AUDIENCES 119
AUDIENCES 119
Instead of measuring responses electronically or behaviorally, as its domestic counterpart does, the GEM interrogates the geopolitical origin of TV texts, and the themes and styles they embody, with particular attention to the putatively nation- building genres of drama, news, sport, and current affairs. GEM adherents hold that local citizens should control television, because they can be counted on in the event of war. This model is found in the dis- courses of cultural imperialism, everyday talk, broadcast and tele- communications policy, unions, international organizations, newspapers, heritage, cultural diplomacy, and post- industrial service- sector planning, as per the NWICO and globalization issues described in Chapter 2 (see Schiller 1976; Beltrán and Fox 1980; Dorfman and Mattelart 2000).
The GEM favors “creativity, not consumerism,” in the words of UNESCO’s “Screens Without Frontiers” initiative (Tricot 2000). It is exemplified in Armand Mattelart’s stinging denunciation of First- World TV’s influence on the Third World:
In order to camouflage the counter- revolutionary function which it has assigned to communications technology and, in the final analysis, to all the messages of mass culture, imperial- ism has elevated the mass media to the status of revolutionary agents, and the modern phenomenon of communications to that of revolution itself[,] . . . . . . an element in a total system answering to the imperialist metropolis’s conception of the role of the superstructure in the counter- revolutionary struggle in Third World countries, i.e. that of smuggling in its models of development and social relations.
Néstor García-Canclíni notes in this context that: “We Latin Ameri- cans presumably learned to be citizens through our relationship to Europe; our relationship to the United States will, however, reduce us to consumers” (2001: 1). Transcending the old NWICO critiques of imperial and corporate power, vigorous critiques of imported tele- vision have come from Islamists, with religious leaders and researchers leading the way. They have focused on secular, pro- Western elites dominating the airwaves to the exclusion of faith- based TV and
120 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS governance. Spirituality and ethics have displaced technological trans-
fer and capitalism as sites of struggle, and exerted great influence on Arab states and diasporas (Mowlana 2000: 112–14). In Nigeria, concern is expressed that violent gangs have formed in the twenty- first century in emulation of US versions seen on TV (Onwumechili 2007: 138). In Canada, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network targets viewers who are spread across a massive nation, often in small clusters, to enable the maintenance of their culture. The network broadcasts in several languages. The only way it could survive in this form is thanks to a GEM mandate from regulators – market eco- nomics would probably see the spectrum space go to a US- programmed network (Beaty and Sullivan 2006: 62).
How should we evaluate these models? The DEM suffers from all the disadvantages of ideal- typical psychological reasoning. The psy- function claims the status of a science, and goes guarantor of both happiness and productivity. Its histories praise famous fore- fathers and their “findings,” rarely problematizing the production of data in any meaningful way (Danziger 1998). It assumes “any- thing that is important in its history will have been absorbed into the ongoing research tradition.” This very sanguine model con- nects to the essentialist conceit “of an a- historical human nature” (Brock 1995). The DEM relies on methodological individualism, failing to account for cultural norms and politics, let alone the arcs of history that establish patterns of text and response inside politics, war, ideology, and discourse. Each massively costly laboratory test of television’s impact on audiences, based on, as the refrain goes, “a large university in the mid- West,” is countered by a similar experi- ment, with conflicting results. Prudish politicians, generous grant- givers, and jeremiad- wielding pundits call for more and more research to prove that TV makes you stupid, violent, and apathetic
– or the opposite. Television Studies 1.0 academics line up at the trough to indulge their contempt for the apparatus and their rent- seeking urge for public money. The DEM never interrogates its own conditions of existence – namely, that governments, religious groups, and the media themselves use it to account for social prob- lems, and that TV’s capacity for private viewing troubles those authorities who desire surveillance of popular culture. And it trends to focus on life in the First World, from which endless, effortless extrapolations are magically made to account for all of humanity