Plenary I. Global, Hybrid or Multiple? Global, Hybrid or Multiple?

Abstract

There is a strong presumption by many that first satellite TV in the 1990s and now the Internet in the new millennium has begun to strongly globalize people's identities. However, many questions lurk behind this surface of apparent change. What is truly easily available to people, not only in physical access, but also in terms of effective access to understand or enjoy? How many new information and entertainment sources are truly global, versus transnational, national, regional and local? What are people actually choosing to read and watch amongst all these new options?What structural, economic, cultural and other factors guide people's choices as they choose among all the new possibilities? What is the role of cultural history, language and proximity? What has been shared historically and what is coming to be shared now, in part through the new media themselves? What impacts do global media have compared to national, regional or other media have upon culture? In a larger sense, what impacts do today's global media have on people's identities and how should we understand both those impacts and the identities themselves in this new world? And what impacts to all of these phenomena and have on the structuring of cultural spaces and markets in at local, national, regional and global levels?The movement from traditional local life to modern interaction with mass media has produced identities that are already multilayered with cultural geographic elements that are local, regional (subnational but larger than the very local), transnational based on cultural-linguistic regions, and national (Anderson, 1983). In this study, we argue that new media users around the world continue to strongly reflect these layers or aspects of identity while many also acquire new layers of identity that are transnational, or global. In this paper, we examine the relationship between processes of hybridization of identity and culture over time and the buildup, maintenance, and even defense of various layers of multilayered identities. These layers of identity are articulated with a variety of media, such as television and the Internet, but not in a simple sense of being primarily influenced by media. Some layers of identity, such as those religious traditionalists hold, may actively resist many of the ideas most television channels and Internet sites and messages carry.These increasingly multilayered identities are articulated with a variety of changing structures. As we shall see below, social class and geography strongly structures who can access what new channels. Further, the media institutions themselves are becoming plenary I. Global, Hybrid or Multiple?

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