Author

Adrian Athique

Year

2014

Publisher

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

DOI/Link

View Source

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.870868

Abstract

The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of
cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad
range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing
body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses
particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field
of study, our knowledge of transnational audiences remains highly fragmented and
lacks a common conceptual or comparative framework. In the main, overarching
theories of global media flows and markets continue to rest upon theoretical
understandings of media reception that are largely derived from a previous epoch
where media mobility and intercultural communication was not a primary focus. As a
consequence, contemporary studies of transnational media reception still require a
coherent geography capable of addressing the unique demands of this kind of work.
There is a pressing need, therefore, to articulate the theoretical work on the
transnational itself with a technologically and politically updated configuration of
media reception in the twenty-first century. Ambitious as this proposition might sound,
defining this terrain in a comprehensive and accessible fashion has become a necessary
step in furthering critical debates in this exciting and important field. This article will
not achieve this goal, naturally, but will instead seek to lay out some of the conceptual
terrain from which we might proceed

Keywords

Digital Citizenship