Changing Media Spaces: The Transformative Power of Heteroglossic Practices

Abstract

For many years a central role has been attributed to the medial in the rise of standard and national languages (Innis 1997). Recent developments, however, may well be contributing to the de-centring of national and standard languages. The monolingual habitus of media which address a national audience, their normalizing and standardizing role, is not an inherent feature of particular mass media technologies, but is rather due to the way media technologies are socially appropriated. In the period of the emerging nation-states a process of hierarchization of languages was set in motion through censorship and licensing procedures, which fostered state or national languages. At the same time the media began to fulfil a controlling function through the ‘correct’ use of a unitary language on the one hand and through meta-linguistic discourses on the other. National broadcasting was able to create ‘a sense of unity — and of corresponding boundaries around the nation’, ‘turn previously exclusive social events into mass experiences’ and ‘link the national public into the private lives of citizens’ (Morley 2000: 107).