Symbiotic transformations: youth, global media and indigenous culture in Malta

Abstract

The article explores the impact of global commercial media on young people’s developing perceptions of their own cultural identity. It works from the premise that local cultures are not so much getting replaced by ‘global culture’ as inflecting it by coexisting with it. The discussion draws on data collected in the course of focus group interviews with young adults living in the Mediterranean island of Malta, in order to stress the specificity with which young people from different cultural contexts consume global media. I argue that, as in other postcolonial communities, though the choices available to Maltese youth have become strongly inflected (or ‘hybridized’) by the commercial imperatives of global media, the ways in which they are appropriated and played out retain very idiosyncratic characteristics, which mark them out as uniquely Maltese.