Multiple Levels of Audience Identity and Cultural Choices

In Chapter 8, I focused on audience choices among geographically, linguis tically, and class or cultural capital-defined levels of television to show how those levels of cultural experience shape television viewing. In fact, in the chapter, I argue that people's lives are shaped by various forces, such as class and their experience of cultural geography, which then shapes their viewing of television, particularly their choices of what to watch. People experience levels of identity and make television choices related to them, but it is harder for interviewees to reflect on what forces shape their choices. So I take very seriously the levels of identity that people articulate, but I also infer others from structural aspects of their lives.

In this chapter, I focus on the lived experience of audiences with various levels and forms of world television. In particular, I focus on audience identi ties and how people seem to form multiple identities that correspond in many ways to the multilayered cultural geography of television in the world. One explanation for this is that many of those levels of experience with cultural geography are broadly experienced by nearly the entire television audience. Everyone has experience of his or her city or locality, and this experience is increasingly addressed directly by local television production in many large cities or provinces. Although some people live isolated from any experience of nationality, most seem to be touched by national television as well as nation ally defined schooling, newspapers, books, radio, government political cam paigns, and so on, as shown in the Brazilian interviews reported in Chapter 8.

The other central argument of this chapter is that although identity for many people may be defined as increasingly hybrid, it is perhaps more

Maldng Sense of World Television

clearly seen as multileveled. In fact, the two ideas are complementary. Hybridity is a long-term process in which all identities are constantly chang

ing (Nederveen Pieterse, 2004); I argue here that, based on the interviews described in this chapter, most people experience identity as regards media in part as a series of cultural-geographic levels from local to global. Depen ding on the place and group, they also experience identity as related to lan guage, class, culture, and religion. Also, identities and media uses are divided still further by ethnicity and gender. So the idea of levels of identity, per se, is a heuristic device for understanding the way that people seem to experi

ence identity, particularly in relation to the complexity of world television.

Based on a review of the literature as well as fieldwork in Texas and Brazil, I find that people make sense of media first through a set of cultural identities based on space and place: local, regional, national, and

global. Related to these are identities based on culture and language, which are usually linked to space and place but can be transnational. Examples are transnational, postcolonial, cultural-linguistic audiences,

such as the Francophone, Anglophone, or Lusophone world; more con tiguous geocultural audiences, such as those in the Arabic region, East

or South Asia, and Latin America; or audiences composed of migrants or diasporic communities. These identities, which can define television

viewing, can be maintained and re-created even after people have moved away from the place where the cultural-linguistic identity was first formed (Appadurai, 1 996).

The next level of identity relates to social class, based on the idea of cultural capital and linked to experiences within the family, school, neigh borhood, and social groups; it is shaped by economic class commonalities (Bourdieu, 1 984) and a sense of group experience that solidifies into a class

habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). Whether people verbalize in these terms or not, most also experience arid interpret media through a sense of ethnicity or race, as it is culturally constructed in the place and time where they live.

Almost all people similarly experience media through an awareness of themselves and their identity in terms of gender. In some countries, people also have a distinct sense of identity related to their age group. In the United States, for example, media use and understanding are heavily segmented by age group. This may not be as true of other societies. In Brazil, upper-class youth are likely to have media uses that are very different from those of their

parents, but such large differences (as reflected in interviews by the authors) are less common among the working class. Finally, almost everyone experi ences media refracted through a sense of values shared with a community; this is most often expressed in terms of religious group identification, but it relates to other communities of values as well.

228 Chapter 9

Depending on the circumstances of the individuals and the groups they are associated with, different levels of identity might be primary for expe riencing and making sense of television and other media. For some, class

identity might seem primary, as in some of the studies of the British work ing class (Morley, 1 992). For others, as in studies related to the reaction to some Hollywood productions by audiences in the Islamic Middle East, religion might be a primary identity for interpreting media experiences ( Chambers, 2002). For others, a primary identity for interpreting media might be ethnicity or gender, or both. For example, U.S. Latinas tend to view imported Mexican television in terms of their own experiences of class, gender, and ethnicity within the Latino minority in the United States (Rojas, 200 1 ) .

I n this chapter, I first examine a variety o f theoretical arguments about the audience experience of world television, culminating in my argument that this experience can be analyzed as mediated by an increasingly complex set of layers of identities. I then examine these arguments and theories using the case of Brazil, via fieldwork I conducted in the city of Sao Paulo and areas in and around Salvador, Bahia, and Ilheus, Bahia, in 1989 through 1990 and in the summers of 1 99 1 through 1 998; and continuing in Salvador in 2003 through 2005 and in East Austin, Texas, in 1 999 through 2005. Viviana Rojas, Martha Fuentes, and Juan Pinon were crucial in developing and interpreting the fieldwork in East Austin. In this chapter, I also draw on fieldwork conducted by Antonio La Pastina in Brazil, as well as his writing and analysis of those interviews.

Multiple Levels of Audience Identity and Cultural Choices