Meaning making in the age of global circulation

HERAM, YAMILA; EICHNER, SUSANNE

Tampere

Conferencia; 23rd Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research; 2017

University of Tampere

In a media landscape that is more than ever coined by a global trade of content as well as global circulation of meaning the question of the underlying mechanism of the circulation of cultural products becomes even more pressing than before. Within this setting, fictional formats have their own economics, in terms of monetizing aspects as well as in terms of the production of meaning by audiences. The formats allow their audiences to negotiate, broach the issue and remix discourses without necessarily addressing them directly in a local context. The case of Danish Drama TV Series thereby serves as a case to dig into these mechanism that are viral at the level of production, textuality and reception; and it digs in its transferal from a specific geo-cultural location into various kinds of cultural contexts. For instance, in such a context the present discourse of emancipation vs. a backlash ? as witnessed in the recent American elections ? finds its equation in the strong female protagonists present in Danish crime and drama series. How and why do audiences from different cultural backgrounds and from different socio-political conditions of gender equality negotiate this topic and appropriate it to their everyday lives? This current study is part of a bigger research project ? ?What makes Danish TV Drama series travel?? (located at Aarhus University) and presents results form a comparative study of two geographically distinct regions ? Germany and Argentina ? to shed light on the specificities of the media landscapes as well as on the audience preferences that enabled the formats to successfully ?travel? to these distant places. Taking the argument of Straubhaar (1991, 2007) and his concept of ?cultural proximity? as a starting point, this paper empirically explores the specific ways and strategies of audiences in attributing meaning and relating to identificatory concepts of self and others offered by series within a different cultural context. The assumption is that television series can serve as a ?container? of narrations, stereotypes, concepts of self and others that can function as an archive of imaginations of regional, national or trans-national representations to which the audiences can relate to. This is possible for several reasons: because they recognize themselves in the text; because the text (via story, audiovisual staging, narrative pattern, etc.) appeals to a ?desired proximity of modernity? (Iwabuchi, 2002), (for example, as Denmark representing an idealized society of social stability, state welfare and gender equality); or because they may be read similarly by different cultural and ?national? audiences because of the ?transcultural state? of the world where cultural commodities are interpreted similarly by audiences from all kinds of cultural backgrounds. The study employs a method mix that is adjusted to the two different context: While in Germany Danish drama series are broadcasted to a broad audiences by ZDF, audiences in Argentina are more dedicated fans that can only access the series via online channels. Two different sets of methods ? offline qualitative methods (focus groups, interviews, audience ratings) as well as online ethnographic methods and an online survey are combined to meet the two specific conditions.