39 Chetumal 2 4 passim, 18, 28 29, 36 41 passim, 49 53, 83 92 passim, 100, 129, 142n Chinese modernity 122 23 choice fatigue 75 Chong López et al, B. 49 Clasemedieros 91, 142n Clicker 76 Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 33 Colbert Report, The 80 Colloredo Mansfield, R. 34 Comedy Channel 80 commercial nationalism 46 47 convergence culture 27 28, 63, 75 Coppel department store 37 Couldry, N. 27 Couldry, N. and Hay, J. 27 Couldry, N., Livingstone, S. and Markham, T. 26 Creeber. G. 141n Cultural Studies 27 Curb Your Enthusiasm 7 Curran, J. and Park, M. 23 Curtin, M. 22, 44, 45, 48, 116, 120 Daily Show, The 80 DaMatta, R. 104 Dayan, D. 10, 11, 18, 30 31, 66 67, 77, 78 Dayan, D. and Katz, E. 10, 30 Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico 53

Index 153 de la Calle, L. and Rubio, L. 91 Díaz, P. 54 55 digital media: and community 61 62, 64 Digitalsmith 76 Discovery Channel 87 DIY citizenship 46 Douglas, M. 30 Dussel, E. 111 East Asian modernity 120 21 Eisenstadt, S. N. 111 Ellis, J. 43, 66, 67, 75, 114, 115, 142n, 143n El vuelo del águila (The Flight of the Eagle) 54 55 Escobar Latapí, A. 91 Escobar Latapí, A. and Pedraza Espinoza L.P. 90, 91 Estrellados 95 Family Television 16 family viewing 6 8 Fiske, J. 21 Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. 11 12 Flow 68, 72, 140n Foster, R. 22 Friends 94, 95 Fuego en la sangre 141n Fung, A. 19, 44, 45, 77, 122 23 Fung, A. and Zhang, X. 122

Home Territories 24 Horst, H. A. 101 2 Howes, D. 143n Hoy 57 58, 94 Hulu 73, 141n Idol 48, 122, 123 imagined national community 50 52 immediacy 67 68 Inda, J.X. and Rosaldo, R. 143n indoctritainment 46 Ishak, S.Z.A. 116 Iwabuchi, K. 44, 121 Jara Elías, R. and Garnica Andrade, A. 14 Jenkins, H. 45, 63 Katz, E. and Scannell, P. 9 Keane, M. et al 23, 44, 45, 111, 116 Keywords 29, 62 Kottak, C.P. 21 Kraidy. M. 18, 44, 112, 118, 119, 121 Kraidy, M. and Khalil, J.F. 7, 23, 44 Krauze, E. 55

García Canclini, N. 3, 31 Geertz, C. 30 Giddens, A. 110 Giglia, A. 102 Gilbert, D. 90, 104, 142n Gillan, J. 70 Ginsburg, F. et al 34 Green, J. 9 Gripsrud, J. 9, 25 26, 44, 60, 66, 68 Guardian, The 59 Guerra de Chistes 94 Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 63

La Niñera 94 La Que No Podía Amar 141n La Reina del Sur 51 Latino media 49, 51 Latin American television 49, 55 56 Leal, O.F. 35 Leal, O.F, and Oliven, R.G. 55, 141n Learning to Labour 143n Levine, E. 24 Lévi Strauss, C. 29 liveness 67 68, 72 74 Liverpool store 37, 94 Liu, K. 118 Lomnitz, C. 50, 53, 54, 120 López, A. 55, 56, 141n Lost 70 Lotz, A. 9, 22, 69 70 Lozano, J.T. 49

Hall, S. 111 Hamburger, E.I. 55 Hartley, J. 16, 22, 46, 114 Havens, T. 22 Hay, J. 64 65. HBO 80, 95 Hess, D.J. and DaMatta, R. 105 Highmore, B. 30 History Channel 87 Hobson, D. 143n

Ma, E. 112 13, 114, 115 16, 121, 123 Maliki, J. 116, 120 Mankekar, P. 32 Marcos, N. 51 Marcus, G. 30 Martín Barbero, J 33, 55, 56, 57, 141n Maxwell, R. and Miller, T. 31 Mayer, V. 31, 55 Mayer, V. et al 22, 31 McCarthy, A. 40, 141n

154 Index media anthropology 33 35 mestizo (mixed national identity) 120 21 Mexico: media history; 53 55; media research 42, 49, 88 Mexico City 51, 53 54 Miami 48, 51 Miller, D. 29, 33, 143n Miller, D. and Slater, D. 33 Montijo, G. 57 Moran, A. 19, 48, 116, 120 Moran, J. 30 Morley, D. 6, 16, 24, 27, 44, 110, 120, 132, 142 43n Morley, D. and Robins, K. 118 multichannel environment 69 72, 78 79, 135 Murphy, P.D. 54 Nielsen 140n Netflix 73 New Keywords 65 Olympic Games 3 Orozco Gómez, G. 57, 88 Palomo Flores, F. 142n Peña Nieto, E. 59 Pertierra, A.C. 27 28, 66, 77, 114, 115, 127, 140n Plaza Las Américas Chetumal 36 40, 94 Porto, M. 55 PRI (National Revolutionary Party) 53 public sphere, the 24 25 Quintana Roo 37, 52, 84, 89, 91, 141n Queensland 2 Raw 95 Raw and the Cooked, The 29 Reading Television 11 12 Re-Locating Television 25 Rheingold, H. 64, 74, 81, 135 Rivero, Y. 115, 119 20 Rizzo, T. 76 Rofel, L. 32 Rosaldo, R. 33 Rosas Mantecón, A. 49 Rothenbuhler, E.W. 31 Sakr, N. 7, 23, 44 Sawney, H. 65 Seeing Things 114, 142n Shirky, C. 11, 25 Sky 92, 96

Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. 35 Silverstone, R. Morley, D. and Hirsch, E. 27, 33, 98, 100 Simpsons, The 93 Sixteen and Pregnant 2 Slim Helú, C. 58 Smack Down 95 Soy tu dueña 141n Spigel, L. 35, 98 99, 113, 118 Spitulnik, D. 31 Sun, W. 113, 114, 122 Sun, W. and Zhao, Y. 17, 45 46, 77 Sunkel, G. 57 Sunstein, C. 79 80 Survivor 45 swine flu 3 Tay, J. 48, 140n, 141n telenovelas: importance of 55; Mexican 55 56; research on 55 56 Televisa 13, 54, 56 58, 92, 93, 94, 96, 134 Television Culture 21 TV De Mente 93 television in: Australia 8 9, 51; the Balkans 45 47; China 8, 22, 45 47 passim; Cuba 119 20; Japan 8, 121; Korea 8; Mexico 12 15, 54 55, 88, 134; Taiwan 121; US 6, 22, 77 Television Studies after TV 15, 43, 44 That’s Me 46 Thomas, A. 23 Thussu, D.K. 23 Tinic, S. 22 TNT 95 Top Gear 48 Toussaint, F. 14 Turner, G. 44, 72, 75 76, 116, 123, 141n Turner, G. and Tay, J. 11, 15, 42, 43, 140n, 141n Two and a Half Men 2 Ugly Betty 122 Vallarta Vélez, L. 52 Virtual Community, The 64, 74 Volcˇ icˇ , Z. 17 18 Volcˇ icˇ , Z. and Andrejevic, M. 18, 46 47, 58, 122 Waisbord, S. 55 Watching Dallas 21 western modernity 109 10, 119 20, 137

Index 155 Whitney, D. 76 Wilk, R. 19, 69, 117 18, 142n Williams, R. 29, 35, 62, 66 Willis, P. 143n Wilson, S.M. and Peterson, L.C. 63 Wire, The 7

YoSoy132 59, 141n YouTube 73 74, 141n Yúdice, G. 54, 65 66 zones of consumption 6 9, 81 82, 123, 136 37