American Television as a Global Public Sphere

Abstract

This article examines the hegemony of the American media industry, and the effect that American teltevision has on global publics and global citizens. On the one hand, American television newa (and other global news service) produces the subject position of the "hlobal audience" that encourages a new type of attentiveness, a new form of collective monitoring, and a new politics of publicity. This new subject position encourages social reflexivity, but it does so in an uneven way, which also provides a number of distancing mechanisms that allow viewers to escape from ethical responsibility. On the other hand, genres of American entertainment programming produce technologies of transnational cultural citizenship, allowing the popular to come into contact with the civil spherein public debates about cultural policy, in aesthetic publics (which combine cultural criticism and social commentary), and at the level of the social imaginary. In this way, American television provides a kind of hybrid public space, which combines local and global publics in a way that denaturalizes both, creating a situation of ideological competition between multiple discursive forms and competing forms of cultural origin.