Student Reviews: Remediation (Blog 8)

     Over the duration of this course, we have explored many topics related to the interplay between media and its audiences. The cultural implications of remediation, the socio-political perception with which we percieve Graffiti, are but a few of the interesting topics which we have covered. Anthropology students, Rachel Roy and Chelsea Ousey wrote effective blogs commenting on Mazarella’s article, Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Each offered their own unique perspective on this issue, which are supported by the conclusions of Hong and Chiu in their article, Toward a Paradigm Shift: From Cross-Cultural Differences in Social Cognition to Social-Cognitive Mediation of Cultural Difference.

     Rachel Roy’s blog entry examined Facebook within the context of the author’s work. She highlighted an interesting example of how Facebook, as an internet community was able to unite people under one cause. She exemplified her personal experience during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver in Flashmob, as well as an even more contemporary example in Egypt’s recent revolution. Roy discusses how the flexibility of Facebook’s nature as a global social medium is what makes it have distance and intimacy simultaneously. This seems reasonable to conclude because of the level of personalization of the medium which allows the user to create a personal outlet which reflects them individually with pictures, posts and a friend network. The vastness of this medium and its ability to transform depending on the individual is what also creates distance which pertains to its global and individually stylistic aspects. Roy later illustrates how the alternate reality and one’s ability to create and manipulate one’s virtual reality is an important aspect to consider. The global nature of Facebook, allows for a venue of cultural exchange whereby individuals are able to appropriate cultural attributes from one another and thus re-create themselves over time. This cultural appropriation may remain solely online, but it also may transition off of the screen and into one’s real life in the form of knowledge at the very least.

     Chelsea Ousey examined Mazarella’s article in application to an ethnographic film on the indigenous people Kayapo. Ousey describes how this ethnographic film was self-mediated by the Kayapo, the result of which enabled them to control their mediated representation. As such, the Kayapo were again as Mazarella claims, able to become self-aware of themselves and percieve their interaction through its mediation. Ousey calls into question the effect of globalization on culture, as indigenous groups like Kayapo are in contact with the film crew who initially filmed them, or the effect of this culture being shown to audiences around the world. Ousey concludes that culture is re-constituted by its interaction with foreign cultures. The process Ousey describes is one in which culture is not percieved as a static element, but an evolving, progressive entity which thrives with new stimuli from foreign contact.

     This argument is supported by two researchers in Hong Kong,  who together examined the effect of media on cultures. Hong and Chiu claim that “cultures as dynamic open systems that spread across geographical boundaries and evolve through time” (Hong, 1). They endorse the dynamic constructivist approach as a framework with which to investigate and perceive culture. They claim that rather than Globalization to be viewed as a threat to cultures, the fusion of cultures can be a benefit in which “multicultural individuals can spontaneously change the cultural lenses that are available to them through multicultural learning” (Hong and Chiu, 14). Therefore mediation of culture is a benefit to both the audience and its subjects.

     Both students drew intriguing insight to Mazarella’s article. The Hong and Chiu study supported their common ideas surrounding the benefits of mediation and cultural fusion. Interestingly enough, I wonder how the students will reflect on their own works, as it has been received and remediated through my blog.

Sources:

Hong and Chiu. (2001). Toward a Paradigm Shift: From Cross-Cultural Differences in Social Cognition to Social-Cognitive Mediation of Cultural Difference. Social Cognition, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2001, pp. 181-196