Debating Identity- ‘Unities of Differences’

During, S. “Debating Identity” In Cultural Studies: A Critical introduction, Routledge: London, 2005, 194-210

‘Identity’ or ‘Identities’ that each of us construct seem like a rather complex system we engage in in our social settings in order to establish our sense of belonging and place within the collective regimes of identities. Despite the fact that some of our identities are innate qualities that are given to us without choice; such as our physical identities that differentiate us into different race, gender, ethnicity, customs and colour. However, in our current society, the practices of identifying ourselves revolve more around social concerns and judgement as our society constantly classify us, judge us and place us socially in measure of others.

In another words, as we engage or participate in different practices, groups, ideas,values and institutions we are also engaging dynamically with the world and the society we live in. It seems quite inevitable to escape this system of identification or classification in our society as through identification and classification, our social status, values, individualism and our sense of place and belonging are established.

When we think about it, our everyday practices we commit in our everyday life contribute to our collective identity. Our identities are  constructed through these practices of embracing and negating ideas and values and we do this also being aware of others interpersonally judging us.

Simon During, in his writing claims that identities reduce our individuality by lumping us into collective groups. However, in this aspect, sense of belonging to various communities is also established as we agree (or accept) to be part of particular groups. Simultaneously, in this practice we are also able to express our  resistance of values that we are not or that we do not agree with.

‘Children Overboard’

A Telling Symbiosis in the Discourse of Hatred: Multimodal News Texts about the ‘Children Overboard’ Affair“– Mary Macken-Horaik

I found this article great in a way that it clearly showed how stories are shaped and constructed in journalism in order to disclose events in a certain way. It was interesting to see how ‘values’ and ‘negative/positive positions’ can be easily shifted in the course of writing a factual report via using different role allocations, categorization and collective/specific presentation to illustrate the event.

Mary Macken-Horaik deconstructs this particular article ‘Children Overboard’ in these categories and shows how these techniques are applied to subliminally imbue what should be considered important in this event.

Firstly in Genericisation-specification, she talks about how we can endow more values and importance according to how we represent the people being involved in specific or generic way.  For example, the articles tend to give more importance to a particular personels by specifically denoting them with their name and status (eg, Prime Minister John Howard) while the group of people who are considered not that important in the story are denoted in a generic group.(the boat people, the government, etc) It was also interesting to see how this technique could also be applied in images as well; as Mary Macken-Horaik mentions the image of the group of children assumed to be thrown overboard is captured as a group with blurred faces which instantly makes them very generic and place them in a group.

The second tool Mary Macken-Horaik talks about in her writing is categorization. Here she extrapolates how different groups of people involved are categorized in different relations depending on what their enactions are in the story and how this practice of categorization identify their status, positions and importance in the story. For example, in this article that Mary Macken-Horaik deconstructs, the asylum seekers are identified by their gender, provenance, appearance and their relation (eg. their children). On the other hand, the Australian rescuers and accusers are classified by their social status such as occupation and often their full names. In result, their role in the story becomes inevitably more legitimate.

The last tool is how we allocate roles to the people in the story. By allocating different roles to particular parties they seems to get organized into different categories and the values that comes with those categories. For example, the Navy plays more active primary role in the story which instantly gives them positive aura. They are denoted as the ones who are ‘helping’ and ‘rescuing’ the asylum seekers who were illegally ‘heading towards australian territory’. On the other hand, the asylum seekers are portrayed in more negative view as they are committing aberrant activities such as ‘throwing children overboard’ in order to be taken ashore.

Media Audience and Audience Studies

Coulrdy, Nick.  “The Extended Audience”.  From Gillespie, M. (Ed).  Media Audiences, Opend Uni Press, 2005, 184 – 196 and 210 – 220

 
 ‘Mass media’ and ‘media journalism’ has often been associated with power in society. It has power to influence, manipulate how we think and also holds credibility for reliable information distribution in society. It seems to me that often our focus is on the media itself and how it can be treated to give adequate information or stimulus. However, when we think about it, media only holds power because there are audiences. Credibility and power only comes from social agreement and celebration. The celebration of media from the mass as a whole endows power on media.

 In this sense, media requires to understand audiences and audience activity in order to engage them in our constant shift in audience behaviour. With technological shifts and different practices and engagements that comes along with new media we realize our behaviour and uses of different mediums also actively change.

 In the age of mass reproduction and mass media, audiences were thought as simple recievers of  information. However, in our current society, examining audience is more complex than it was ever before with the rise of the internet and the concept of ‘user’ given to the public in a global scale. Nick Couldry illustrates this contemporary phenomenon by giving us two main terminologies to the new audience studies; ‘diffused’ and ‘extended’ audiences.

 The term ‘diffused’ audiences basically refers to how our media consumption and usuage has become ubiquous in enacting our everyday life and how it affect us in a pervasive way. It also notes on our spatial/mobile shift in media usuage and how this reforms our way of life and the society as a whole. It was interesting to see how ‘exercise of power’ is questioned in this process of medial shifts. It seems as users of the internet we now stand in a equal platform along with other more professional media corps and in this repect we are given more control in what we can broadcast to the public. We have power to consume what we want and the traditional mass media such as public broadcasting and newspapers does not have power over us as they used to. Distribution of information is also another prominent shift. Our echelon of social structure used to be organized according to classes with more knowledge and information, however, such importance of information seems to diminish with the new mass information distribution enacted by the global network and the formation of ‘informed audiences’.

 Also the ‘diffused audience’ as active users and producers of media no longer fulfills their position as ‘audiences’. Their role as users and also as audiences constantly oscillate between these two very different domains and in this sense thier role as audience has ‘extended’. With the rise of ‘informed audiences’ by networked society, we now define ourselves as active participants of media rather than audiences of various of media forms.

Networked Society & the shift in our social infrastructure

Castells, M. Excerpts from “Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A theoretical Blueprint” From The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar, pgs 3-7 & 36-45

In this text, Castelles explores the concept of ‘networks’ in our social context; as a crucial system that regulates us in our heavily networked society. He examines how humans as social networking animals has embraced practices of networking over significant period of time and how our practices and ways of networking has evolved and intensified with introduction of new technologies. In this respect, he pays high deference to networking as  “fundamental pattern of life” especially in the means of anthropologic discourse.

He begins his extrapolation by illuminating some historical practices of networking prior to Ethernet technology and shows how this globally enacted technology has reconstructed our way of acting and understanding the world we engage in.

When I was reading his text, I could not help but agree with how our society is constantly challenged and reformed in various levels in the event of new technological shift. With the celebration of internet as a global apparatus that defines our way of communication, socialization and information distribution; we are now placed in a complex infrastructure of networks where our sense of time and space has annihilated. This new technology, where it challenges our tradional sequence of time and place, our preconception of these concepts has in a sense insidiously altered as we immerse/connect/navigate in these temporal, virtual spaces provided by the internet. Now as a heavy networkers, it is almost obligatory for us to stay connected. The various tools for networking such as computers and mobile phones now become so attached to us that we feel that they are extention of ourselves. We now make sense of the world by networking and in this process of accepting/ negating/ producing information in response to the world approached to us through this networked medium we construct our identity and individualism. It is also important to note the notion of ‘choice’ that comes along with ‘internet’ and networks. We are now given more choice and control in what we choose to view  power to actively participate and contribute to the dynamic pool of information.

Castelles also notes on distribution of ‘power’ in this technological shift. Now as a powerful tool, networking devices used pervasively in our society places us in a equal platform where everyone is treated equally. The immense distribution of information and knowledge shared through networking seems to have a dramatic impact on our values of information and knowledge and therefore it seems to change our previous perception of power where our social status was organized based on knowledgeous cultural capital individuals build to be socially more credible in our echelon of society. Also as producers, within the internet networks, we are able to broadcast our views along with other major mass media corps.