How Do Media Play a Role in Imagining a Large-Scale Collectivity? Essay Example

Media are often indispensable for imagining a large-scale collectivity. For one thing, media provide means of communication, such as writing, television, etc. As Anderson’s work has made clear, a sacred language and its written script have proven absolutely invaluable in the imagining of such large-scale collectivities as the Islamic Ummah, Latin Christendom, Buddhism, and the Middle Kingdom with its Sinocentric world order (12-15). Before the precipitous developments of print-capitalism, the Reformation, and eventually the Enlightenment broke its power, Latin was the common language of the secular and clerical elites of Europe—or more precisely, of Latin Christendom, so called to distinguish it from its Byzanto-Slavonic Orthodox counterpart in Eastern Europe, and other Christian communities (13-15).

While literate Latin speakers were a small, highly-educated, usually elite minority in this community, they could relate to each other on the basis of their common identity as Roman Catholics, and by means of Latin. Latin was both the language of the church, used during the Mass, and the Pan-European language of scholarship. Mastery of this language, and especially of the ability to read and write it, marked one as a member of the upper strata in a plethora of European societies. But the rise of European print-capitalism in the sixteenth century, which favored the vernaculars, undermined Latin. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, challenges to the sacral legitimacy of European dynasticism played a seminal role in undermining the use of Latin among the elite. The large-collectivity of Latin Christendom gave way to new, overwhelmingly national, large-scale collectivities mediated by vernacular media (Anderson 16-21).

If a group of people shares the same media, whether a specific book or television show or a more general tendency to listen to the same radio and watch movies from the same studios, they will be exposed to many of the same things. More, they will be able to participate in a shared universe of meanings constructed by, or from, the common media that they share. The phenomenon of movie and television show dialog, especially catchphrases, making their way into general usage is already a familiar one to many Americans. Spitulnikprovides examples of mass media as cultural reservoir and reference from Zambia, emphasizing communications characterized by a lateral directionality (164). In Zambia, the importance of radio is considerable: it is consumed more widely than any other medium, and is the only mass medium in the country to use Zambian languages (165).

The result of this is that Radio Zambia, part of Zambia’s state-run radio broadcasting network, has an audience of about 9.1 million Zambians who readily ‘recycle’ phrases from popular radio programs (165-166). The phrase “Hello, Kitwe?”, and variants thereof, used by Lusaka broadcasters before transferring an allotted four-hour slot of broadcasting to that Zambian city has become, in popular usage, a kind of Zambian version of “Houston, do you read me?” Zambians may use it to attract someone’s attention, often in a semi-comedic manner (167-168). The humor comes from taking a shared reference, with a meaning that is quite accessible to many Zambians, and then deploying it in a different context—case in point, and an example given by Spitulnik, getting the attention of one’s friend in a crowded store (167-168). Of course, there is still an important commonality between the original context and the new context: in both cases, the interlocutor is attempting to get someone else’s attention (168).

Similarly, the phrase “over to you” is widely used in radio broadcasting, and has in turn been appropriated by many Zambians for other contexts. The key element here is turn-taking: one person has completed some action, perhaps a speech action, and is now signaling to someone else that it is their turn to contribute or present some action (Spitulnik 168-169). Spitulnik gives examples of the use of this phrase in weddings, indicating turn-taking to select and lead wedding songs, and even to close a written letter (169). Spitulnik’s examples are clear demonstrations of the use of media to imagine a large-scale collectivity: their use demonstrates the expectation that others, many others, will know what one means because they, too, listen to Radio Zambia.

Bollywood films present another powerful example. As Tejaswini explains, it is quite common for Bombay studios to remake Hollywood films, as well as those of more regional Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil, and older films in Hindi (281-283). However, Bombay filmmakers go to great lengths to take common Indian moral values into account. They will refuse to adapt Hollywood films which, in their opinion, go against the grain of Indian morality in such a way that would cause them to repel Indian audiences (288-289). The American film Fatal Attraction is case in point: an Indian filmmaker refused to adapt it because he felt that audiences would be unable to empathize with a protagonist whose motivation for adultery was boredom (288). By refusing to adapt certain Hollywood films for the sake of Indian moral conventions, filmmakers are helping to reify a certain conception of what is and is not acceptably Indian. One can only wonder whether those conceptions would shift if the filmmakers took more risks, or how long it would take for the films to shift in order to ‘track’ widespread changes in moral values within Indian society.

A similar case is the exclusion of teyo-dawa ‘schoolgirl’ speech in self-representing form from print media in Japan during the Meiji period (Inoue 108). It was simultaneously marginalized, and also resignified as the default female voice. Teyo-dawa was marginalized by Japanese modernizers, male and female, even as it proliferated in print media designed to appeal to young women (108-124). Like Bollywood films and the conceptions of Indian morality they reify, the uses of teyo-dawa speech in media signified particular audiences, who could comprehend themselves as members of a much larger collectivity.