ABSTRACT
The methodological base of international media research is comparative: but what should be the unit of comparison? So far the criteria of difference have been mostly ‘national-territorial’: the nation state is taken as the unquestioned starting point in comparing media production, representation, reception and appropriation in different countries. While this makes sense in specific fields of media research (media systems, political economy), which, like most media politics, remain territorially bound in many respects, it ignores other phenomena which may need to be formulated outside the frame of the ‘national-territorial’: cultural formation linked to race, gender and ethnicity, and deterritorialized popular cultures. In addition, it obscures our view of what ‘media cultures’ might be in an era of media flows that consistently overlap national borders. Based on these considerations we want to argue in this chapter for a
‘transcultural approach’ to comparative media research. This transcultural approach does not start with the ‘state’ and its territoriality as the essential centre of comparison but outlines a more complex horizon for carrying out media research by comparing different media cultures understood as specific, if often blurred, cultural ‘thickenings’. To make such an approach understandable we first criticize the ‘container thinking’ implicit in much of the present comparative media research. Then we outline our understanding of media cultures as ‘cultural thickenings’ or ‘amalgamations’. Based on this we finally explain a ‘transcultural approach’ as a specific way of comparing media cultures. Overall we hope to develop arguments that provoke us to think about comparative media research in a new way. It is important to emphasize at the outset that we see our argument as just
one perspective on a very complex theoretical problem. If we look from the perspective of national cultural discourse, we must agree with Ulf Hannerz that (national) cultures can no longer be seen as based simply on what is shared by their members since ‘contemporary complex societies systematically build nonsharing into their cultures’ (Hannerz, 1992: 44). Seen from outside that national perspective, we can still think of media cultures or diaspora cultures, for example, as based principally on shared meanings but only on condition
that we give up the assumption that such sharing takes place necessarily, or even importantly, within the container of national territories. It is the latter perspective whose implications we develop here, since it is the prospects for comparing ‘media cultures’ – as part of a wider internationalizing of media and cultural research – with which we are more broadly concerned.1
