Transnational Media Flows Research Articles

Cultural porters and banyun in Chinese fandoms on Bilibili

Banyun is the grassroots transnational media flow of foreign media content on Chinese platforms, particularly Bilibili. In this case study, we explore the role of the practitioners of banyun, the "cultural porters," in relation to other fans and the original creators of the "transported" videos. We propose to understand banyun in Chinese online fandoms as a practice of partial storytelling through free digital labor, which shapes interpretative frameworks shared among fans and facilitates engagement with the fan object. We find that porters can transform their identities from fans to influencers with great fluidity, but they are also confined by negotiations of collaborative roles and boundaries of power with the original creators.

Watching Turkish television dramas in Argentina: entangled proximities and resigned agency in global media flows

Abstract For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas (dizi) in Latin America, the land where the telenovela was born. Drawing from 25 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Argentina, we develop the notion of “entangled proximities” to explain different viewership positionalities. Moreover, we show that audiences adopt a “resigned agency”: they experience pleasure while recognizing the role of market forces. Finally, we build on the cultural proximity theory by arguing that these contemporary audiences are instead driven by a desired proximity with both the past genre of the telenovela and with the past society depicted in it.

Exporting Shame: Competing Ownership Models in Pirated Transnational Media Flows

Exporting Shame: Competing Ownership Models in Pirated Transnational Media Flows

Netflix, library analysis, and globalization: rethinking mass media flows

AbstractThe advent of subscriber-funded, direct-to-consumer, streaming video services has important implications for video distribution around the globe. Conversations about transnational media flows and power—a core concern of critical communication studies—have only just begun to explore these changes. This article investigates how global streamers challenge existing communication and media theory about transnational video and its cultural power and considers the theory rebuilding necessitated by streamers’ discrepant features. It takes particular focus on Netflix and uses the library data available from Ampere Analysis to empirically explore and compare 17 national libraries. Analyses suggest considerable variation in the contents of Netflix libraries cross-nationally, in contrast with other U.S.-based services, as well as Netflix libraries offering content produced in a greater range of countries. These and other results illustrate, albeit indirectly, the operations and strategies of global streamers, which then inform theory building regarding their cultural role.

From global to neo-global: Mapping the ‘tele’-visual geography of South Asia through a transnational lens

ABSTRACT Globalization and transnationalism have expanded the physical territory of television and are responsible for global reshaping of media industries and cultures. In the contemporary mediascape, Indian television industry is an interesting site for excavating new transnational patterns wherein the circulation of Indian TV content extends beyond the diaspora and caters to non-diasporic audiences, especially, in South Asia and South-east Asia. The popularity of Hindi language TV soaps in Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, etc., have aided in mapping a new ‘tele’-visual geography of popular culture that deems Western media influence as almost insignificant, if not absent. Chronicling the success of two Indian TV programmes – the story of a ‘child-bride’ Balika Vadhu (2008–16) in Vietnam and a Hindu mythological Mahabharat (2013–14) in a Muslim-populated Indonesia; this paper traces the transnational circulation of Indian TV content amongst non-diasporic markets in South-east Asia. Drawing from Daya Kishan Thussu’s notion of ‘contra-flows’ and Brian Larkin’s conception of ‘parallel modernities’, the paper argues that the success of Indian television programmes in non-West media markets diverts our attention towards new kinds of transnational media flows which I have termed ‘neo-global’ flows that operate amongst emerging centres of media production and need not be mapped against dominant Western flows.

New Patterns of Flow and Rethinking International Mediascapes: The Influence of Stuart Cunningham on Theories of Television's Travels

Stuart Cunningham contributed to important publications that advanced thinking about transnational media flows, much of which remains relevant a quarter of a century later. This essay explores Cunningham's collaborations with Elizabeth Jacka and John Sinclair in ‘Australian Television and International Mediascapes' and ‘New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral View’ to explore the prescient and productive theoretical innovations these books offered the field.

Review essay: Global and comparative perspectives on media and development

This essay reviews the works ‘Television and the Afghan Culture Wars’ (University of Illinois Press) by Wazhmah Osman and ‘Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan’ (Routledge) by Farooq Sulehria as recent contributions to the fields of global and comparative media studies. It considers the overlapping themes in these works through ruberics of media imperialism and development in terms of growth of television industry in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the broad context of globalization and transnational media flows.

Revisiting Transnational Media Flow in Nusantara: Cross-border Content Broadcasting in Indonesia and Malaysia

Revisiting Transnational Media Flow in Nusantara: Cross-border Content Broadcasting in Indonesia and Malaysia

Hindi Films, Bollywood, and Indian Television Serials: A History of Connection, Disconnection, and Reconnection in Tamale, Northern Ghana

ABSTRACT This article explores the circulation and reception of Indian media (including films and more recently television series) in the majority Muslim city of Tamale, Northern Ghana. This includes the arrival of Hindi films during the late 1950s, the subsequent (short-lived) circulation of Bollywood films in the early 1990s, and the more recent arrival of contemporary Indian television serials in the 2010s. In charting histories of these three regionally linked transnational media flows, this article complicates “linear” experiences of Indian media in Northern Ghana. Though Tamale’s Dagbamba viewers understand these three media flows as regionally linked, they are sensitive to changes in format, narrative, plot, and style taking place in Indian film and television over time. For over sixty years, Indian media flows have gained traction, broken down, restarted, and flowed in “feedback loops”, dependent on the ways in which Indian media reflect, align with, and at times depart from Dagbamba conservative cultural and religious values.

Media as soft power: the role of the South Korean media in North Korea

ABSTRACTThe Korean Wave, or Hallyu, the transnational mobility of South Korean popular culture, has spread globally, including to communist North Korea. This study perceptively examines the South Korean media as a form of soft power and articulates media studies of the Korean Wave and transnational media flows. It focuses on the influence of South Korean media on North Korean society, especially on how it motivates North Koreans to defect and facilitates their adaptation to life in South Korea following their defection. Interviews with 127 North Korean defectors (46 males, 81 females aged 20–50 and over) were analysed. Results reveal that increasing exposure to South Korean media and its soft power continues throughout the media consumption process, which eventually motivates North Korean defection. However, the attractiveness of the media did not positively influence defectors’ adaptation as much. This work offers invaluable empirical data on North Koreans’ use of South Korean media, and timely policy implications which further aims to contribute to the literature of soft power by focusing on its relevance to transcultural consumption.

A ‘real’ fantasy: hybridity, Korean drama, and pop cosmopolitans

This study examines the complex, multidirectional process of media transnationalization and online fandom within the new media environment, focusing on the transnational media flows from the East to the West. Based on an online ethnography examining the fan culture surrounding Korean television drama (K-drama) in the West, this study explores the appeal of K-drama to Western fans and its impact on fans’ identities and worldviews. The analysis suggests that scholars should take a closer look at transnational media fandom as a key site for identity creation and embrace of pop cosmopolitanism.

Cultura fronteriza, identidad mexicana, clase y consumo de medios: una mirada a los estudiantes de secundaria “Fresa”

La franja fronteriza entre el sur de Estados Unidos y el norte de México brinda una excelente oportunidad para estudiar los efectos del flujo de producciones mediáticas de Estados Unidos a México. Muchas teorías de la comunicación han intentado explicar la recepción de los flujos mediáticos transnacionales en los países latinoamericanos. Los académicos del campo del imperialismo cultural argumentan que el flujo de la cultura es unidireccional desde los países capitalistas o del Primer Mundo (principalmente Estados Unidos) hacia los países en desarrollo (también conocidos como el Sur Global); otras teorías afirman que existe una dependencia asimétrica entre países desarrollados y subdesarrollados (Fejes, 1981). Sin embargo, argumentos recientes afirman que las audiencias tienden a preferir contenido estrechamente relacionado con sus propios valores culturales (Straubhaar, 1991). La investigación de la audiencia ha concluido que no hay evidencia para respaldar la pérdida de identidad cultural en algunos países y regiones de América Latina de acuerdo con su preferencia de medios. (Straubhaar, 1991 Lozano, 1992). No obstante, esos estudios también han encontrado que, independientemente de la proximidad geográfica o cultural a los Estados Unidos o Europa...

A genre auteur?: Enrique Urbizu’s post-Western films

Enrique Urbizu belongs to the ‘New Generation’ of Basque film directors who (together with Medem, Bajo Ulloa, de la Iglesia and Calparsoro) ‘were greeted as the new generation supposedly destined to carry the flame of Basque cinema forward’ in the 1990s (Santaolalla 1999, 311). Of all these directors probably the one who has received the least critical attention is Urbizu, maybe because he belongs much less to the ‘auterist tradition’ of Spanish and Basque cinemas (Evans 1999) than some of his fellow directors. This tradition may have been particularly harmful to Urbizu’s reputation, since he has frequently been considered ‘un cineasta de perfil “industrial”’ (Benet 2005, 68), a genre specialist rather than an auteur. This article vindicates the value of genre studies in Spanish cinema, following the call made by Beck and Rodríguez Ortega to ‘explore the interrelationships between national cinemas, transnational media flow and genre as discursive frameworks for constructing meaning’ (2008, 18), reviews Urbizu’s career, and considers some of Urbizu’s films from a generic perspective, specifically through the lens of a subgenre which has inherited and modified the features of a classic Hollywood genre: the post-Western.

National television moves to the region and beyond: South Korean TV drama production with a new cultural act

ABSTRACTThe study examines Korea’s unique television production systems and TV drama production strategies in the context of Korean dramas’ rising international trade along the line with its new governmental act to television industry. In 2006 the government passed a new cultural act specifically to promote TV content production, as an amendment of the Media and Cultural Industry Act. This act specified that media content production could exclusively perform using a special purpose company (SPC) system as a limited periodic firm, upon registration for creating media content only. The transnational Korean dramas using SPC programming grow the dramas’ export value in both production and distribution sectors, in light of divergent transnational media flows. Korea’s dual production system takes advantages of the government’s SPC policy, which simultaneously affects the TV content distribution sectors over the domestic outlets that excel international flows of K-dramas.

The box office performance of European films in the UK market

European films accounted for 17.4% of UK cinema releases in the period 2002 -2014, but only 1.8% of the gross box office. Drawing on box office data, audience surveys and interviews with industry players, this article argues that European films generally perform badly in the UK box office because they suffer from a heavy `cultural discount' and structural weaknesses at the level of production and distribution. Those European films which do `breakout' are either English-language films with qualities designed to appeal to a mainstream British audience (e.g. stars and special effects) or foreign-language films with cultural elements (e.g. well-known story, director, genre, subject matter or source material) which many British cinemagoers are already familiar with. Breakout European films are also mainly released by Hollywood studios or major independent distributors. These findings provide insights into academic and policy debates about transnational media flow.

On (Not) Watching Outlander in the United Kingdom

The cultural proximity thesis states that in a world of transnational media flow, audiences continue to prefer content situated within their local frames of reference. Yet the means through which such content is distributed and accessed can also be sites for cultural proximity. This paper explores how television distribution practices can create transnational meanings through a discussion of the contemporary television series Outlander’s controversial distribution in the United Kingdom. Released in the US at the height of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the Jacobite sympathies of Outlander’s narrative were widely believed to have restricted the UK release of the series. Outlander failed to secure a distribution deal with a UK broadcaster, and was eventually released in the UK on Amazon Prime six months after its US debut. British audiences struggled to reconcile the programme’s foreign distribution with its local relevance, objecting to having to go beyond the recognized spaces of national broadcasting (for distribution and consumption) to access a culturally proximate programme (in terms of content). Watching Outlander in the UK consequently became a transnational experience: one that involved moving beyond the sanctioned boundaries of national broadcasting, and re-contesting the borderlines within the United Kingdom itself.

National Self-Sufficiency in Broadcast Television Programming: Examining the Airtime Shares of Homemade versus U.S.-Made Programs

Building on economic and cultural theories about transnational media flow, this study investigates individual countries' self-sufficiency in broadcast television programming. It traces and predicts the airtime shares of domestic and American programs, using longitudinal data taken at decade-long intervals during 1962–2001 for 20 countries or territories worldwide. Regression analysis reveals that the airtime share of homemade programs is an increasing function of the size and affluence of that country's domestic audience. That of American shows is, in contrast, negatively related to not only the same economic descriptors, but also the cultural distance of that country from the U.S.

Diasporas and Audience Studies: A Fruitful Match? Reflections From a Media Ethnographic Study on Turkish and Moroccan Film Audiences

Diasporic communities, especially in urban multicultural settings in the West, have emerged as one of the major sites for innovative audience research. This growing body of research connects media sociological questions with the study of global and transnational media flows. In this contribution, some of the main studies on diasporic audiences are revisited, exploring in which ways diaspora studies and audience studies have turned out to be a fruitful match. This is linked to and further exemplified by the discussion of a media ethnographic study of film reception among the Turkish and Moroccan communities in Antwerp, Belgium. It is demonstrated how the ‘diasporic turn’ reformulates traditional boundaries in audience research, proposing banal yet meaningful engagements with media texts. Finally, it is argued that a focus on diasporic audiences has revealed that ethnicity and nationality intersect with other social and cultural determinants such as gender, generation and religion, putting the diasporic proposition itself into perspective.

Neo-Ottoman Cool: Turkish Popular Culture in the Arab Public Sphere

In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkey's foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibrancy in Arab cultural production? This article grapples with that question via a systematic analysis of pan-Arab discourse about Turkish popular culture, concluding that some Turkish dramas conjure up an accessible modernity while others enact a counter-hegemonic narrative that puts Middle Easterners in the role of heroes. The rise of Turkish television drama in the Arab public sphere offers insights into the geopolitical underpinnings and geocultural consequences of transnational media flows.

Exile media, global news flows and democratization: the role of Democratic Voice of Burma in Burma’s 2010 elections

This article explores the links between transnational media flows and social and political change in authoritarian regimes through a conjunctural study of Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a Burmese exile media organization. Drawing on observation and interviews conducted at DVB’s Oslo studio during the 2010 elections in Burma as well as documentary research, the article explores how diasporic media may contribute to democratization in a military regime where press freedoms and political expression are severely curtailed. The first section draws on Appadurai’s theory of global flows to scrutinize transnational flows of people, capital, media, ideas and technology contributing to DVB’s operations from 1992 to 2010. The next section engages with theories of media and democracy in order to examine DVB’s innovative satellite television coverage of the 2010 elections. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the ongoing relevance of opposition media based outside of Burma amid liberalization measures undertaken by Thein Sein’s nominally civilian government in 2011.