 I'm going to leave the task of introducing each of the speakers to my colleague Henry Jenkins, but I do want to say one thing first. One of the speakers today, Aswin, you need to help me with the last name again. Puna Thandik. Aswin Puna Thak. I screwed it up again. I'm sorry. You can see his name there. It's my Anglo-Saxon weaknesses that make it impossible for me to say Indian names. I apologize. Aswin is a graduate of the MIT program in comparative media study, and to my knowledge, he is the first such graduate to speak at a communications forum event. So this is a doubly interesting and exciting moment for those of us in CMS. So I'm Henry Jenkins, and I'm going to be moderating this discussion. The title, Global Media, tells us next to nothing about what we're going to be talking about for the next two hours. There's so many theories of globalization out there, so many ways it connects to the word media. So the first thing we're really going to try to do is get on top of that. For the moment, I think we might describe it as locally and nationally specific modes of production and consumption in a context of global circulation. That is, we're going to be very interested in local level decisions that get made to produce content that's going to be seen by audiences around the world. This national still plays a very important role in our understanding of what constitutes global media. No sense as the nation-state disappear, but the relationship of local media industries to a global marketplace are changed profoundly. Just to give two examples in the last week that would sort of point to this. The first is that at least as of Monday afternoon, a hundred million people have seen Susan Boyle's appearance on Britain's Got Talent, an extraordinary story. Just by point of comparison, 37 million people saw the final episode last season of American Idol, one of the highest rated shows on American television. So far, close to three times, the number of people who have downloaded Susan Boyle's video on YouTube has watched one of the highest rated shows on American television. This is a global phenomenon. It's worth, and all the fuss that's been made about Susan Boyle, we lose track of the fact that it's from a television show that's not commercially available in this market. Indeed, if people get hooked in the Susan Boyle story, they won't be able to follow it on broadcast television. Although pirates are already there, right? You can go and bit tour and see Britain's Got Talent easily enough, but you're not going to be able to see it on American networks. And so it says something even when a hundred million people in the United States are around the world are interested in this content, there's still borders and barriers that block entry of international content into the United States. And we've got to actually think about that even when we're talking about commercially produced content in English language from Great Britain, one of our closest allies. The second marker I wanted to point out is YouTube launched a movie channel on the last couple of weeks, which has the content organized by genre. And one of the genres they organize content by is foreign film. Now, what does it mean for YouTube, which operates, is globally accessible? To have a category of foreign film, who is it foreign to? Right, how do people understand their experience? Where one country is able to produce film that's seen globally and is seen as Hollywood and every other filmmaking industry in the world gets labeled as foreign and glumped into the same genre by a global media company like YouTube. So this points to the degree to which as a society, we're in a very contradictory state in terms of a much more greater access to global content than ever before. And not having developed our conceptual framework to think about it very well. So each of the speakers today will be talking about different national context, different genres, different modes of circulation. But we hope that together they give us a snapshot of how the media system, a global media system is beginning to take shape and what the implications are of this global, this increased but not yet their system of global circulation of media. So that said, opening this up. We're going to each of the speakers are going to give a very brief opening comments describing some of their research and thought in this area. And then we're going to start mixing it up with some of the topics that are on the board there and eventually open it up to you to the floor for questions, comments, participation, which is always the highlight of any of our communication forum events. So first up is Aswin Puntabecker, a 2003 graduate of MIT Comparative Media Studies Master's Program. I'm really proud to have him there for that reason. He studies globalization, cultural industries, new media and media convergence, and public culture. He's currently working on a book that provides an historical critical account of ongoing changes in the media sector in Bombay and examines the operations of film, television and dot com companies as they grapple with the challenges of imagining Bollywood as a global cultural industry. Very good. So for a few days in February 2009, nearly about 3,000 individuals, executives, directors, producers, policymakers, bureaucrats from all over the world came together for a number of days in Bombay to celebrate a decade of the globalization of Indian film and television. And while this three-day convention organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry attracted participants from a range of industries, there was no doubt that the proceedings were dominated by this thing that we now recognize as Bollywood. And over three days, a number of panel sessions tackled various aspects of change that the film industry has undergone over the past decade, a decade since the government officially granted industry status to cinema and initiated a discourse of corporatization. And of course, over these days, there was a lot of disagreement over what actually Bollywood needs to look like, debates about the merits of Hollywood-style organization and practices versus the family-run and kinship-based model that has defined the workings of the film industry since the late 1940s, partnerships with Hollywood studios, treaties with organizations like the UK Film Council, Piracy and so on. And as I wandered from one panel to another, I started just making a list of people, of places, of companies, of different kinds of organizations that seemed to have a stake in these discussions of Bollywood and of the globalization of Indian cinema. And among the people who were there was Yash Chopra, who's the chairman of this very important film committee, a stalwart of the industry and who, along with his son, Aditya Chopra, is seeking to redefine Yash Raj films as a new kind of global media company. There was Karan Johar, another filmmaker who has played a crucial role in redefining relations between the diaspora and the film making industry in Bombay. And while these established players in the Bombay media world made their appearances on various panels, there were other individuals, organizations and companies that were also involved. So to begin with, as you saw, the US was a partner country throughout this convention and the US commercial service had a very prominent presence. And that little shot you saw of the stall, oddly enough for this throughout this four days, there was nobody manning that booth. It was just this stall of saying US commercial service by USA and that was it. I never quite figured out who was behind this, why they set up the stall and so on. And there were multinational firm companies and television companies, Sony Colors, which is a YCOM owned company with which in a year is now the leading satellite television company. And there was ZCAFE, there was MiP TV of television sales urging executives from Bombay to travel. But there were also others, Shekhar Kapoor from London, a 15 percent delegation from the UK Film Council. And Adil Hossein who runs a company called Dillywood, which acts as a mediator for firm companies coming from Bombay, a diasporic entrepreneur who handles everything from lodging to food to travel for film crews that travel here. There was Anjula Bhatt, CEO and co-founder of Desi Hitch, a New York based web portal involved in creating a space for Desi remix fusion music. And individuals from Warner Brothers, Fox Searchlight, Disney, NBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a number of venture capitalists and so on. Now, many of the panel discussions were focused on and they actually revealed a lot of confusion, conflicts, and tensions in the ongoing kind of negotiations around redefining a national film industry into what many people want to call as Bollywood, a global cultural industry. One sense that was very, very clearly emerging was, in spite of all these confusions, one thing was clear that the spatial coordinates of this thing that we call Bollywood had changed dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years. So the answer to the question, where in the world is Bollywood or how is the world in Bollywood would have to be, it depends. So here's one possible mapping. We can begin with, say, in the northern suburbs of Bombay with Yashraj firms in the Lokhandwala complex, which is comparable to perhaps the Burbank area in California, where a number of film and television companies have their offices. And from here, we could slowly move up a little north to take a look at the firm city a little further north in Gurugam, Mumbai, which offers a range of spaces, a range of production options. And from here, keeping in mind that the redefinition of Bollywood spatial coordinates began to change when satellite television made an appearance in India in the early 1990s, we could move to the south of the city, to the offices of MTV, and to all the transnational advertising agencies. And then from there, maybe all the way to London, where the UK film council is based, and where people like Shekhar Kapoor are invested in forging stronger ties with a range of players in Bombay as well. And from here, we could then move to Burbank, where companies like Warner Brothers, Disney, and Fox Searchlight are all trying to figure out, and their imaginations and practices are also caught up in redefining the Bombay film industry into Bollywood Inc. But the one thing that I do want to point out is, let's not forget that this is only one possible map, and that if we follow this map, we could begin to develop an understanding of how the imaginations and practices of state institutions, this was organized by the national institution of the federal government, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and we could also map the imaginations and practices of different industry professionals. But there are some other parts of the world which are also involved in re-creating Bollywoods or re-imagining Bollywood geographic reach. So here's another possibility. We could move from the suburbs of Bombay to Karachi in Pakistan, which is a renowned hub for media piracy, and from there to Dubai, which complicates matters a little bit more given the city's position as an important media capital in both legitimate and illegitimate ways. And from there, all the way to Beirut in Lebanon, where distributors, as Brian Larkin has shown us, were invested in circulating Bollywood films for over three decades now. And from Lebanon all the way into Nigeria, where the circulation of popular Hindi cinema has not only inspired local filmmakers, but has set up a new kind of path of circulation for Bollywood over the last few decades as well. And all of these places, this mapping from Bombay to Karachi to Dubai to Nigeria, was very much what Ravi Sundaram has called a pirate modernity, where the culture of the copy actually defines both the production, but also the circulation of these sorts of films and television programs. So as we begin considering what seems like a rather dizzying assemblage of media technologies, of people, of capital, I'm inclined to agree with anthropologist William Madgewella's observation that there is really no simple correlation anymore between the spatiality of cultural production and the production of cultural space. And as we begin delving more and more into these sorts of maps and circuits, it becomes clear that we're forced to confront the limits of established media studies paradigms, that even today carve up the space of media culture into production, reception, or at best, a syncretic approach that takes us through maybe a circuit of culture of sorts. And while some scholars have tried to shift our attention to thinking about television sales and distribution and how that creates new circuits of circulation, I'm not convinced that these established models are adequate. And I'd like to finish up this by suggesting that maybe approaching all of this by thinking about circulation, as Brian Larkin has done in the context of Nigeria and that the C3 team here has done in talking about spreadability, is maybe a way forward. And what I'd like to do in the rest of the conversation is to perhaps consider how focusing on circulation might allow us, might actually inform and revitalize our field, and maybe even define a new kind of problematic from which to then approach the question of media globalization to understand how one particular city in the world is not only emerging as a media capital, but has actually historically over time managed to maintain its position as a dominant media capital. All right, so next up is Carolina Acosta Zuru. She's Associate Professor at Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. As a native of Georgia, and I'm proud to see someone from my own state here at MIT, a native of Caracas, Venezuela. Carolina teaches public relations, graphic communication, and cultural studies, and she studies telenovelas and their diverse audiences. I'm just going to show you first the clip, since some people don't know what telenovelas are, and so just show you how this, you don't need to understand. Spanish should know what's going to happen. The episodes are really important because those are the cliffhangers. So all over the world, but some people think they're like soap operas, like the American soap operas. They are like soap operas. They aren't like soap operas. They are like soap operas because they're melodramatic, because they're every day of the week. They're not like soap operas because they have an end. They have 120 episodes, maybe 300 episodes, but they end. The American soap opera only ends 50 years later or something like that. And that makes a huge difference in how people relate to the characters, in how people relate to the stories. And also telenovelas in Latin America are not only in the afternoon blog. They are on prime time. They're the most important television genre in Latin America. So let me take you really quickly through this very complicated telenovela world. And it's interesting because Bollywood has sort of erased or blurred all these distinctions between production and consumption. And here you're going to see it's not as easy to blur these limitations or the limits between production and consumption. So let's see if this thing works. Two billion is the global audience of telenovelas. 12,000 hours are produced every year. They're watching almost every region of the world. They are currently in a new phase in the last 15 years. Masioti says it's called transnational. Guillermo Rosco calls it mercantile. But really the emphasis is on sales. There has always been this tension between the cultural and the business aspects of telenovela. The business aspect is eating the cultural aspect. So it's becoming sort of standardized. And we'll talk about what kind of standard is being used increasingly. Not only exclusively produced in Latin America, many countries in which telenovelas were watched are now produced in their own. And there's a huge international market for the format. You sell the format and each country produces it. So the telenovela world has become the empire of what we call the remake. And if you want to talk about remakes, we have to talk about her. This is the original Betty, the Colombian Betty. Yo soy Betty La Fea. And of course we know that the world is full of Betty's now, including the US Betty, which by the way ugly Betty is not a telenovela. And so this is the empire of the remake. And is this good? Look at all of them. They all have braces. They all have eyeglasses. They are all endearing. They have to be. If not, they're not Betty. But let's go to Latin America. Because Latin America and Spain, where people speak Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America and Spain, these are the big markets still, the original markets. And these are the number of telenovelas on the air in each of these countries in March, last month. So huge. Ecuador, who produces only two telenovelas, they have 37 on the air. So who are the major producers? Well, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela have been traditionally the producers. Colombia is sort of a newcomer in the last 10 years. It has become huge. But we have also a new player. And this is a player that defies the nation state, Telemundo. Telemundo is located in Miami, headquarters in Miami, but it co-produces with Colombia RTI. And it is a huge player, as we will see. So how is the pie divided in the Americas and Spain? Well, 32% of telenovelas on the air come from Mexico. And this is something I want you to start noticing. This is how the pie, the whole pie in the Americas and Spain works. But if we look at each of these major producers, they're also consumers. So what's on the air in Argentina? This is what's on the air in Argentina. Nothing from Venezuela, something from the rest. But how are Argentina and telenovelas? They are producers, so what do they produce? Until the 1990s, they underscored a lot of the local. I loved them, because I thought they would say a lot about the country. Not anymore, not anymore. Now the international market is the goal to get that. So now they're trying to become standardized. So not the same. They also have an accent issue. The accent in Spanish from Argentina is something that is not widely acceptable in other Spanish speaking countries. So they say they have an accent issue. And sometimes they try to neutralize that, which is a shame, I think. But they have a success. They've become the big marketers of youth-oriented telenovelas. And they sell lots and lots of formats. There's a huge producer called Chris Morena that sells lots of this. Look at Brazil. Open television. This is what they watch, Brazilian telenovelas. They are fabulous. It's the realism in telenovelas. Social, cultural issues, political issues are part of the telenovela. It's not just a love story. The context of the story is pretty important. Characters are not Manichean, not goody, goody, goody, goody, so good and naive. She's stupid and evil, evil, evil with these eyebrows permanently like that. No, not like that in Brazil. And the characters, because they're not Manichean, they evolve, which is pretty nice in a storyline. High production values. This is like Hollywood, the way they produce. It's beautiful. Remarges are rare. They produce new stories all the time. It's a very strong industry. Language issue. They're in Portuguese. So they're dubbed in the rest of Latin America. And some people don't like that. They like to watch their telenovelas in the original language. What about Colombia? This is what they watch in Colombia. Look, no Brazilian telenovelas in Colombia. Humor, lots of it. Characters are defined by a main trait. So sometimes they seem a bit cartoonish, but you can't take away your sigh from them. They're fun. It's fresh. The storylines feel fresh. They do not shy away from showing local context and local problems. They've had telenovelas with lots of drug issues, drug trafficking, the narco traffic, et cetera, the obsession with plastic surgery, all that you can find. What about Mexico? 72% is from Mexico. Some from Telemundo. And the ones in Telemundo are shown on TV Azteca. Televisa, the big giant, only shows what they produce. And a little bit from Colombia also in TV Azteca. None of the rest. Mexican telenovelas are what you think about when you think of telenovelas. Very melodramatic, moralistic. The characters, these are it. She is so beautiful and naive. She is ridiculous. And he's such a hunk, but he's not particularly intelligent. And they are like that all the way until the happy end. Of course, the evil ones will pay dearly. Crime and punishment and punishment is huge. Context tends to be unimportant. These are underscored by the Catholic principles, these telenovelas. Very predictable. There's always a big mention with a huge staircase. And the big evil mother-in-law will throw the protagonist down the stairs so she loses her baby. Always. They don't write new stories. These are remakes and remakes and remakes. In the last 10, 12 years, Mexican telenovelas in Televisa have all been remakes of old telenovelas. What about Venezuela? They have a more balanced thing. Why? Because we're not producing much. That's why the pie looks more balanced. So telenovelas in Venezuela, if you take the Mexican model, melodrama, and the Brazilian model realism, you can place all Venezuelan telenovelas somewhere in that continuum. Some are very realistic. There was a telenovela. I wrote a book about a telenovela in which there was a character that was a metaphor of Hugo Chavez, the president. So that realistic. But there are also the melodramatic ones. The industry is heavily affected by the country's political situation. President Chavez closed RCTV, a huge telenovela producer because they were in the opposition. The other network, Venevisión, is terrified. So there's a lot of self-censorship going on. And because RCTV is out, Venevisión has no local competition. So the industry is completely deformed. The local market is deformed. They win no matter what they broadcast. So it's a very sad situation. Therefore, it has lost terrain in the international arena. You can see it by the other pie charts. Now, so this is sort of a summary of all the pie charts, just so you remember. And here are the telenovelas broadcast in the US. In the US, we have three major players. Univision, Telemundo, and Azteca America. And this is what we see. Half, almost half of the telenovelas are from Mexico. And these are, of course, the makeup of Latinos in the US. 66.8% come from Mexico. And then the rest. And if we look at the census numbers for people that are not born in the US, that live in the US, look at the major producers, Mexico. A third of people who are not born in the US, who live here, are from Mexico. So it's a major player. So if you are going to decide in univision and all these networks, what kind of telenovelas you're going to show the Hispanic population, you're going to think of what are they watching when they grow up. And this is what they watch when they were growing up. So they have been taking this bottle since birth, which is Televisa. And this is what univision offers. Univision offers just Televisa. These are the pie charts for univision, Azteca America, and Telemundo. The major competition is between Telemundo and Univision. So there's what we call the Telemundo model. What is it? It has two goals, bid univision and the international sales. Goal number one, they haven't achieved. They have improved, but they are not close. Big goal, international sales. They're selling a lot. They co-produced with Colombia. They have all sorts of things. They adapt all novels. They remake novels. They have a few original stories. Multinational cast, these are the stories in which the father has a Colombian accent, the mother has a Mexican accent, the daughter is Venezuelan, the other one is Ecuadorian. This is like the organization of American states. But at least the protagonist, one of them has to be Mexican because they know that the majority of the Hispanic population comes from Mexico. Beauty is always over-talented in this model. And they strive for a neutral accent, but frankly, it sounds most of the time like Mexico and a little bit Colombian sometimes. The context of the stories is generic. Somewhere in Latin America, there was this gorgeous farm or cattle ranch. We don't know where. Oh, he went to the city and he says, city, ciudad. We don't know where this is. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that the girls have our show in their midriff. That's really important. So this is sort of the Telemundo model. And there's a Miami model also, not made by Telemundo, by the branches of the big producers. They have branches in Miami to make telenovelas for the international market. Gold is international sales. All remakes and rehashing. You take three stories. You cut them into little pieces and you produce something new with them or old. It's very melodramatic. Again, the multinational cast. And here, the neutral accent really sounds Mexican. And the vocabulary is very Mexican. The context of the storylines, luxury. They're all in beautiful, beautiful places. These two models are selling a lot elsewhere in the international arena. And the local telenovelas producers, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina are looking at that. And so we see this thing creeping in. So this is like the big panorama. And of course, we will get to talk about this later. But I just wanted to mention that there are these things that have disrupted the traditional we produce, you consume telenovelas. YouTube is a huge archive of telenovelas. And this is the people love it, the public loves it. If you are in Romania, you can watch what's going on in Colombia. But some of the producers don't like this. So Televisa has been arguing with YouTube. At a point, they closed every single account that had a Televisa episode on YouTube. They closed them all. So there were thousands of users with accounts closed. Venevisión in Venezuela doesn't allow their content to be seen outside of Venezuela. So but the people, they don't take it. They rebel. And I can show you later how. Oh, sorry. Well, blogs, of course. And there are many, many blogs. And there's also blogs in which they place the videos, hidden from the networks, their chats, their message boards. All these things make the world, the telenovela world, seem a little bit smaller than it really is. It's really complex and big. And I know I've just given you the broad strokes. But I guess with questions, we can put this together. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next up is Jonathan Gray, who comes to MIT so often. We're starting to think of him as one of our locals. He's an assistant professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University and soon to accept a new position at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He's the author of television entertainment, watching with the Simpsons. He's got a new book out on Satire TV. And he regularly contributes to the group blog, the extra textuals, up the content stream without a paddle. OK. So I wanted to talk to you about some ethnographic research I did in Malawi last summer, where I went largely to look at how media was consumed. I was particularly interested in how sort of ideas of America or other countries, in particular South Africa or Nigeria, were developed through media consumption. Malawi, I mean, I'll just say a few words about Malawian media production, talking about sort of three industries of film, television, and music, and then talk a bit more about consumption. With film, the story is quite quick. Most people I talked to said that there were five Malawian films. I couldn't confirm that number, but the mere fact that most people don't seem to know of many other Malawian films show that is not much of a Malawian film industry. As far as television goes, there's one public broadcaster, and that's it. And the public broadcaster plays largely live elements, so it's partly C-Spanish and showing a lot of parliamentary proceedings. Malawi football games get played, or soccer, sorry. Games get played, and then we get some music videos. And then for music, there is much more of a sort of vibrant level of production. Malawian music has been fairly successful in the region, actually not just in Malawi. And Malawian reggae, particularly, has done fairly well. Although at the same time, as much as it's done well, when I say well, what I mean is it's circulated. It's not at all financially lucrative. When I was there, one of the more successful Malawian musicians actually was working in the same town that I was at as his day job was a research assistant where he got paid the equivalent of about $10 a day. So he needed to do that, even though he was one of the more famous musicians in the country. There are a few exceptions to that rule, but by and large, it's not an industry that pays a lot of money. So what we have in these three main forms of media production is a business that is not at all a big business. There's very little room for making a lot of money. What you do get, though, is a large amount of media circulating nonetheless, largely because it's coming in from other countries. In terms of, I can just walk you through. First, for those of you who don't know where Malawi is, here we go. Malawi, unfortunately, became more famous for the fact that Madonna wanted to adopt her child there than anything else, but there we go. In between Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique, and home to the second largest lake in the continent, I was doing my research in Rumpi up in the north and Luwande. There are two main cities, Blantyre and La Longue, and I wasn't there. But a large amount of the population does actually live in the outlying towns, such as Rumpi and Luwande. So as far as going back to those industries, as far as film goes, there's a lot of film that gets watched, particularly at what we call video shows. And here's an example of one with Arnie adorning the governor on the outside. Video shows, every town I went to had at least one video show, often multiple you get in for about five kwacha, which translates to about three cents. And how it works is once you're in, you can sort of stay in and watch as much as you want. It's very interesting that it says Kelvin and Sheila videotape library for the best and latest movie, because what I was really interested in is with a lot of the movies that we're playing were not at all the latest movies that we would consider. It was very much a sort of flashback to the 80s and to the 90s with a lot of Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme. It seemed the only exceptions, the only time that I was seeing movies that had been released anytime in around the last 10 years were when they had an African-American actor at the center of them. And largely what was playing was either Hollywood film or you were also seeing some Nigerian films playing as well. How they'd work is you just outside, there'd be this thing telling you what was going on. None of these had been legally purchased. It was all piracy and pirate-led, and largely through VCDs and through two DVD collections that had been put together. And then they would be watched in, this is a sort of average video show where you have this tiny television at the front and then the guys sitting around. Only guys, it wasn't deemed acceptable for women to go into most video shows. I heard that this was different in the two main cities, but it certainly wasn't outside. So these were the kids watching. And I'll get to this in a second. It was also the video shows where you could watch some of the television. Again, not much Malawian television. And there wasn't too much interest, I found in television in general, outside of television as something that played movies. So the movie channels that would come in by satellite from South Africa started to get picked up by some of the video shows that actually had a dish or a lot of bars and particularly bars that serviced some of the foreign researchers that were there. And so television largely became a sort of medium that sort of overflowed outside of bars and a lot of it would get watched with people standing watching in the windows. And there wasn't much sort of interest in series. And indeed, I saw only a few sort of recognizable series while there, the only two being CSI and prison break. So go figure. And then as far as music, you would get multiple music sellers in each town at the... And this is an example of one from the Mangochee, which is one of the larger towns where you're getting a lot of DVDs and VCDs and then also CDs for sale. And the music, I mean, one of the things that had actually led me to an interest in Malawi was the oddity that is Dully Parton's supreme reign in Malawi. Dully Parton is pretty much as big as it gets. Rap, hip hop, R&B are the sort of key genres that have moved over from America along with easy listening. As with the popularity of Nigerian soaps, melodrama I think was particularly popular and so you saw that through the popularity of Celine Dion and so forth. Country music was huge though and particularly Dully. There's a sort of interesting story behind that because I'd asked why is Dully so big and I continued, was interested in this and largely through a sort of quirk wherein around the 70s and 80s there was a wave of missionaries who came into Malawi largely from the south and they brought the country music with them and then set up offices in a country that largely has subsistence agriculture and so it set up something of a middle class because you can now work in the offices rather than out in the fields. And so country music became the music of the middle class. I'm somewhat ironic given that here it's seen as the music of white trash. And so country music became a sort of sign perhaps of having made it. Of course there's also for a country where there's subsistence agriculture is the job for many people. There's some nice shoehorning of interest given what country music is about at the same time. But so what we had was other than country music and easy listening which again was quite often very old, music from the 70s and 80s. The only sort of modern music that you were getting was again music largely by African American artists from the US or music coming in from neighboring countries and there was a large amount of it. So I mean what I wanted to do here was just give you a sort of a snapshot all of it very brief because whereas I'm assuming most people in this room are some sort of very basic working familiarity with what Bully word or telenovelas are as a concept. I'm also assuming very few of you have a basic working knowledge with Malawi as evidenced by the fact that one person who I think isn't here right now continually asked me about my research in Maui a very different place. But I thought that I could then turn to some of the thematic questions that Henry has posed. But I mean the one thing I would throw down that I have a particular interest in is what all of this suggested in terms of our continual fetishization in media studies with the new. Derek Comper as an excellent book called Rerun Nation where he sort of reminds us that a large amount of what's on television in America is reruns. And yet we continually talk about everything that's new. And here I was in Malawi in a large amount of what was being listened to and what was being watched was stuff that would have been considered sort of old and old fashioned and from the sort of 80s and Jean-Claude Van Damme and not the modern ironic reinvention of Jean-Claude Van Damme. And so it made me, I think there are some interesting questions to be asked about the fetishization of the new and how studying media globally perhaps might force us to look at the different temporalities of media. Not just to pick up on Austen's issues of circulation, not just spatial circulation but also the sort of temporality of circulation, what moves where and how fast it moves and what doesn't move there at all. So that for instance, again, as much as music moved around freely there was really no rock whatsoever. I played some U2 for someone and it was the first time they'd heard it and REM was completely unknown and so forth. And so there were very different sort of paces and temporalities of it and perhaps we can get into that more of it at the moment. I just wanted to give a brief overview. That's me. Okay. So next up we have Abduramani Sissako, a filmmaker, Sissako, sorry, who was born in Mauritania and raised in Mali. He's, we've been watching his films through the program the last few days. Bomb Beko is the most recent of them but his work goes back to the 1990 short film Le Joux and the 2002 film Waiting for Happiness and he's gonna share some of his thoughts with us. Thank you. I'm going to speak in French. I don't speak English a lot. Madame, who is next to me is going to translate. Thank you. I'm going to speak in French because I don't master English very well and the lady sitting next to me is going to translate. She's my wife. I find myself in a special situation. Because I come from a continent because I come from a country, a continent, that's the consumer of all these. But that does not, but hardly produces any images. It's a sad situation for my country. But in a larger way for the African continent. Because if the images are a mirror, imagine you go every night in your home and your bathroom and you see somebody else in front of you. It's a situation of a real culturalization. I'm a terrible one because in particular the Mexican telenovelas take the space in the majority of African television. And in a country like Mauritania, the last 10 years, produced three films and sadly I'm the director of the three films. It's really a sad situation because we realize that between the films that themselves are hardly seen in the countries, that the population is watching other images in the form of telenovelas, whether they're Mexican or Brazilian, or maybe a little bit Egyptian, or maybe a little bit Egyptian. For the Arabian countries. So I would be an administration of the consumer side of what I would call bad eating. The more you eat, the more you're hungry and you're going to eat more and it doesn't really help you but you continue eating. Like other drinks that are famous on this continent, not only in Africa, it's not necessarily the best drink, but it's a drink that imposes itself. So I think that telenovelas in the African consumption, Bollywood a bit differently are products of consumption. Like other products that exist that are not images that are also consumed. So Africa produces very few things, very few images. But the other situation, in my opinion, that I think is more grave in this prolification of image and communication, there's a continent that receives images but that does not produce. There's a feeling as if this continent does not have anything to share with the others. So there's no fluid exchange. And I believe that all places have a richness to transmit to another but this transmission does not happen because already there's a condescending of even on the notion of culture because it's a culture that feels stronger and more it's dominating, more it feels stronger. But the notion of culture is actually the opposite of that because culture is what's particular in the other that we need to go and get. But people that only receive but that don't, but that the other does not take does not have the feeling of participating in this common effort which is the construction of humanity which is more equal and that's curious of one of the other. That's my introduction and I'm here to listen to what my colleagues have said that's passionate to me and if necessary I can answer questions. So as I said in the introduction what we wanted to do here was give snapshots of four very different local media scenes as they've been impacted by the global flow or the barriers to global transmission of media. One of the things that struck me just listening to this is the emphasis on piracy as a mechanism by which media travels across national borders for better or for worse. It seems like each of you touched on this in one way or another and I wonder if we could elaborate a little more about the relationship between legal and extra-legal or illegal systems of circulation and how that's impacting the different scenes that you look at. Telenovelas are broadcasts but these days people just watch them on YouTube. I know that I'm doing right now a case study of a telenovela produced in Venezuela and Venevisión, the network has forbidden or has vetoed the transmission on YouTube or any of these video-sharing places of this telenovela. So if you're in Venezuela you can watch. If you're outside it says you're not allowed in the country where you are trying to watch. Well, people around the world most of them Venezuelans at first said, well hello and so there is this guy and he's placing the videos in a blog, in a blogger blog and there's a community around it and they don't tell anyone. They don't tell that address to anyone. I don't tell it to anyone because I am watching there too. This is my object of study and now this guy has included a chat on this blog. So any time of the day you go into this blog you can see not only the episodes and he's only one evening behind let me tell you. And you can see people chatting live about what's happening and they have produced a community. They talk about the country. Why are they saying this in the telenovela? Oh, it's probably self-censorship because of this and this. They do a whole lot of analysis. So it's interesting because there is piracy in that sense but there's also piracy in Spain in particular. There are lots of people who go on the web and advertise services that they will tape a telenovela for you via satellite and they sell it to you very expensive. When that happened the major producers like Televisa decided to produce a rigid versions of telenovelas. You can buy a whole telenovela on Amazon on 1495 and it will not be the whole telenovela. Not 120 hours but 40 hours. And that hasn't worked. People still go to YouTube and to other places. It's like people will want to watch their thing no matter what. At one level it's useful I guess to just start with thinking about relations between the legal and the extra legal. For instance just very recently almost as if to coincide with this global convention celebrating a decade of globalization the MPA set up an office in Bombay to figure out ways to monitor and possibly clamp down on the kind of piracy that happens there. And even more recently there were full page ads taken out in newspapers, English language newspapers in particular. Warning filmmakers in Bombay away from trying to adapt the recent Brad Pitt film the one in which he ages backwards, what's it called? Benjamin Button. The Benjamin Button film. So it's okay but that kind of relations between the legal and the extra legal seems not only it doesn't seem very productive at one level because one of the things to recognize right away that in cities across Asia, across parts of Africa and even in Latin America a significant way in which so-called legal media circulate are actually through cultures of the copy. So in many ways for instance would say early television. The way in which cable expanded into homes across Asia was through local neighborhoods young men stringing cables across rooftops which enabled the kind of spread of cable TV in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. Diaspora culture if you were to think about that, diaspora culture is a culture of circulation and so it seems instead of thinking about this sort of legal extra-legal binary it's perhaps much more useful to think about the ways in which these two realms actually inform each other and the way in which for example fans of a film music director will at the same time that they're actually setting up bit-torrent sites to circulate songs online will also go to the local neighborhood pirate and tell them to remove the songs get a full series of their favorite film music director office shelves because they want that film music director's CDs to sell more. So it's a much more contradictory and sort of ambivalent relationship to the legal and the extra-legal than this kind of discourse of piracy allows us to acknowledge. Yeah I mean I might jump in on that and that it would be important to point out that there would be very little media moving around Malawi if not for piracy and take movies for instance there are no official movie cinemas even in the cities in Malawi this is a very poor country that the multinational corporations that make a lot of the media that gets pirated these corporations just aren't interested in Malawi they can't make money from Malawi because they can't charge or they won't charge low enough movies in Malawi particularly move through piracy and through piracy alone and a large amount of music moves that way too so I mean on one level one sort of has to throw off a sense of caring about the poor plight of Time Warner and so forth very early on the other hand I would point out that this is the curse that really kills Malawi and media production in and of itself when I was there almost every day there would be a newspaper article about Malawi's attempts to try and get better laws to work against piracy not because they cared about making sure that Disney and so forth were making yet more money so that local Malawian musicians could actually make some kind of money rather than having to work as research assistants for farm projects looking at HIV because they're as much as they're famous their productions basically just don't make the money there so I mean I think there were really sort of two very different forms of piracy there the one that sort of makes media move in the first place but then also the attention to the piracy that actually stops oppression and makes it very hard for many people to actually go into making media at any level Do you have anything you wish to I would like to say two words about piracy in Africa I would like to say two words about piracy in Africa that looks a bit like the consumers of a joint that we look for but not the producer but not the producer as it was said hundreds of thousands of pirated films are in Africa as it was said like hundreds of thousands of pirated films are in Africa like like Slumdog Millionaire like Slumdog Millionaire that we saw in Africa it was seen at the same time as the western world millions of products are made in Africa but these are hundreds of thousands of products that were made outside and it's difficult to trace where the producers the majority of these films come from China myself when I went there to show my film Bamako it was a Friday in all the big shops the pirated films on Monday he was already pirated and missed the shops with the cover much nicer than our French cover of the film so it means that it's a real industry something that's been talked through that's profitable to people that are never touched another legal circulation of films that I would like to talk to that I think is very serious it's an African television public television who to balance showing advertisements instead of advertisements show telenovelas and it's actually just to fill the time spaces because there's no local production or nothing slotted for that time without really thinking of the consequences and here I think there's a real from the political part in a country where you have 60 to 70% there are an alphabet it's a school so the screen is a school so if you fill it up with content that's not awesome then it's a bad school one of the things that I did want to add which your comments sparked was when we talk about piracy in this extra legal sort of if you keep falling into that line of discussion it really leads us to ignore the fact that cultures of circulation are also cultures of production and I recognize that we need to make this very context specific but the ways in which most of the world are able to actually enter into an engagement with different kinds of emerging media technologies be they productions of VCDs be they subtitling of DVDs within a day of its release in some part of the world and the way in which it then gets circulated it's not the circulation then needs to be thought more broadly in terms of circulation of not just the artifacts the cultural products themselves but also certain kinds of skills and abilities to produce media technologies that are part of the discussion so one of the questions that your comments sparked was when you think about cities like Kano or Lagos or even Johannesburg and the kinds of circulation that happened through these regional media centers isn't aren't those evidence that there are maybe other things that are happening in the landscape of media production in Africa not just about receiving and circulation but actual production that happens I think it's a particular example of Nigeria in South Africa I think that Nigeria or South Africa are particular examples that have an enormous production which is a good thing because at least the mirror that I was talking about earlier and people can see themselves projected so the children can see that their father can be the thief or the doctor so at least the society is better told to itself Nigeria is a particular country Nigeria is a particular country in the same way that they make the they make the tires of the cars that you can buy without much means that you can use and it works in the cars but the quality is not the same and I think Nigerian films it's also that but at least it's a less it's a less a problem it's very important that there's a local production so to follow up on this could you say something about the systems of circulation that shape the flow of your films to the world different kind of film culture than the Nigerian one clearly but how are you succeeding in getting your films out to larger populations I went to to study film first in the Soviet Union and that took me a long time but that also set up my relationship with image and cinema so I do a certain kind of film which does not have a big it's not very popular nowhere like the independent cinema like some independent films but I think that as long as there's one person that's interested in one thing for me that's a lot so I consider myself lucky that my films are seen a bit I exist more because of I'm an author writer director but the real frustration is when you make films and often the film has very little chance to get seen in your own country but yet you used actors of your country the story of the country but there's no screening rooms or theaters to show them and there's one thing I would like to permit myself to say because it's a reality if I give my film to the television of my country they can ask me to pay for it to show my film so it's not them paying me but it's my it's not it's the reality so we're very saddened when we live in this kind of situation and we know that we've changed it in one day or today so films circulate films go to take my last film which had more success than the previous one it was it was I got a lot of press and media because it was at the Cannes Festival so I had a French distributor who sold the film internationally as well as in the States with the New Yorker distributor that just closed down so now it's difficult to get the film in the United States it's just to show how fragile these films are how fragile the people who are distributing these kind of films are so I would like to have the panelists talk about genre which is an issue that cropped up across a number of the presentations clearly art films or independent films travel differently around the planet than melodramas or action films or musicals so what role do you why do some genres generate the global flow if you're describing whether it's the action films or the film productions you've talked about I think in the case of telenovelas there are several factors that make it so well received globally one is melodrama melodrama is universal it's been used even in our coverage of the Olympics how do we cover the Olympics now we make it melodramatic we create the hero myth in every one of our athletes it's a Cinderella story the Cinderella story in particular which is repeated in many telenovelas resonates in many cultures because the face of poverty around the world many times has the face of a woman and so it resonates elsewhere in addition to that there is what Mr. Sissake just said this is a very cheap way to feel the airwaves when you buy a telenovela you have material for one hour for every day of the week for at least four months it could be four to eight months cheap so that's another reason especially in Eastern Europe and through the transition this was an easy way to feel the airwaves and now of course there is not the consumption now there is the addiction because they are addictive because people think oh no I've heard so many people say only stupid people consume them because they are of massive consumption and massive deprecation too but I want any of you I challenge you to sit through two episodes of a telenovela two episodes and then you tell me if you don't want to know what's going to happen and I've tested this every semester with my own students and it's amazing so they have something in them and I think also that telenovelas what are they and this is Venezuelan writer who once said telenovelas are the spectacle of sentiments of emotions and that's universal emotions and sentiments and this is why people identify with this strange stories that can be some of them very strange all over the world so that's for telenovelas I think Bollywood has a lot of melodrama too it does but I'm not again I'm a little uncomfortable with this because it seems like we're talking about why certain genres travel and let's say we take different kinds of television shows and why one television show gets bought for one part of the world and not another but it seems like in hindsight we can if we talk about notions like cultural proximity and that's why this particular show was worked in this market in hindsight we can discern some sort of a mysterious correspondence in pretty much any sort of media and cultural relationship why Bollywood films clicked or Bombay Cinema clicked in 70s and 80s Nigeria one way to explain it that Brian Larkin does is to talk about notions of parallel modernities that certain changes that were happening in youth culture and in other parts of Nigeria resonated with that but to speak about these sorts of universalistic categories of emotion and melodrama and so on again I'm not sure how far it gets us thinking about global media flows and maybe Jonathan can add a little bit here about the ways in which industrial executives justify the decision to buy and syndicate and circulate certain kinds of media products, rely on these sorts of assumptions about some correspondence between what will work here and what won't work and thinking about the way in which we've talked about media globalization and how television and film circulate around the world maybe notions of cultural proximity are not really that useful at the end of the day I don't know if you I mean my first my first sort of response when I was in Malawi was to look at how much melodrama there seemed to be across different sort of media so that again a lot of the sort of Celine Dion I can't live without you lyrics which by the way were crossed over regardless of gender too but so it wasn't as coded as feminine as it tends to be in America but at the same time I then started to find that there were all these exceptions out there so that I mean a lot of the songs that are really popular from within Dolly's you know, Irv and they're all there but a lot of the songs that are popular they're actually a lot more sort of they're not just about you know, I can't live without you there some of them are more sort of complex interesting ones and then again with the interest in a lot of African American produced music and movies or any sort of movie about Africa seemed to circulate too so that the curious case of Benjamin Button would go absolutely nowhere in the average video show but Hotel Rwanda could be found pretty much every roadside stop where they were selling stuff and so I mean often there needed to be a reason to be interested in it but I was finding all these exceptions to the sort of supposed rules of what travels well and doesn't travel well and I mean as I suggested earlier Dolly is a perfect example of that there's a sort of sense of happenstance that sometimes perhaps we're looking for the sort of easy rules about what travels to where we tend to sort of lose out on a lot I think of sort of Tim Havens does work on the global media marketplace and he talks about what's his phrase for it there industry lore where he just talked about so these assumptions that things don't play well so that like traditionally Hollywood has felt that the rest of the world isn't interested in African American shows even though there's absolutely no real data to back that up and I remember growing up as a child moving around the world when I was in Singapore the facts of life was huge in Singapore and Malaysia and it was marketed solely as Trudy or Trudy Trudy's show and she was at the center of it and she was the hero of it and yet that goes completely against industry lore that would normally say no no no don't put in that African American character because the rest of the world can't hear about so there are the dangers of trying to find those simple rules one of the things that was interesting that emerged from the entire media convention was this was right around the time that Slumdog was getting more awards and leading up to the Oscars so of course all the panels featured someone from Fox Searchlight and all the questions were about well can we replicate this and of course everybody was trying to come up with reasons for why it worked in this market and why it worked somewhere else but the happenstance seems to be crucial because the one thing that seemed guaranteed is every sales agent every distributor who attended the convention did say at the end of the day that they will now look twice and think twice before rejecting something that had anything South Asian to do with it so to that extent perhaps these sorts of correspondences do work but beyond that I'm not sure notions of genre, melodrama or kung fu action cinema why they travel to one part and another they need to be much more locally specific like the work you're doing in Malawi and we need to be much more careful about that I think that there is a principle of addiction that was mentioned but that's explainable because of the mass quantity you send the same thing again and again all the time and on top there's also the melodramatic side that emotions there there's a suffering of these people regardless of how much richer than yourself they are because there's these big houses and beautiful houses but inside them they are suffering and I think that is something that interests people it's not something I've studied but it's probably better placed for it but I consider that there's an openness to the matter my wife was telling me earlier in my ear Japanese was very popular so it disappeared it's less now because there's not as much visible, there still exists in television a lot of people know them by heart so we know the characters really well I wanted to ask you about the scene in Bombico that has Danny Glover and what his role is in the production and what you intended to comment on in that scene maybe you could share a little bit of the scene with the crowd here in Bombico there's a moment that lasts about four minutes that's a film within a film so in a courtyard there are people watching television like they do every night so it's the beginning of a film Spaghetti Western that I shot myself with Danny Glover because Danny Glover helped me financially to make the film he co-produced of course we first helped in the sense of towards the film and then I had the idea of the sequence of the western in which I wanted to film my friends as actors so I asked Danny Glover if he could come and that's how he participated in the film it also shows in Bombico that television is a moment of evasion, a runaway space for people it's due to the fact that in a family where there's 20 people that live together maybe there's not five books available so we go towards something that's more accessible I know people in our family the workers that work in the house the people that help follow the telenovelas whether they're Brazilian or Mexican but follow them without knowing a single word because they don't even speak French or any other language but they will never miss as she said in an episode so that's what TV means a lot of things that there's a need that's created by it I promise that the audience will get a chance to ask questions we've left this opening segment go a little long but I'm eager to see questions from the floor there are two mics down there and if anyone has a question to get us started, if not we'll buy us some time by asking another I wanted to hear a little bit more about co-production in these different regions there's this idea that if we co-produce then we're broadening the market but then we get these cases where you have that with the movies with Spain you always have that Cuban movie with an old revolutionary anarchist uncle or whatever what is he doing there that has totally changed the co-production policies have changed the aesthetics of much of Latin American film I wonder how that is affecting telenovelas and what happens and I don't know in Africa what the reality of co-production is I'm speaking from Costa Rica which is my case our situation is that co-producer we die also but it's related to financing and we just have to deal with our monster neighbors because in fact we're talking now about Brazil and Mexico and it sounds like Latin America is producing so much but at least in film 90% of all films made in Latin America from the very beginning have been made in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina and that's it so ok comment on question but co-production well co-production is what the telemundo model it's not only theirs but they are the ones who have made it very successful why do they co-produce because it's cheaper to have actors placed in Colombia where you pay Colombian salaries instead of Miami salaries so and also you use all these actors there of course you save the big bucks for the big stars which are those protagonists that at least one of them has to be Mexican ok you're very right about the issue of films I think Colombia just like it is has come up in telenovelas has come up also in film it is sort of the part of it on the blog Venezuela just like it is lagging in telenovelas now it is lagging in films even though President Chavez has created film villa to produce films and he has given money even to Danny Glover to produce films in Venezuela of course these films have to be with a particular point of view let's call it that way I think there are other there are countries in which the only way they can play the production game is by co-producing so there is a model right now in which the Miami model is being used co-produced with countries like Panama the Dominican Republic so they make one telenovela in the Dominican Republic in which the protagonists the antagonists are this multinational cast of heavy hitters everyone else the Dominican Republic and that's the only way they can produce a telenovela and let me tell you the Dominican Republic is a huge consumer of telenovelas countries that do not produce telenovelas in Latin America tend to be the largest consumers actually so they have tried this model in the Dominican Republic recently in Panama and we have to see how it sells abroad to me the issue is that now the model is that melodramatic model is a model that tells the same story with little variations but it's not saying anything telenovelas can say a lot and there is lots of research about telenovelas being very effective in health campaigns for instance in Venezuela extremely effective in the political discourse also in Brazil but the model that is being sold abroad the model that is circulating with success is a model that really sells very well but doesn't say much my case is a bit particular so perhaps it's better to speak in general because I live in France Arte France which produces Arte France that co-produces my films France is a European country which has a policy of financing of films I would say is great France is one of the European countries that have a policy of financing films that's quite incredible so I have a company which co-produces with Arte production that co-produces with Arte so I have the advantage of the finances or commissions but I'd like to talk for example about the African telenovelas starting to exist so for example there are telenovelas in Ivory Coast because it's in French so it's viewed in all the French-speaking African countries and there are others that are made in Burkina Faso and they also start to use actors from Ivory Coast or Mali so for those who do having small co-production with each other but one has to know that all this becomes more and more possible because in the development of Africa and the daily struggle people are starting to count on themselves so we don't no longer wait as much for things coming from outside and then I'm sure that we see in many domains but also in cinema even though there are very few films that are produced so I'm actually curious with the first two provocations that Henry brought up I was wondering if we could push them together a little bit because as when you talked about the necessity of having sort of a cultural specificity baked into that it seems there is this question of not like a technologically determinist platform specificity but so the sort of regulations and structures and protocols that surround the encounters of media as it moves and how that changes what content circulates and then how that content in turn shapes the sort of flows and spaces of transmission so I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about how I guess if we have to fall into the legal extra legal binary how the different modes of circulation affects maybe what media what kinds of media circulates what telenovelas for instance if they're the same as the ones that are being sort of pushed outward by the national broadcast producers and if the different kinds of safe and engagements affect how that media is then sort of processed and used that's a large question I'm just racking my brains about where to begin one way to maybe start thinking about this to say let's going back to the co-production aspect of it is co-production immediately reminds us that state institutions are very very vested in it and that there are certain kinds of cultural policy decisions that shape what kinds of co-productions are allowed and not allowed and co-productions also remind us that every co-production is an encounter of translation between different kinds of production cultures and built into that is also what finally then circulates across the world so speaking in terms of the Bollywood context one of the dangers of using the term Bollywood even though it gives us some specificity in this panel it actually erases a lot of other boundaries about what actually is circulating so the first mapping that we did say from Bombay to London to LA that mapping only suggests that only a certain kind of Bollywood cinema circulates because the diasporic market in the UK and the US has been constructed in a very specific way over the last 15 years which gets complicated even further by the fact that within the US the trajectory of South Asian migration means that certain model minority discourses fit into the way in which consumption of Bollywood happens which in turn filters all the way back to Bombay which then leads to further sorts of industry-lower-getting sediment that are saying okay these films work let's just keep pushing these films out but then if you look at another mapping another historical moment say from New Delhi the central government making certain decisions about their geopolitical ties and then a certain kind of melodramatic films actually travel into Russia and into Eastern European former socialist bloc countries and then when we move to say the African context the much more angry young man films of the 70s of a popular star Amitabh Bachchan those are the ones that were traveling around so those are the sorts of examples that come to mind which remind us of the ways in which the national continues to play a role in these kinds of transnational circulations and the way in which state institutions continue to regulate the ways in which certain continent, certain kinds of films get to move around the world and not others I'm not sure that even begins to tackle that question but I think it also shows the degree to which we need to study who the pirates are and I mean I can understand why a lot of the times people don't want to be the pirates the forerunner of this did a lot of burning while I was in Malawi or because we don't want to draw attention to them but with the example I gave of how country music became popular the answer to that question that I kept on asking was basically who were the pirates how did it get there and so I think there's still there needs to be a lot more study of taking these things from culture to culture and place to place what are the interests there what kind of interaction they have with the people there too for instance in Malawi I also noticed that Bollywood was almost nowhere to be seen there's a long sort of tense relationship between Malawians and between the Indian population in India that I think when I talked to people was partly responsible again there was a sense there that they didn't want to watch Indian media because they didn't like Indian people and so I think sometimes just asking the questions of who brought the media and what are the what do we think about these people and what else do they bring with them starts to open up a lot of answers to other questions the only thing I would like to add is that in the realm of telenoelas there is this question about okay so if you watch a telenoela on YouTube or somewhere else if that telenoel is sold to their country will they watch it does having the telenoela on YouTube increases or decreases the potential the sales potential of that telenoela and I've asked this question to several people in the business and you can't find one answer some think it increases sales no no it decreases sales so while I just told you that story about Venezuela and told you the story about Televisa, Telemundo for instance they put every day their episode of Doña Barbara El Rostro de Anali they put it on the web for everyone to watch and Doña Barbara in the last two months has been the most widely sold telenoela in the world and they have the episodes there so there is that question about is telenoela watching a thing we do on computers or if we have the choice to watch it as a family at home is that how we watch so the patterns of consumption I think we can't forget them when we think about all these concepts that are so blurred now distribution consumption, circulation, production one quick addition there's no reason to assume that the industry professionals aren't talking to the pirates so one example is there is a wheeler dealer I guess is the best way to describe who lives in Boston but who travels regularly to Chile, Poland Germany, parts of China and so on just looking for fan communities, small sub-cultural fan communities of say Shahrukh Khan a Bollywood star for example and what he does is he goes there and starts out with them, encourages them to form a little club or an association and actually gets them subtitling rights things of that sort, organizes screenings and then goes back to Bombay and talks to the legal distributors and the producers and say here maybe I've discovered a little market here why don't we strike a deal I'll get this commission and we'll start say pushing a few films into that market so we need to break, really need to complicate this extra legal extra legal thing to assume that these different spaces are not already in dialogue with each other, they are but that's what I think the kind of ethnography that Jonathan is describing would help us get into and understand these sorts of networks and dialogues much more so I guess when we talk about global media you think about barriers but essentially we don't really see one based on distribution or really I guess you could say culture but instead we see one based around the language and Karadina started off by saying that if you just watched the media you really don't need to know the language to understand what's going on depending on the situation of course but as Eswin said during his talk when the media is distributed it also teaches people how to produce and essentially create their own works so I wonder if there's a sort of conflict between the dispersal of global media based on the language and how that's affected the development of media in different areas around the world well you guys get started and I'll jump in fansubbing comes to mind I mean but you're right that language and geocult certain kinds of markets do impose certain boundaries around this but that seems to be where it begins is in small sorts of fansubbing activities where there's one very popular website a YouTube channel set up by a woman and it's called srkpugly.net I mean a fan of Shahrukh Khan and this woman has learned Hindi, learned to subtitle every single thing that Shahrukh Khan appears in from advertisements to TV shows to films and that's where it begins but yes there's no getting away from the fact that language organizes certain kinds of flows and even within certain kinds of countries especially say South Asia given the number of languages that there are at least seven, eight viable film industries in South Asia at this point in time but only the Hindi language Bollywood films get privileged as the global media product the rest are still at best regional or maybe translocal if you want to people want to be charitable but there's a politics to the way in which certain language television and films circulate and not others and I think in the digital digital age fan-subbing seems to be multi-generational you can reproduce the thing without diminishing the quality of the original so when I was in Shanghai a year ago a reporter has been covering the pirates there and what she said was it took less than 24 hours for an episode of Prison Break to air on American television and to be translated into Cantonese or one of the other major Chinese languages and it's done by teams of amateur fans who want access to that content and it spreads out to the hinterland via the computer and the Cantonese version gets translated into a different Chinese language that may deal with a smaller language population and again teams are waiting to do that so it's a 48-hour or 72-hour process as opposed but the flow of media is, you know, there would have been a time when language was an absolute barrier to that and it seems to me that it's now multi-stop but as long as you have digital organization and digital reproduction it's less complicated a problem than it might have once been whereas culture may be, you know, cultural affinity may be much more crucial than language I think in the end in determining what circulates I mean I guess to follow up with that I mean if you've been on the internet in a year it's obvious that audiences have taken up the effort to help the distribution of media but in terms of production has the language barrier really solidified certain areas of production enough that there hasn't really been a flow between those areas in terms of something like genre or just general general elements of the actual production instead of the reception I don't know I think telenoelas are translated and dubbed in almost every language in the world I think an interesting case I found is actually inside the United States because for a while there Telemundo had closed caption in Spanish in English of its telenoelas and then suddenly they stopped because of the financial crisis it's a recent event look at her face and there was this uproar and I have a blog and in my blog people were writing like crazy in English what happened and so there is this other blog in which there is a group of ten people who are all over the United States and they every day each one of them is in charge of one telenoela and they write recaps in English every episode every day of every telenoela broadcast in the United States and all these people that were in the uproar are now flocking there so they watch the episode and then they read without understanding it and then they go and read the recap I don't know the other thing is that I mentioned how in Latin America some people say I don't like to watch Brazilian telenoelas because they're dubbed and I like my telenoelas in my language in my native language I always find that interesting some of my students when they say they don't go to see foreign films because they have subtitles and when I tell them in my country every Hollywood film has subtitles it's like they've discovered some new land or something like wow really well Latin Americans everywhere in the world people are watching telenoelas either dubbed or subtitles so it's not a big deal although it seems to be I would just add to I mean in Malawi there is no fan subbing going on there aren't many people online to begin with and there isn't the resources for even official subtitling so then I mean linguistic barriers there are very hard I mean Malawi shares way more of a border with Mozambique than it does with either Zambia or Tanzania and yet you don't hear much about media from Mozambique in Malawi because Mozambique has a different linguistic background both in terms of local dialects but also in terms of having been a French colony instead of an English colony and so I mean there is a very hard and fast divide as much as we can get excited by how fan and should get excited about how fans and audiences are bridging some of these divides that then might have some sort of trickle over effect or production it is important to remember that there are many countries in the world where the finances for such things are just not there I wanted to add an example on the languages I think there are things that are changing there is a cable which is called Afrikable for example there is a cable called Afrikable at the station in the Francophone and African countries the base is in Mali and which starts to show Ghanian but subtitled in French and so people watch them because the fact that it is Ghanian the fact that it is African there is a need for other African countries to see African stories of seeing African stories stories where you can recognize yourself in them but I think we also have to talk about that people have the capacity to create their own language with the images that they see without necessarily understanding Spanish Hindi or English and I think that is very important to deduce what is going to happen with a cinema habit to deduct what is going to happen for cinema because of the language of cinema and for me that is the most interesting factor one of the themes that keeps appearing in the discussion that has appeared in the discussion this afternoon is what we might call the tension between the global and the local and one of the things that struck me as I thought about the discussion was I thought back to film scholarship in the pre-digital age when one of the primary issues for a number of years was the problem of the major media producers especially the United States so flooding local markets with their own material that local filmmakers had very little chance and as some of you surely know it was an era in which a number of national organizations and even legislatures made limitations on the amount of American media the number of American films that could be shown in particular countries what I'm curious about is whether or not there's some version of this now in the age of global media that is to say isn't it possible to imagine that what you've all been describing is a circumstance in which it is no longer the case that there is one major media nation that is flooding the market but that there are a relatively smaller number a relatively small number of major media producers Bollywood is one the telenovela consortium is one American media continues to be a dominant thing and that these there might be a few others but these three or four sources coming to dominate global media as well and flooding out the possibility that certain kinds of local or or national media enterprises would be national and local media enterprises might be inhibited or restrained partly because of the fact that the global media that is now finding a much easier way to spread itself even leaving aside the issue of piracy which increases the problem in certain ways creating a situation in which even more intensely than in the era of American dominance of media we're going to have a relatively small number of sources creating essentially the entertainment for the entire globe. Does this seem like a ridiculous fear or something to worry about? I think to some degree there it's the sort of Coke Pepsi war right that if Coke and Pepsi can convince you that you have to choose Coke or Pepsi you know both of them have won in the long run and if it was if the issue used to be American dominance versus local that's one thing whereas I think at least what I saw in Malawi and of course this was assisted by the fact that there's very little local production outside of the realm of music is that the major the countries that do flood Malawi with their media people can play them off against each other so if you resent American presence and certainly a lot of the people I talked to did resent American presence and so their response to that was to watch more Nigerian media or people would feel that Nigerian media was too outlandish and that dealt with witchcraft and they didn't think that that was right and so they'd watch lots of American media and so what you have there is Nigerian media and American media have sort of become the Coke Pepsi battle where Malawi and media and the possibility of Malawi sort of producing something in between sort of fools it by the wayside now I mean that might be very peculiar to Malawi given that there isn't the money to produce or sort of rival but at the same time suppose that there are probably many other countries like that around the world where the sort of war that goes on between these sort of global media industries leads the sort of local production totally by the wayside right that's what that's the issue that I think is of concern yeah I mean it's useful to remember that American dominance was never complete or never quite spanned the entire globe there were many other industries that were not so much resisted but really there was they had their own trajectories of influence and so on but you're at the point you make is one that Michael Curtin has made recently as well and thinking about relations between media capitals instead of continuing to think about whether one media capital dominates the world I mean perhaps public access television in the US is a good example of how local media production is increasingly difficult to do okay alright well thank you so much for coming it's been a great discussion