As a result of the western colonizing movement of the 19th century, a massive diasporic movement of people across boundaries formed a unique group. This ongoing process of population movement and mass exodus, as well as the effects it caused drew attention to the academic world at both cultural and political levels. However, unlike the original residents, this diasporic shift demonstrated distinctive traits such as identity and an ideology which evidently differed from those of the natives. As Sreberny (2000. P179) argued: “Diaspora has become a key term in theorizing about immigration, ethnicity and identity” and exerted a considerable influence historically, culturally, socially and economically on developed capitalist societies. Nowadays, academic studies increasingly attach importance to the formation and meanings of diasporic identity because it has been the dynamic motive of how diasporic people conduct themselves in western advanced societies. Of course, because of the multiple factors that worked together to influence the shaping of diasporic identity, in this essay I shall particularly discuss how diasporic media, one of the influential factors, helped construct the meaning of community and identity. Firstly, I will elaborate the ability of how diasporic media constructs the meaning of community and identity. Secondly I will discuss how the meanings of community and identity are shaped through media representation and consumption in everyday life.
The development of human technology has enabled communication to break the restrictions of distance, and even invented new tools of shaping identity through the media. “Mediated communication, as it initially developed through the press and later in radio, television...
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...ome to us at an interesting time, before the Revolution, 40 percent of Tehran movie theaters were showing pornography. The function of this office is purification as well as promotion for the arts.” The first part notions the Western stereotype of the Orient since the same as the time when it was discovered, but now the people of the Orient realize the stereotypes and are changing the way they see themselves because of these stereotypes. It is only by correcting these assumptions, stereotypes, and misconceptions of the Orient at the heart of society today, the media can Orientalism be fixed. The Eastern people must be allowed to sympathize in movies and films to humanize them and have intimate interactions. Otherwise, the Orient will be continued to be known incorrectly as a place with people who are without reason, screaming, protesting, and in swarming mobs.
Are technology and the media shedding the very fabric of the existence we have known? As technology and the media spread their influence, the debate over the inherent advantages and disadvantages intensifies. Although opinions vary widely on the subject, two writers offer similar views: Professor Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, in her article “Can You Hear Me Now” and Naomi Rockler-Gladen, who formerly taught media studies at Colorado State University, with her article “Me Against the Media: From the Trenches of a Media Lit Class.” Turkle asserts that technology has changed how people develop and view themselves, while at the same time affecting their concepts of time management and focus (270). Similarly, Rockler-Gladen believes media and its inherent advertising have had a profound effect on the values and thinking of the public (284). I could not agree more with Professor Turkle and Ms. Rockler-Gladen; the effects technology and media have worried and annoyed me for quite so time. The benefits of technology and media are undeniable, but so then are the flaws. People are beginning to shift their focus away from the physical world to the virtual world as they find it easier and more comfortable. The intended purpose of technology and media was to be a tool to improve the quality of life, not shackles to tie people to their devices. I no longer recognize this changed world and long for the simple world of my youth.
In her article, Sarah Senghas argued that media demonstrate their own view of reality in the effort to provide life to the overall form and tone while this tone is of racism and bia...
As the Diaspora experience is presented as a distinct identity trait of the Jewish people, there is ...
“Cultural identity is not something that is easy to manipulate by acting on the mass media, nor does it seem to be much influenced by media culture. It survives and flourishes in many a form, and the general expansion of television, music and other media have added some widely (internationally) shared cultural elements without evidently diminishing the uniqueness of cultural experience in different nations, regional and localities of Europe” (McQuail, 2000, p. 237) Cultural imperialism thesis has also lead to many cultural protectionism policies, designed “to defend indigenous cultures against their corruption, pollution or destruction by foreign elements” (Morley,2006, p.36). Problems arise when trying to understand what is meant by foreign (and to who) and also when trying to examine and define the purity, originality and indigenousness of one’s culture that needs to be defended. Cultural imperialism tends to assume that the most countries from the global South had indigenous, pure and authentic cultures before the Western influence came along via transnational corporations. One could argue that this view tends to be a romanticized perspective of the Third World which disregards the complex relations between countries and their former colonial powers while also ignoring the fact that most cultures are hybrids. There is a problem with the inaccurate presumption that the phenomenon of cultural mixing is recent, when actually all cultures have, to certain extent, absorbed elements from another cultures through history. Therefore, the complexity of intercultural flows must be acknowledged, along with the ambivalence of their meaning when being brought into new
Looking the historical moment we are living at, it is undeniable that the media plays a crucial role on who we are both as individuals and as a society, and how we look at the...
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Though contemporary media continues to create stereotypical images they can be contested and renegotiated through alternative and independent sources. In Renee Tajima’s essay “Moving the Image: Asian American Independent Filmmaking 1970-1990” she posits that artists of color will not sit in the center or margin of media but instead “as the links of a new cultural matrix” (MTI, 32). While traditional media continues to be constrained by dominant hegemonic representat...
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The negation of the Diaspora has a mythical character, which functions to legitimize social and political practices and mobilize action and identification with a cause. Gordon establishes this myth of identity through anchoring of the present in the diasporic past and actualization of the diasporic past in the present in the Yishuv.
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
One of the greatest exports of American culture is American media. American media is one of the most widely distributed and consumed cultural forms from the United States. This means that not only do Americans consume large quantities of their own media, but many other countries in the world consume American media, too. People in other countries will not interpret or understand the media in precisely the same ways that Americans will and do, nonetheless, many aspects of American culture and American reality are communicated to numerous viewers as part of the content in the media. The media is an important tool in the discussion of race, class, and gender in America. It takes a savvy viewer to discriminate between and understand what media accurately represents reality, what media does not, or which aspects of experience are fictionalized, and which elements ...
Hartley, John (2002), Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts, London, Routledge, pp. 19-21.
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Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.