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Untitled - socium.ge

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Television, the Internet, and identity 395La2. It is interesting to observe that Catalan-speakers watch television inCatalan (83.4 percent), Spanish-speakers watch it in Spanish (83.4 percent),and bilingual viewers adopt a bilingual behaviour: 48.2 percent watch inCatalan and 51.8 percent in Spanish.But, in considering the influence of Catalan Television in identity building,we observe that, on one hand, knowled<strong>ge</strong> of the langua<strong>ge</strong> has grown from 50percent to almost 100 percent from the beginning of TVC broadcasting untilnow. On the other hand, we also observe that, even though knowled<strong>ge</strong> of thelangua<strong>ge</strong> has increased a lot, its normal use is still low in proportion. Some43.2 percent of Catalans still consider their own langua<strong>ge</strong> to be Spanish; 50.3percent speak Spanish at home, and 41 percent speak Spanish with friends.These percenta<strong>ge</strong>s of Spanish use are higher among young people (Castells etal., 2002).We can conclude that TVC has been an important instrument in normalizingCatalan culture, recovering knowled<strong>ge</strong> of the langua<strong>ge</strong>, and strengtheningthe country’s cohesion. However, there is still a long way to go in the constructionof Catalan representation. Perhaps, a key differential factor in Catalonia,as a network society, could be a search for a collective strategy of adaptationto the chan<strong>ge</strong> produced by structural globalization, a search to find new waysto present and represent itself.TVC has been a powerful and successful instrument for the recuperation ofthe langua<strong>ge</strong>, but, just as important as langua<strong>ge</strong> is content, which is the creatorof the imaginary, the builder of meaning, and of a specific type of discourse.Catalonia, in spite of the great leap forward that TVC represents, has had andstill has a serious deficit in the control of its own representation, its meaning,caught between the global content and the Spanish imaginary. That is one ofthe main challen<strong>ge</strong>s that Catalonia has to face.GLOBALIZATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF THELOCAL: DALLAS AS INSTRUMENT OF LINGUISTICNORMALIZATION IN CATALONIAThe programming choice for the opening night of the new Catalan channel,TV3, in an effort to promote the langua<strong>ge</strong> and culture of Catalonia to thewidest possible audience, was the hit episode of Dallas, “Who Shot JR?”dubbed, of course, into Catalan. All the autonomous broadcasters havefollowed similar programming strategies, choosing to dub the most popularimported series into their own langua<strong>ge</strong> rather than pursue a strategy based onsubtitling or on broadcasting in-house production, without the presti<strong>ge</strong> tocapture mass audiences.For an important part of the Catalan population it has been difficult to

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