Layers of Identity as Boundaries for Choices and Understandings

Identities are clearly complex, even within an individual, much more so when aggregated to the level of collective identities in an even more complex culture. In my concluding thoughts, I return briefly to complexity theory, which I examined at the institutional and organizational level in earlier chapters. Increasing levels of identity seem likely to increase complexity at

both individual and collective levels, leading to more complex, less easily predictable patterns of television choices and understandings by audiences. Viewers will share some layers of culture and identity, but it's unlikely that any will share all because they vary by gender, race, class, family back ground, language, and age. These all add different layers of experience and identity to guide choices and understandings among a set of television offer ings, which are also increasingly multilayered and diverse. In fact, I have demonstrated in this chapter and the preceding one, in the case of Brazil, television helps form the cultural capital that works alongside identities to

inform choices and understandings of television.

Making Sense of World Television 253

One useful aspect of complexity theory is the idea of recursivity (Balcazar, Diaz, & Gabarro, 1 995; Kak, 2005 ). The idea is that patterns tend to repeat, that the whole of something develops or emerges from a process of repetition of many smaller, similar parts, like a computer program made up of many similar subprograms. In this sense, individuals in the same culture tend to share many of the same layers of culture. Many will share common experiences as women or Latinas; some will add having watched the same television programs, some not. As a combination of gender, ethnic, and cultural linguistic identity, Latinas will have a lot of common patterns but also some variation-another key idea of complexity theory-that will emerge, change, and hybridize over time. Thus, the meaning of Latina is a constantly chang ing but still a recognizable cultural pattern or identity. Similarly, the larger culture will be made up of many people who share quite a few things, repeat ing patterns, but with a lot of variation. Some are watching television in English from within an Anglophone cultural-linguistic sphere dominated by the United States. Some, while living in the United States, are watching tele vision in Spanish from within a Latin American culture-linguistic sphere dominated by Mexico. Both patterns are recursively performed or carried out by large numbers of people who sometimes interact more, sometimes less, but add to a collective pattern or identity for the United States.

Another related way of seeing the constellation of layers of identity for an individual or for a group is as a personal or collective set of boundaries that give some sense of the limits to what is likely in people's interests, choices, and understandings. If someone in the United States has a regional identity that is turned off by New York culture, they may draw a personal boundary . that excludes Seinfeld. If they don't speak Spanish, then fairly clear bound aries are drawn around their viewing choices in terms of the languages and

the large-scale cultural-linguistic, Anglophone versus Hispanic spheres of television in the United States.

On the other hand, interesting variations happen that cross such bound aries. For example, some primarily English-speaking television viewers in the United States found the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea (I am Ugly Betty) so interesting when it was broadcast in Spanish that they struggled to watch it. That caught the attention of U.S. broadcasters, who prepared a U.S. version, initiating what may be a significant cultural innovation, adapt ing the Latin American version of the soap opera back to the United States (Rivero, 2003 ). This may happen not only in the specific case of ABC's pro duction of Ugly Betty but also the more general case of U.S. television net works adapting the format into more general English-language use for U.S. audiences (Bielby & Harrington, 2005). This is also an interesting example of recursion, in genres and formats rather than individual identities; it shows

254 Chapter 9 how examples recur and adapt over time, as Colgate-Palmolive deliberately

localizes the soap opera in Cuba, whence the idea spreads to Colombia, where producers further adapt or glocalize the genre to fit Colombia, which produces a telenovela that concretizes a possibility of U.S. producers relo

calizing the genre and the specific production in the United States. (See Chapter 6 for more discussion of localization and glocalization of the telen ovela and other genres.)

Layers of Identity as Boundaries for Choices and Understandings