******* WHITE ********** EJC/REC Vol. 5, No. 2&3, 1995 *****

RECONSIDERING TELEVISION PROGRAM FLOWS,
OR WHOSE FLOW IS IT ANYWAY?


Mimi White
Northwestern University


        Abstract:  This article presents an
     introductory critique of some traditional
     approaches to media flow research.  The economic
     and political interests can no longer necessarily
     be conceptualized as co-terminous with nation
     states, and the proliferation of media sources and
     channels make the direction and uniformity of
     media flows less disruptive.  The present state of
     affairs requires a fundamental reconceptualization
     of the field:  the nature of media flow research
     needs to be re-conceptualized differently from
     previous notions of one-way flows that serve
     coherent national interests, and whose asymmetries
     can be measured statistically and unambigiously.
     The global circulation is now much more complex
     and contradictary and new culturally-based models
     and methods are needed for understanding global
     media and power.


     My comments are offered from the perspective of
contemporary cultural theory.  I want to advance some ideas
about the state of contemporary global culture, and media
culture in particular, that have significant implications
for the future of television program flow studies.  This
includes the proposition that flow studies may be best
considered to be "historical."  By this I do not simply mean
that they have been carried out in the past, but rather,
that the state of media culture which flow studies charted
or represented references a mediascape that increasingly no
longer exists.  As such, my remarks are intended as a
reassessment for current and future work on program flows
and global media power, and not as a criticism of their
importance in the past.

     Of course, the present state of affairs to which I am
turning my attention is persistently hinted at in the extant
studies.  Throughout the flow literature, there are repeated
and increasing references to changes in media culture,
especially in the form of impending satellites, along with
arguments for the need to add cultural perspectives to the
quantitative and institutional approaches which dominate the
field.  Thus one report after another, including those by
members of the Media Flows Symposium, often signal shifts in
the global mediascape which, it is proposed, have
implications for the future.  I am suggesting that this
future is no longer ahead of us, but is, rather, already
here.  And the present state of affairs requires a
fundamental reconceptualization of the field of analysis.
This includes how we understand even such basic terms as
"television" and "flow."  Moreover, this is not merely a
play of language, but signals the demand for new conceptual
frameworks of understanding.

     My basic thesis is something like this:  Media may
flow, but they also disperse and erupt, in ways that
intersect with flow, in predictable and unpredictable ways.
These dispersions and eruptions may assume an irregularity
that cannot be contained by the concept of flow.  They occur
within, between, below, and above official networks of media
and information flow which are, in themselves, considerably
heterogeneous and complex.  Moreover, these irregular
dispersions may be nearly invisible (hence unmeasurable in
conventional terms) in their singular appearances within the
context of general, comparable data gathering.  But they
accumulate in ways that are influential, generating
significant intensities in the global cultural economy.  As
such, they can exist outside the sphere of conventional flow
studies, despite their ordinariness and ubiquity in everyday
media culture.  In other words, the present tendency to
measure flow overwhelmingly through an accounting of
nation-state units may now obscure more than it reveals.

     In this regard, consider the following extract from a
1985 report concerning television program and news flow:

     So far the introduction of satellites has not
     changed the basic patterns of the flow of
     television programmes and news.  Although they
     have contributed to the improvement of regional
     exchanges in some cases, there is a trend towards
     transnational concentration.  The new
     communication technology may offer some
     alternatives for the future.  But it may also be
     that the rapid development in communication
     technology and electronics, including all kinds of
     data services, only increases the gap between
     those who have access to information and means of
     using it and influencing others and those who do
     not have these capabilities (Varis, 1985, p. 54).


     This extract cogently summarizes what is implicit in
most flow studies.  They are concerned with the
possibilities of influence implicit in patterns of media
circulation.  Thus it is assumed that media flow is
measurable, traceable in comparable terms, and that this
circulation lines up with particular interests and
influences, that are most commonly understood in terms of
constituted nation-states.  Interestingly, while the cited
paragraph identifies the new information "haves" as
transnational, the quantitative computations and
enumerations of program flow continue to be carried out in
relation to national units.

     In other words, flow studies propose that television
programming--defined in terms of geographical origin
relative to geographical points of reception--expresses
something about spheres of influence and domination in
international relations.  These may be broken down into
specific categories--aesthetic, political, cultural,
ideological, etc.--but there is always a sense of structural
causality and intentionality that hinges on an initial
nation-state identity.  In addition, the methodological
emphasis is on predictive results:  can the analysis of data
in this way yield meaningful strategies of intervention to
change the current distribution of (nation-state) interests
as discerned in this approach?  In this context there is a
call to supplement institutional and quantitative approaches
to flow studies with cultural and qualitative methods, such
as ethnographies of reception.

     The conceptual framework that I want to bring to bear
calls into question the foundation assumptions of flow
studies.  For in the current state of affairs, it is no
longer always the case that media texts have a clear-cut
national identity, or that the movement of texts from one
place of production to other sites of consumption first
carries and then implants the political-ideological-
economic-cultural "interests" of the ostensible country of
origin.  While this hardly eliminates concerns with access,
power, and domination, it does suggest that how these issues
are understood needs to be reassessed.  In this context,
there are two sets of issues that I want to bring to bear.
One has to do with the nature of the contemporary
mediascape.  The other, related but broader, has to do with
the place of the nation-state in defining interests and
influence, especially when it comes to media production and
reception.

     The larger rubric for both sets of issues are loosely
drawn from Arjun Appadurai (1990) and from James Schwoch's
(1190, 1993) world-systems approach to understanding global
media.  The idea of disjuncture (Appadurai), or what I call
incommensurability, is particularly crucial here.  For at
the heart of my argument is the idea that the things that
are flowing, dispersing, and erupting, are not necessarily
of a like nature, nor are their sources of production, their
means and modes of distribution, or their contexts of
reception necessarily comparable, even within the confines
of a given community or nation-state, let alone across an
identifiable set of trans-national or sub-cultural
communities.  Moreover, current scholarship measures all
programs by assigning them the same, universalizing weight,
without clearly discriminating among texts that may be seen
at different times by different groups in different places.
[1]

                         Mediascape

     First, the proliferation of programming (or what the
industry calls software) has changed so much in the past
decade that it is nearly impossible to even talk about
"television" or "broadcasting" in the same terms as were
used twenty, or even ten years ago.  The familiar entity has
undergone considerable transformation through a variety of
technological and institutional factors, including the
expansion of national media systems around the world,
decentralization, satellites, cable, and video distribution
(through legal and other channels).

     It is not just that there are larger and more
cumbersome systems to account for; but also that we are now
confronted with intersecting, simultaneous textual and
technological systems that cut across one another in
variable ways.  As an even uniform medium, "television" no
longer exists; and any meaningful study of program and
information dispersion has to account for all of its forms.
In this sense, the term software is far more appropriate,
signalling the diversity of the "object text" that can flow
with new information delivery systems, to be picked up on
television monitors and screens around the world--data,
music, movies, video games, dramatic series, etc. all at the
same time.

                           Nation

     Second, and of equal importance, is the question of the
nation-state as the central unit of analysis for
understanding global cultural economies.  Now, the adequacy
(or inadequacy) of the nation state has been raised in flow
studies, at least as early as 1985 (Mowlana).  Yet the
implications of this for how one might identify the source,
or the aim, of programming is not pursued.

     I am thinking, for example, of U.S.-based video
production by and for various diaspora, exile, or
multicultural communities--Chicano media, Iranian community
video, etc.  (Naficy, 1993; Noriega, 1992); and of the
Indian popular films that are shown Friday nights on the
Evanston cable access station, even though there is only a
small Indian community in Evanston, Illinois (although there
is a substantial Indian community in the neighboring
Chicago, which does not get the Evanston community access
channel on its television systems); and of the bootleg video
markets in Latin America where copies of popular U.S.
primetime dramas such as Dallas could circulate within
twenty-four hours of their initial U.S. commercial
broadcast, even as older episodes aired on official national
broadcast systems (Schwoch, 1990).

     Getting closer to conventional mainstream commercial
television production (identified with "American-style"
programs), I am also thinking of television programs
produced by U.S. companies in Canada, with a primary
interest in global distribution, that may be sold within the
U.S. in syndication, but are as likely to be available in
Taiwan or Finland as they are in any particular television
market in the U.S.  Indeed there is an increasing body of
programs--Renegade, Highlander, and Baywatch, to name a
few--that are designed and marketed in relation to
impressions, however stereotyped or limited, of what will
sell in the global market much more than with the U.S.
national audience in mind.

     In all of these cases there is not a very clear or
singular point of production or reception that could be
defined in terms of a single national identity.  On the
contrary, these are all muddled cases, some of which involve
more traditional or obvious "American" or "First World"
interests than others.  In referencing the nation-state to
"quantify" program flows, flow studies diminish--by virtue
of their methodological constraints--the complex
interactions of global and local forces around the world,
acting within and across the boundaries of the familiar
nation-state, often without an explicit management decision
or policy, but instead via cultural habits or practices,
gray markets, personal contacts, and the like.

     Looking at the situation from the perspective of
government policies, for example the U.S. government's
aggressive protection of global markets for U.S. media
"software," does not clarify the situation.  For of course
the U.S. government policy is not strictly linked or limited
to "national" cultural or economic interests.  Its support
of this position benefits Rupert Murdoch (whose status as a
U.S. citizen is the result of his desire to own a global
media empire and not vice versa) and Sony as much as it does
any "American" national parties.  In other words, the U.S.
GATT position in 1994 regarding media promoted transnational
interests as much or more than any conventional range of
national interests.  (The fact that flow studies conflate
transnational interests with U.S. and other western national
interests is another problem:  they lack an articulatable
conception of global or transnational identity that may
intersect with, but is not identical to, the nation.  [2]

                          Example

     Another example may illustrate my point, this time in
relation to personal anecdotal evidence, which does not even
constitute data for proper ethnographic study.  As a U.S.
citizen residing in Helsinki, Finland for a few months in
1994, I was able to watch on almost a daily basis
English-language infomercials for products which I had no
interest in actually purchasing (either in Finland or in the
U.S.).  The programs could perhaps most readily be
considered U.S. television in Finland (among many other
countries, since prices were usually provided in at least a
dozen currencies).

     But while the programs may originate in the U.S. it is
not necessarily the case (indeed it is doubtful) that the
products being sold were manufactured in the U.S.  This
raises a question of the significance of origins, a question
which flow studies have not yet critically interrogated.
Moreover, the companies producing the products are as likely
as not to be transnational corporations, which could be
based in France, the U.S., Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, and
many other places.  And the distribution network for the
products may yet be situated in other places.  In terms of
nation-state identities and interests, what is flowing
where?  Obviously programs and products are flowing from
site to site with no clear or identifiable points of
national origin.

     What I want to highlight is the incommensurability of
levels of global circulation all at stake in even one
program and product that I happened to encounter (and
frankly, purposely chosen, a fully banal and inconsequential
program, from fringe programming time, totally suffused with
commercial intent).  All the program does is demonstrate the
uses of a product which it then tries to sell directly to
viewers.  Thus in this example what flows in terms of the
program itself, its "meanings," labor forces, corporate
economic interests, national identity, class identity, etc.
does not line up or function in the same way.

     All of these are at stake in this program:  the labor
force that produces the program is not the same (or
necessarily the same nationality/ies as) the one that
produces or distributes the product; the national-economic
interests of the manufacturer of the product may have
nothing to do with the nationality/ies of any of these labor
forces, to say nothing of the interests of those who view
the program just for the heck of it or those who buy the
product; the national-cultural and class identity of the
products hardly links up with official U.S. state
ideological interests, or with the interests of national
elites in countries around the world where people view these
programs and purchase the products they sell (even as the
programs may air on government-sponsored broadcast
stations).  These are the cultural conditions of a
fundamental incommensurability.  The point is, I don't think
that most program flow studies ever even imagined
programming on this order, or take this kind of program that
seriously.  But within the current methodological framework
of flow studies, it certainly continues to "count" as "U.S.
television in Finland" even if this description and
enumeration tell us little.

     Presumably in a very general sense one could argue that
U.S. style consumer culture seems to be gaining the upper
hand.  But even this is only true in some contexts; and what
"U.S. style consumer culture" references is, again, a
complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, embodying conflicting
interests rather than representing a unified coherent center
of power.  Moreover, it is important to remember that
capitalism is, historically, global culture (Braudel, 1984;
McCormick, 1989; Wallerstein, 1974, 1990), though the U.S.
has perhaps been the premier site of aggressive consumer
culture (so-called late capitalism) in the 20th century.

                         Conclusion

     I would like to borrow and rework a metaphor from an
earlier flow study, the idea of the one-way street.  (Varis,
1974) When it comes to television program flows, one-way
streets still exist, though some of them are in great
disrepair.  Moreover, these streets have been cut across,
displaced, and supplanted by a host of other conduits, not
only by the well-known information superhighway (which, we
know, is also a net), but also by metaphorical tram lines,
subways, bike paths, and so on.  Each of these proposes
different possibilities for and limits to television program
flow -- using that term in the broadest sense.  And they are
all active at the same time, including too many things
flowing down the old one-way streets.  Because so much is
going on at once it is possible, and even likely, that with
some regularity things flow the wrong way down the original
one-way streets, undetected in the hubbub of other activity.

     Flow studies need to reinvigorate by examining all
forms, modes, and conduits of media flow with a new-found
diligence and attention to detail exemplified by the
flaneur.  This may include the need for theoretical and
critical assessments that are not only statistically driven.
It also requires more than the ethnographic study of
reception that previous flow studies have acknowledged as
the most obvious avenue for adding cultural perspectives to
their work.  The mediascape of the 1990s requires that we
stop counting the familiar movement on the one-way streets
and develop more complex, multi-method models for
understanding relations of global media and power.

                          Endnotes

     [1] I am aware that some recent studies have expanded
their variables to begin accounting for time of broadcast
and, therefore, audience size.

     [2] For a cogent analysis of this distinction see
Schwoch, 1990.


                         References

Appadurai, A. (1990).  Disjuncture and difference in the
    global cultural economy.  Public Culture 2(2), 1-24.

Braudel, F. (1984).  Civilization and capitalism 15th-18th
    century.  (3 vols.)  S. Reynolds (Trans.).  New York:
    Harper and Row.

McCormick, T. (1989).  America's half-century:  United
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Mowlana, H. (1985).  International flow of information:  A
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    Communication, No. 99.  Paris:  UNESCO.

Naficy, H. (1993).  The making of exile cultures:  Iranian
    television in Los Angeles.  Minneapolis:  University of
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Noriega, C. (Ed).  (1992).  Chicanos and film:  Essays on
    Chicano representation and resistance.  New York:
    Garland.

Schwoch, J. (1990).  The American radio industry and its
    Latin American activities, 1900-1939.  Urbana:
    University of Illinois Press.

Schwoch, J. (1993).  Cold War, hegemony, postmodernism:
    American television and the world-system, 1945-1992.
    Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14(3), 9-24.

Varis, T. (1974).  Television traffic--A one-way street?
    Reports and Papers on Mass Communication, No. 70.
    Paris:  UNESCO.

Varis, T. (1985).  International flow of television
    programmes.  Reports and Papers on Mass Communication,
    No. 100.  Paris:  UNESCO.

Wallerstein, I. (1974, 1990).  The modern world-system,
    1600-1750.  (2 vols.)  New York:  Academic Press.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Author Information:  Mimi White
                     Department of Radio/TV/Film
                     Northwestern University
                     1905 Sheridan Road
                     Evanston, Il. 60208, USA
------------------------------------------------------------
                      Copyright 1995
   Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, Inc.

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