Television The Public Sphere And National Identity

Television's role and influence in time, in age of globalisation of the media.

This study gives a broad reinterpretation of television's role and influence on democratic societies in a time of increased globalization of the media. Covering developments in both the USA and Europe, it examines the relationship between television and society, and predicts TV's future.

In this broad-ranging text, Peter Dahlgren clarifies the underlying theoretical concepts of civil society and the public sphere, and relates these to a critical analysis of the practice of television as journalism, as information and as entertainment. He demonstrates the limits and the possibilities of the television medium and the formats of popular journalism. These issues are linked to the potential of the audience to interpret or resist messages, and to construct its own meanings. What does a realistic understanding of the functioning and the capabilities of television imply for citizenship and democracy in a mediated age?

?There can be no political sovereignty without culture sovereignty.' So argued the CBC in 1985 in its evidence to the Caplan/Sauvageau Task Force on Broadcasting Policy. Richard Collins challenges this assumption. He argues in this study of nationalism and Canadian television policy that Canada's political sovereignty depends much less on Canadian content in television than has generally been accepted. His analysis focuses on television drama, at the centre of television policy in the 1980s. Collins questions the conventional image of Canada as a weak national entity undermined by its population's predilection for foreign television. Rather, he argues, Canada is held together, not by a shared repertoire of symbols, a national culture, but by other social forces, notably political institutions. Collins maintains that important advantages actually and potentially flow from Canada's wear national symbolic culture. Rethinking the relationships between television and society in Canada may yield a more successful broadcasting policy, more popular television programming, and a better understanding of the links between culture and the body politic. As the European Community moves closer to political unity, the Canadian case may become more relevant to Europe, which, Collins suggests, already fears the ?Canadianization? of its television. He maintains that a European multilingual society, without a shared culture or common European audio-visual sphere and with viewers watching foreign television, can survive successfully as a political entity ? just as Canada has.

This book explores the ways in which intellectual and cultural publics from the early modern period to the postmodern present have actively constructed their cultural identities within the social processes of modernity. It brings together some of the most compelling recent writing on the public sphere by scholars in the fields of literary history, cultural studies and social theory from both sides of the Atlantic. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a major re-examination of recent scholarship on the theory of the public sphere as developed by Jürgen Habermas. They also stand as a collective effort both to interrogate and to extend this influential model by exploring modern forms of intellectual and cultural activity in all their rich diversity and ideological complexity. Contributions range from the divided inheritance of Shakespeare publishing history to the new forms of mass-mediated cultural experience in contemporary Britain; from attempts at cultural regulation in the literary public sphere of the Romantic period to the postmodern political conflict played out in the American public sphere of the 1990s; and from varieties of religious dissent to modes of postcolonial criticism. The book furthers the dialogue between academic methodologies, fields and periods, and presents readers with a contested narrative of the key cultural and intellectual practices that have made up our modern world.

The advent of satellite television and its adoption in the Maghreb brought about a profound social change. This book, which explores the relationships between the media and the public sphere, shows that the simple and quotidian act of watching satellite television as opposed to national television mobilizes novel ways of expressing identities along with a range of critical positions targeting political regimes. By bringing certain topics hitherto hardly present to the center of homes, the media reveals the pivotal functions of gender relations, which are today at the heart of social and political matters in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book offers a unique interpretation of the use of satellite television in authoritarian contexts and contributes to a better understanding of the media and the political public sphere. The book will interest teachers and students in communication, political studies, gender studies, sociology and anthropology of the Arab worlds and the Mediterranean.

In a uniquely dualistic creative career spanning five decades, John Ormond made major contributions to both English-language poetry and documentary filmmaking. Born in Swansea, he learned to ‘think in terms of pictures’ while working as a journalist in London, where he secured a job at the celebrated photojournalist magazine Picture Post. Employed later by the BBC in Cardiff during the early days of television, Ormond went on to become a pioneer in documentary film. This book is the first in-depth examination of the fascinating correspondences between Ormond’s twin creative channels; viewing his work against the backdrop of a changing Wales, it constitutes an important case study in the history of documentary filmmaking, in the history of British television, and in the cultural history of Wales.

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