Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
about”? No, we are not sure of what they are talking about! Who is doing this in
Bangkok? The lifestyle promoted by the rappers reminds instead of the
Hollywood film “The Hangover II” (2011), rated by Bangkok Post film reviewer
Kong Rithee as one of the worst sequels he has ever seen, yet celebrated
because set in Thailand is drawing big crowds. After the release of the
Hollywood movie, the Internet was inundated with tourist promotional websites
of Bangkok and Thailand. Travel Happy.info is an interesting example to refer to
because it both identifies the places represented in the movie, and critically
acknowledges how the media and Hollywood industry manufacture and distort
reality. Many of the places represented in Hangover II do not exist in reality,
rather were built in Los Angeles as interior sets. This note brings us back to the
functioning of systems of representation and the social construction of meaning.
Stuart Hall (1997) defines representation as “the way in which meaning is given
to the things depicted (…) Your work of representation is your measuring of the
gap between what you think is the true meaning of an event or object and how it
is presented in the media” (p.6). Media literacy is key in measuring this gap and
investigating representations critically from within.
The Bangkok City music video alternates outdoor and indoor shots. Da
Endorphine, who is never outdoor and who is always dressed in black, lifts her
finger up to the sky (as it also happens in Empire State of Mind) and invites Thai
people to “Announce for the world to know that this is Bangkok City, Explain it
so they understand, That this is the city of the Thai people”. What we see at this
point in the video (and in later scenes) is on one hand the strong sense of
belonging to the “Chat Thai” (the Thai nation) and “kwam pen Thai” (Thainess);
on the other hand, the promotion of these values through the re-appropriation of
the dominant codes and systems of representation (looks, rapper style, English
language, glamorous life, money, ideas of modernity, technology and so on)
that are best understood by the west.
This nexus of local and global allows us to configure the Thai community as
transnational. Vertovec and Cohen (1999) maintain, “people who embody
transnationalism weave their collective identities out of multiple affiliations and
positionings and link their cross- cutting belongingness with complex
attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, peoples, places and traditions
beyond the boundaries of their resident nation- states” (p.189). This video
becomes a hybrid space where strong pride and allegiance to the nation is
manifested, yet multiple affiliations beyond the nation- state are also
established. The intercultural dialogue that takes place between Thai and non-
Thai people and the physical or mediated mobility of individuals in social spaces
(east and west) play an important role in the configuration of new identities.
The concepts of culture and identity are inseparable and co- constitute each
other. Stuart Hall envisions cultural identities as “symbolic articulations that are
a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’, having histories, yet undergoing
constant transformation. Far from being externally fixed in some essentialised
past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (cit.
in K. Woodward, 1997, p.54). The symbols that are in the texture of cultures
operate to form identities and build societies. One may argue that the strong
western- centric discourses that permeate everywhere in Bangkok (omnipresent
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