(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
The aim of this paper is to understand and expose their usage of media, mostly television, and
computer, radio, telephone, stereo/walkman, dvd player related to their being a diasporic
community in Central Asia. In order to apply the project, I had a field study using depth
interview method with 20 Ahiska Turks, a sum of 10 women and 10 men. I also wanted to
expose the generation gap between former Soviet Union citizens and latter independent
Kyrgyzstan Republic citizens of Ahiska Turks, so 5 of women were older than 40 and 5 of
younger than 25, as just were men.
In this study, I sought to try to move beyond the national mentality and categories of
“community”, “identity” and mostly “belonging” just to explore alternative transnational
possibilities. So, there can be appropriate categories to understand what is happening in
transnational cultural experience, as Aksoy and Robins (2000, 2001, 2003) elsewhere argued.
Here I too would like to move beyond these diasporic cultural studies’ concepts of
‘homeland’, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘loss’. Therefore I tried to answer how they experience their lifes,
and how they think and feel about their experiences through what is the difference that tv
makes for them and what is the nature of their engagement with the new transnational media?
Diasporic Cultural Studies and Media Theory
The prevailing framework concerning how transnational satellite broadcasting systems sustain
new kinds of “global diasporic cultures” or “transnational imagined communities” is very
problematic. Because “it seeks to understand transnational developments through what are
categories of the national imaginary-and is blind to whatever it is that might be new about
emerging transnational media cultures” (Aksoy and Robins 2003: 90). As a result, it remains
caught up in the mentality of imagined communities, cultures and identities-as grounded in
the national mentality (Anderson 1991).
My approach will assume that new developments in being diaspora can’t make sense of this
diasporic cultural frame. I am concerned with the kind of developments described by
Alejandro Portes in which “a growing number of persons..live (triple) lives: speaking three
languages, having homes in two-three countries, and making a living through continuous
regular contact across national borders” (From Aksoy and Robins 2003: 92). What I am
arguing is that the arrival of Turkish television has made a difference for Turkish-speaking
diaspora in Central Asia. What is the nature of that difference?
Diasporic media are said to be providing new means to promote transnational bonding and
maintaining diapora’s identification with the “homeland”. There surely is a certain kind of
truth in this argument. But this kind of truth is only a meagre and partial one. The problem
with diasporic media studies is that its interests and concern generally come to an end at this
point. The diasporic agenda has generally been blind to what else might be happening when
migrants are connecting in to the “homeland” culture (Atabaki and Mehendale 2009: 2). The
limits of diasporic media studies come from the readiness to believe and accept that diaspora
audiences are all behaving as the conventional and conforming members of “diasporic
communities”. So I should be concerned with the audience’s minds and sensibilities, but not
their cultures or identities. Not how they belong, but how they think.
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