Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesIndeed, which construction of Europe is the current coinage? The old continental/geographicboundary of Europe which perhaps includes (some of) Turkey isnot the same as the political boundary of the European Union, with Turkey andsome of the fragments of the former Yugoslavia as expectant would-be membersof the new club.Second, the invited focus is toward electronic image-based media, not towardprint, probably the longest-standing media practice for many migrant communities;nor toward radio, a cheap and effective and potentially community-basedmedium. Most of the available research focuses on television, but it is important tomake some brief comments about the Internet.The Internet is, of course, the diasporic medium par excellence, obeying fewboundaries – least of all territorial ones – in its production and reach. As a publishingmedium, information can be shared by all members of a particular diasporicgroup no matter where in the world they are. It thus has the potential to constructand maintain transnational diasporic consciousness like no previoustechnology. As a medium of connectivity, through chatrooms and list serves, diasporicindividuals can be connected in more or less real time, articulating the differentsegments at home and “abroad” to each other in virtual community anddeterritorialising politics. Websites can also be instantiations of the not-yet-existentbut certainly imagined national community, as is the function of eelam.comand tamilnation.com (Jeganathan, 1998). They can also function to bind otherkinds of communities, like a “British Muslim” or an Islamic diaspora (Bunt, 1999;Mandaville, 2001). The web also allows personal home pages in which the personalsense of loneliness, foreignness and disconnection of diasporic individualsmay be manifest but also (re)solved. 1 Others can of course find and make contactwith the individual, so breaking the psychological isolation and creating very“local” sites in cyberspace. Other issues that are likely to be of increasing importance,especially for exile politics, are the relationship between the Internet andother kinds of media: the Internet seems likely to emerge as the 24-hour broadcastingmedium (viz., the television programme Big Brother in the UnitedKingdom during summer 2000); also, the Internet remains a space somewhatbeyond complete state political censorship so that as political censors shut downnewspapers in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt, for example, the content appears almostimmediately on the Internet. Both of these elements are ripe for exploitation bydiasporic groups.Third, the stress is upon media use, toward minority audience-based studies ofmedia consumption habits and cultural tastes. The brief thus assumes the availabilityof, and brackets the nature of, minority media channels themselves. Thereis an implied distinction between channels for minorities versus programmes forminorities within mainstream media, such as Belgium’s magazine programmeSinbad for immigrants, or BBC2’s magazine programme East. Often what mediaare available to a community only becomes clear from audience-based studies,__________1. On personal webpages of the Bosnian diaspora, see Hozic, 2000.156