Monday, September 14, 2009
The Role of the Media & the Nation
Silvio Waisbord’s chapter was interesting in that it examined the media and the role that it had in the past and continues to have in reinventing the nation and nation building. Waisbord looks at how the media, especially the radio and public broadcasting, have played a pivotal role in bringing people together from various distinct backgrounds. Nevertheless, Waisbord also mentions how many find the media to be an incredibly strong force for promoting nationalism by exposing differences between those of different backgrounds. One important note that Waisbord does bring up is that opportunities for nation building differ because not everyone has the same access to various media outlets. Waisbord discusses how the media remains to be one of the strongest forces promoting national identity, offering opportunities for shared media experiences, and contributing to the maintenance of nations by institutionalizing national cultures (387). Waisbord concludes the chapter by addressing globalization, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism as issues which could perhaps challenge the role of the media in nation building, but then summarizes that he feels that the survival of the nation and the media’s role in preserving it is here to stay even if the relationship between the two has changed within the past several years.
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"One important note that Waisbord does bring up is that opportunities for nation building differ because not everyone has the same access to various media outlets."
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you brought this up, because that was one of the comments that caught my attention as well. Choice, as well as access, influences people's understanding of national identity. It's no secret that Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart have completely different audiences--and that those audiences have completely different conceptions of what "America" and "patriotism" mean, although I think plenty of people in both viewerships would describe themselves as both.
Couple that with Karim's assertion that symbolism has more to do with national identity than ethnicity or linguistics, and you get a situation like we had in the 2008 elections and Sarah Palin's controversial division of the voting public into "real Americans" and others. In this case, "real" Americans were clearly not identifiable by ethnicity, language, geography, heritage or citizenship; "real" Americans were those who recognized and accepted the same symbols of patriotism that she embraced. If we accept nationalism as a symbolic construct, her claims are defensible. Of course, voting rights are awarded based on more geopolitical understanding of nationalism, to a number of people who clearly live in the United States of America, albeit not the symbolic "real" America her words conveyed.