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NEW MEDIA NEW WALES
IMAGINING NATIONAL IDENTITY
IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
ROBERT ANDREWS
This dissertation is submitted to the Centre for Journalism
Studies, University of Wales, in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Journalism,
Film & Broadcasting.
May, 2000
2
D E C L A R A T I O N
I declare that this dissertation is the result of my
own efforts. The various sources to which I am
indebted are clearly indicated in the references in
the text or in the bibliography.
I further declare that this work has never been
accepted in substance of any degree, and is not
being concurrently submitted in candidature for
any other degree.
Robert Andrews
3
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
I would like to thank Michael Bromley, whose
brainstorming meetings were always fascinating,
for his patience and guidance, and Thor Ekevall,
whose kettle was always hot, for his time and
advice.
Additional thanks go to Ian Hargreaves for a
beneficial Wales Media Forum conference, to
Jocelyn Hay for the Voice Of The Listener And
Viewer conference, to Euryn Ogwen Williams and
Elan Closs Stephens of S4C for their generous
communications, to Alex LaHurreau for assistance
with developing research tools, and to all those
whose excitement and enthusiasm inspired my
choice of study.
Not least, gratitude to my family for their
supportive assurances and my friends for their
helpful encouragement.
4
A B S T R A C T
Cynical beliefs of those who claim nation states are nothing more
than artificial constructs generated, in large part, by the mass
media are based on a recognition that the attempts at winning
audiences by broadcast and print institutions are made by
reaching to a particular geographical territory, that content is
made relevant to those within it, and that consumption across it is
widely simultaneous. Such features would create an ‘imagined
community.’
But the onset of new media - characterised by a global reach
which sanctions communities regardless of geographical space,
reception of content requested by the audience rather than
producer, abundant outlets and consumption at any time - sounds
a caveat to this process of identity production.
Framed in the emerging dichotomy that political devolution and
the old media are reconstituting nationhood whilst new forms
typified by the internet are encouraging a transcendence of
existing community bonds to engage in non-national consumption
and communication, this dissertation draws on a range of
theoretical discourses and new cases to establish the so-called
imagination of the Welsh nation by mass media, then seeks out
the new permutations for identity in the abundant and
fragmented internet era. How are people using the new media
now to find or ignore nationality, and what does this tell us about
the future of mediated Welshness?
5
C O N T E N T S
Title 1
Declaration 3
Acknowledgements 4
Abstract 5
Contents 6
Introduction 8
Literature review 10
Methodological Overview 12
Old media... 14
Identifying national identity 15
Imagined communities 18
Wales, a media artefact? 23
Locating old media's building site 37
New media... 41
Being digital: teaching new tricks 42
Permutations and practicable hypotheses 53
Finding new national constructions 59
Conclusions 70
Bibliography 72
Appendices 76
6
If the student of the media will but
meditate on the power of this medium of
electric light to transform every structure
of time and space and work and society
that it penetrates or contacts, he will have
the key to the form of power that is in all
media to reshape any lines that they
touch.
Marshall McLuhan
7
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Where is Wales on the web? The argument which underpins this dissertation is that
which sees the nation as a construction of the mass media, the best exponent of which is
Anderson, with his claim that countries are ‘imagined communities.’ Such a hypothesis
claims that social and political decisions enacted by ‘the media’ have determined the
shape and identity of ‘our’ nationality, acting as conduits for a mass socialisation which
encourages a particular version of a shared community.
It is the media, it is claimed, which enact participation in this community because one
citizen cannot know all of the others without mediated communication. Messages
distributed by the mass media therefore endow a sense of unity in individuals
previously regarded as strangers.
Wales does not appear the archetypal nation... a country which is not a state, a
homeland which is part of a kingdom of many, one with its own language spoken by
only a minority. But the Welsh identity is, indeed, distinct from others, and it is the
initial aim of this study to examine what may, therefore, be a classic case of imagining
the nation.
One cannot understand the effect of new media on national identity, however, without
first comprehending how they have led to its present derivation. Approaching identity
as a property in a study which is, intentionally, primarily theoretical (nationality itself is
difficult to quantify and future possibilities even more so), I first explore the material
which examines the Andersonian hypothesis in application to Welshness in order to
understand its contemporary origin, then examine new media theory in abstract and in
application to particular new circumstances.
New media currently being popularised and developed offer radically different forms of
consumption from the broadcast and print outlets which it is claimed have constructed
the nation, thereby - I can hypothesise - potentially radically affecting the shape and
future construction of that national identity.
8
Traditional media (principally broadcasting and the press) adopt a ‘push’ reception
model, have a limited geographical reach, are scarce in distribution resources and
content, and provide material at the discretion of the producer. But new media
(instigated by satellite television and followed by digital broadcasting, but typified by
the internet, which is expected to accrue more subscribers and converge with other
forms) exhibit a ‘pull’ reception model with which the audience finds and uses material
at its own discretion, a global reach which exposes the audience to ‘foreign’ content and
people, and abundant material which is usually not produced in the situated culture.
It is not the intention here to pointlessly re-trace the footprints already made by authors
and circumstances in examining the media and nationality, but rather to accept their
integrity and forge a new path, with my and other feet, which seeks near-future identity
permutations given new interfaces and new relationships.
Produced at the proliferation of new media, and when nationality is being continually
renegotiated and Wales is being culturally and politically recontextualised, it is the hope
of the author to contribute to the national and theoretical debate by exploring trends in
globalisation and communication occurring amid increasing localisation. It is hoped to
counter internalisation by framing nationality in a universal theoretical framework,
generating an observation and exploration of the media-community relationship
experiencing a dramatic reconstitution in communities the world over... the Welsh
dimension can be thought of as the extended case study of a vested interest.
As Smith asks, ‘Who is the nation, where is the nation?’ (A. Smith, 1997: p39) How are we to
find Wales on the internet? What are the new forms of nationality being produced
online, and how do they differ from the traditional media-received identity? The Wales
Media Forum was established to ask such questions, and fundamentally I wish to
venture to address its first: ‘will new media technologies help define and draw together
a Welsh media identity, or will the global forces that drive the internet dictate further
dissipation?’ (Hargreaves in G. T. Davies, 1999: p2)
9
L I T E R A T U R E R E V I E W
There is much literature - largely radical and periodical-originated but also well
contributed to by seminal thinkers in their field - regarding the nature of the new media.
McLuhan’s writings (eg. 1964, 1967, 1968 and in E. McLuhan & F. Zingrone, 1997) are at the ideological heart
of this exploration’s progression; Being Digital, by archetypal digerati exponent
Negroponte (1996), is a handbook par excellence and the magazine he co-founded, Wired,
has always been an avidly-consumed personal reference, the doctrines of which form
another influential text here; and Rheingold’s The Virtual Community (Rheingold, 199N) is
regarded as a touchstone for new-community thinking, whilst van Dijk, in The Network
Society, effectively draws abstracts of the broad themes of the revolution (van Dijk, 1999).
Yet there is an information gap in such material’s application to the Welsh context
which this work now seeks to address... perhaps excited, inward-looking devolution
literature is clouding a deficit which, meanwhile, sees Wales becoming part of an
increasingly global culture. Mackay & Powell’s Connecting Wales remains the only
identifiable source of research into the effect of the new media on the national
consciousness, submitting an investigation of the internet’s ‘use in relation to Welsh
culture and politics’ by qualitative and quantitative analyses of two Welsh online
forums (Mackay & Powell, 1998: p204). This dissertation does not seek to plug the entire empirical
gap left by the otherwise absence of such data, but, whilst Connecting Wales is the
primary model for this investigation, with its juxtaposition of the old and new media
nationalities, there are shortcomings in a study of such length which I hope to address.
To understand Welsh national identity, however, is first to understand national identity
as a general property. Smith (1997) offers a useful checklist of the component of the
nation which it is wise to memorise, and there is much literature on the rôle of the
media in Welsh life, perhaps attributable to the politicisation of that rôle by debates
concerning the country’s constitution and languages.
10
Anderson’s hypothesis (1991) underpins this work in his analysis of the nation as an
‘imagined community,’ a view supported by Hartley (1994) and Schlesinger (1994)... each
renders national identity little more than the ritualistic use, consumption and reach of
mass media, and a largely arbitrary concept.
The application of this hypothesis to the Welsh case can be witnessed in a broad array
of texts. Talfan Davies (1999), Mungham & Williams (1998), Allan & O’Malley (1999) and
Hannan (1997) all offer overviews of the Welsh media industry in largely argument-based
essays; Mackay & Powell (1997), Osmond (199N), Williams (2000) and the government cement
the snapshot further by referencing factual research and policy rationale; contemporary
coverage of the issue confirms its politicisation and keeps material fresh; and this
dissertation employs additional supplementary opinion in the treatment of attended
events and encounters as quotable resources. It is, however, John Davies (1994) who is our
best exponent of the imagination of Wales, claiming it is simply ‘an artefact produced
by the media.’
True to a nation low on internet penetration and high on historians, however, little of
this embraces the vital new media debate. If the Mackay & Powell work is a
‘preliminary empirical study of the use, or shaping, of what is commonly heralded as a
new media technology of enormous significance’ (Mackay & Powell, 1998: p203), then this work
hopes to become an informed, broader investigation of the principles of interaction
between the new media and national identity.
11
M E T H O D O L O G I C A L O U T L I N E
Fundamentally, this study is one of juxtapositions and comparisons between the
conventional and the radical, and is essentially theoretical because national identity is,
perhaps, too complex a property to accurately quantify, and because it is hoped to
embark on an exploration which produces an educative understanding of possible future
constructions.
Essentially, the study employs continual appropriation and re-generation of
predominating rationales and hypotheses as I assess and assimilate relevant material and
conditions. In the language of memetics, I first explore and adopt constructivist
hypotheses of the so-called old media’s constructivism and, second, examine the
characteristics of the new media which propose future constructions, in order to apply
those hypotheses to the emerging circumstances.
Such a line of questioning might be expressed in the query: If the conventional media
have imagined the nation, how might the national community be thought by the radical
new media?
The general method, then, is to survey a range of texts and identifiable circumstances in
a qualitative, theory-based approach, appropriating ideas voiced in literature, research
and occurrence to develop a liberal set of prevailing hypotheses. It is these hypotheses
which are then balanced against those of the emerging media to establish the divergent
construction methods of old and new, and informally tested in a case examination of the
new communities.
The gaps are fundamental. Overlaying the found old shapes onto the evolving new like
a transparent animation cell, do the lines fit, and what do the differences tell us?
Survey texts and investigate claims>
Appropriate predominating rationales>
Generate hypotheses>
12
Discuss new circumstances>
Apply old hypotheses to new principles>
Gather data to test>
Draw conclusions>
Postulate on possible permutations>
13
O L D M E D I A
H O W D O T H E Y D O T H A T ?
14
I D E N T I F Y I N G N A T I O N A L I D E N T I T Y
National identity is a component of identity in general, which itself may be personal or
collective and may emphasise lived experiences, cultural practices, habitual features or
self-reflection (Kaunismaa, 1995: kaunismaa.html). Giesen, in Kaunismaa (ibid), finds national identity
to be a threefold property, consisting of contextual social understanding of everyday
life, historical processes and discursive relational codes; thus, especially given the latter
component, it would be partly dependent on communication. It is also one which
communicates in the meter of the collective, where nobody is made to feel unconnected
from everybody - an ‘umbrella concept’ (ibid). But it is not the same as nationality, which
precedes the identity it provokes, because the extent of that everybody is clearly
demarcated by geographical boundaries drawn by aggregated historical political actions.
Identity, a concept indulged only in the mental sphere, is physically and ‘historically
constructed through human actions’ (Tängerstad, 1998: film.html).
The owners of national identities subscribe to the doctrine that they are received, the
current national collective having little influence over the character of its group identity.
This means identity is perceived as natural because its constructors belong to that same
group, and is further adopted through acceptance of the collective discourses of ‘us’... it
would be ‘the result of a collective, human production process over time’ (Kaunismaa, 1995:
kaunismaa.html). Furthermore, the binding of ‘our’ nation and its identity implicitly
distinguishes it from ‘their’s, basing national identity largely on perceived difference.
Smith defines the nation with a five-point plan in which national belonging would bear
the following components (Smith, 1997: pp11-14):
historic territory housing a unit of population, a homeland>
common myths and historical memories>
common, mass public culture>
common legal rights and duties for all members>
a common economy with territorial mobility for members>
15
Historically, a unified Welsh territory was only produced from a collection of disparate
kingdoms with the expansion of the English state over Offa’s Dyke. Paradoxically, their
incursions, it seems, define our community. Likewise, the Irish sea delimits Welshness
to the West, North and South. This casts nationality as a largely tangible, geographical
concept - community spirit would derive not from true similarity, but from enclosure
within the same geopolitical space, the Welsh geography acting as container to those
within it.
Whilst the present is perceived as a scene of ideological conflict, the historical past -
which quickly learns to seek and distribute histories of its own, homogenised
interpretation - becomes a manageable construct of cultural touchstones, uniting in
understanding the community which is handed its stories. Wales, like many other
nations, has its own patron saint, David, whose religious work is celebrated each March
1, but who has rather become a focus for national celebration for its own sake. ‘Wales
seems to preserve so many archaic practices and beliefs,’ appearing a community ready
to define itself in the images of the past, due to the perception that there existed a
unified Welshness prior to English subjugation. (Jenkins, 1992: pp319-358) The National
Eisteddfod and other eisteddfodau continue to prolong and promote this culture, which
is largely communicated in the Welsh language, whilst the success of the rugby teams
of the 1970s is another popular, nostalgic common memory. All such collective
memories are dependent on a sense of continuity between generations - ‘it is
yesterday’s man who predominates in us’ (Bordieu in Ankara, 1997: ).
The concept of a unified culture dependent on a unified language is highly problematic
in the unfortunate community of Wales - its history is written in a language which just
18.6 per cent of the population speaks (Aitchison, 1999: 91). ‘Languages were the media
through which the great global communities of the past were imagined’ (Anderson, 1991: 14),
and Smith says a nation must have a set of common understandings which bind the
population together in its homeland, facilitated by a shared tongue, but Wales appears a
cultural schizophrenic, its mass culture expressed by ‘agencies of popular socialisation’
16
including education and the mass media, which are predominantly English-medium.
(Smith, 1997: p11) Balsom identifies, in fact, three versions of Wales: Y Fro Gymraeg
(Welsh-speaking Wales), Welsh Wales and British Wales (Balsom in Thomas, 1999: p288). If a
common tongue is a conduit for massification, then the geographical division of
Welsh-language ability illustrated in Appendix A1 can be interpreted as a division
making cultural unification within that territory difficult.
Even in the political terms claimed necessary for national feeling, Wales’ realisation of
its own identity might be regarded as surprising. Owain Glyndwr’s attempts at creating
a parliament having failed, Wales’ democracy has historically been one which
recognises local constituency differences within Wales and the rest of the UK, but not
which distinguished the principality itself from the rest of the union. Political kinship
implies a legal equality and reciprocal democratic rights common to all members of the
community, rights which outsiders are excluded from holding, but only with a devolved
Welsh Assembly being established in 1999 has there been such a distinct tier of
government for Wales and accountable only to it. Indeed, Cymru has never held a place
at the United Nations, and does not look likely to, but devolution does fulfil, somewhat,
the political requirement for national community.
Conceptions of the nation such as Smith’s, express national identity as inherently
cumulative, historical and natural, which, given the failure of Wales to meet many of
the given requirements for nationhood, makes it surprising there is held a
distinguishable sense of community personality at all.
17
I M A G I N A T I O N O F T H E N A T I O N
If there are reasons why the manifest national identity of the Welsh had not been
evoked by the apparently historical development outlined in Smith’s model, then there
is a popular, if cynical, hypothesis to the contrary which may, unknowingly, explain the
origin of contemporary Welshness.
Hartley claims the historical construction of national community is seriously at odds
with the facts (Hartley, 1994: p196). The nation is, in fact, ‘a discursive construct whose identity
consists of its difference from others.’ 1 It has fallen to parties with an interest in either
extending, enhancing or creating from scratch such communities to communicate those
messages which would make individuals homogenous. With shared culture and
aspirations at national identity’s core, Smith acknowledges:
the task of ensuring a common public, mass culture has been handed over to
the agencies of popular socialisation, notably ... the mass media (Smith, 1997: p11).
What exists within this unspoken task of ‘popular socialisation’ is the social
construction of community based on a series of inclusions, exclusions, promotions and
negations concerning history, citizenship and national belonging itself. Indeed, ‘a nation
does not express itself through its culture; it is cultural apparatuses that produce the
nation’ (Donald, 1988: p32). The mass media are said to be keepers of these apparatuses,
communicating cultural artefacts accepted as characteristic of the community they
address, but it is the demarcation of this recipient community by a reach only within the
same territorial unit, or homeland, that, with cultural messages, defines the addressees
as members of the nation. Whilst nations are seen as ‘culture communities, whose
members were united, if not made homogenous, by common historical memories,
1 Inspection of this hypothesis soon reveals it to be metaphysical and ontological to the point of being hyper-semantic,resembling an argument that this does not exist simply because it is implicitly expressed as being not that. Hartley deniesthat national identity is a tangible phenomenon, despite its own obvious expression - regardless of origin.
18
myths, symbols and traditions,’ it is the mass media institutions which act as conduits
for these memes (Smith, 1997: 11) 2.
Resembling something of a McLuhan’s apprentice, Anderson says ‘we are faced with a
world in which the figuring of reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural’ (Anderson, 1991:
p22). It still is. In the multi-media aesthetics of pictures and sound which enable the mass
transmittance of cultural-constructivist memes, television and the other popular mass
media are endowed with forming the mental maps of the worlds in which we live.
Indeed, the penetration of mass media has brought about ‘changes in modes of
apprehending the world [which] made it possible to ‘think’ the nation; they ‘provide the
technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation’
(ibid: pp22-26).
We may say the imagined nation is built from three inter-dependent components:
memetic content, assumed territorial reception and chronologically-determined usage.
Anderson claims the simultaneity and chronology offered by the mass media in this
construction process binds strangers on the same territory in a common media ritual:
A person will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his
countrymen. He has no idea of what they are upto at any one time. But he has
complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity (Anderson,
1991: p33).
Simply put, the scheduling of conventional broadcast media output encourages a
homogenisation of the quotidian rhythms of the message recipients within the reception
territory because it is a ‘mass ceremony.’ When a particular news programme is
2 The ‘meme’ is an analytical tool employed (first by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins) to explain cultural transfer inthe language of genetics - ideas and practices ‘leap from brain to brain’ (Dawkins in Schrage, 1994). Schrage says memeticsoffers a new paradigm to explain how ideas spread in popular culture; it makes cultural exchange tangible. Memesmultiply in receivers in a blossoming communication process. Most interesting to this study, Witoszek outlines aframework for studying media’s construction of identity using memes, ‘imaginative social units of social memory whichpreserve and mediate communal identity or community crisis over time.’ This study makes reference to ‘memes’ in thelatter context, as an umbrella term for mediated cultural messages.
19
broadcast to a certain geocultural mass of people, that mass is bonded by its continually
reinforced, calendrical information retrieval. They become the audience (media which
arrogantly perceive as singular the diversity of individuals within its viewership always
bear the side-effect of imagining communities leading to ‘the generation of the
impersonal will’).
The mass ceremony of media use is central to chronology’s construction. Each morning,
for example, the newspaper reader is:
well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by
thousands (or millions) or others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose
identity he has not the slightest notion (Anderson, 1991: p35).
Furthermore, the reflection of the medium’s use by these anonymous people, who are
deemed to be similar to one another in some way or ways by virtue of their common
information requirements, serves to root the imagined nation in banal life. Indeed, ‘the
obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing creates an extraordinary
mass ceremony: almost precisely simultaneous consumption’ (ibid).
But it is the framing of this evolving simultaneous similarity in a bounded geographical
context which makes the common community identity national. The limit of the media
outlet’s reach mimics that of the already-existing national territory 3 and, therefore,
makes the nationality expressed in the ensuing programming intrinsically linked to the
identity expressed in the historical, political precedent.
Ceasing the extent of spectrum inclusion territory at a particular frontier serves to either
reinforce the already-given national identity existing within the given boundary, or to
begin constructing anew where there was not a boundary in existence. Similarly, the
necessity for print media distribution to take place by an existing transport
3 Griffiths notes that a pre-existing national culture had taken hold before the popularisation of the mass media,expressing the historical development of the national identity, in logic opposite to the Andersonian hypothesis, as‘always already given.’
20
infrastructure both reinforces the part government has to play in enabling a
communications network from a transport network and makes the ability of that
communication secondarily dependent on the national network’s proper functioning.
Conventional media’s obvious handicap in the reach of content distribution thus
threatens to make messy the extent of the matching of national boundary with media
boundary, so the compensatory ability to place transmitters strategically highlights
policy-makers’ rôle in imagining the nation.
With these preconditions in place, it is the cultural content of the media which
ultimately enables identity construction, and it is often the mythologies of the same
historical past which ‘naturally’ developed the nation which we find re-used as the
deliberate memes of television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Having ‘re-built’ the
national sphere using the distribution and addressive capacity of the media themselves,
outlets express a responsibility to satisfy the new awareness of the national community,
reinforcing what national mutual recognition there was with evocative historical
messages.
For evidence to support Imagined Communities in action, we can look to Kurdistan,
which both supports and flies in the face of Andersonian hypotheses. A stateless,
‘homeless’ people split by geography (they live across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and
so have no given homeland), religion (Muslims and Zoroastrians share the same
community), dialect (at least three main variations) and war (unwanted travellers,
forced into movement by Turkey and Iraq), the Kurds are nationally dispossessed. In
1994, MED-TV was launched ‘to develop Kurdish culture and language,’ ‘to stop our
society slowly disappearing’ (Ryan, 1997: p44). With upto eighty percent of those in
Kurdistan watching its news and folk culture memes, the channel was dubbed ‘Little
Nation.’ ‘For a few hours every night, the world’s largest stateless nation has a home,’
and staff ‘think this is the first step on the last, long part of the road to the formation of
a Kurdish state’ (ibid: 46). Turkey, allegedly keen to suppress Kurdish cultural expression,
has made efforts to close the station, but it broadcasts from Brussels and Sweden:
21
While others worry about the media destroying national identity, MED-TV is
proving that the opposite can be the case, even in the worst of circumstances. It
is a remarkable force, bringing together - perhaps in itself - uniting a nation (ibid:
p49) 4.
4 In April 1999, the Independent Television Commission revoked MED-TV’s licence to broadcast in the UK for airingfour items ‘likely to encourage acts of violence in Turkey,’ in breach of the 1990 and 1996 Broadcasting Acts. Source:ITC news release, http://www.itc.org.uk/news/news_releases/show_release.asp?article_id=285.
22
W A L E S , A M E D I A A R T E F A C T
Constructivist hypotheses give little credence to the already-existing, historical concept
of the nation. But, whilst the Kurdish case - an attempt to facilitate that nation from
scratch - is one clear example of mass media’s ability to construct communal
sensibility, finding evidence of a media-massified Wales is similarly effortless. Indeed,
successive industry figures have boasted of their ‘cultural mission’ to that effect; the
rôle of BBC Wales, for example, is to:
Serve the nation of Wales in all its diversity with united purpose.>
Reflect and enrich the life of the nation.>
Put back into the community the richness and variety it perceives>
and reflects; to be reporter and patron.
Provide the debating chamber for democracy, the platform for>
artistic achievement and the repository for historic archives.
Speak of Wales and things Welsh with authenticity and authority>
to the United Kingdom (G. S. Jones, 1990: 160) 5.
Highlight the events that galvanise the nation of Wales.>
Provide the social glue that binds all the communities of Wales>
together (BBC Wales, 1993).
Such a mission statement clearly marks producers as not just reflecting the memes of an
already-existing national community, but also creating and circulating new ones,
constructing and reinforcing that community in its citizens’ shared consciousness. For
‘galvanise,’ we can read ‘massify.’ Their purpose, almost paradoxically, would be one
of a selective mass homogenisation - mass because they address and encourage the
whole of the nation, selective because the people which constitutes that nation is
narrowly defined as residing within its bounded territory:
In Wales, to a greater extent than perhaps any other country in Europe,
broadcasting has played a central rôle, both positive and negative, in the
development of the concept of a national community. (J. Davies, 1994: ix)
5 Geraint Stanley Jones; Controller, BBC Wales, 1981-1985
23
Indeed, Davies goes further, asserting that ‘contemporary Wales could be defined as an
artefact produced by broadcasting.’ (J. Davies, 1994: OBC) The other significant Davies 6
admits the broadcast media ‘determine a whole matrix of cultural references within
which we live our lives; [they] shape, define, legitimise,’ (G. T. Davies in K. Williams, 1993: 40) whilst
Osmond, too, claims that, in the sense of a people struggling to become a nation by
progressively establishing its own institutions, that of Welsh broadcasting has a pivotal
rôle (Osmond, 1996: 111). That is, it seeks to encourage Wales.
To accept that the media can, in fact, construct a Welshness in this way, we must accept
the validity of media effects hypotheses including the ‘hypodermic needle’ 7. Whilst
there is certainly a case for arguing that the audience constructs its own view of its
social reality and its place within it, negotiating with the media and texts which would
have it belong to the nation first and foremost 8, it may be that, given media forms
which implicitly deny oppositional response to those texts, the ultimately more human
compulsion to belong to a series of networked communication communities encourages
a decoding concurrent with the preferred reading... a de facto acceptance of massifying,
nationalising media memes.
Making the media into that massifier which sanctions Smith’s concept of the nation, the
imagination of Wales is executed with reliance on a trinity model consisting of:
Boundgeographical
spaceà
Distinctset of shared
cultural memes
àCompliant,
simultaneousreception
So for such institutions to enact a massification of the people within the geography to
be nationalised, they must first match the confinement of the memes’ target audience
with that of the existing or to-be-existing national territory, aiding the process of
6 Geraint Talfan Davies; Controller, BBC Wales, 1990-20007 Suitably, the analogy, which refers to the mass manipulation discussed in O’Sullivan et al (1994, p151), connotes passivityand dependency.8 See Hall, 1980.
24
inclusion and implicit exclusion which is central to the divisionism within communal
identification.
T e r r i t o r i a l C o n t a i n m e n t
In conventional broadcasting, the addressing of the audience is made through the
ethereal radio spectrum, a scarce natural phenomenon the waves of which have no
regard for invisible geopolitical borders 9. One would expect, therefore, that transmitted
memes would spill over into neighbouring nations. But, perhaps fortunately for the
imaginers of these nations, the technology’s distribution capacity is far from so great
that it can automatically encompass multiple nations; so a transmitter infrastructure has
been built to ensure that the intended programming reaches the intended audience - a
matter of installing the minimal degree of distribution capacity necessary to address the
desired territory and no more. The medium is not ideal for exactly matching reception
territory with boundary - it is imprecise and, as will be hypothesised, highly problematic
- but it offers a certain measure of control.
A Welsh broadcast territory was drawn in 1935, after complaints in Wales of
over-centralisation in London by a BBC keen to encourage a British unity during
war-time, and ‘BBC Wales’ was formed in 1964. Davies claims ‘all the subsequent
[cultural and national] recognition of Wales stemmed from’ this move (J. Davies, 1994: p205).
The ITV network, too, was established from the outset to counter cultural
Londonisation with an enhanced regional UK spread, but a Welsh entity was born
awkwardly with a franchise that originally split the country in two and still joins it with
the West of England 10; although HTV has effectively territorialised Wales with its own
dual administration and under ITC guidelines 11.
9 Analogue terrestrial television content is distributed along the Ultra High Frequency spectrum on Bands IV and V,using frequencies between 470 and 854HMz, or channels 21 to 68.10 At inception, the regional ITV network had devised a broadcast franchise comprising both the Wales and the West ofEngland geographies. Mackay & Powell (1997) note that the franchise’s first operator, TWW (Television Wales andWest, in 1958), had broadcast only to South Wales, leaving Granada (from the North of England) to serve North Walesuntil the arrival of WWN (Wales West and North/Teledu Cymru) which was subsequently taken over by TWW,integrating the portions of the Welsh territory.11 ITC, the Independent Television Commission, which regulates commercial television operators in the UK.
25
Each of the established and conventional broadcast outlets sees the content and territory
policy reflect the UK constitutional reality in which Wales exists (see Appendix A2): BBC
Wales seeks to address Wales only, but is subject to sharing network time with UK
memes; HTV Wales seeks to address Wales only with some programming, shares other
programming between Wales and the West, and is subject to an increasing degree of
UK network memes; S4C seeks to address Wales only, while the Channel 4 content it
re-broadcasts is also available throughout the UK; and Channel 5 has no regional remit,
and rarely features Wales in its UK make-up. Nevertheless, Appendix A3 shows how
the intended reach of the main analogue terrestrial broadcasters in Wales (Fig. 2) 12
corresponds exactly to the country’s already-existing geo-political territory (Fig. 1).
Allan & O’Malley claim this matching of territories was driven by the BBC’s fear of
the medium’s potential for ‘social unrest,’ forcing the corporation, ‘at a very early
stage, to acknowledge the status of Wales as a distinct nation with its own traditions
and aspirations,’ indicating that the rôle of the broadcaster is not so much to
intentionally imagining new national incarnations as to service those already in
existence (Allan & O’Malley, 1999: p136). It was protests from within Wales, after ITV had already
delivered regionality, that led to the BBC’s Welsh creation, indicating that the national
audience itself sought more of those nationalising memes. This interplay between the
producer-led rendering of the national territory and the citizen-led cry for devolution
suggests that cynical conceptions of the constructors as out-and-out nation-builders may
be slightly inaccurate - the relationship between imaginer and imagined would appear
more symbiotic.
Yet the drawing of territory not only demarcates here from there, but also incorporates
all those distinct communities within the here. Jones notes ‘S4C has dealt with the
problem [of north-south lingual division] by uniting Welsh speakers and helping them
to understand each other,’ and the same effect can be said of distinct regional memes
12 BBC1 Wales, BBC2 Wales, HTV Wales and S4C.
26
other than language 13. Of course, such is the location of both the geographical and
media entities of Wales, that the country has only one media neighbour with which to
exchange and withhold memes anyway. With nationality established largely through
difference from them, which is partly demarcated by geo-political boundaries and the
media which inhabit them, Wales only borders England, since mediated cultural
exchange with its Celtic cousins is prevented by the Irish Sea, where transmitters and
newspapers would tend to sink and content from neither medium reaches across
effectively. The media boundary thus mimics the historical boundary, the rôle of Offa’s
Dyke and the ocean falling to Greg Dyke and the network 14. It was, however, only with
the onset of political devolution that the BBC re-defined the BBC Wales, Scotland and
Northern Ireland territories ‘national regions’ and granted more scheduling autonomy
with which to serve those countries alone 15.
So, the concept of a media territory serves to make the extent of the audience - and,
therefore, the reception and affect of constructivist memes - finite. The replication of
the already-existing geo-political territory and population within that reach exacerbates
the ‘us and them’ division because, it is supposed, the content received (and the
interpretations made of it in the distinct situated culture that would secondarily affect its
reading) is different in each territory. Territorialisation makes content exclusive.
M e m e t i c C o n t e n t
The extents of massification having been established (the selection in our ‘selective
mass homogenisation’ process), it is then that content - the carrier of cultural memes -
which subsequently serves to affect the audience into nationalisation. Indeed:
13 Carwyn Jones AM, Labour, speaking at the National Assembly for Wales’ response to the Welsh Affairs SelectCommittee report on Broadcasting in Wales, 16th November 1999.14 Greg Dyke, Director General, BBC, 2000 -15 At the Wales Media Forum / Royal Television Society conference, ’Wales: A New Media Agency,’ at the Universityof Wales in November 1999, BBC then-Director of National & Regional Broadcasting, Mark Thompson, pledged toBBC Wales more autonomy in scheduling opt-outs and said content would be more clearly branded as made-in-Walesacross BBC1, BBC2 and BBC Choice.
27
for many people, their very sense of Wales as a distinct nation, with its own
traditions, customs and rituals, is largely derived from the content of these
media (Allan & O’Malley, 1999: p129).
True enough, the mass media would seem to render and relay the symbolic markers of
nationality, communicating a set of memes which serves to contribute to the conception
of that community within the nationally bound context 16. It is those traditions, customs
and rituals - the aggregated markers of national identity - which the conventional media
with communising remits routinely circulate, manifested in a memetic structure which
comprises a handful of meta-memes which consequently invoke various specific
cultural units:
Constitution Self Culture History Symbols
Ø Ø Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô × ×
Democracy Language Rugby Anthem Dragon
In establishing a content analysis framework, one might claim it is the aggregation of all
such memetic messages which, in fact, constitutes cultural identity. Broadly, such
memes either reside in the matched territory or originate from it, validating the national
community in content, and they resonate strongly in the ideology of public service.
They consist, in part, of the constitutional reality to which Wales belongs, making
outlets with both a Welsh and British remit ‘like a Russian doll - a national broadcaster
within a national broadcaster’ - ensuring that a portion of content is unique to Wales
whilst a good proportion remains common to the wider UK territory (G. T. Davies, 1999: p51).
Assuming mass-mediated messages have a (hypodermic) effect on their audience, the
16 One of BBC Wales’ own programmes, ‘How To Be Welsh,’ which intentionally built its own content from such aprescriptive definition of Welsh memes, is an interesting parallel (see Appendix A4). Another, ‘Painting The Dragon,’was a source of the nation’s stories as artistic vignettes; a third, ‘Jones, Genes and Evolution,’ which claimed Welshnessis genetic, thus gives a false impression; and, in May, the rhetorical question posed by ‘A Musical Nation?,’ produced byDai Smith, answered with a definition that proposed musical memetic make-up and in which singer Michael Ball said:‘We’ve done a pretty good job of inventing ourselves so far; the trick is to bullshit and keep perpetuating the myth.’These are classic acts of constructivist imagining.
28
receiver would thus be dealt a federal, composite community identity consisting of
Welshness and, as it were, UKness 17. Similarly, the public service remit is to create a
feedback loop in which Welsh affairs are presented to the rest of the UK and affairs
from around the UK are shown to Wales 18.
BBC Wales and HTV Wales are, then, essentially opt-out services, the majority of their
memes originating from English-based UK production centres - which may, in turn, air
content from overseas. The extent of this memetic cross-circulation has been largely
proportionate to the historical constitutional and, subsequently, cultural uniqueness
enjoyed, or not, by Wales. Each broadcaster’s situation may be a symptom of outside
ownership, as they produce little to reflect the country on the wider networks and the
majority of their own content is produced outside Wales. But these accumulated
minority opt-outs and the aggregated uniqueness of the memetic representations in the
content aired on them have, in fact, well served to demarcate Welsh media reception,
just as the entire regional broadcasting system has well served regional diversity
throughout the UK. Indeed, commercial regulations, whilst ultimately laid from
London, stipulate minimum requirements for commercial television’s ‘regional’ content
(ITC, 1999) 19.
This constitutional meme is repeated within the crucial democracy meme which
broadcasters and the press proactively imagine. The media ‘play a central part in
facilitating understanding of, and participation in, the democratic process,’ and both
broadcasters and newspapers have served such a function in a Westminster
parliamentary context 20 while the Welsh news media were reporting a continually
17 For example, the BBC Wales hybrid airs a news programme pertinent only to Wales but also a UK and internationalprogramme which acts as aggregator for those local events deemed relevant to every broadcast territory, and the WesternMail includes at least one page devoted to UK and World affairs... though, conversely, its capacity to distribute Welshstories to UK publications is, perhaps, involuntary and limited without the same sort of nationwide network relationship.18 As well as a regional identity produced by local press.19 The Independent Television Commission, in 1999, required HTV Wales produce 11hrs 43mins of these ‘regionalprogrammes’ per week, per viewer. The broadcaster ultimately aired 12hrs 6mins. (Source: ITC Annual Report 1999,http://www.itc.org.uk/about/ann_report_99/prog_reg.asp). The Broadcasting Act 1990, Section 16(2)(c) requiresChannel 3 franchise operators give a ‘sufficient amount of time’ to ‘regional programmes,’ the definition of which is thesubject of a January 1997 revision by the ITC. See Appendix A5.20 Alun Michael MP, then-Welsh Secretary, responding to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee report on Broadcasting InWales in a letter cited by the Western Mail.
29
devolving political sphere. Now that devolution has offered Wales a distinct political
constituency of its own, those media have a rôle which is similarly unique.
The National Assembly for Wales, the jurisdiction of which matches Welsh media’s
coverage extents, was advised to conduct affairs in a public, transparent fashion. 21
Deliberating, it noted the media’s reciprocal responsibility ‘to help create a new
democracy, society and a new sense of governance in Wales’ (Davies in NAfW, 1999) 22.
Complicity, journalism responded proportionately 23, each public service broadcaster
acknowledging a ‘shared view of [their] public obligation to be a bridge between the
Assembly and the general public’ (Davies, Richards & Jones in G.T. Davies, 1999: p62) 24. Thus, coverage
has been volumnous, leading to accusations that the democratic meme is behaving like
the state’s public relations appendage 25 - an argument which well supports the
constructivist, Andersonian hypothesis that implements Smith’s nation with the help of
democracy; and one difficult to argue against when the broadcasters create ‘an
important window to let the people of Wales see their Assembly at work’ 26, and when
‘nationalist’ politicians talk up the media’s ‘all-important rôle in enriching our
democracy and promoting our new democratic national institution’ 27, or its ‘powerful
influence in safeguarding, developing and cementing a Welsh identity’ 28. This
promotion of the democratic meme is complicit 29 in a bid to enable mass national
21 The Welsh Affairs Select Committee, of 11 Westminster MPs who serve constituencies in Wales, compiled a reporton the requirements for broadcasting proceedings of the National Assembly for Wales, prior to its commencement in1999. Likewise, the National Assembly Advisory Group sat temporarily to develop practical policy for the organisationof the body.22 Ron Davies AM, Labour; speaking at the National Assembly’s ‘Broadcasting In Wales’ debate.23 According to BBC Wales’ Head of News & Current Affairs, Aled Eirug (in The Western Mail of 1/3/2000, Businessp12), the broadcaster secured an additional £6.3m to fund a ‘substantial editorial response’ to devolution which consistsof live Assembly-based programming, news reports with the Assembly as the central agent, additional strands ofprogramming and a collaboration with S4C2 on continuous live broadcasts from the chamber. HTV Wales’ £17m fromits last franchise bid was on the basis of providing a similar response to devolution; though only £1.5m was directedtoward Assembly coverage; a new political unit was established. Likewise, The Western Mail also installed staff atCrickhowell House.24 In 1998, the Controller, Managing Director and Chief Executive of BBC Wales, HTV Wales and S4C, respectively,penned a joint working paper to be considered by the National Assembly Advisory Group.25 In The Western Mail of 1/3/2000, Business p12, in the article ‘Reports Cannot Act As PR Agency for the Assembly,’Aled Eirug defended BBC Wales’ coverage of National Assembly proceedings against accusations it presented matters intoo positive a light.26 S4C Chief Executive, Huw Jones, in The Western Mail, 22/9/1999, describing the S4C2 channel.27 Elin Jones AM, Plaid Cymru, speaking at the National Assembly’s ‘Broadcasting In Wales’ debate.28 Cynog Dafis AM, Plaid Cymru, speaking at the National Assembly’s ‘Broadcasting In Wales’ debate.29 The company established to manage broadcasting from the Assembly comprises the BBC, HTV, S4C, NTL and theNational Assembly for Wales itself; the First Secretary was appointed Chair of the company, whilst four Members fromeach party sit on the board. The National Assembly bore half of the £580,000 cost of contracting Barcud Derwen toinstall broadcast facilities; the broadcasters provided the other half. Source: Welsh Affairs Select Committee, 1999, &
30
citizenship, coverage becoming ‘an ideological practice that helps to sustain [...]
collective self-determination’ (Curran et al, 1982: p15).
Hence, the perception of the memetic self is a curious one, a stereotype collection
constructed, to itself and others, more from a distorted selection of the nation’s own
identifying units as representing a single unit.Waters suggests the Welsh stereotypes, or
memes, no longer identify the Welsh people, but their media is replete with them and
the alternatives he proposes are merely updated versions of Wales’ traditional clichés
(see Appendix A6)..
As a newspaper’s prescription for cultural identity, nevertheless, it is evidence of
McLuhan’s assertion that ‘media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the
other.’ And it is a hypothesis also suitably borne out when language itself becomes
memetic content:
Language is really a storage system for the corporate and collective
experience. Every time you play back some of that language, you release a
whole charge of these ancient perceptions and memories. (M. McLuhan in E. McLuhan & F.
Zingrone, 1997: p177,& p284)
The Welsh language is played back mostly by S4C, BBC Radio Cymru, Radio
Ceredigion, Y Cymro and others that consequently release those memories Smith claims
are required for the production of shared identity. True to the belief that ‘traditional
vernacular are themselves the great mass media’ (ibid: p284), Welsh becomes the content of
television, radio or the press, and this amalgamated, piggybacked medium becomes a
conduit for the implementation of collective massification and for the replaying of
cultural history. S4C acknowledges ‘the channel is part of defining a new nation that
grows from new circumstances from the point of view of knowing the language ... S4C
is part of redefining Welshness’ (Stephens, 1999: p3). But Wales is a bilingual country, and a
National Assembly for Wales, 1999.
31
language-produced Welshness may only be defined by a two-tier construction process
in which we find that the English-language media, too, have imagined the nation.
All broadcast and press products strongly circulate the rugby meme. Whilst subject to
local tribal rivalries at HTV/S4C club level, international matches on BBC Wales affect
national unification by utilising the team as a unifying agent. Illustrating the effect of
public service, the victorious 1999 win against Wales’ only media and geographical
neighbour, England, would have likely not have provoked the extent of national
sentiment had it been aired only on Sky Sports, as are England’s own home games.
Furthermore:
historians may trace the re-birth of Welshness not to the opening of a National
Assembly, but to the [Rugby World Cup in 1999]. It was less the reopening of a
competition than the reinvention of Wales as a country no longer burdened by
history 30.
M o d e o f A d d r e s s a n d R e c e p t i o n
Of course, these memetic markers are merely free-floating units unless adopted by the
mass which territorialisation created... the memes must be implemented. Fortunately for
the national imaginers, the conventional media which distribute them exhibit a
one-to-many mode of address, with which a single message is communicated to the
entire collective. This is an inevitable by-product of the Marxist-hegemonic public
service ideology which seeks to provide the many with cultural nourishment from the
breast of the centre; of the commercial media sector which views content in
production-line economics, most lucratively sold en masse; and of the scarce, expensive
access to production and distribution capacity which maintains the rôle of the few as the
memetic producer for the many. The meme need only be produced once, but is
delivered many times over and, in turn, virally.
30 Daily Telegraph reporter cited in: Owen, 4/10/99, ‘World Reacts Favourably to Nation’s Show of Pride,’ The WesternMail.
32
Having reached the intended minds, it is then the task of that meme to have an affect on
the audience the outcome of which is compliant with its own message. The analogue
technological capacity installed in television, radio, the movie, the newspaper, the
magazine and all like media is such that the above mode is implemented in a one-way
addressive stream. The act of consuming the content of each is of consuming a
discourse, unlike the negotiated interactions indulged in conversation, because the
media are intrinsically simplex 31. They cannot inherently offer the audience any
communication resembling a ‘right of reply’ much less a distributed content production,
thus any possible oppositional response to the meme that would result in its rejection
rather than adoption, is annihilated.
Hall (1980) might claim the dominant ideology of a text may not be automatically induced
because the situated culture in which memes are received can affect their decoding 32,
and the integrity of his model’s hypothesis stands. But, in respect of nationalisation, in
which the audience is situated in precisely the same culture as the memetic producer
and surrounded by thousands of like minds, what other reading of nationalising memes
can there be but one compliant with the dominant, facilitating the adoption of the
cultural identity in those cultural packages? Consequently, Hall concedes, far from
merely reflecting reality, the media construct it (Chandler, 1994: marxism11.html). Whilst noting the
integrity of active-reader hypotheses, the effect here would seem to be that of the
hypodermic needle 33 and, given the already-existing quality of nationality (Griffiths, 1991: p81)
and the content requirements that it invokes, an acceptance of massification is
supported. The imposing addressive mode thus encourages adoption of national identity
upon reception.
31 To appropriate the parlance from the worlds of electronic circuitry and computer communication, in which a ‘duplex’device permits the two-way transmission of a signal, most often describing the ability of a communication device totransmit signals from two parties to each other simultaneously. ‘Simplex,’ the opposite, thus refers to the one-waytransmission of such signals.32 A dominant reading is produced when the receiver’s situated culture matches that of the producer, delivering the‘preferred reading;’ a negotiated reading is affected when some cultural discrepancies here inflect the reading; and anoppositional stance is taken in the presence of a divergent situated culture, placing the audience in conflict with thepreferred reading, and with the meme that would affect national identity.33 Suitably, the analogy, which refers to the mass manipulation discussed in O’Sullivan et al (1994, p151), connotes passivityand dependency.
33
The deployment of the trinity model which facilitates this culture is well expressed in
the mission of The Western Mail as, increasingly, national contextualiser of federal and
international occurrences:
In Wales, that means being Welsh, providing Welsh angles on information
about Wales, for Wales, how it affects Wales (Fowler, 1999) 34.
Whilst such a function may be regarded as competitive product placement designed to
serve an already existing Welsh community, such a high degree of conscious editorial
territorialisation would serve to reinforce, or instil anew, the cultural and political
identity such publications fully intend to communicate. Indeed, the journalism of today
is the history of tomorrow.
Moreover, in respect of the Welsh press’ national imagination, The Western Mail is
quick to subtitle itself ‘The National Newspaper of Wales,’ contextualising its own
product in a manner which its content follows - delimited by the extents of territory or
of the occurrences which impact upon the public already residing within it.
Anderson finds it is the novel-esque omnipresence of the newspaper, by which only the
reader is aware of the actions of all participating characters, which sanctions the
extension of scale from local community to the broader, national community contained
by the aforementioned extents of coverage. That a news page is a medium for arbitrary
events collected and juxtaposed ‘shows that linkage between them is imagined,’ thus
‘imagined linkage derives from,’ first, the calendrical coincidence that such events
occurred on the same day and, second, the newspaper-readership relationship which
generates a community of customers (Anderson, 1991: p33). Furthermore, what is the automatic
obsolescence of the newspaper as soon as it is read gives the readers a shared sense of
consumption because the product’s newness is fleeting.
34 Western Mail editor Neil Fowler, addressing the Wales Media Forum / Royal Television Society conference atUniversity of Wales, Cardiff, in November 1999.
34
Appendix A7 shows how the avowed ‘Welsh press’ take advantage of the affective
addressive mode offered them by implementing cultural memes in their own
prescriptive discourses, expressed in the familiar, collective language of ‘us’ 35. But the
extent of any indigenous Welsh national press at all remains unclear, and herein lays
massification’s malfunction...
With most newspapers consumed in Wales produced in London’s situated culture 36,
UK titles are more massifying than the indigenous (see Appendix A8, A10), and the local press
are more popular, too (see Appendix A9), and split Wales in two (see Appendix A11), leaving it
without ‘the essential element of a [national] journalistic constituency’ (Hannan, 1997: p56).
The democratic sphere, therefore, is not healthy, because there is an ‘information
deficit’ (G.T. Davies, 1999: p18)... the majority of cultural memes are produced outside of Wales.
Because, also, on the terrestrial spectrum, memes ‘travel in straight lines and do not
reach many communities because of the shielding effect of mountains or hills’ (BBC
Reception, 1998: tv_recep/terrestv.shtml), the particularly undulating topography of Wales makes mass
consumption difficult (see Appendix 13) 37. Indeed, many close to Offa’s Dyke can and do tune,
instead, to English channel variants 38.
The fragmentation of the Welsh reception community discredits the notion of absolute
mass consumption - too few numbers are consuming the same memes to affect
widespread nationality. The fractious and sporadic reach was blamed for the low
turn-out in the 1997 devolution referendum because a significant proportion of the
electorate was not in possession of information required to make political decisions 39.
That Geraint Talfan Davies claims such a hypothesis is ‘false logic,’ whilst also calling
35 For, the reporter is always on the side of the reader, even when instructing certain behaviours.36 London-produced newspapers account for 87 percent of Welsh consumption (source: Welsh Affairs SelectCommittee, 1999: par37)37 Wales’ 181 transmitters comprise 20 percent of all those in the UK, whilst Wales only contributes 5 percent inpopulation terms. The Cambrian Mountains divide North and South, whilst hills degregate even nearby communities.38 Some 40 percent of the population, or 400,000 people, lives in franchise overlap territories (source: Welsh AffairsSelect Committee, 1999: par5) (see Appendix A12). 57 percent of Cardiff households tune aerials to HTV West insteadof HTV Wales, 55 percent in the Vale of Glamorgan and 46 percent in Newport (source: Mungham & Williams, 1998:p122).39 See Welsh Affairs Select Committee, 1999; and National Assembly for Wales, 1999. Notably, the Assembly passedan amendment to the debate’s motion which made clear the institution’s concern at fragmented coverage and statedintentions to enhance the spread of coverage.
35
for a remedy to fragmentation in the interests of national culture, itself appears illogical
(G.T. Davies, 1999: pp7-9) 40.
Furthermore, the opt-in concentration of Welsh-medium programming on one dedicated
channel has, one might argue, led to the ghettoisation of language and exclusivity of
culture, disuniting an otherwise bilingual nation 41.
[This] ‘results in at least two entirely separate arenas for communication
within Wales,’ inducing ‘uncertainty, disunity, a fractured image of the self’
(Osmond, 1996: p118).
Wales, whilst its identity is self-evident, is ‘a victim of its geography,’ its unity subtly
undermined by shortcomings in distribution capacity... ‘such infrastructure is a
hindrance to, even the cause of, the fragmented culture that is Wales’ (Mackay & Powell, 1998:
p204).
The mass media have indeed played a central positive and negative rôle in the creation
of the national community... their realisation of the national artefact, on the one hand,
and the erratic socialisation created by their sporadic imperfections, on the other, each
find constructivist hypotheses highly effective. Where received, Welsh media content
has successfully imagined the nation; where not, the ultimately fractious gaps in
national sentiment still implicitly suggest Anderson is correct.
40 In the week of the referendum, claimed Plaid Cymru councillor Gareth Roberts (of Teledu i Pawb / Television for All)canvassing in the problematic Holywell area with Dafydd Wigley, no-one knew who the party President was or what thedevolution issue was about, but awareness was great in nearby areas exposed to Welsh television. Source: R. Owen, ‘TVReception Fears For Campaign,’ The Western Mail, 21/1/99, p2. See Appendix 13.41 Of the 88 hours of television produced in Wales, just 25 percent is in the language spoken by the true mass (source:Mungham & Williams,1998: p117), and these are the predominantly federal UK channels.
36
L O C A T I N G O L D M E D I A ‘ S B U I L D I N G S I T E
Wales may be a victim of its geography, but so is every nation, their media-received
community identities constructed as much from these intrinsic features of media and
distribution channels as from deliberate ethnic intention.
Territorialisation, it has been shown, takes place in the control of the tension between
the problematic scale-extending and scale-reducing tendencies of terrestrial
transmission to simultaneously expand and cease spectrum and circulation travel at an
invisible frontier, and is further cemented by matching existing political boundaries and
by choosing culturally-specific content from within. Traditional society is based on
direct interaction with people living close to each other (van Dijk, 1999: p20); inhabitants of old
media’s society may not always engage in close, direct interaction (mass mediated
communication has the effect of replacing interpersonal communication), but the
community which they are forced to inhabit is tangibly geopolitical, its identity a
physical derivation of the land geography in which it is contained. Media content’s
conventional mode of distribution has been aboveland or overland, where the power of
broadcast and the scope of print are limited, but not so much that they cannot usually
provide a construction extended to the national and reduced from any international
tendency. Terrestrial transmitters’ deficient reach allows borders of reception to be
drawn at will.
But value is placed on the broadcast spectrum - the ether - because it is a scarce
resource; the analogue signals which it distributes are relatively inefficient... result: ‘TV
bandwidth is a pig’ (Negroponte, July 1996: p112) 42. Terrestrial television broadcasting effectively
has bandwidth enough for only five channels, radio licences have been awarded equally
sparingly, even satellite’s bandwidth is limited, and the plurality of print is restrained by
the distribution economics of physical transportation.
42 The term ‘bandwidth’ visualises a distribution channel as a pipe in which content travels; the wider the pipe, the morecontent, or the greater the composition of that content. Old media’s bandwidth, for example, would ultimately refer to theamount of information which can be carried by analogue terrestrial television and radio, satellite, and the size and depthof a newspaper after distribution economics have been accounted for.
37
We can say, then, that the number of media channels available for consumption is finite
and so, therefore, is the extent of memetic content. There is a condition of scarcity, and
such scarcity thus generates a limited set of memes, resulting in an audience largely
sharing identical cultural messages, regardless of polysemic interpretations - an
extremely unifying tendency. It is this shared consumption which creates the perception
that scattered individuals belong to the same community unit, strangers becoming
acquaintances introduced by a common agent of focus which is psychologically stored
for retrieval after the event of consumption.
This is the one-way, one-to-many meme in action. Conventional media are not
conversational media, offering no technological capacity for return or synchronous
communication which might sanction a communicable oppositional reading to the text,
instead making the user into a passive reader. The annihilation of disagreement
facilitates the adoption of nationalising cultural units; the media ‘reinforce a consensual
viewpoint by using idioms and by claiming to voice public opinion’ (Woollacott, 1982: 109).
We can say the ability to produce the nation rests in the power to control the
production of cultural memes. The concentration of memetic production in the hands of
the few reduces the likelihood of cultural diversity in those messages, thus maintaining
the integrity and sanctity of an ultimately singular, exclusive conception of identity 43. It
is both the one-way and the one-to-many interpellative modes of television, radio,
cinema, print, etc. which should force us to redefine all such media broad-cast media -
in the truest sense of the concatenation, they all address a large range of people in a
pitched stream.
These media being inflexible media, the output of content is timetabled by producers;
they throw out information not at the direction of the users whom they claim to serve
but at regular, scheduled intervals within a given period. A television news show, for
43 Van Dijk (1999: p38) expresses the one-to-many broadcast model in the analytical model of a tree structure, in whichthe root is a producer which feeds a message to each of the many, many leaf receivers.
38
example, might be aired at 18:00hrs each evening; a newspaper might go on sale every
morning; Coronation Street is on at 19:30hrs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday...
each operates on the promise of delivering information which is chronologically new
yet at entirely predictable moments, the nature and location of which are complicity
known by aware consumers.
It is that limited bandwidth which means progamming must be output economically -
there are so few distribution channels, and institutional content production is arranged
so accordingly, that products are perceived as events, transient and available for a finite
period... ‘for one night only!’
The effect of finite availability encourages the many to flock to devour the meme all at
the same time, creating the extraordinary mass action of simultaneous consumption of
the same content. As Anderson observes, simultaneity is crucial in the imagination of
community because the act of collective reception generates another remarkable sense
of shared action: the individual, without having met compatriots, ‘has complete
confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity’ (Anderson, 1991: p26). What is
more, this en masse act of receiving information at scheduled intervals is ritualistic,
creating a ‘mass ceremony’ (ibid) or national rhythm of which most individuals are aware
and in which most are able to participate: ‘steady repetition is a compulsion mutually
reinforced’ (Stipe, 1983).
‘The idea of a social organism moving calendrically through homogenous,
empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of a nation, which also is
conceived as a solid community moving steadily up (or down) history’ (Anderson,
1991: p28).
The construction of a mediated culture reliant on these tangible, limited distribution
(drawn territorially and fragmented topographically) ties the imagined community to
geography itself, even though culture is a mediation executed on the intangible mental
sphere. Terrestrial media, with content reach confined by bounded extent, make the
39
ensuing identity terrestrial, too. The identities of the old media, then, are geo-national,
the community a collection of disparate individuals, distinct occurrences and smaller
communities bound together despite their initial differences, the extent of which is
limited only by the correspondence of analogue distribution’s failure and the
‘constructivist camp’s imagination.
40
N E W M E D I A
T O A F F I N I T Y A N D B E Y O N D
41
B E I N G D I G I T A L : T E A C H I N G N E W T R I C K S
Since the media’s construction of national identity is the product of their intrinsic
characteristics, the new media’s different properties, it can be hypothesised, would
directly usurp the very nature of the country’s imagination, proposing new or non-
constructions. Fundamentally led by the continuing application of Moore’s Law in
processor manufacture 44 and the convergence of forms, the change from old to new
media is one fronted by the internet 45, which encompasses and invokes many media,
and is meta-expressed in the change from atoms to bits (Negroponte, 1996: p4).
A b u n d a n t I n t e r e s t s
When tangible analogue information is converted into those ethereal yet processable
digital bits, it becomes more efficient 46 - software design means a producer can send to
a receiver content compressed 47, and hardware advances mean the capacity of existing
infrastructure can be increased 48. Negroponte likens the ability to compress content to
the arrival of freeze-dried cappuccino which, upon the addition of water, can be
restored with all the richness of one freshly made in an Italian café (Negroponte, 1996: p17).
Indeed, it is the removal of the whole notion of the ‘copy’ in this act of being digital
which obliterates newspaper economics, because the necessity to consider the cost of a
print run suddenly no longer impinges - bits are easily reproducible with no financial
incursion. More starkly, compression of conventional broadcast data into bits makes
44 Gordon Moore, co-founder of chip manufacturer Intel, observed the power of a silicon chip computer processordoubles every 18 months. Source: www.pcwebopedia.com/Moores_Law.htm.45 This study refers to the ‘internet’ rather than the ‘Internet’ as an ideological statement: it is my contention that theinternet and those forms it spawns are contemporary media mature enough to no longer be treated with any of theadoration that has made them institutionalised. Furthermore, it is nations themselves whose names are capitalised and,such is the discussion of hypotheses here, this study would find that the proposition of John Perry Barlow, that theinternet should undertake a ‘declaration of independence’ from which would be made a nation, is illogical. Further, infact, there is no such thing as the internet; its networks and diversity so multitudinous as to be personal to each user. Theinternet is merely a medium.46 A ‘bit’ is the smallest unit of information processable by a machine, connoting only a binary value. Combinations ofbits begin to form meaningful information. Source: webopedia.internet.com/TERM/b/bit.html.47 For example, the standardised MPEG (Motion Pictures Experts’ Group) video compression protocol transmits onlythe portions of a frame which are changed from the previous picture, minimising the information requirement. The sametechnique is true of internet-specific RealVideo and WindowsMedia formats, and the popular mp3 music variant ofMPEG compresses CD-quality audio into fractions of their actual size. Analogue television and radio sends a whole newpicture or piece of audio in each transmission, taking up precious bandwidth.48 A modem (modulator-demodulator) at the transmission end of an analogue telephone line encodes information intodigital bits for communication across the existing infrastructure whilst, at the reception end, the information is decodedand reassembled by the same protocol (the water in Negroponte’s example overleaf). See also ADSL. Broadcast signals,after being sent out from transmission suites, are sent to OnDigital’s Transmission Centre for digital compression, thenout to countrywide transmitters.
42
room for upto six television channels in the space historically occupied by one 49, and
there is a new multiplicity of distribution channels and media.
Essentially, bandwidth is radically increased; more content can be pushed down larger
pipes, creating a crucial paradigm shift from scarcity to abundance.
In multi-channel homes, the share of conventional analogue channels - that is, the only
channels with a national-regional remit for Wales - drops dramatically 50 (a trend which
newsreader Huw Edwards labels ‘quite worrying’ 51) and use of conventional media in
general drops further as new media such as the internet become more popular, half of
internet users reporting they use television and newspapers less 52. When an
infrastructure supports a multiplicity of media outlets, each is capable of satisfying one
of the diversity of society’s different habits, reducing the salience of the public service.
The whole concept of broad-casting - to address as many people as possible with little
content from few outlets (limited space to devote to a broad range of interests reduces
the size of the ‘news hole’ and increases superficiality for each) - is thus overthrown by
the onset of narrowcasting, by which more minority interests can be satisfied more
often.
The inevitable consequence of content abundance, then, is memetic abundance,
heterogeneity. Crucially, it is a diverse set of memes which is produced and circulated -
memes which, in their narrow concentration, preference the subject at hand over any
49 For a recent illustration in relation to Digital Terrestrial Television (which should not be highly thought of as thegreatest realisation of many of the factors discussed in this study), see Appendix B1. The number of television channelsin UK homes rose from 14 to 64 between 1991 and 1997, making 25 percent of homes multi-channel (E.G. Jones, 1999:unit15.htm).50 See G.T. Davies, 1999: p60.51 Speaking at the ‘Reporters And The Reported’ lecture ‘Can Programmes Like Mine Have A Future?’ at University ofWales, Cardiff, on March 9th, 2000.52 Forrester research found that half of internet users watch less television, and 38 percent spend less time reading ortalking on the telephone (www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,15538,00.html). MediaMatrix figures suggest that, evenduring television shows expected to be great massifying events, the worldwide web eroded viewing figures(206.57.110.3/PressRoom/RKarchives/05_18_98.html) Likewise, an increasing number of households with bothtelevision and internet access use the two media simultaneously as ‘consumer multitasking,’ indicating the internet ismaking inroads into concentrated television viewing (206.57.110.3/PressRoom/Press_Releases/07_12_99.html).
43
ethnic intentions. The likes of Gilder see bandwidth’s finite property as merely a
temporary factor (Bronson, 1996: gilder.html) 53.
Indeed, conventional media are like a jug of water - everybody has to drink from the
same jug at the same time and the only options are to drink or not drink. But, in future,
everyone will have their own glass and be able to put their own flavour into it and pour
water into it when they are ready to drink (E.O. Williams, 1998). Abundance enables
empowerment, and the avoidance of the constructivist effect.
What may be witnessed, then, is the radically reduced visibility of the cultural meme, as
choice and interest-led programming’s satisfaction of the public’s existing diversity
overwhelms the public service’s lack of depth in breadth. When a plurality of specialist,
niche media outlets encourage individuals’ consumption patterns independently of each
other, it is difficult to conceive of the Andersonian tribal hypothesis of mass
participation remaining a pertinent factor - everyone’s watching the other side. Thus,
the mass audience is diminished, invoking a transition from national homogeneity to
splintering and fragmentation of the audience. In this sense, in fact, the already
fractious national consumptions of Wales become an ironic indicator as to its new
media future.
But, more than the ‘explosion in choice’ sales pitch that merely provides more content,
it is the emergence of new addressive modes which more substantially contributes to a
negation of nationalisation, for modem-based media permit two-way, duplex
communication.
53 ADSL (Asymmetical Digital Subscriber Line) technology ‘fools’ the existing analogue telephone infrastructure intothinking it is a broadband digital network capable of high-speed transmission, and digital cable distribution boasts evenmore capacity than analogue. Both technologies can be used to deliver broadcast-quality video and audio content fromthe internet and other services and include upstream capability. Gilder proposes a bandwidth corollary of Moore’s Law,forecasting backbone capacity will treble annually for the next quarter of a century.
44
C o o l M e m e s
Browning fundamentally defines ‘new media; communications for all, by all’ (Browning, 1998:
p105):
Old media divides the world into producers and consumers: we’re either authors
or readers, broadcasters or viewers, entertainers or audiences. One-to-many
communications, in the jargon. New media, by contrast, gives everybody a
chance to speak as well as listen. Many speak to many - and the many speak
back (ibid).
Conventional media narratives are linear, inducing compliance with memetic units.
Blessed with the intrinsic potential to ‘speak back,’ however, the products of the new
forms satisfy van Dijk’s ‘transition from allocution to consultation’ (van Dijk, 1999: p38).
Effectively, new media communication resembles conversation.
McLuhan observes that media in general are cooling down. Hot media (television,
radio, the newspaper) capture attention in high definition but do not leave room for
closure of messages by the audience because they are low in participation and seek to
maintain the integrity of their own authority. But cool media (electronic mail, the web,
newsgroups, chat, interactive television), benefiting from the provision of plentiful
content permitted by converged hypermedia 54, are high in participation (M. McLuhan in E.
McLuhan & F. Zingrone, 1997: p162). Where the old exhibit a push quality in their one-way address,
the new boast a pull mode of reception by which the user must make a conscious
decision to locate content - the user no longer must complicitly accept the memes
produced at the centre.
54 ‘Hypermedia’ derives from ‘hypertext,’ a term coined by Ted Nelson to describe ‘non-sequential writing, text thatbranches and allows choices by the reader;’ see landow.stg.brown.edu/ht/history.html. ‘Hypermedia’ thus refers to theability to interlink many kinds of forms - including images, audio and video - to enable the branching of nodalinformation within a text.
45
Enabling a realisation of active-reader hypotheses and the production of something akin
to Barthes’ ‘writerly text’ 55, cool media - and the web in particular - allow the user to
make specific message selections from the pool of available content which satisfy the
priorities, specialisations and affinities of his or herself, rather than of an editor who
makes gathering and gatekeeping decisions on the basis of a conception of the
individual as identical to the mass - a judgement which also regards events occurring at
one extent of the territory to be as important to individuals at the distant other. Such is
the relationship afforded by hypertext, a web user is able to disregard timetabled,
pre-prioritised current affairs memes, for example, and go online at any moment
deemed suitable to select content in a manner entirely dependent on whether the
expected memes make the act of clicking worthwhile. When news or other memes can
be obtained at a time which is at the discretion of the audience, the evidence of the
Andersonian conception of mass simultaneity contributing to community appears much
less potent.
But it is not even true that the programming itself is shared anymore. More than
modifying the one-to-many convention to allow selection from the available meme
pool, the computational and archival functions of cool media - with the web’s
client-side ‘cookies’ and server-side user databases 56 - endorse a one-to-one model by
which content can be personalised so that only the memetic categories specified by the
user are available (by default, they will be those that match his or her affinities), the
remaining memes filtered out from delivery... ‘the future won’t be 500 channels; it will
be one channel, your channel’ (Sassa, 1998: p100) 57. In expressing this new individualisation
of media, Negroponte refers to The Daily Me, a theoretical construct which has
nevertheless been realised countless times over (Negroponte, 1996: p153), a personalisable
‘newspaper’ which returns only the content pre-specified by its reader (Excite, Yahoo!,
55 See landow.stg.brown.edu/ht/history.html.56 A ‘cookie’ is a file stored on the user’s computer which stores information set by a web site - an age, location,sporting team or favourite news category, for example - and is re-supplied to the site for processing on subsequent visits.The same function could be carried out by storing the information on a web site’s own database.57 Sassa (1998) calls such distribution ‘W-cubed: whatever, wherever, and whenever I want it.’
46
CNN, FishWrap and Crayon are amongst those offering such customisation) - the only
prospective mass is what has been called ‘mass customisation’ 58.
But The Daily Me is ‘ego-centric’ - having eliminated the rôle of the editor, ‘the user
may become isolated from his or her neighbourhood, city, state and nation because he
or she has filtered out information. It’s more isolation and less real life’ (Harper, 1997:
ajrdailyme.html). Clearly, then, the satisfaction of affinities independent from territory
threatens constructivism and the ethnocentric missions of Fowler and hot media
contemporaries who cannot satisfy complex networks of interest specific to the
empowered individual.
Moreover, implicit in these forms is a production capability which constitutes a
remarkable power shift from the producer to the user. Cool new media affect a punk
redistribution of intelligence from transmitter to receiver that would satisfy Marxist
ideals. Media which are in-built with the capacity to make content (they are fashioned
on computational media which require input and engagement) and the removal of
prohibitively expensive access to distribution (common economics applied to
bandwidth scarcity makes it expensive) place the tools of production into the hands of
the many.
The memetic authority, then, rests with the audience itself, taken from central control as
per the Law of Microcosm 59. Since information production constitutes an expression of
identity (Wellman & Gulia in Smith & Kollock, 1999: p177), productions such as personal web pages can
resemble the new meme pools... if specifically referring to the nation of Wales, then
they begin to constitute a truly ‘mass-produced’ construction of its ethnic identity.
‘It’s not that [these new producer-consumers] will compete with The New York Times,
but the consumer becomes part of the process of telling stories in a way that edifies the
58 Alvin Toffler refers to ‘mass customisation’ - basically, the ability of everyone to personalise their media requirements- in ‘Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior,’ P. Schwartz, Nov 1993, in Wired 1.5, www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.05.59 See George Gilder, eg. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/gilder_pr.html.
47
public discourse’ (Bender in Lasica, 1999: ajrjdja.html). The public sphere discourses of hot media
claim to facilitate the ‘active, self-determining political nation’ of the Staatsnation, but
the truly participatory quality of the cool media expose the former as offering little
more than the ‘largely passive cultural community’ of the Kulturnation (Meinecke in A. Smith,
1991: p8) - it is the ability to engage with the political sphere directly and to disintermediate
the selective information providers which could truly facilitate democracy’s rôle in a
mediated nationality 60 61, leading to the ‘socialisation of politics, which produces a
more prominent rôle for citizens in the production and determination of society’ (van Dijk,
1999: p86).
Yet Toffler claims that self-determination, which is the political expression of mass
opinion framed by territorial democratic rights, will find it increasingly hard to arrive at
consensus on an issue as society becomes more heterogeneous and fragmented,
producing ever-smaller majorities (Toffler, 1996: p54). With such a marginal mandate,
democracy and its Fourth Estate benefactors would conceivably find it hard to justify
their own appointment, much less maintain the unified identity of a nation which long
ceased to be a mass.
Most crucially, the self-production quality of what are social media makes active groups
from the narrow, niche interests implemented by abundance; the affinities become
communities. Whilst content and its audience undergo a scale-reducing segmentation,
the valued specialisation of each niche means they subsequently experience a
scale-extension that allows the formation of miniature masses. It is a representative
re-massification into what van Dijk expresses as ‘component masses’ (van Dijk, 1999: p169).
Newsgroups, chat spaces, bulletin boards and web-based forums, for example, are
media ‘in’ which like-minded individuals congregate to indulge those interests - a
60 Rheingold (1993: 9.html) cites Dave Hughes from Colorado as an originator of online democracy, when, in 1983, thecitizen of Welsh decent, mobilised protest against Colorado Springs city council’s threat to prohibit telecommuting. SeeAppendix B3.61 Recently, Stand.org.uk and YouGov.com offer a more direct, issue-based relationship between the public, electedrepresentatives and the act of democracy.
48
many-to-many dynamic in which output and input are linked so equally as to resemble
conversation. Recursively, memetic production by the diverse many would appear to
guarantee an increasing plurality of miniature masses, further discouraging the shared,
homogenous sense.
L o c a t i o n , L o c a t i o n , L o c a t i o n !
Herein lies the most fundamental departure. Whilst conventional media’s communities
are the product of shared place, the new communities are constructed from shared
interest. Every community requires a context - a massifying motivation - and it is the
tangible geopolitical space which offers such containment to the conventional
community. But, rather than witness such collectivism despite differences, the
contemporary media generate kinship because of similarities, leading some (eg. Rheingold,
1993) to claim such collections are true or organic communities - intentionally bonded by
affinities, not bound by accidents of birth, politics and continental drift.
Indeed, the concept of place is fundamentally diminished. The versatility of internet
traffic to traverse a multitude of communications networks, provided each operates a
common protocol, has made all the available networks and devices of the world
interconnected, producing an international scale-extending force, and the subsequent
abundance of the world’s memetic diversity - supplied by the enormous multiplication
of participants - is thus what feeds the narrowing and heterogeneity of the niche.
So, no longer is reception territory contained by the deficiencies of terrestrial media or
the massifying intentions of nationalising institutions. If ‘satellite footprints spill over
the former integrity of national borders’ (Morely & Robins, 1995: p112), as they do along Offa’s
Dyke, then the absolute reach of newer media floods with disregard over any sense of
containment the territorialised media hold. Fundamentally, because a user can consume
memetic output from any distant location, ‘the link between culture and territory
becomes significantly broken. What is being created is a new ‘placeless’ geography’
(ibid).
49
But, such is the dynamic of bit-based networks, both ends of a communications wire
are, to all intents and purposes, the same place. Distance is effectively annihilated; this
is no ‘placeless geography,’ but not a geography at all...
Cyberspace is not geopolitical. Cyberspace is a topology, not a topography.
There are no physical constructs like ‘beside,’ ‘above,’ or ‘to the north of’
(Negroponte, Nov 1996: p112) 62
With globalisation, the new media say ‘bye-bye, borders’ (Browning, 1998: p105), resurrecting a
modified cultural imperialism hypothesis as memes float from extrinsic nations to the
situated culture not automatically, but when requested. All agents of demarcation and
opposition thus reside not in territorial shapes but in ideological hierarchies.
We witness the emancipatory ability of the individual to disengage from the geonational
identity in order to indulge in high-definition trans-national commonalities. ‘ There are
no remote places,’ notes McLuhan (McLuhan, 1997: p30); the individual is as close to the
distant, previously unattainable meme as he or she is to the indigenous, and can
transcend the localised memetic construct.
‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village... a
simultaneous happening (McLuhan, 1967: p60).
Such conditions shock Andersonianism. The abolition of the prime unit of national
containment is accompanied by the abolition of the property which endorsed ritualistic
mass consumption. Where that simultaneity had been national, the global chronology
makes the whole world my community... the individual can, ethereally, be remotely
there as easily as, palpably, being physically here as content can be consumed by two
receivers on separate hemispheres at the same time. We thus observe the extreme
62 All conceptions of new media experiences as somehow spatial are entirely metaphorical constructs of the ethereal. Thenature of ‘cyberspace’ is usually attributed to Gibson, ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions oflegitimate operators, in every nation... a graphical representation of data abstracted in the banks of every computer in thehuman system’ (1995), or, more conservatively: ‘the total interconnectedness of human beings through computers andtelecommunication without regard to geography’ (www.whatis.com/cyberspa.htm).
50
decreased significance of physical presence and, in a sense, disembodiment and the
absence of locality as the user enters a ‘consensual hallucination’ (Gibson, 1995: p12). ‘Our
central nervous system [and memetic reception] is technologically extended to involve
in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us [and] we
necessarily participate’ (McLuhan, 1964: p4), so the cultural arena of the individual is extended
to receive non-local memes.
In short, the media contrasts which starkly suggest new constructivist hypotheses can be
expressed as follows (and see Appendix B2)...
O l d M e d i a N e w M e d i a
Bandwidth Scarce Abundant
Content Little Diverse
Relevance General and Mass Specialist or Personal
Reach Bounded Unbounded
Mediaspace Localised and Geopolitical Global
Communication One-to-many Many-to-many or One-to-one
Consumption One specified time Time of individual's choosing
Memetic products Widely identical Individualised
Address One-way Two-way
Reception Passive Participatory
Delivery Push Pull
Production Centralised Distributed
Determinism Kulturnation Staatsnation
Bonding Geographical Interests
Community Despite differences Because of similarities
Relations Cultural compatriates Cultural strangers
Participation From territory From anywhere
We witness the upset of each element of the trinity model of media nationalisation -
territorial delimitation of media consumption is no longer necessarily in effect;
51
consumers are emancipated from the consumption of scarce, shared content; and what
content remains to be shared can be taken with entirely new production and memetic
authority.
Essentially, we can hypothesise the dissipation and diminution of the national
community and the continual assertion of communities of interest.
52
N E W F O R M S : P E R M U T A T I O N S A N D P R A C T I C A B L E H Y P O T H E S E S
So, the forces driving new media question fundamentally whether there will any longer
be mass media to administer massification to people in Wales. Essentially, we might
hypothesise the decline of their national community and the continued ascendance of
communities of interest.
‘As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation state will give
way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will
socialise in digital neighbourhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant’
(Negroponte, 1996: p7).
E x t r a - t e r r e s t r i a l a p p r o p r i a t i o n o f r e m o t e n a t i o n a l i t y
Indeed, with the annihilation of geography, a web user situated in Wales can consume
memes designed for an entirely distinct territory or culture, as the global village takes
effect. Internationalisation of distribution has prompted producers - the San Fransisco
Examiner, for example - to establish web editions, resulting in an unlimited
geographical reach, so that when a Welsh person accesses www.examiner.com, he or
she consumes a text which was produced and is stored in a culture-territory of
thousands of miles away.
A simple analysis of such outlets, as seen in Appendix B4, reveals the memes - or,
stories - we find bear no relation to the situated culture in which our Welsh subject is
physically located or, likely, even to his or her individual life. Indeed, the memes have
no resemblance to those Welsh constituents identified earlier in this study as the key
circulations in conventional nationalisation. The memetic subset absorbed by the
‘Welsh’ individual belongs, in fact, to an entirely different location. New media memes,
it transpires, can leap countries in a single bound 63.
63 Some Welsh television and radio channels are also available throughout the UK , thanks to digital satellitebroadcasting’s new abundance.
53
Thus, the Morely & Robins hypothesis would appear to be legitimately borne out, as
‘the link between culture and territory becomes significantly broken ’ (Morely & Robins, 1995:
p112). Additionally, cool products made from the staples of conventional publishers’ and
broadcasters’ hot content may masquerade as ‘new media,’ but old media memes online
remain old media memes, still credited with a prescriptive mode of address prior to
interactive consumption. So, when the product is ‘shovelware’ 64 rather than radically
conceived, again obliterating active and interactive readership, the ensuing identity
administered to the individual is the remote one. Having determined that memes have
an affect on their receiver, the mediated identity of a Haverfordwest resident who
consumes primarily San Fransiscan media would begin to resemble that of a San
Fransiscan, and his or her national identity consequently shaped by the United States
national dynamic which continually reverberates above Californian regional media.
Such a hypothesis corresponds to a cultural imperialist effect, but on request.
T h e D a i l y M e i s n o t T h e D a i l y W a l e s
The Daily Me is realised in a number of different scenarios, yet memetic reception is
not daily at all unless the user consciously chooses to consume content with all the
ritualistic repetition of Andersonianism, disregarding empowerment and efficiency. As
a permanent, portable object, a copy of The Western Mail, once it has been published,
can be picked up for use at the discretion of its owner, but the incessant act of sale each
morning discourages memes from public release as soon as they are produced and
encourages simultaneous mass consumption, instead, the morning after 65. Likewise,
transient broadcast bulletins communicate at times which make consumption similarly
homogenous. Whilst hot ‘rolling’ services such as BBC News24 and Sky News claim to
offer ‘news when you want it,’ they are still subject to timetabling and prioritisation
64 Shovelware is ‘content taken from any source and put on the web as fast as possible with little regard for appearanceand usability,’ thereby not fulfilling the potential of a more capable medium. Source: www.whatis.com/shovelwa.htm.65 The Western Mail editor Neil Fowler told the 1999 Wales Media Forum / Royal Television Society conference‘Wales: A New Media Agency’ that the publication was considering publishing content on its TotalWales web siteimmediately upon being filed in the newsroom. The site would, in principle, become a rolling news service whilst the‘dead-tree’ publication would thus become a secondary product, current when the print run plucks memes from the newspool.
54
concerns. It is the ephemeralism of personalisable services such as My Yahoo!, seen in
Appendix B5 (Fig 3), with which the user can immediately access memes not held back
for publication or broadcast at future allotted hours... when I accessed My Yahoo! at
3.56am, for example, I read a political meme, filed at 1.44am, hours before the sleeping
mass of Wales... if, already fragmented, that mass was ever to read it at all. As
consumption becomes user-determined, the conventional framework for mass
understanding thus appears to disintegrate.
The user can, indeed, tailor memetic consumption to such a degree that the democratic
meme within such a story - or any of the other memes earlier identified as key cultural
components - can be consciously averted. Appendix B6 demonstrates how an individual
can opt in and out of memetic categories (Fig 1) and can adjust the degree of depth and
coverage given to each, whilst he or she is also able to re-prioritise memes as would
best suit personal attachments (Fig 2). Effectively, the consumer is able to banish the
culture category that is ‘Home’ (see Fig 1) with a single click to grant his or her own
authority to what is significant to the individual rather than the national collective.
Such media, we can hypothesise, would thus produce a uses-and-gratification dynamic
66 in which there is no longer a unified sense of what is important to the nation. Geraint
Talfan Davies warns Wales:
there is the direct threat that fragmentation of the viewing and listening public
may mean that the media will play a lesser rôle in maintaining linguistic and
cultural development 67.
Indeed, the appearance of Wales-specific content within the broad selection framework
is intensely negligible 68, as the likes of Yahoo! and Excite take news feeds largely from
international agencies with little, if any, memetic production indigenous to the
66 Blumler & Katz (1974) - in O’Sullivan et al (1994, p156) - find people use media in order to fulfil certain needs,including diversion, personal relationships, personal identity and surveillance of others.67 VLV conference.68 There is no ‘Wales’ category featured in either of these portals, and the ‘Welsh-Scottish Premier Division’ leaguetable which can be appended to My Excite is a full season out of date, indicating serious deficiency in the rugby meme.
55
principality. Of a small, informal sample comprising Yahoo!, Excite, CNN and MSN 69,
there was no indication of news content specifically targeted at the Welsh territory
(with the exception of weather reports), and no Welsh content provider is engaged in a
partnership which sees indigenous content used by extra-national web sites, as
GuardianUnlimited has demonstrated by sharing news with Yahoo! and MSN, but such
a relationship only makes a Welsh person’s new media memes as sparse as those given
to Wales in The Guardian itself and other incursive London press ... the majority of
content is organised non-nationally. We thus hypothesise the pre-eminence of
non-Welsh memes, contributing to a reduced visibility of Welshness.
H i e r a r c h y n o t t e r r i t o r y : c o m m u n i t y c o m e s f r o m c o n v i c t i o n
Yet it is not merely the link between culture and territory which appears to become
broken. In this ‘general demassification,’ Wales’ culture itself would seem to diminish
as non-national, pro-affinity memes circulate in specific, niche communities.
Afforded an extraordinary multiplication of available like-minded participants by the
international reach of media connections and the extension of nervous systems, cool
media support specialist social groups populous enough to actualise van Dijk’s
‘component masses’ (van Dijk, 1999: p169).
Community requires context, which, in offline Wales, is established by residence in the
geography of extent and is narrow because the comparatively small population produces
little cultural diversity. Online communities, by contrast, are established by a context
which is expressed entirely in the indulgence of diverse, territorially-independent
passions.
Indicating the extent of trans-national online heterogeneity, groups directory Liszt
catalogues some 80,000 Usenet newsgroups, 90,095 mailing lists and 37,751 chat
69 With the exception of CNN - which, in the MediaGuaridan of April 10th, 2000, revealed it is to increase its regionaland localised web news output - these web sites constitute 3 out of the UK’s 4 most visited locations (source:Nielsen/NetRatings, www.eratings.com/news/20000504.htm), making the sample broadly representative of user’s newmedia destinations. No figures are available for Welsh web use, so we must transpose these results onto Wales.
56
channels. Such arenas are ‘a way to find groups of people discussing whatever it is you
really care about’ 70, rather than what BBC Wales Today or the Wales On Sunday
supposes the individual cares about. As the eminent cosmos of community media,
Usenet is a subject-organised hierarchy of groups, the memetic content of which is
contributed by original postings and follow-ups which constitute discussions always
framed by the self-expression of the group’s own, titled affinity...
‘The medium is the message because it creates the audience most suited to it .
The content of a medium is a conscious reflection on itself’ (M. McLuhan in Wolf, 1996:
channeling.html).
That is, the memes circulating within an online community are determined by its
designation and, consequently, define that community:
The members of, say, a chat group about the TV show Friends are all interested
in that subject and ‘talk’ only about it. Rarely does anyone discover the things
over which they differ (Browning, 1998: p112).
In fact, the memetic range is simply narrowed to such an extent that divergent opinion
is always self-contained by the narrow remit of the group’s founding context. All
demarcations between communities thus exist not in geopolitical, territorial
boundaries, but in ethereal, hierarchical structures entirely derivative from ideology
and interest.
Usenet’s hierarchy, for example, is organised along typically geography-independent
lines, the majority of upper categories (umbrellas, if you will) being broadly relevant to
inhabitants of many nations and cultures (see Appendix B6). The
‘alt.sports.soccer.manchester.united’ newsgroup, for example, illustrates how
communities of interest are formed by extending in the broad hierarchy a narrowing
70 Even these figures are wildly conservative, not accounting for web-based and other forums. Source: www.liszt.com.
57
degree of specialisation principally contained under a nonspecific banner. With this
specialisation, memes rarely, if ever, venture from pertaining to Manchester United FC.
Here, communities are defined by intangible affinity structures in which the imagined
nation can be transcended, its amassed social identity discarded to float in the
more-imagined metaphor of cyberspace... after all, ‘the final point of a virtual world is
to dissolve the constraints of the anchored world so that we can lift anchor’ (Heim, 1993: p137).
‘Communities formed by ideas will be as strong as those formed by the forces of
physical proximity’ (Negroponte, Dec 1998). All of this implies that G.T. Davies’ ‘information
exile’ is replicated online. Essentially, if the modes of the old media ‘made it possible
to ‘think’ the nation’ (Anderson, 1991: p22), then, we can surmise, the changes and reversal of
those modes in new media would make it possible to ‘unthink’ the nation.
58
F I N D I N G N E W N A T I O N A L C O N S T R U C T I O N S
C a s e s t u d y : U s e n e t
But, whilst each affinity hypothesis can be suitably borne out to imply a diminution of
national feeling, such hypotheses cannot be corroborated to indicate the full extent of
the new media’s implications. Rather, it appears, it is possible also to ‘ rethink’ the
nation...
Indeed, as Wales’ old, hot media producers repurpose analogue or atoms memes online,
so their content-gathering techniques and national audience convictions - grounded by
geographical jurisdiction - also migrate to the emancipated media, resulting in a
shovelware replication of the constructivist product’s territorial imagination 71. More
fundamentally, the cool media boast the contradictory existence of Wales-specific
congregations, clearly indicating that ethereal, global hierarchies are not exclusively
confined to interest-specific affiliations. We observe the #Wales chat channel carried by
various IRC networks 72, the Cymraeg-L mailing list group for Welsh learners to
converse by e-mail and, most fundamentally of all, a number of Usenet newsgroups 73:
alt.culture.welsh wales.cymraeg wales.sportalt.music.wales wales.education.general wales.sport.general
soc.culture.welsh wales.genealogy wales.sport.rugby-union
uk.local.north-wales wales.history.general wales.talkuk.local.south-wales wales.music wales.test
uk.local.west-wales wales.music.general wales.usenet.announcewales.adverts.general wales.politics wales.usenet.config
wales.announce.moderated wales.politics.assemblywales.config wales.politics.general
We thus find that Welshness can exist amid the international din of global voices.
Online, national identity becomes a series of interest groups , a collection of niches
among and alongside many.
71 TotalWales, BBC Wales Online and BBC News Wales Online (recall that The Western Mail and BBC Wales constitutethe country’s few indigenous content producers) all serve to repurpose, with negligible modification, content whichoriginated in the hot newsrooms and studios of print and broadcast.72 Internet Relay Chat, a multi-network architecture for participating in real-time, text-based discussion in distinct‘channels.’73 Whilst universal accessibility of newsgroups may be hampered by variances in which internet service providers chooseto carry which groups on their newsservers, the list here, obtained from NTLWorld’s newsserver, is believed to becomplete or near-complete.
59
L o c a t i n g W e l s h n e s s : h o w d o w e f i n d n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y ?
We can see in the Usenet hierarchy, the organisational importance of which is crucial,
that Wales-specific memes circulate initially in broad, interest-based categories in
which the specific cultural context is the result of a global narrowing - from
‘alternative’ to ‘music’ to ‘wales,’ for example. In 1998, however, the dissipated
residence of Wales-specific memes at the ends of such fragmentary group chains
prompted the creation of the ‘wales.*’ upper hierarchy on grounds of cultural-political
autonomy:
Wales is a nation; we have our own language, culture, national sports teams
and, soon, Assembly. I, for one, want that recognised by having our own
hierarchy. The government of the United Kingdom recognises Wales as a
nation; why can’t Usenet? It’s a demand for a recognition of Wales as it stands
now (Greenow, 1998: msg) 74.
Consequently, there was enacted a group reorganisation which led to the residence of
distinct Welsh memes under the top-level ‘wales.*’ umbrella, a policy which has
resulted in ‘the ghettoisation of Welsh culture within the hierarchy, as S4C has done
with Welsh TV’ 75. Indeed, such organisations are analogous to the opt-in and opt-out
models identified of territorially-contained television and the press in Wales... the broad
‘alt.*,’ ‘soc.*,’ and ‘uk.*’ classifications resemble the generalising UK-centric
producers, with their minority regional programming, whilst the ‘wales.*’ hierarchy is
likened to the internalistic reconstitution of Welsh language and culture by S4C, S4C
Digidol, The Western Mail and, increasingly, BBC Choice Wales, as non-Welsh memes
become the opt-outs from the norm because interests with a national slant are
continually ‘in’... ‘all Wales, all the time!’
74 For transcripts of the discussion, see Appendix B7, http://www.deja.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=recognition+wales+usenet+hierarchy&ST=MS&svcclass=dnserver&DBS=1 andhttp://www.deja.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=welsh+ ghettoisation+language&ST=MS&svcclass=dnserver&DBS=175 See footnote above.
60
The group topic represents the ontological importance of nationality in the order of
things. Domicile of all Wales’ memetic productions under the nation’s own category is
a semantic and practical re-unification of the wired Welsh in their own context, a
context which is territorialistic, immediately connotating all that the Welsh land
signifies. Cultural demarcations here may be essentially ethereal and ideological, but
they frequently adopt the same shapes as the geographical.
Likewise, in cool national communities we witness the genesis of cultural codes of
practice for digital national identity which remarkably imitate physical-world
considerations employed both by law and by courtesy - Usenet’s Welsh charters, for
example, declare official bilingualism (see Appendix B8), as do users voluntarily:
[In soc.culture.welsh], either [English or Welsh] is welcome. Netiquette dictates
that if the first post on a topic is made in English, I should reply in English. But
if it was in Welsh, I will normally respond in Welsh, often with an English
translation 76.
Thus, the cultural anchor is not completely cast away; but the baggage of nationhood is
deliberately transferred. The niches of the embracing Welsh hierarchy closely resemble
the country’s key memetic components, and beg inspection...
M e t h o d o l o g i c a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n s
Unfortunately, it would appear implicitly impossible to corroborate the hypotheses of
‘Welsh’ people transcending national, territorial media in favour of emancipatory,
niche memes. Indeed, this was the major imperfection in Mackay & Powell’s study (1998:
p204). Implicit in such a hypothesis is the understanding that the Welsh individual, of
course, discards national identity when he or she participates in the new communities,
thus his or her actual nationality is made anonymous. Likewise, there is no convention
76 Dyfrig Thomas cited by R. Andrews (Sep 3, 1998), ‘Dyfrig Spreads The Welsh World On The Internet,’ in ‘LlanelliStar’ (Swansea: South-West Wales Publications), p34. Mr. Thomas is proprietor of Welsh-language literature chain store‘Siop Y Werin,’ a member of Llanelli’s Eisteddfod 2000 steering committee, and a member of the Wales-Usenetcommittee which manages the Usenet wales.* hierarchy. See Appendix B9 for further details.
61
for identifying Wales-based internet addresses beyond a ‘.uk’ suffix 77. Measurement of
the exact memetic consumption of Welsh folk in non-Welsh channels is thus impossible
within the remit of this study. More sophisticated modes of research are required in
which a sampling of users in Wales would install monitoring software which logs
online activity including the extra-territorial 78. It would, however, help to consider such
a failing a finding... Welsh nationals’ probable, yet invisible, participation in
non-national communities creates a research gap which, in fact, validates those
hypotheses.
The objective in looking at newsgroups which are Wales-related is to address, with
representative evidence, a handful of concerns regarding the nature of national
participation, in order to comprehend the new Welshness. Namely: What memes do we
find? How popular are they? Where do they come from? How do they distinguish the
Welsh identity from others?
I looked for software capable of capturing and interpreting a sample of messages posted
to Welsh newsgroups, and discovered GetNews and GroupStat 79. I employed
GetNews to download from NTL’s newsserver any and all messages posted, during the
month Wednesday 15th March to Wednesday 19 April, to the following,
highest-volume newsgroups:
alt.music.wales wales.cymraeg
soc.culture.welsh wales.politics.assembly
uk.local.north-wales wales.talk
uk.local.south-wales
uk.local.west-wales
77 Only ISO 3166-1, UN-recognised nations can have abbreviated codes created to identify domains as national, despitethe recent inclusion of territorially problematic communities such as Palestine. For a list of country codes andinstitutional instructions on creating national codes, see Appendix B10.78 Such a method would resemble the work of the British Audience Research Board, which logs the television activityof 10,500 people happy to meter their media, and is automatically and remarkably well suited to computational mediasuch as the internet.79 GetNews and GroupStat are complimentary tools written as source-code scripts for the Perl language, a system notbest suited to my Windows98 PC. A compatible version of Perl had to be downloaded and extensive modifications madeto the code of each script during the course of an e-mail exchange with Alex LaHurreau, the author. Mr. LaHurreau hascredited my help and modifications in the current release of both scripts, freely available fromwww.locl.net/homes/alexdw/comp/groupstat.
62
GroupStat’s processing was then deployed on the samples to generate measurable,
ordered data for each group, presenting the following:
Most popular threads (or, memes; the top 15 or so>
can be considered a community’s prime memes)
Top cross-posted groups (indicating where the>
community intersections and demarcations lay 80)
Most prolific posters (their e-mail addresses can>
reveal actual national locations)
I was thus able to generate a good set of data which deploys quantitative processing to
produce visible, meaningful qualitative readings and interpretations for an informal
content analysis 81.
Kaunismaa claims ‘in studies of national identity, the position of the researcher is part
of the phenomenon’ because ‘the researcher is also a citizen and a member of an ethnic
group’ (1995: kaunismaa.html). Yet, whilst my political and cultural identity cannot, Kaunismaa
argues, be discarded, my mode of data collection is non-participatory, and my sample a
collection of groups which are obviously Wales-related because it is specifically they
which are my concern.
D i s c u s s i o n o f f i n d i n g s
The consequence of the conversion of nationality from an underlying foundation for
being to an interest all of its own, we find, is an intensely concentrated adherence to the
context in question, the subject meme deviating little from the group’s function.
In alt.music.wales, for example, content is dominated by reverence of already
well-known bands from Wales (#9, #14); recommendations and information for
newcomer artists which amounts to promotion; and scene appraisals, even the negative,
abusive of which (#1, #5) demonstrate a maintenance of the meme at hand. Memes
80 Accepting that the principle of self-definition is aided by that of comparable opposition.81 All data can be found in Appendix C1.
63
attain a degree of coverage and value which the scarcity of conventional media cannot
sustain.
In the uk.local.* hierarchy, localisations are effective, with the effect of concentration
making a meme highly locally specific... ‘Llandudno food’ (#14) for example, is a
popular uk.local.north-wales topic, whilst the uk.local.south-wales ‘Free NTL Internet’
meme (#9) does not make an appearance in the North or West variations as NTL’s own
service is restricted to a South Wales cable franchise. Participants, then, are naturally
attracted to the group of their own situated culture, transposing even sub-national
territorial dynamics onto the new media.
Most representatively of this point, the memes of soc.culture.welsh (by definition, truly
the newsgroup devoted to ‘Welsh Culture,’ and almost volumnous enough to warrant
such an accolade had uk.local.south-wales’ 2010-article volume not beaten its 802
substantially) are intensely narrow and serve to recirculate Welsh-English divisions (#2,
#9), non-Welsh ostracisation (#5), preoccupation with Welsh symbolic (#14, #39) and
historical memes (#20, #21, #30), constitutional concerns (#13, #9), cultural events
(#56), and Welsh contributions to external occurrences (#17, #36). Likewise, with
wales.cymraeg’s popular privileging of culture memes almost exclusively associated
with the language itself (a rock band’s first exclusively Welsh-language album (#6),
methods of meeting Welsh-speaking users of an internet messaging system (#3), for
example), divergence from lingually-specific memes is uncommon.
Fundamentally, then, we find that the variety of national identity expressed in such
communities is profoundly ethnocentric and parochial in the extreme . The imagined
communities of the new media are remarkably specific. When the nation becomes a
highly focused community of interest, that interest, essentially locking out divergent
64
memes, produces a form of culture which is not that of the broad, national mass but one
of high-definition self-referentialism, and devoid of non-national tones 82.
Seemingly contradictory to this evidence of internalisation is the frequent discovery,
amongst participants’ names and addresses, of country codes 83 not native to Wales 84.
Throughout almost the entire sample of communities, we find contributions to the
meme pool from New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, the USA,
Hong Kong, Germany, France, Singapore, Australia, Italy, the Christmas Islands,
Finland, Spain and Russia.
These constitute remote connections to the national sphere. Additionally, since the
sphere’s identity is, as has been shown, territorially derivative in structure and
ethnocentric in nature, the foreigners and the expatriates making those connections from
afar indulge in a Welshness which, according to both nostalgia and worldwide
stereotypes, is idealistic, or typical.
Contributions remote from Wales are least frequent in uk.local.north-wales,
uk.local.west-wales and wales.cymraeg, and most frequent in soc.culture.welsh, the
high-definition, ‘Welsh Culture’ newsgroup itself. This might indicate that, of those
extra-territorial connections to the nation, the majority are made by seeking the prime
national, ‘Welsh Culture’ brand over the local conceptualisations and over a
language-dependent forum unreadable to the foreigners. Additionally, it would appear
the soc.culture.welsh participant ‘neb’ (#8), in making the political statement of
expressing a ‘.cym’ country code for Cymru which does not exist, exhibits an
ontological desire to relocate his or herself in the identity infrastructure as Welsh.
82 Except beneath uk.local.*, of course, where the intensity is of a Welsh region, as well as the nation.83 CCTLDs, or Country-Code Top-Level Domain names such as ‘.uk’ indicating the national location of a web site oremail sender. See Appendix B10.84 Whilst, as has been noted, there is no native Welsh CCTLD, we can infer that many participants located in ‘.uk’origins are either resident in the Welsh territory itself or are Welsh-concerned individuals (ie. exiles) in the other regionsand nations of the UK.
65
‘Cross-posts’ are those memetic messages which have been forwarded to multiple
groups. Whilst NetScan software 85 produces thorough newsgroup data too unwieldy for
a study of this sort, it helpfully expresses groups which receive cross-posts as
‘neighbours,’ a metaphorical construct which puts one in mind of spatial proximity.
Yet, whilst the neighbours of territorial nations - particularly Wales, which has but one -
are forces of cultural opposition, those of digital communities are ones of similar
associates. Whilst offline neighbourly relations serve to demarcate the nature of one’s
own nation by differentiation from the other, online groups’ cross-posts are made to
communities which share at least some common memetic thread.
Under the auspices of society and culture, soc.culture.welsh’s neighbour’s are
predominantly the culture groups of other nations, but also each local Welsh group,
uniting the districts within a national arrangement. Likewise, the clear main relations of
uk.local.north-wales, uk.local.south-wales and uk.local.west-wales are each other,
suggesting a consensual construction of an infrastructure for cultural exchange, where
previously unserved by deficient transport infrastructure and problematic media
reception. Indeed, whilst uk.local.north-wales’ other neighbours are groups
encompassing the region’s adjacent Granada TV and Daily Post content connections,
so, too, uk.local.south-wales and uk.local.west-wales share the same cross-post
destinations, and all are, of course, largely recipient of memes from the Wales-specific
groups.
These groups’ fertile lists of neighbours, in tandem with the remote participation
hypothesis, might indicate purveyors of forums as diverse as israel.gayjews and
alt.sex.fetish.agriculture can intersect and remotely co-exist with a Welsh identity. Only
wales.cymraeg and wales.politics.assembly remain introspective, exhibiting a high
85 NetScan is a Usenet analysis tool, analogous to GetNews and GroupStat used here, which was considered as analternative mode of research in this study. Developed at UCLA by Marc A. Smith, who utilised the software in‘Communities In Cyberspace’ (1999: p195) in a study unrelated to national identity, NetScan is now owned byMicrosoft, and is available for live public testing at netscan.research.microsoft.com, but it is unfinished and, whilst thedata produced is comprehensive, much is difficult to comprehend.
66
degree of cultural ‘stickiness’ as memes venture no further than their own political and
lingual jurisdictions 86.
Of the trinity construction model, we can say that territorial containment is largely
escaped but potentially prevails, memetic components are extremely diverse yet
specificities can be shared, and that cool, liberal reception obliterates hot simultaneity.
I d e n t i t y p a r a d e
The transcendence of geography may allow for an avoidance of nationality, but it is
clearly indicated that, as well as a jettison or deconstruction of the nation, there is
entirely possible a reconstruction.
Whilst conventional media continues to produce finite content for an old, finite-stream
conception, despite the presentation of the economics of the new, the capacity of
networked, many-to-many media users to create their own content and to talk to others
results in the self-construction of cultural memes. Effectively, the nation speaks unto
itself, its identity representation its own responsibility. Says Euryn Ogwen Williams:
Interacting through the telling of a tale is a natural Welsh instinct. That is how
the Mabinogion were created 87, with the storyteller interacting with his
audience. Film and television drama narrative is an American convention;
therefore, it is possible for creative authors [the new, participatory audience] to
use the revolution to jog the memory of a nation and create a Welsh style (1998:
lecture_intro.html). 88.
86 With the exception of memetic cross-pollination from wales.politics.assembly to uk.politics.misc above other groups,indicating constitutional devolution, rather than issue politics, is important.87 BBC Wales, HTV Wales and S4C bosses told the National Assembly, prior to its inception, that ‘an audio stream ofthe Assembly would be practicable today and should be made available on the internet’ (1998 joint working paper inG.T. Davies, 1999: p69), but, two years on, BBC Wales only publishes a single stream repurposed from BBC2’s‘Assembly Live’ programme on Tuesdays and Wednesday afternoons, not taking advantage of the ability to offermultiple streams from committee meetings and so on, thereby boosting the democratic Staatsnation.88 Euryn Ogwen Williams is in charge of digital broadcasting and interactive services at S4C, and delivered this speechduring the Wales Today lecture at the 1998 Bro Ogwr National Eisteddfod.
67
Cultural constituents may thus be retained, the nation becoming re-familiarised with
itself by means of a symbiotic national representation which produces always automatic
identity:
Because of media exposure, most Welsh people probably know New York
better than they do our capital city. But because cheap new technology lets
people tell their own stories, they can tell everybody what the country is really
like. It’s a lot more democratic, transmitting our history orally, like a new
Mabinogion (Gower, 1998: p34) 89.
We see such consensual familiarisation in arenas such as BBC TalkWales (Appendix C2) 90,
the collection of online forums which again hold dear key memes as the nature of
Welshness goes up for debate, and in S4C’s National Eisteddfod chat room, which
leverages Wales’ most revered cultural event to create a relationship with its audience
(Appendix C3).
The result of having active individuals publishing memes unto each other produces a
legitimate automatic representation of Wales which unifies its constituents.
Connections from afar, however - to Usenet newsgroups, TotalWales’ ForumWales and
Worldwide Welsh arenas 91, and the Gwlad rugby message board 92 - constitute a
striking remote participation in Welsh national life. Welsh diasporas linked to their
homeland via media could achieve through remote connectivity what those of Ireland
have through traditions propagated by sheer numbers of diasporic descendants. Distant
from the territory which gives the national culture its whole origin of being, individuals
can fulfill a communicative and ongoing part in the vitality of the corporate collective .
Effectively, the cultural life of a meme is suddenly joyfully indefinite , regardless of
location.
89 Jon Gower is a television and radio presenter, writer and cultural commentator.90 See www.bbc.co.uk/talkwales and Appendix C2.91 See www.totalwales.com.92 See www.glwadrugby.com and Appendix C4. The tightly-knit Gwlad online community is a collection of Welshrugby fans resident in Wales, London and farther afield which regularly holds get-togethers in London.
68
Such inclusion in globalisation would feasibly create an international, networked
nervous system of expats and patriots whose memetic exchanges produce, store and
transmit identity on the lines, in the interlinked nodes of both the homeland Welsh and
the foreign Welsh.
Indeed, Metcalfe’s Law decrees that the value of a network increases when does the
number of its users, because more people can communicate with more people 93. What
we can thus surmise is that ‘Wales’ - construed as a people network - would gain more
national cultural value as it gains new, distant minds and memes. Likewise, the
increased availability of Welsh speakers, whilst sparse internationally, would boost the
language’s use, as nationality is reconstructed.
93 Bob Metcalfe, developer of the Ethernet network standard and the 3Com networking company, his law coined byGeorge Gilder. See eg. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//6.11/metcalfe_pr.html.
69
C O N C L U S I O N S
The essence of imagining a new media identity in Wales is that of the fundamental
tension between the capacity of the Welsh to disengage from their cultural memes,
reducing the value of the national network, and the potential reconstitution of
Welshness in a concentrated and often remote arrangement. Territorial residence is no
longer paramount to the experience of mediated nationality, rendering a diasporic
society firmly culturally situated, and it is media’s audiences themselves who control
the production of the corporate identity.
Whilst evidence of Welsh inhabitants disconnecting from national consumption online
is hard to come by, the existence of the principle and possibility themselves make the
occurrence obvious. Yet it is conversely true that the conversion of nationality into the
sort of niche groups many escape to results in a highly coherent, if exclusive, form of
that identity, having the effect of turning the country’s underlying foundation for
individual life into one individual act amongst many.
The essence of the revolution is this: the destruction of any power that does
not arise out of a willingness of individuals to sign up to a community (E.O.
Williams, 1998: lecture_intro.html).
National identity is remarkably migrated. In this sense, what is produced is a
representation of the long-occurring process of schizophrenic identity management
which comprises the national as merely one of a gamut of the individual’s everyday
identities. It is thus conceivable that the specialism afforded to each merely intensifies
the experience of all, including nationality, which is rarely uppermost in the mind when
consuming mediated content.
Despite such expectations and the widening of the individual’s sphere of interest, the
conventional media remain largely purveyors of repuporsing, which satisfies the narrow
sphere. More importantly, however, in Wales all permutations discussed here are
70
tempered by the lowest new media penetration in the United Kingdom, penetration
which is as fractious as that of conventional broadcasting and print 94.
Consequently, whilst the old media’s mass is uncertain, neither can there be a mass
audience of the new media. Internet access is predominantly via the widely used
standard telephone network, but such computer-mediated access to the new media is
seen as having a steep learning curve on its way to higher penetration. Whilst the
television - familiar, widely spread and intuitive - is mooted as a better mass agent of
media convergence, the existing topographical problems of broadcasting would appear
to make the scope of TV-delivered cool media similarly fractious 95 .
Rather, it seems, with a multiplicity of forthcoming distribution channels, and differing
degrees of regional penetration for each, it may ultimately be that national identity, in
line with the true social make-up regardless of media, is destined to be as fragmentary
as ever.
94 Cymru.com (1999: pp9) finds internet and cable access is denied to many rural areas whilst mobile phone coverageis hampered by topography just as terrestrial broadcasting.95 In the medium term, with interactive cable television and internet services, realistically, not expected masspenetration for some time, the prime mode of ‘digital’ television delivery will be terrestrial.
71
72
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