There are currently 12 Turkish channels included in the satellite package offered to Turkish-Australians by the providing company UBI World TV. It is estimated that approximately 20,000 households have access to these new media. The channels range from religiously oriented stations like Kanal 7 and Samanyolu TV to Turkish Public Broadcasting Service's transnational enterprise TRT-INT. All of these channels, with the exception of TRT-INT, are privately owned commercial stations that broadcast nationally. Therefore, a 'very minimal percentage of the programs included in these broadcasts is targeted specifically for the Turkish-Australian viewer, or for any Turkish migrant audience around the world' (Karanfil, 2007: 64).The significance of transnational media within a diasporic context stems from an important recognition about the media themselves. At the centre of any given contemporary society and culture, media play a constitutive rather than a reflexive role (Hall, 1992). As Yu Shi notes: 'this gives questions of culture, ideology, and the scenarios of representation a formative and not merely an expressive place in the constitution of social and political life ' (2005: 56). As cultures are uprooted from places, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become salient (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992). Diasporic individuals, living in cultural borderlands, cling to remembered or imagined homelands; they carry on practising authentic home cultures, wanting to make sense of the constantly changing subjectivities that stem from their migratory experiences. Media in general, and transnational media in particular -for diasporic subjects -act as agents through which identities are formed, reproduced and reformed rather than merely represented. This is an important reason why transnational media constitute such a crucial zone for diasporic
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.