Goldsmiths - University of London

Jan 2008 - July 2010

This project notes that media spaces are becoming at once globalised and transnationalised. The imagined unity of national audiences begins to be dissipated, and is disturbed by the entirely different phenomenon of fragmented, taste-driven, and transnationalised audiences. With the advent of digitalised search engines, mobile telephony-based data and image broadcasting, and Internet-based media, we are arguably at the brink of another media revolution, where an entirely new imagination of media audiences and their relationship to media is called for - beyond the frame of imagined community. A key contention of this project is that the media cultures and practices of new global migrants are productive for understanding the dynamics of change. Through Internet cafes, phones and multi-channel digital television - all key portals - migrants in Europe may spatially zoom in on, and participate in, the cultures from which they have been dispersed with significant implications for the sense of spaces of belonging, identity, citizenship and engagement. What we might awkwardly term 'portalness' is an emergent phenomenon, now jostling with the older imagination of community.

This project examines these (migrant) media and cultural transformations in the particular context of an enlarging Europe. The agenda of European unification sits awkwardly against the background of culturally fragmentary processes engendered by the media developments highlighted above. What distinguishes Europe, however, is the ongoing determination to form a common polity in the midst of powerful fragmentary forces. What, we must then ask, are the implications of these developments for public culture? How should policy-makers and regulators be re-thinking the nature of the public sphere in a changing Europe?

The project explores these questions in relation to European media and cultural policy and changing European media geographies. Key case studies concentrate on transnational European media institutions and practices involving Roma and Christian media.