Cultural Uses of New, Networked Internet Information and Communication Technologies:

Implications for US Latino Identities
 
 
Jonathan James McCreadie Lillie
Master's Thesis, 1998

School of Journalism and Mass Communications
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Committee Members: Lucila Vargas (advisor), Anne Johnson, Marcus Breen
 
 
  Index of Chapters

Introduction

I. Methodology

II. Theoretical Considerations: Cultural Identity, Cultural Space and US Latinos

III. Television

IV. The Internet

V. Results of the Pilot Survey

VI. Implications and Conclusions

VII. References

VIII. Appendix A. Copy of Email Survey

IX. Appendix B. Internet Terms

X. Appendix C. Sample Web Page

Footnotes




Introduction

As the volume of transnational cultural flows continues to increase, greater understandings are needed of what cultural space and cultural identity might mean for real people Ð both those at the margins and those who are more privileged (by dominant cultures and political-economies) within society. The spatial bias of electronic media necessitate research approaches that seek to understand the matrices of (1) the political-economy of text production and distribution, (2) the cultural implications of these texts within the social uses of audiences, and (3) the potential for beneficial uses of new media environments which can be seen as vital means for reducing the hegemony of 1 over 2.

David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995) have asked how communication systems are involved in the construction and maintenance of cultural identities in an era of changing patterns of global and local image and information spaces. My thesis will attempt to begin such an inquiry by analyzing the cultural uses of the conglomeration of information and communication technologies that run through what is commonly referred to now as "the Internet."

Although the Internet is largely populated by English-language sites and technologies (with a heavy US influence), it is accessed by people of almost every nation and contains numerous cultural and social spaces. Yet despite the growing cultural, social, political and economic significance of the new, networked information and communication technologies of the Internet, there are no established theoretical and methodological models for understanding and analyzing the implications of peoples' cultural uses of these technologies. This is a major obstacle for the future of Internet and New Media Studies.

To find some appropriate and developed concepts with which to explore cultural uses of Internet technologies, this thesis first looks to literature on the nature of identity construction, cultural identity and cultural uses of television. Television has been studied for many years due to the prominence it has achieved all over the world as a domestically consumed information and entertainment medium.

The cultural uses of media by US Latinos are explored in this thesis as a focal point for placing this inquiry of identity and cultural uses of media and the Internet within the context of real cultural groups and the daily lives of real people. The focus here is on the role played by Spanish-language television and Internet use in the cultural identity construction of some Latinos. The goal of this inquiry will be to help answer my primary research question: What is the nature of the use of new, networked communication and information technologies for (1) cultural identity maintenance and (2) cultural reproduction in an age of rapid change and convergence in communication technologies? A secondary research question is: How does the cultural use of new communication and information technologies differ from the cultural use of television?

As stated above, the principal reason that this thesis takes up questions of cultural uses of television is to help find concepts with which to study cultural uses of the Internet Ð a new arena of research where very little scholarly theoretical and empirical work has been done. Much of the best and most useful research on social and cultural uses of media have focused on television. Furthermore, there is available information on the Spanish-language television industry and the use of US Spanish-language television by US Latinos.

As this thesis shows, the heterogeneous nature of US Latino identities, cultures and cultural uses of media in the USA called for an in-depth look at these issues and helped to further understandings of cultural uses of the Internet. In addition to there being a lack of theoretical development concerning Internet use, there are also not many precedents for ways to gather useful data on this subject. Therefore, the strategy of this thesis has been: (1) to explore useful concepts on cultural identity construction and cultural uses of television (this was done through literature reviews and theoretical synthesis and covers issues of US Latino cultural identities and uses of Spanish-language television), (2) to design and use a pilot study for gathering information about US Latinos' cultural uses of the Internet, and (3) to take the results of this study and the concepts of identity and television use to offer some insights on the nature of cultural identity maintenance and cultural reproduction via the use of Internet information and communication technologies.

Ever since Marx and Engles, some scholars and activists have been concerned with the locus of control of the means of production being the hands of a small power elite. We now live in a society where not only the means of physical production are owned and run by the capitalist class, but the means of symbolic (i.e. cultural) production are as well. With commercial television, this is a constant flow of texts Ð carefully created cultural encodings designed to gather the largest possible audience to sell to advertisers. Commercial television production is thus committed to reproducing the most dominant and popular ideologies, lifestyles and cultural symbols, neglecting positive representations and tastes of groups marginalized within societies. Commercial sites on the Internet also produce content according to this capitalist logic. Yet, at the same time, Internet technologies present many more opportunities for marginalized (and other) groups for expression, publication and horizontal communication. As scholars we must work to better understand what this means for culture, ideology and identity.

Television is, culturally, the most important medium in much of the world. Many scholars, such as those working from the Birmingham school, have criticized this growing cultural significance while studying active audience uses of this medium. The near future of entertainment/information technology promises continued convergence of media platforms. Push (television) and pull (World Wide Web) options might coexists in multimedia environments.

The reality of present and future communication technologies necessitates the application of various research traditions within reception and media studies to grapple with the growing frequency and importance of multimedia use for cultural identity and social and political interaction. My thesis work will attempt to address this concern by analyzing the various ways that both Spanish-language television and the Internet are used by various Latino groups to facilitate identity construction and cultural maintenance. Implications are drawn as to how media use for cultural identity construction might be influenced as Latinos and others engage in the more participatory processes of Internet use.

Newly introduced media technologies have always assumed massive cultural significance in that quite literally the symbols of a society or societies are communicated within a different syntax and with varying strategies with each new medium. The introduction of radio and film, for example, had profound effects in many Latin American countries where they were vital tools in creating a sense of nation and national identity and culture. One of the main goals of this thesis is to argue that for culturally marginalized groups such as US Latinos, selective use of television texts has been an important strategy for cultural identity maintenance. Networked technologies can be used for cultural maintenance and reproduction and other empowerment outcomes for members of marginalized groups.

Network access can provide a variety of alternative cultural and social spaces to the pervasive cultural grip of English and Spanish-language transnational media corporations. Yet the use of networked information and communication technologies is mostly the privilege of relatively elite groups of middle and upper class peoples in wealthy areas of the world. Public Internet access projects and participatory communication policies must be implemented if the democratic and empowerment potential of network use is to be realized. By discussing the limited benefits of television use and the greater possibilities of Internet use for cultural reproduction and other empowerment processes, this thesis seeks to inform access projects, policy and future considerations of the many issues involved.

Concerning television use, an exploration of both the social and individual uses and gratifications of Spanish-language television has been grounded within an informed look at the development and the current status of the commercial US Spanish-language broadcasting industry. This literature review shows that while the economic and political goals of the commercial media work towards the cultural and political merging of heterogeneous US Latino groups, selective exposure/uses can include cultural maintenance that reinforces diverse cultural identities. For Internet use, both identity construction and cultural expression will be explored by surveying US Latinos who use the Internet. This data will be synthesized with concepts of cultural identity and media use for cultural maintenance for the purpose of deriving a better understanding of the different processes involved for cultural uses of Internet technologies.

There are many reasons why audiovisual spaces, particularly mainstream Spanish-language television and the alternative cultural spaces available on the Internet, might be important to US Latinos. When many Anglo-American peoples think of 'American television culture' they think of programming offered by the major English-language networks: Sienfeld, pro football, Dan Rather, The Simpsons, Oprah, N.Y.P.D Blue, Regis and Kathy Lee, General Hospital. Programs are created to attract the largest possible audiences to sell to advertisers.

The legacy of US media studies, both traditional quantitative content analysis and textual criticism, have demonstrated the disparities, inequalities and biases of the mainstream media, both entertainment and news (if the two can be separated). Among these critics have been an increasingly vocal and visible group, concerned with the position of Latino images and cultures in US television programs and other mediums as well (Subervi-Velez, 1994). Jimmy Smits from N.Y.P.D. Blue, for example, represents one of the few Latino television stars, or Latino actors in general, to be found on prime time US television. Furthermore, US Latinos in the mainstream English-language news are more often framed as problems: illegal immigrants or gang members (Subervi-Velez, 1994).1 Preferred language, social/political issues, information, and images and cultural symbols likely to be valued by multicultural US Latino groups, are lacking in the mainstream English-language audiovisual spaces. Thus these audiences often chose Spanish-language channels when such media are available. This is one of the main reasons that advertisers interested in marketing to the potentially vast US Latino (or rather official "Hispanic") audience, about ten percent of the US population, do so through Telemundo and Univision, the major US Spanish-language networks.

Figure 1.

 There are around 25 million people classified by the government as Hispanic living in the US (Figure 1). These descriptions, "Hispanics," "Mexican-Americans," "Cuban-Americans," etc,.. are part of the official dominate nomenclature. Indeed, many people who have immigrated from Mexico and now reside in the US do chose to call themselves Mexican or Mexican-American, but these terms come with much cultural baggage no matter which side of the border you live on. The term "Hispanic" was not widely used until government agencies began to use the it in the 1970s. A person is of Hispanic origin if the person's ancestry is Mexican, Mexican-American., Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican; from any Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean, Central or South America; or from Spain (Oboler, 1995:1).3 Suzanne Oboler in, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives (1995), states:

The term [Hispanic] fails to recognize the extremely rich ethnic and racial diversity of Latin Americans, for example, Argentineans of Italian, German or French, descent; Mexicans of Irish or Japanese ancestry; Cubans with Spanish, Lebanese, African or Chinese forebears; Peruvians of English, Russian-Jewish or Inca lineage; Venezuelans of Polish or Uruguayan stock; Brazilians of Korean or Greek heritageÐ the varieties go on. And, of course, there are those many Latin Americans who are entirely or partly African and American Indian ancestry with some of the above thrown in (Oboler, 1995: xiv).
 

Oboler notes in her work that various political forces have been responsible for how Latinos are defined, and that these definitions have affected how individuals and groups define and understand themselves. Many Chicanos in the US Southwest and Puerto Ricans, for example, have been living under US colonization for many generations, yet they are considered under that same Hispanic label as the wave of Latin American immigrants arriving in larger numbers in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (Oboler, 1995). In media and political arenas, both television giants and Latino journalists and politicians seek various unities and convergences (cultural and socio-political) of diverse Latino groups to further their perspective market oriented and political goals.4 Felix Padilla has offered the term "Latinismo" to describe projects and movements for Latino political unity for the purpose of addressing social and economic inequalities (Oboler, 1995).

The criticisms of the US English-language media discussed above can be seen within the "liberal" tradition of (mainly US) mass communication research. Liberal feminist media studies in the US, for example, have used techniques such as content analysis of female representations on mainstream television to illustrate the frequent use of negative stereotypes and other inequities (Steves, 1987). Although liberal feminists have been widely criticized in the past for neglecting questions of race and class, media studies of Latino representations in the US have often used similar techniques and arguments (Subervi-Velez, 1994). Where identity is concerned, the some US researchers in this "liberal" tradition posit (though sometimes not explicitly) that the inadequate and negative representations of women and Latinos (and other marginalized groups as well) in the media are likely to have detrimental effects on the identity construction and self-view of members of these groups.
 
 

Questions of Television Use

Although it seems doubtful that Spanish-language television provides more equitable representations of women, it does offer a cultural/representational sanctuary for many US Latinos. The vast networking, communication and expression capabilities of the Internet can be seen as another sanctuary/source for desired representations. When the task is to discuss how these cultural spaces interact with cultural identity, liberal mass communication research methods and theoretical assumptions are inadequate. Instead, we must look to reception studies, cultural studies and critical communication theory. Chapter Three of this thesis covers several concepts from these areas of study which have been applied to understandings of the interaction of television texts and their audiences. Particular attention will be paid to how US Latinos use Spanish-language television for cultural identity construction and maintenance.

Of the different approaches that been used to study processes of television use, reception studies have been particularly pivotal in mapping out the vital role of the audience/media consumer(s), in the construction of uses and meanings during processes of reception. The concept of the active audience Ð that users of television, radio and other media selectively expose themselves to certain texts (programs) and selectively (both consciously and unconsciously) make meaning of these texts Ð has been one of the most important observations within relatively recent media and communication studies. Theories of selective exposure are vital to any understanding of how heterogeneous groups of US Latinos use messages within available cultural and social spaces to help construct individual and collective identities.

Selectivity is first encountered in an audience's decision to view/consume certain programs that match their personal preferences, tastes and viewing habits. Uses and gratifications research has aimed to find out what motivates program selection and what audiences "get out of" their viewing experiences (entertainment, companionship, information, etc...). Reception studies can be seen as going further. This emerging area of research has worked from the uses and gratification focus on audiences (as opposed to texts), and cultural studies' concern with how social and cultural power relations affect reception and the production of meaning within mediated experiences and other social events as well.

British cultural and communication studies have been particularly influential in the development of what is now known as reception studies (particularly due to the work of British scholars Stuart Hall and David Morley, which is discussed at several points throughout this thesis). Students of reception studies have looked at questions of (1) the role social/group environments in television consumption (Morley), (2) social uses of media texts, and (3) the nature of encoding and decoding processes (Hall). Chapter Three discusses how these three areas of research offer ideas of how processes of television consumption influence individual and group identities. It is the research of Stuart Hall (and others) on the nature of text encoding and decoding, however, that is most fundamental in connecting the political-economy of text production with the possible consequences of this logic on the cultural identity of audiences (while at the same time not relapsing into an implicit appropriation of "direct effects" to explain away assumptions about the indoctrinating power of the mass media).

In "Encoding, Decoding" (1980), Hall insists that we understand the moment(s) of the creation of the text and the moment(s) of reception and creation of meaning as distinct situations taking place in different environments (social, political, economic). Encoding occurs when the media, as cultural producers, take information and ideas and put them into linguistic codes. These coded texts are designed to work to "enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding of the event within the limit of dominant definitions in which it has been connotatively signified" (Hall, 1980:134).

For commercial television this means encoding that frame and define commercialism, consumption, capitalism, and other concepts such as versions of democracy and individuality, all as natural, positive-goods Ð institutions, customs and lifestyles not to be questioned. Hall considers a dominant reading, one in which a viewer accepts and buys into the meanings that a text is intended to convey. Yet, other decodings, which are important in understandings of the active audience, are possible. With a negotiated reading an audience only accepts part of what the text has been designed to convey while disagreeing with other parts or creating alternative meanings as well. An oppositional reading/decoding involves an audience's complete usurpation of the text, creating an alternative and often critical meaning/interpretation. Another important aspect of the decoding process is conscious and unconscious identification with certain symbols or events occurring within a text. Thus, a Latina watching a Spanish-language program might recognize a situation in the text as sexist, (which can be negotiated or oppositional stance) while identifying with a strong, matronly figure.

Although negotiated and oppositional readings are possible, these are limited due to social and cultural institutions, and other sources of social power, that reinforce and facilitate dominant readings. The motivations and institutional structures that affect text production must therefore be explored as extremely relevant locations that influence cultural identity. Chapter Three includes a discussion of the development and current political-economy of the US Spanish-language television industry as a necessary step for understanding encoding and decoding battles waged within and around the mainstream US Latino audiovisual spaces and US Latino identity by the corporate Spanish-language cultural industries and US Latino communities and individuals themselves. Today, some US Latino communities are not only faced with questions of the motivations and powers behind Spanish-language broadcasts, but often, and more importantly, whether any Latino-oriented-audiovisual spaces are offered at all in places where the cultural needs of Latinos are not a priority for commercial industries. This is the case in the city of Raleigh, NC, where a grassroots group of US Latinos is pushing for greater cable access to Spanish-language television (The Raleigh News and Observer, 1997, August 14). As mentioned before, Internet access is another issue affected by the politics of culture and economics.
 
 

Questions of Internet Use

Understandings of the hegemonic-like cultural power of the media and the selective exposure of audiences are invaluable to media studies. However, much more work still needs to be done to reconcile these two areas of observation and scholarship. If networked, computer-mediated cultural and social spaces might become (at least for some groups) the most dominant information/entertainment/communication model in the future (eclipsing or engulfing television as we know it), then both concepts (hegemony and selective exposure) must be revised in consideration to what they might offer for analysis of Internet use and the evolving cultural implications of the information/communication "revolution."

Compared to broadcast and cable television, the information and entertainment options available on the World Wide Web are incredibly vast and diverse despite the economic barriers to network and hardware access. Audio, video, text-based, hyper-text and real-time communication are currently being used. Rather than creating beneficial meanings from limited numbers of sources, multifarious texts matching specific interests and needs are more likely to be available via the Web or other Internet technologies. Most significantly, Internet access allows for many types of participation in communication processes. This fact has significant implications for identity construction, cultural maintenance, the creation of cultural texts and social networking. Through engaging in such processes, the empowerment potential of Internet use is great (Lillie). As some postmodernists have pointed out, such opportunities can be especially important to members of groups marginalized culturally and socially by mainstream society. "Virtual communities" have been studied as communities of association where individuals use computer networks to express themselves and to commune with members of a particular identity group (Braddlee, 1993). Yet utopian predictions concerning the Net's impact on human civilization often bypass the social, economic and political inequalities in which the mechanisms of cyberspace exist. English-language and corporate culture are certainly greatly over represented. Furthermore, the information and communication technologies used via the Internet are, for the most part, only available for upper middle-class peoples in highly-industrialized nations.

When considering the present and future of new, networked information and communication technologie, it is certain that while they seem to have many positive and democratizing uses, there are also many obstacles that limit this potential. Thus, to begin with, the cultural, political, social and even economic implications of Internet use by marginalized groups (and also by developing nations) must be explored to see if any of the Net's potential is being realized. A second step is to analyze (1) which technologies are being used (2) to different ends (3) by what groups or interests. This information should be used in policy considerations for access projects and NII (National Information Infrastructure) initiatives.

I. Methodology
 

Given the complex and diverse nature of this thesis research, I hope to offer a multidisciplinary and positional approach. Positionality (a term similar in meaning to standpoint epistomology) is a key concept in this challenge towards considering the pervasive cultural realm which many students of cultural studies have recognized as blurring the distinctions between cause and effect. This connotes an epistemological, practical and vital respect for the lived experiences and heterogeneous environments in which people consume, mediate and create cultural symbols. It also recognizes the limitations and layered conceits of scholarly authority where myths of "others" are produced within many of the same discourses that have sprung from the Godhead of modernity, facilitating various forms of marginalization through capitalism and hegemonic power structures. A positional analysis can be a powerful alternative to the external cultural definitions offered by traditional, mainstream, hegemonic mass communicated messages. Positionality quite simply refers to the subjective nature of personal and group interpretations of reality, and thus, a positional analysis seeks to gather knowledges from various perspectives and contexts relating to research subjects. The epistemological standpoint of the researcher must be acknowledged in relation to the cultural projects and other issues important to research subjects.

As a researcher, my epistemological standpoint has been highly influenced by the opportunity to attend (1) a private liberal art college, and (2) a public university for a Master's degree. My political views are socialist. I was raised in a middle-class, Caucasian family in a college-town in North Carolina (USA). Although my beliefs and experiences have certainly guided my assumptions and conclusions, the methods I chose to gather data on US Latino's cultural uses of the Internet have given some individuals who are US Latinos a voice within this research. Furthermore, much of the purpose of this research has been to explore how to go about studying the cultural uses of new, networked information and communication technologies. Thus, paying attention to the research process and the types of results achieved has been important for helping to offer a theoretical and methodological framework for future work. Finally, I think that the physical isolation, and often inaccessible syntax of academia creates hierarchical or at least skewed relationships between most scholarly work and the lives of the real communities that are often studied. With this in mind I plan to publish my thesis, once it is completed, on the Web. The (information) elitist nature of the Internet not withstanding, I believe that this is the most logical and most doable way of taking advantage of an increasinly global technology to enhance interconnectedness with a wide array of communities and interests.

To reiterate, my main research question is twofold: What is the nature of the use of new, networked communication and information technologies for (1) cultural identity maintenance and (2) cultural reproduction in an age of rapid change and convergence in communication technologies? The secondary research question (How is the cultural use of new communication and information technologies different than television use for this purpose?) is largely a sub-category of the primary question and is answered during the course of the thesis. My research methods for answering my main question have been (1) theoretical synthesis, and (2) a qualitative pilot study of Internet use which consists of an email survey of US Latino Internet users. In attempting to develop an approach to this research, I found that theoretical perspectives of Internet use are still are in their infancy. Furthermore, the literature on cultural identity and the cultural significance of media use are fragmented and complex. Thus, this thesis continually strives to extract and built on the most useful concepts of collective identity and media use which are then applied to the results of the pilot study to help answer the main research question. In drawing conclusions from the research, I have begun to suggest (in Chapter Six) some useful, yet preliminary, concepts for a theoretical framework for understanding cultural uses of Internet technologies (a project that I plan to work on in the future).

The theoretical challenge/goal involved is to utilize the knowledge bases and theories covered to explore the nature of individual and group media use for cultural identity and expression. This endeavor is vital for being able to apply some these concepts to the use of Internet technologies as well. Thus, much of the thesis is devoted to this theoretical synthesis. I started by looking at what has been written about collective identity, cultural space, and television use (particularly US Latinos' use of Spanish-language television) because there is useful research on these subjects. This literature review and theoretical synthesis is taken up mostly in chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two tackles three questions in order to establish a conceptual background for the thesis. These questions are: (1) What is the nature of cultural identity construction within "late modernity?", (2) What are "cultural spaces" and how are they affected by the dominant, capitalist audiovisual industries? and, (3) Who are US Latinos, and how might their identities be affected by colonization of their cultural spaces? The concepts drawn from looking at these questions are then applied to research on television use which is covered in Chapter Three. Discussion in this chapter concerns how television in general, and also Spanish-language television, may be used for cultural maintenance and draws heavily on Manual CastellsÕ theories of collective identity formation and other ideas about the nature of cultural identity. Lastly, a look at the US Spanish-language television industry is offered to help contextualize research of television use by US Latinos. We come out of these two chapters with an understanding of several key concepts of what cultural identity might be and how it can be influenced and maintained through the consumption of domestic media. This theoretical framework is then utilized to analyze the data collected in the pilot study. Chapter Five presents the results of this study, while Chapter Six will answer the main research question by discussing the implications of the survey results and concepts from earlier chapters. The purpose of Chapter Four is to briefly cover some background information and research on the Internet as a context for discussing the results of the pilot study.

The original, "virtual" fieldwork (the pilot study) for this project analyzes Internet use for cultural identity maintenance, expression and communication. I am calling this "virtual" fieldwork a pilot study due to the fact that I am attempting to develop this as a useful technique for answering questions about Internet use. This pilot study is thus both a means to gathering data, and is also an end in itself, since one of the purposes of this thesis is to develop a methodological model for researching the uses of new, networked information and communication technologies.

The steps taken in this virtual pilot study were as follows: A) I visited Web sites created by US Latinos and which offered information or other content for and about US Latinos.
B) Next, I emailed some of these Web authors to find a volunteer group of US Latino Internet users for an email survey designed to gather data to help answer my research question.
C) Most of these surveys were completed and emailed back to me, at which point they were processed and used to help answer the main research question.

Seventeen questions were included in the survey. A copy of the complete emailed survey (which also had demographics questions and a section on anonymity) is offered as Appendix A. The survey questions are presented below in four series. Each series contains related questions and a brief discussion of why these questions were chosen for my pilot study.

Survey Questions: Series One

1. What US Latino/Hispanic media do you use regularly? a) magazines b) television c)newspapers d) radio

2. Do you use US Spanish-language media? a) not at all b) sometimes c) frequently

2.1. If so, what Spanish-language media do you use? (chose those that apply) a) magazines b) television c) newspapers d) radio e) list others

3. Do you consider Spanish-language television to be a viable cultural resource?

3.1. If so, why?

Questions numbers one through three were included to be able to compare the importance of various Latino and Spanish-language media for each respondent to their Internet use. I hoped that question three, furthermore, would help add to the knowledge gathered in Chapter Three about the importance of Spanish-language television for some US Latinos. Some of the data on Spanish-language television use suggests that bicultural and low (Latin American heritage)5 groups might get less out of using this medium. I wanted to see how many of my respondents used Spanish-language television and whether they think it is valuable as a Latino cultural space.

Series Two

4. Do you feel that your culture, the cultural background and heritage that you and your family identify with are marginalized or underrepresented within the mainstream culture in the US? Please explain.

For question four, I was wondering if feelings of marginalization might predict (1) the respondents attitudes about the cultural significance of Internet use, and (2) the cultural and political content of their pages.

Series Three

5. How many years have you been using the Internet?

6. From where do you have/get Internet access? a) home b) work c) library d) friend(s) e)list other

Question six is particularly important for discovering the social environment of Internet use. One of the major differences between television and Internet use may be the nature of social environments which can significantly influence the mediation and interpretation of texts. The number of years a respondent has been using the Internet will be an important factor in future research where a larger number of subjects are surveyed. At that point I may be able to draw conclusions on whether the nature of Internet use may change as more experience and knowledge about cultural resources are gained by individual users.

Series Four

7. Do you have a personal or group web page?

7.1. If so what is the URL?

8. What kind of content have you put on your Web page?

8.1. Is your Web page important to you as a site for cultural expression?

8.2. Why or why not?

Questions seven and eight were used to find out the nature of cultural reproduction and participation of respondents via the World Wide Web. The Web is definitely one of the most culturally significant technologies available through the Internet due to the wide range of media that users can access and consume, while also being able to publish their own texts. The creation of a personal or group Web page can represent an important use of new, networked media. Those who create "Latino" Web pages may also be helping to create virtual communities of US Latinos.

Series Five

9. Have you visited Web pages created by and for Latinos? Why?

9.1. What is the cultural significance of Web pages created by and for Latinos?

10. Have you interacted with other US Latinos via the Internet?

10.1. What specific Internet technologies have you used to do this? (email, listserves, the Web, etc)

10.2. Why are these interactions important to you? (culturally and otherwise)

11. Of the Latino oriented Web sites that you use (or have used), what percentage would you estimate are US sites, versus sites originating within Latin American countries?

12. Do you use the Internet to communicate with people who live in Latin America?

13. Do you think that interaction with people and (Web) sites from Latin America influences your cultural identity? How so?

14. Has your perception of Latino communities and culture in the US been influenced by your Internet use?

15. How has your identification with these cultures been influenced by your Internet use?

The next series of questions, helped to find out how and why the Net is used for cultural maintenance and cultural communication. Numbers nine, ten, fourteen and fifteen aimed to assess whether respondents felt that interaction with US Latinos and US Latino culture(s) (via the Internet) was important to them, and how it was important to them. Similarly, eleven through thirteen assessed the importance of interaction with people and sites from Latin America.

Series Six

16. Do you think Internet access projects in poorer Latino communities could be beneficial? Why or why not?

17. Lastly, please describe your cultural identity, what you think it is and what influences it.

Question sixteen was included to see what kind of support there is for Internet access projects in poor communities. Part of my motivation in writing this thesis was to produce research that could help to document the potential benefits of such projects. Finally, by asking the last question, I hoped to see how the respondents described their cultural identity, in hopes of furthering my own understanding of it, and for supplementing the discussion of cultural identity offered in this thesis.

In addition to these main questions, there were also several included to gather demographic information on the subjects. These were: (1) current city/area of residence, (2) place of birth, (3) year of birth, (4) estimated personal or family income, (5) marriage status, (6) whether the respondent have children, (7) highest level of formal education, and (8) how often they used Spanish.

The last section of the survey was Òanonymity,Ó which allowed the respondents to chose a level of confidentiality for the information that they provided for this research. I also transferred the finished surveys to my home computer. Once all the surveys were on my hard-drive I deleted most of the correspondence between myself and the respondents, including the surveys, that were on my email server. The Human Research Review Committee advised deleting all the surveys and personal information on the respondents (such as email addresses) after the thesis was completed. The down side of this is that this data (the surveys) would no longer be available for future use in their original form. In similar research down-the-road, I plan to ask the respondents permission to be able to keep their information and surveys in storage. I did keep the email addressed and URLs of a few respondents who were interested in further correspondence about the issues covered in my thesis and in the surveys.

Fifty-three inquiries were sent out (as email) to various US Latino Internet users. Nineteen individuals who received this email replied saying that they wanted to participate in the pilot study. The survey was sent to all nineteen of these volunteers. Fourteen of them actually sent back completed surveys. I chose not to use one of these, due to the fact that this respondent did not understand several of the questions. To analyze the results of the final thirteen surveys, I first gave each respondent a pseudonym and grouped together all of the responses for each question. This allowed me to observe trends in the data for each question. For example, I could see that almost all of the respondents are able to access the Internet from home. Personal information given in response to the demographic questions was used to produce a brief biographical sketch of each survey participant. These biographies helped me to better understand the answers given to some questions. Overall, the responses were used to discuss the ways some people use Internet technologies for cultural maintenance and cultural reproduction and how concepts of media use can be applied to understandings of cultural uses of these technologies.
 

 

II. Theoretical Considerations Ð Cultural Identity, Cultural Space and US Latinos The selective uses of Spanish-language television, Internet uses and also actors seeking unified political action for US Latinos represent ways that audiovisual spaces can be used to beneficial ends. To establish an informed theoretical context for this thesis, several fundamental questions must be answered concerning the principal issues that are to be discussed:
(1) What is the nature of cultural identity construction within "late modernity?" (2) What are "cultural spaces" and how are they affected by the dominant, capitalist audiovisual industries? (3) Who are US Latinos, and how might their identities be affected by colonization of their cultural spaces?

 
What is the nature of cultural identity construction within "late modernity?"
 

All identities are constituted within a system of social relations and require the reciprocal recognition of others. Identity...is not to be considered a 'thing' but rather a 'system of relations and representations'...the maintenance of an agent's identity is...a continual process of recomposition rather than a given one, in which, the two constitutive dimensions of self-identification and affirmation of difference are continually locked...identity is seen as a dynamic, emergent aspect of collective action (Schlesinger, 1987:236-7, quoted in Morley and Robins, 1995:46).

Identity can be described as the construction of meanings from lived experiences and realities on the basis of cultural attributes that are given priority over other sources of meaning and authority (Castells, 1997:6). Manual Castells in his comprehensive volume,The Power of Identity (1997), distinguishes between identity and social roles such as musician, Presbyterian, care-taker, or soccer player which are tied to formal and informal institutions and organizations of society. Castells writes that:

The construction of identities uses building materials from history, from geography, from biology, from productive and reproductive institutions, from collective memory and from personal fantasies, from power apparatuses and religious revelations. Individuals, social groups, and societies process all these materials, and rearrange their meaning, according to social determinations and cultural projects that are rooted in their social structure, and in their space/time framework (Castells:7).
 

Castells' hypothesis is that identity construction since modernity can be separated into three categories: (1) legitimizing identity, which is introduced by the dominate (hegemonic) institutions of society to further, reproduce and rationalize their privileges, power and domination vis-a-vis social actors (a theme which corresponds to analysis of nationalism and various media criticisms); (2) resistance identity, emerging from actors within cultures that are marginalized by dominate discourses and power relations, and who therefore build "trenches of resistance and survival" against these forces; and (3) project identity, "where social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by doing so, seek the transformation of overall social structure" (Castells:8). Castells' identity construction typology is situated within an understanding of the political-economy of cultural production and social power within the era of "late-modernity" or postmodernity.

The defining features of this historical period is the primacy of transnational capitalist powers to control the use of communication and information technologies to colonize cultural spaces and socio-economic discourses with their products and neoliberal logic.6 The dominate ideology in modern societies is thus in transition from a nation oriented, state-driven hegemony to a new neoliberal order/hegemony where the consumption of transnational, multicultural products occurs within the vertical integration of most cultural symbols and meanings into this dominate political-economic logic. Yet, even in late-modernity, state governments, civil institutions and new social movements reacting against neoliberalism continue to strive for power and legitimacy in society and culture.

The nature of identity has been considered (at least implicitly) by modern scholars, particularly ontologists, existential philosophers, psychologists and others. It has only been in recent years, with the advent of cultural studies, that cultural identity has been labeled by name as a topic for consideration and research (Hall and du Gay, 1996)(Woodward, 1997). For the purpose of this thesis the discussion of cultural identity will be limited. Not much more is needed here than an understanding of how individuals or groups come to identify certain symbols, behaviors and ways of knowing as their, "our," or "my" culture. Cultural identity and collective group identity are two concepts whose similarities and differences are also considered within this Chapter and Chapter three.

Early modern writers who wrote on identity Ð what and who an individual feels she or he is, and what she or he identifies/has solidarity with Ð often held either essentialist or non-fixed views. For essentialists such as Descartes, Kant and Husserl, identity is naturally fixed within a person without possibility for change (Kellner, 1992). Other early modern philosophers including Hume, Nietzsche and Sartre considered identity as a variable which could be changed by the individual and his or her circumstances in life. Later theories of identity fit into this later, non-fixed grouping, but focus on the constructed nature of identity. Basically, these more contemporary modern writers have been preoccupied with understanding how social and cultural relations and institutions are instrumental in the construction of identities. Constructionists see identity as "constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristic with another person or group, or with an idea" (Hall, 1996:2). Thus, both cultural identity and personal identity are formed through experiences of, and identification with, certain events, rituals, social institutions and symbols of culture(s) in which an individual was raised and lives. Intuitively speaking then, cultural environment, or cultural space (this is the term that I have chosen to use throughout this work) is of utmost importance to personal, collective and cultural identity construction.

It is important at this point to distinguish between personal, or self-identity and cultural identity. Personal identity, as the term implies, is unique to the individual. Everyone has a subjective experience of life and forms different patterns of thoughts and behavior. A person's cultural identity is part of her or his individual, personal identity. Cultural identity has always been closely tied to collective temporal epistemologies. Cultural identities are collective identities in many ways, although each individual constructs different understandings of her or his cultural identity.

Cultural identity is made up of shared histories, cultural meanings and patterns of behavior that express who and what a cultural/social group is and what they have been through and value. Individuals and families within the group protect, embellish and often embody aspects of the collective cultural identity. Gender roles, prejudices, religious practices and civic rituals are often imbedded within cultural identity. It is easy to see then how personal identity and cultural identity can come into great conflict within an individual. An example of this, is that in many societies today some women and men personally identify with concepts and practices of equity and flexible gender roles, whereas their cultures in general continue to proscribe non-egalitarian gender roles within collective cultural identities. Sources of cultural and social power can be seen as seeking to enforce or encourage certain cultural identifications.

In the transition from traditional (tribal) societies to those existing within modernity, the lived histories of human kind has seen many changes in the nature of cultural space. For the traditional, the space in which a society and culture functioned was wed to a single social place. Though some groups were nomadic, societies remained cohesive, whole. There was often only one distinct culture with which members of that society could identify and through which they could understand themselves and their roles in the society. Even in these times, it seems intuitive that the politics of "Who am I?" were/can be processes of give and take within the (sometimes more, sometimes less) constraining limitations within a society.

A male hunter (for example) or a female midwife (for example) Ð both finding themselves within social roles dictated by gender (and most likely mediated by other actors as well, such as family rank) might have sought opportunities to excel within these roles, gaining reinforced identity through achievements and praise. Customs, belief systems, and social institutions are parts of both traditional and modern society's ideological apparatuses. Ideological apparatuses are the communication technologies, practices and most importantly institutions (social, religious, political) by which the cultures and ideologies of a society interact with its members. This interaction can either be direct (i.e. when an individual or group experiences a ritual song, or television program) or indirect (i.e. when an individual or group interacts with other members of their society who are indoctrinated into its cultural systems). Within the politics of "Who am I?" both direct (film, television, religious ceremony) and indirect influences (parents and friends) affect cultural identity.

The central problem that modernity has created for the construction of cultural identity is the fragmentation and colonization of cultural spaces that used to be distinct to one people, one society. "Modernity signifies the destruction of past forms of life, values and identities, combined with the production of new ones" (Kellner, 1992: 142). Arising out of the development of militaristic nation-states in Western Europe, capitalism and colonialism have been the principal engines facilitating this process. The advancement of communication and transportation technologies were essential for allowing (1) the colonization of many traditional societies and cultures and (2) the globalization of capitalism. These innovations were thus the propagating arms of the ideological apparatuses of modernity. These spatial technologies enabled European conquistadors and capitalists to wage campaigns of indoctrination, profiteering and the genocide against many indigenous peoples and their cultures. This illustrates how within modernity the transformation of cultural spaces has always been caused by power relations. Military, political, social and economic power have all been utilized to privilege one culture over others.

Today, people talk of global languages such as English and Spanish, but rarely consider what this implies for cultural space, cultural identity and cultural power. Less than two-thousand years ago the ancestor of modern English was an obscure Indo-european language in the far north-western corner of the Roman empire. It has become the first language of many of the world's peoples, and the second language of even more people. The history that I am referring to demonstrates that in modernity one of the principal means by which cultural spaces have been transformed is through colonization and war. Now, within late-modernity, the English-language threatens to transform many more cultural spaces through the spatial bias of electronic media, principally through television and film. Those that control the communication technologies also control a vital portion of the cultural system. Many parts of the modern world are filled with cultural products which were created within another society according to experiences and meanings indigenous to other cultures. Cultural/communication policies in many countries have attempted to limit the amount of US/foreign entertainment products precisely due to the effects they are thought have on local cultures and cultural identity.

Colonization and immigration are two modern trends which have created a plethora of multicultural societies. Political, economic and social inequities exist in all of these, being based often on histories of class and ethnic privilege/discrimination. Ethnicity is a term which draws much of its significance from the dispersion of cultural and racial groups in modern times. It is used to categorize people by race and national/regional origin. Ethnicity has also come to play a greater role in the politics of difference and cultural identity. The mechanics of this are indeed quite fascinating. To begin with, ethnicity is often dictated by the dominant discourses present in a place of origin. Nationality, for example, is assertive in this way among most modern cultures. Nationality has always struggled with smaller regional ethnicities for loyalty and for recognition within the cultural identities of individuals and groups. While governments have utilized the power of the electronic media to bolster national identity, local ethnicities are reinforced by community cultural heritage like the passing-on of customs and heirlooms from parents to children.

Feelings of ethnicity and cultural identity have also been affected by race relations. Many marginalized groups have for a long while been continuously afflicted by the politics of race: the politics of slavery, of institutional racism, of war, discrimination and hate crimes (to name a few). Ethnic groups who have suffered under such racial politics have in many instances built political and social movements to defeat such atrocities. The Zapatistas in Mexico are an example. As the Zapatista and other indigenous people's movements illustrate, cultural preservation can be an important project within the political goals and motivations of marginalized ethnic groups. The Zapatistas are also an example of how ethnicity is an important sight for the construction of resistance identities for marginalized groups in multicultural societies.

The politics of "Who am I?" will always involve a mediation between the individual and the many groups that have a stake in his or her cultural identity. Family and relatives often seek preservation of cultural heritage and values. Community and religious leaders usually have this interest as well. The state seeks the assimilation of aspects of a national identity which entails the state's version of patriotism, duty, citizenship, etc... The media, advertisers and other capitalists hope that individuals accept their versions of reality, desired lifestyles and patterns of consumption. Through these influences, cultural power is used to encourage certain cultural and personal identities. Yet, all cultures include ways of knowing and being which are valuable to individuals and groups that are part of these different cultures, and also have much to offer peoples of other cultures.
 

What is cultural space, and how is it affected by the dominant capitalist audiovisual industries?
 

Social geographer Ed Soja posits that late-modernity's "current crisis is accentuating spatiality and revealing more clearly than ever before, the spatial and locational strategies of capitalist accumulation and the necessity for labor and all segments of society "peripheralized" by capitalist development and restructuring to create spatially conscious counterstrategies at all geographical scales, in all territorial locales" (Soja, 1989).

As Soja suggests, the components of dominate cultures/societies which legitimizing identities emerge from, and which resistance identities react against, are the architectural product of the capitalist political-economy. Capital accumulation is the motivation behind the cultural industries7 whether these interests draw from the mainstream dominate US society to sell new cultural products or, if the symbols and information are selected from various Mexican realities for the purpose of massing the largest possible audience to sell. Thus, within the totality of the possible frameworks for commercial (i.e. capitalist) cultural industries, the primary task is creating consumers out of audiences.

The primary result is the colonization of cultural space Ð the places and mediums through which people experience and interpret social symbols, and where they start to build their legitimizing or resistance identities. In the same way that civilizations have historically incorporated frontier spaces into their boundaries (determining the design and function of those spaces by the needs of the center society) so too corporate interests incorporate new cultural consumption spaces as new communication and information technologies emerge.

The car, the bedroom, the private or company office, the home, and other public, private and "family" spaces as well have been exploited as places where modern individuals consume entertainment/information products through radio, television, video and new technologies, such as the World Wide Web. These spaces are literally created by big business which invests in design research towards new technologies, as opposed to traditional spaces such as face-to-face communication, belief systems, traditional music and artwork, etc.. that may be colonized by corporate-driven cultural products, or by the influences of other social institutions. Certainly, media consumers do negotiate benefits from such colonized spaces, but the question is: do these positive uses outweigh the negative consequences of allowing corporate interests to wield such pervasive power in cultural and communication arenas?

Canadian communication scholar Jody Berland notes that the dominate US influence in the production of cultural products within the digital domain (film, television drama, CDs, computer-mediated communication technologies, etc..) is due to the vast US entertainment and military industrial complex that invents and produces many communication technologies first and is thus able to produce large amounts of cultural products within these mediums at the highest technological levels. Only countries with large domestic markets, advanced production capabilities (such as Mexico), or effective protective cultural policies can hope to meet national demands for "high(tech)-quality" entertainment products. Multinational corporations are thus more likely than not to colonize English-language (and other) international/foreign audiovisual (and other entertainment) spaces with US cultural products and Latin (Spanish-language) audiovisual spaces with Mexican cultural products. Dallas Smythe proposes that the role of the mass media in sustaining hegemonic structures maintained by big business:

...is to produce people in audiences who work at learning the theory and practice of consumership for civilian goods,...and to produce audiences whose theory and practice confirms the ideology of monopoly capitalism (possessive individualism and authoritarian political systems)(Smythe, 1981:123).
 

Berland supplements this thesis, suggesting that, "Media and information technologies and the entire material, spatial, and social organization of knowledge are part of (and in fact, central to ) the "means of production" whereby natural space is produced as productive space, as part of the hierarchically organized social space of contemporary capitalism" (Berland, 1997:62). As these authors have observed, the cultural goods produced by capitalism are created according to the logic and world-view of the dominant society, and particularly those groups that have the most money to spend. The lucrative pornography markets found in every audiovisual industry are examples of the engendered biases of socio-economic inequities that are replicated in the colonization of transnational cultural domains.

Michael Foucault observed that it is vital to not see technologies themselves as facilitating marginalization, but rather to understand these processes within the scope of practices - the practices of using technologies in certain ways that affect spatial organization and function. When the space in question is that of cultural space, where individuals and groups experience cultural products/symbols (such as music, artwork or television programs) personal and group experiences and mediations of cultural products are affected by the practices of production and dissemination of those products which are experienced within social space.

Whereas products produced by the transnational entertainment/information industry seek to promote the universal value of depolitisized entertainment, mass consumption and stereotypical mainstream values, as articulated by Dallas Smythe, alternative, activist or indigenous cultural products can potentially have unique practices of production that serve heterogeneous, diverse goals and intended meanings. When these types of alternative communications are disseminated through contemporary communications mediums, they are able to project their products into the cultural spaces of human experience. This amounts to (1) resistance of the colonization of cultural space by products pushed by transitional capitalism, and (2) the possible emergence of project identities at the individual and group levels. Analyzing some of these cultural communication strategies and projects facilitated by US Latinos using the Internet has been an integral part of my thesis work.

The postmodern global political-economy suggests that the politics of capitalism is increasingly dominant in dictating or perhaps facilitating the myths of social and political discourse. One of the primary features of the neoliberal political-economic order is the role of national governments in working to create deregulated climates in which transnational corporations can further their influence over global economic and cultural flows. This cooperation of forces, as Berland notes, has worked to globalize the US First Amendment, extending freedom of speech to mean the freedom of corporations to colonize any cultural space with depolitisized entertainment/cultural products. The recent Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the US is a prime example:

The acquisition of "personal rights" by corporations new exceeds beyond the growth of "corporate speech" and First Amendment rights in the US, and is for the first time consolidated in international law. The US government succeeded in extending the exclusive right of corporations to organize, process, store, retrieve, and disseminate information, currently entrenched in corporate economic structures, to an internationally ratified, legally guaranteed right of corporations to override government policies and political rights (Berland, 1992:49).

Thus, the use of media technologies in the dissemination of cultural products has been disassociated from the political, cultural and social implications of this process. While some countries such as Australia, France, Germany, as well as some Scandinavian and African countries have policies regulating the percentage of foreign entertainment products that are to be disseminated within domestic consumption markets, the depoliticized nature of media communications are not solely descriptive of US, or "foreign" products. The multinationals of Latin American (Televisa, Globo, Venevision) as well as national media in general for the most part facilitate colonization within the often apolitical standard of both modernity and postmodernity. In most democracies, alternative, critical domestic media do exist and are vital for challenging social, political and economic injustices. Generally, these can be considered as important alternatives to national and global hegemonic communication apparatuses, although in real life categorizing many institutions within either side of a spectrum is difficult.

Ultimately, the colonization of cultural space and media communications in general facilitates the continued dominance of current privileged hegemonies and continued marginalizations when media/cultural products within this context fail: (1) to articulate and recognize the realities and persuasiveness of social injustice and multiculturalism, (2) to offer opportunities for marginalized groups to voice their concerns and demands so that national, regional, and international populations and politicians must reckon with these demands, (3) to delineate the uneven distributions of power that perpetrate poverty and social injustice, and (4) to offer media space for marginalized groups to express their ideas and cultures. The majority of cultural products disseminated globally through communications networks by the powers of international capitalism fail on all four counts.

Where NWICO initiatives and media criticisms have failed or been frustrated in ameliorating capitalist manipulation of communication technologies, the discovery of the active audience Ð the acknowledgment of popular voices and skills that were ignored by the dominate communication discourses Ð emerged as a psychoactive force that had always occupied the reality of media users but which now occupied the imagination of academics as well. New networked communication technologies such as those utilized on the Internet allow even more diverse participation in the cultural realm. Cultural meanings, imaginations and identities negotiated from mass communicated texts (produced and disseminated mainly through the logic and channels of the corporate media) can now be published into a more democratic, global, networked market place of ideas.
 
 

Who are US Latinos, and how might their identities be affected by colonization of their cultural spaces?
 

In the US, the primary audiovisual cultural spaces that Latinos are likely to encounter and use are colonized by (1) the dominate English-language networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, etc..), and (2) the dominate Spanish-language entertainment/information networks (Univision and Telemundo). Given that Latinos in the US are minority and marginalized groups, we can hypothesize according to Castells' typology, that, for most US Latinos, identity construction is likely to be along the lines of resistance identity and for some project identity. These forms of identity construction are furthermore likely to involve both resistance too and selective positive uses of (1) mainstream English-language audiovisual spaces (which facilitate the process of acculturation into the dominate culture/society), and (2) mainstream Spanish-language audiovisual spaces that may facilitate Latinoization: the acculturation into a more broadly defined US Latino culture as opposed to more narrow national and ethnic Latinos groups/cultures.

For some US Latinos, particularly for newly arrived groups, both of these dominant cultural industries, however, can and often do facilitate positive uses in terms of (1) negotiated and oppositional readings that reinforce cultural identities within the epistemologies of individuals and groups (i.e. cultural maintenance), and (2) selective and often conscious cultivation of various cultural competencies, such as learning English and learning about US political, economic and social systems. From here it will be useful to explore how use of English- and Spanish-language television can facilitate acculturation and at some points enculturation for US Latinos.

Acculturation can be defined as the assimilation of an alien culture. Enculturation can be defined as the learning of one's own natural culture. Obviously both are processes that affect cultural identity. English-language television can be seen clearly as a cultural space that facilitates acculturation, at least for those US Latinos who are new residents of this country. Both acculturation and enculturation probably result from these recent arrivals use Spanish-language television. Enculturation occurs as cultural maintenance Ð when symbols, practices, and other information from a home country or cultural region exist within television texts. Acculturation through Spanish-language television use might occur as Latinoization. Two questions to be dealt with in this inquiry, are (1) whether acculturation greatly influences the cultural identity of new Latino groups in the US, and (2) if Spanish language television and Internet use by US Latinos influences their cultural identities.

Latinoization can be seen as a form of acculturation because if there is such a thing as a pan-Latino culture in the US, then that culture is in some ways alien to the cultures from which immigrants have come Ð from the various Latin American countries and the many distinct ethnic/cultural groups that live within them. In general, utilizing these terms (acculturation and enculturation) when discussing a multicultural society is difficult and in some ways problematic. When talking about Chicanos and Cuban-Americans who have lived in the US for many generations we see peoples whose cultures are both "American" but also Cuban and Mexican. This underscores that fact that all cultures that can be said to exist within modernity, are hybrids Ð containing symbols, customs and ways of knowing that have been borrowed from other cultures. Cultures continuously mix, merge and engulf one another, and cultural identities will always be changing with the cultural spaces that they draw from. This is not in-of-itself a bad thing. Indeed, multiculturalism as a political and social project can involve peoples from different cultures within a society working together to recognize and respect these plural and heterogeneous realities. Multicultural projects must push for equitable representation and participation of marginalized cultures within mediated spaces if desired cultural identities are to find the resources that they seek.

The process of Latinoization (as well as a more general Americanization, i.e. acculturation) may occur over time for most, if not all Latinos who live in the US for a prolonged period of time. Levels of acculturation and cultural competencies facilitate different types and/or variations in social uses (of groups) and gratifications (for individuals) of cultural resources such as media. Understanding of various cultural symbols and systems, and the development of social, emotional and manual skills related to a society/culture is what scholars mean by "cultural competencies."

Bi-lingualism and familiarity with the dominate culture are important factors/stratifications that influence how and why Latinos use Spanish-language and English-language television and what they can get out of their use. The role of the dominant commercial/English-language, US media in the acculturation of immigrant and multicultural groups have been researched,8 although analysis of the use of Spanish-language television and other mediums for both acculturation and cultural maintenance are not as prevalent (Johnson, 1996). Very little, if any, research has been done on US Latino uses of the Internet, although it seems likely that most US Latinos who do use the Internet on a regular basis are fully bi-cultural.

It is important to note at this point that any process of (1) Latinoization, (2) cultural uses of Spanish-language television, and (3) identity construction in general, is likely to vary greatly between (a) US born and established communities of Latinos (such as Chicanos in the US Southwest) and (b) recent immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Castells' identity construction typology might classify both groups as likely to create resistance identities, which, as mentioned before, vary within and between groups. Processes of hybridization and uses of Spanish-language television for cultural maintenance (discussed below) have been seen as occurring within those groups who have only recently arrived from the South. I expect to find in my Internet research that individuals and groups from diverse backgrounds do communicate via the Internet for cultural purposes, albeit though with different social uses and practices being fulfilled. Latinoization implies a process of acculturation that can be discussed within the problematic of the "American melting pot." As an often marginalized, minority groups, US Latinos are (as this term implies) categorized and defined within the lump-sum of ÒLatinosÓ or "Hispanics." Specificities such as ethnic/state nationalities are not as relevant to the dominate society/culture as broader categorizations. Cuban-American, Japanese-American, Haitian-American, Polish-American, etc....become Latino, Asian, Black, White, when the former's stereotyped ethnic characteristics correspond to the latter's enculturated racial types.

There are many motivations behind the production of Spanish-language television as a vital component of Latinoization, namely the creation of a US Latino market which facilitates a more homologous Latino community/identity distinct from and often eroding more specific national and ethnic identities and cultures. Yet although such forces can clearly be identified as treating Latinos as a cohesive ethnic/cultural group, there is a vital question taken up by Suzanne Oboler as to whether Latinoization (my term not hers) is much more of an imagined process mythisized by US scholars, political actors, journalists and entertainment media (Oboler). Oboler posits that the social value of the term Hispanic, "must be found through exploring the specific context of US society that fostered the emergence of this ethic label as an ideological construct Ð a label that is thus specific to the political and daily life of this nation, to its past ideological self-image and identity as a "melting pot" of immigrants, and to its current redefinition as an "ethnic mosaic"," (Oboler:18).

While news from Latin American countries are a component of Univision and Telemundo's programming, these corporations work to produce a cohesive US Latino audience, thus possibly furthering a process of Latinoization and helping to create a unified Latino culture/community. Mainstream Spanish-language television may respond to some of the dynamics of US Latinos Ð certainly far more than most English-language programs. Yet, content produced for national groups such as Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans are limited, except perhaps where those groups make up sizable proportions of the audience.

The internal politics since the birth of Univision attests to the real and heated contestation (for cultural resources) between the most powerful/numerous Latino groups, Cuban- and Mexican-Americans. For the most part, Telemundo and Univision, as well as a majority of print and large scale music distributors of Latino cultural products, appeal to and target the broader US Latino market. Although some Spanish-language programs might focus on the perceived concerns of one group such as Cuban-Americans, the overall "grammar of production through which the media universalize a style of life" (Martin-Barbero, 1993a:142) is that of the lowest possible cultural denominator, the hodge-podge of US Latinos.

Thus again, both theoretical and real life contradictions clearly arise between active audiences' selective uses and the fact that various media uses and text production occur within broader power relations. The construction of resistance identities for some Latinos who seek to preserve national (often Latin American) and other cultural heritages thus may involve resistances to the process of Latinoization facilitated by Spanish-language television. News about a home country are distinguished and more cherished than news from other Latin American regions. Oboler maintains that difference among Latino cultural groups and difference to other minorities and the dominant culture are accentuated in the cultural/social mosaic within the US and further the resistance identities situated within the unique cultural origins and values of each group, which are grounded and given context against the various "others." Thus within any acculturation hypothesis, the active, selective nature of individual uses and gratifications, and social uses, must not be ignored. Many US Latinos appropriate Spanish-language messages in different ways for cultural maintenance and do find and or create positive cultural resources from these communication channels (Rios and Gains, 1997).

 

Media-transmitted ideology in any political-economic-cultural context is represented partly in language and articulated and interpreted through language and other highly elaborated codes and modes - including visual forms and music - which are further interpreted and used by people in routine social interaction (Morley and Robins, 1995:47).

 
The transnationalization of culture brought about by communication technologies, their reach, and their efficiently are better appreciated as part of the recomposition of urban cultures, along with the migrations and tourism that soften national borders and redefine the concepts of nation, people, and identity (Garcia-Canclini, 1995:10).
 

The creation of new social and political-economic geographies necessitates (as Canclini suggests above) new strategies of community self-conceptualization and identity. So far I have has worked to problematize the power of commercial communication as the most powerful authority in late-modernity to affect cultural identity. All notions of set reality and identity, created through combinations of hegemonic and active selective processes, are ultimately imagined yet cohesive entities. Locally positioned and negotiated imaginations, however, offer the most specific differentiations to other sources of cultural power, by being situated in authentic collective experiences and cultural projects for the enrichment of communal understandings and identity. "Authenticity here does not imply a privileged space of truth that is bounded by the inauthentic. Rather, it refers to the specific pleasures of familiarity, to the capacity of cultural forms to connect with and express vicissitudes of everyday life" (Hawkins, 1993:27).

This view posits the local as a logical sight for the cultivation of cultural products and meanings. It is at the local site of reception where television texts (for example) are shifted through individual and where group epistemologies and meanings/interpretations are produced. Within many communities today, however, most of the technologies of social and political communication and cultural expression are owned and utilized by private capitalists interests, as this proposal has discussed. Therefore, as mentioned above, one of the major tasks of my thesis has been to discuss the beneficial uses of these texts, such as with television, and the breadth of options and potential for expression and empowerment through Internet use.

In summary/conclusion, a main goal of my thesis has been to study the nature of Spanish-language television and Internet technologies, how they interact with the active mediations of Latino audiences and how this plays out to influence US Latino cultural identities. Participatory communication (Ria­o, 1994; Vargas, 1995; Goulet, 1979) and empowerment scholars (Scherwin, 1987; Rappaport, 1995) have posited that groups and individuals that have taken active roles in social communication in their communities are participating in empowerment processes at various levels. This in turn can imply the emergence of collective 'project identities' that serve to assert the legitimacy and actualization of Latino communities' cultural and civil rights, in resistance to their marginalization within the dominate US culture and society.

To summarize, the following portions of this thesis will explore and expand on the following assumptions, some of which have discussed to a limited extent already:
(1) US Latinos' use of dominate audiovisual spaces vary by ethnic subgroup, national, familial, economic, gender and other ties.
(2) While the use of Spanish-language television for cultural maintenance and cultural identity construction involve selectively produced benefits, the hegemonic political-economy of audiovisual text production do have some effects, both selectively mediated and otherwise, that encourage social, political and ideological acculturation towards legitimizing identity and Latinoization.
(3) Experienced inequalities and perceived differences from other Latino groups and other members of society, however, facilitate the development of resistance identity. Selective media use, use of alternative resources and creation of more meaningful cultural products are active strategies of resistance.[9]
(4) Some US Latinos have begun to use the Internet for cultural production and cultural identity construction. I hypothesize that analysis of these cases will reveal expressions of collective resistance identity and cultural differentiation that are offered to Latino groups as new resources for information and cultural and identity maintenance and other uses. Those Internet initiatives that engage in participatory community communication, and, or create texts that are critical of macro- and micro socio-economic and political problems can facilitate the emergence of project identity and other types of empowerment. Indeed, it seems likely that increased access to resources and cultural production are themselves processes of project identity.
 

III. Television
 

The goal of this chapter is to discuss and explore the cultural significance of television use. To begin with, several literatures concerned with the effects, social roles and audience uses of television will be reviewed. The later half of the chapter will seek to contextualize the possible cultural uses of Spanish-language television by some US Latino groups within an exploration of this transnational cultural industry. The main question to be considered is how television might be used in cultural identity maintenance, and more specifically the role of Spanish-language television use in the cultural identity maintenance of some US Latinos. Manual Castells' theories will also be revisited in an exploration of how television texts may be used in the collective and cultural identity construction of different groups. Several ideas, or hypotheses, are discussed. The first is that dominant television channels, in general, are more important to the construction of legitimizing identity and mainstream cultural identity for members of the dominant society. Cultural identity for members of marginalized groups are part of collective resistance identities, where cultural identity is learned within specialized and protected social spaces. Thus, the second hypothesis is that the accessibility, availability and level of cultural specialization of cultural spaces will affect how and why certain spaces such as Spanish-language television or the Internet are used for cultural identity maintenance. These concepts of cultural uses of television and how these cultural uses interact with collective and cultural identities (which have been developed in this chapter and previous chapters) are used in chapters Five and Six (along with the results of the pilot survey) to discuss the cultural uses of Internet information and communication technologies.

There has been a wide range of scholarship conducted in the last few decades that has sought to better understand how media, especially television, affect people and culture. On one extreme, for example, some socialist feminist researchers posit that television and film have almost autonomous power to transform culture, which thus implies great influences on cultural identities. At another extreme, the school of effects research has found it difficult to prove that television exposure has consistent effects on behavior, such as violent behavior in children. Both of these research traditions have been criticized as having limitations and can to a certain extent be seen as suffering from academic tunnel-vision. While in some ways feminist media studies are often obsessed with looking to the text for all the answers, effects researchers who utilize only research methods from behavior sciences are forced to greatly limit their consideration of multiple sources of causation.

Cultural identity and engendered behavior will never be easily studied or tested. Before electronic media, there was a multiplicity of cultural and social environments in which individuals and groups learned roles and identified with cultural events and meanings. For most people the text was the event, the experience, the weekly or annual ritual. For some there were letters, books and, later, magazines. Today, in most societies, electronic media provide cultural spaces that have only been available for a short while (at least in comparison to the history of human societies). Certainly people build personal identity, understandings of cultural identity, and behavior patterns based on culture consumed thorough television, film and electronic music, but interactions with family, peers and other social situations are equally, if not more important to the development of identity.

Culture is endlessly recycled and reconstituted. Texts and ideologies produced in the media, in homes, in the street and in various social institutions are decoded by individuals and groups who carry those meanings with them Ð sometimes embodying them in behavior, sometimes in personal ideologies and identities, and sometimes they create new texts that are influenced by those consumed earlier. Cultural processes are cyclical. Understandings of both the political economy and practices of text production and the motivations and results of reception are vital. Too often they are studied in isolation without much respect for the whole.

If television is only one site, one cultural space in which identity is constructed, why does it receive so much attention from academia? To answer this question you must look at the spatially biased nature of television production. Whereas, until recently cultural products were produced and consumed within local communities, electronic media, like television, are produced in the local, but broadcast and consumed in national and global markets. Though sexist and violent attitudes of parents are likely to be reproduced by their children, the potential efficacy of these attitudes distributed within television texts are much more great. Due to the accessibility that television as a medium enjoys to private homes, broadcasters are viewed as having responsibility to police content for the protection of children and community standards. Certainly it can be argued that the FCC has catered more to the interests of the networks than to community or multicultural interests. The limitations that are followed have not hindered the networks from distributing texts that distort reality in attempts to attract certain audiences. Not only have scholars sought to demonstrate this distortion through quantitative content analysis and qualitative textual analysis, but many have also advocated the production of more realistic and positive representations.

In the US, television has come to be a dominant cultural space, taking up a disproportionate amount of time over other social and cultural spaces. Douglas Kellner sees television as functioning as a modern conveyer of cultural myths and mythologies. He sees the myths of society as being the bearers of social ideology regardless of the medium of distribution. Kellner distinguishes between televisions role as a conveyor of (1) myths, and (2) mythologies (Kellner, 1992). Myths work to articulate and resolve social contradictions within society. Levi-Strauss theorized that since myths can not totally resolve the real contradictions in social reality, new mythical themes are constantly arising. Many of today's myths, told through television shows and genres, idealize youth, hippness, blackness, sexuality and new roles for womanhood (albeit in often stereotypical ways) while social hierarchies, traditional families and relationships, perceived middle class values and cultural authorities are preserved. These myths are attempting to reconcile the strands of modern collective cultural identities with new generational and group identities and values. Mythologies on the other hand do not deal with social contradictions. Mythologies function to glorify and naturalize the dominant social order. They are ahistorical idealizations which cover up contradictions within society (Kellner, 1992).

Seeing television as an important medium for social myth and mythology helps to illustrate its significance as a cultural space. Where song and dance and later theater were principal mediums for coveying myths, now film, electronic music and television are dominant. Raymond Williams termed this shift, "mobile privatization" : the process of the privatization of the domestic sphere and the development of advanced communication and transportation technologies which works to allow experiences and consumption of public information and culture within the isolated, private home (Williams, 1992). Williams considered the real power of television as located in its ability to offer a vast "visual mobility" to audiences. Despite whatever constraining social, political or economic confines people have to deal with in their daily lives, television provides vicarious experiences of fantasy lands, wealthy lifestyles, and exotic cultures, as well as national and regional information.

Since the 1970s, several critics have argued that, as modern carriers of social myths and mythologies, the principal effect of the media is to construct or frame viewer's perceptions of social reality. One of these critics, Herbert Schiller, posits that "America's media managers create, refine, and preside over the circulation of images and information which determine our beliefs and attitudes and, ultimately, our behavior..." (Schiller, 1996: 172). Schiller maintains that there are five myths that structure news media content in the US: (1) the myth of individualism and personal choice, (2) the myth of neutrality of social and political institutions, (3) the myth of unchanging human nature (competitive, greedy, violent, etc..), (4) the myth of the absence of social conflict, and (5) the myth of modern pluralism (that a diversity of viewpoints and information channels are accessible to all (Schiller, 1996). As people are exposed to media texts, they come to accept these myths, and other more specific framings of reality, as the way things really are. Other scholars have shown that this is what happens when consumers produce dominant readings/interpretations of media texts.10 Legitimizing identity, and mainstream cultural identities can be seen as being facilitated in this way. For some (particularly marginalized) groups, however, the culture and reality presented in the mainstream media are too alien and not representative of local realities.

The work of Schiller and other media critics have been influential in guiding mass communication research of what came to be known as the "cultivation hypothesis," which basically states that media exposure affects the construction of social reality. Yet researchers attempting to test the cultivation hypothesis found it very difficult to operationalize the variables involved (Stilling, 1997). Operationalizations of the cultivation effect have ranged from (1) socialization (i.e. enculturation), (2) fear of victimization, and (3) the "mainstream effect" (Stilling, 1997). This last definition of cultivation, the mainstream effect, posits that media use causes cultural homogeneity Ð common self-identification with socio-economic groups or political philosophies. Despite attempts to prove that television per se has certain cultivation effects, the most useful studies have tried to understand the particular roles that television and other media have played in the enculturation and acculturation of particular groups. Processes of enculturation (the learning of cultural meanings and patterns of one's own cultural group) and acculturation (the learning of new, alien cultural meanings) are multifaceted and dynamic. In a recent study, Eric Stilling, posits that use of television programs available in a host-country is one possible source of acculturation for immigrant groups. Stilling writes that, "On a conceptual level, the electronic melting pot hypothesis asserts that immigrants who view a large quantity of host-community television programming acculturate more quickly than those who view a lesser quantity of host community programming" (Stilling:81). To support this hypothesis, Stilling surveyed Latinos who have been living in the US for different periods of time.

One question this research suggests concerns how acculturation affects the cultural identity of immigrant groups. For example, does the acculturation of newly arrived Latinos into the US Latino culture influence the unique cultural identities of these new arrivals? Are those groups who watch more Spanish-language television likely to cultivate cultural identities similar to other US Latinos? In other words, does Spanish-language television use help to facilitate Latinoization to the point of affecting cultural identity? As discussed earlier, Suzanne Oboler maintains that difference among Latino cultural groups and difference to other minorities and the dominant culture are accentuated in the cultural/social mosaic within the US and further the resistance identities situated within the unique cultural origins and values of each group, which are grounded and given context against these various "others." Yet we must remember that resistance identity, as Castells theorizes, is constructed on collective group identity that is accentuated against the mainstream, dominant culture/society. Watching US English-language television can certainly inform US Latinos, or anyone else, about the dominant US culture. Individual Latinos can identify with aspects of this mainstream culture experienced on TV and in other social and cultural spaces. The concept of difference posits, however, that experiences of other cultures helps to established aesthetic and semantic boundaries between "my" culture, or "our" culture, and other cultures. For Castells, "Latino" is a site of resistance from the dominant Ð a site where collective identity is constructed. From this view, Spanish-language television can be seen as helping to solidify US Latino identities (Latinoization) since it is a distinct Latino cultural space. Yet, cultural identity is a collective identity in many ways, and individual's personal identity can be engaged with several different collective group identities. Groups that can foster a collective identity include families (extended and nuclear), clubs, communities, generations, social movements and cultural or ethnic groups. Thus a person can identify with a collective US Latino identity, while her or his cultural identity could draw from US Latino culture(s) and other specialized cultural/social spaces as well.

Although these questions can never be answered definitively, one arena of research that can be utilized to supply some answers is reception studies. Students of receptions studies have sought to understand the wide variety of cultural, social and popular uses of media. David Morley, for example, who has been particularly influential in reception research, has studied the significance of the social context of media consumption. He notes that in the past questions of media interpretation have been investigated by literary scholars while questions of uses and gratifications of media were addressed by scholars in "leisure studies" (Morley). In Family Television (1986), Morley seeks to "consider the problems of audience decoding/choice in the context of family leisure," i.e. in the context of domestic, social consumption (Morley:1). Through a nation-wide study of family television viewing, Morley sought to better understand how family structures, cultural backgrounds and individual motivations influence which programs are viewed, why these programs are viewed, and the various interpretations that are derived from viewing.

For a large portion of the US population domestic media consumption is integrated into the daily lives of families. At times the television provides important information to be used that day, such as the weather forecast and traffic reports. At other times the television provides a kind of companionship while other tasks are performed. The networks structure their programming to provide for different perceived needs and the changing demographics of the perceived television audience over the course of the day and the week. And yet while these text are designed to provoke desired decodings, there is often a social context to the viewing experience. The presence, interaction and attitudes of family members, friends or colleagues inevitably influences the meaning that individuals derive from consumption. Morely writes that, in the past, "television was seen to have direct effects on viewers. Things got a little better when people thought in terms of mediation Ð where, rather than television having direct effects on people, television's effects were seen to be mediated by the family Ð so that, in effect, the family structure was taken to be a complex of intervening variables, which acted as a filter between the individual and the screen" (Morley, 1991:23). The mediation of decoding obviously varies according to the beliefs, attitudes and behavior of the individuals in an environment where media is consumed.

Motivation for viewing is also important to how a text is interpreted. When a group chooses to watch a program there is almost always some sort of cultural significant driving these choices. As Raymond Williams observed, the television offers us experiences of "our" culture or "other" cultures. The situations depicted are often not available for the real life experiences of viewers. People thus participate in many cultural events through television.

The drama of the ER, the high speed chase, the million dollar estate, and professional and college sports, are examples. People identify with different experiences offered on television and integrate these into fantasies and personal identity. My point here is that television texts are created within and with cultural products and meanings. By showing us cultural events, whether authentic or fabricated through high-tech sets and actors, television producers and advertisers rely on aspects of culture to provoke desired decodings from media consumers. For aspects of media texts to be used within personal and cultural identity construction, mediations must take place to reinforce particularly strong identifications or recognitions. The desire of a young boy who wants to be a professional basketball player does not come solely from watching these athletes on TV, but through interaction with peers and older children with the same dream. Feelings of nationalism felt during a media event, are similarly not inherent, but are rather taught, learned and reinforced through multiple socializations Ð some electronic, others not, but all mediated.

The notion of mediation has been studied within inquiries seeking better understandings of "social uses" of media. Morley's family television viewing research is an example. Social uses imply how groups Òhelp themselves to what media offers" (Munoz, 1994:94). In discussing the complex interaction of Colombian women with telenovelas, Sonia Mu­oz posits that "any text, regardless of its process of production (industrial or artistanal) or its form of production (cultivated or mass) takes form only when it is read" (Munoz:90).

The medium, the act of communication, is not just about the technology but how the text is made into a meaning by and for the reader. As Jesus Martin-Barbero observes, researchers must look to media genres to understand how these relate to specific audiences that develop cultural, symbolic competencies through their interactions with individual genres such as telenovelas or Spanish-language nightly news. Mu­oz shows that these mediations of meaning and uses occur very intimately for the individual, but group level negotiations can also be vibrant. Thus, the concept of social uses points out that a certain viewing or household group can have collective motivations and uses of media. Re-creating narratives and meanings are the norm Ð in some cases, through mediation of meaning and collective motivations for consumption. Viewing television as a means for accessing symbols and information that helps to sustain and construct cultural identity is likely to be, in many instances, a process of social uses. This might be especially true in the home where one of the goals of "family viewing" is to help children cultivate strong identifications with specific cultural events and information.

This process of re-creation (and mediation and negotiation) is not just a way of making meaning and use of external texts. The traditions and cultures of these active individuals and groups are also being re-negotiated and re-created. This process has been termed by several scholars as hybridization Ð the breakup and mixing of cultural systems, the delocalization of the symbolic process and the expansion of new and adapted genres (Garcia-Canclini, 1995:207). Hybridization can be particularly understood in relation to those Latino groups who can be considered as part of a Latin American Diaspora. This is not to suggest that older, more nationally established Chicano and Puerto Rican communities (for example) are culturally stagnant. Indeed, all societies are in some ways multicultural and these intermingled cultures are constantly influencing each other at the level of individual actor's evolving epistemologies and acts of cultural production. However, newly arrived or settling-down immigrants are forced to deal with new symbolic and behavior systems. A research team at Victoria University (Australia) offered this further explanation of Diasporas and hybridization:

Diasporic culture is this the product of the constantly configuring, never-ending and complex process which occurs when immigrant or otherwise displaced cultures selectively adapt to host cultures, intermixing and evolving to form a 'new' culture, a culture related to but distinct from both the original and host cultures. This transcultural fusion can be described as 'hybridization' (Sinclair, Pookong, Fox, Yue, 1997).

If cultural identity can ever be influenced by media, it seems that social mediations must play an important, if not vital, role in this. The use of media for cultural maintenance occurs for the most part within patterns of domestic consumption, cultivated through what has been called "the moral economy of the household" (Silverstone, et al., 1994). In the moral economy of the household, commodities are appropriated into the culture and politics of the domestic sphere. Cultural products such as those offered by media in the home, are utilized according to the household's own values and interests. The moral economy of the household unit helps to determine the "degrees of freedom accorded to the consumer (in theory and in practice) to use the products and commodities of late capitalism to define and express his or her own identity, status and membership of a wider group" (Silverstone et al., 1994: 4).

The internal politics and culture of the household affect how and when to household members use media; who gets to use or chose a program; when to buy a new, or another, product; and what kind of meaning household members place during and after consumption. All of these variables are partially affected by the medium in question. Negotiations and mediations concerning television use can be very different than home computer and Internet use. Some mediums may have more cultural significance to the family or household unit, whereas others may be more important to certain individuals. The extent to which a medium is important for a family's cultural identity maintenance depends on that group's cultural and social identification and the content of available media. Yet the moral economy of the household should not be seen as separate from external systems. The dynamics of the home are affected by political, economic and social factors. As discusses above, the social position of a group helps to drive both its media choices and the nature of collective identity formation.

The way individuals within a household use media certainly distinguish personal identity. Teenagers are often infamous (as far as older generations are usually concerned) for their choice and use of music. After all, specialized knowledge and skills can be very important for (1) inclusion and acceptance in teen peer-groups, (2) maintenance of a particular identity, and (3) a sense of belonging, friendship, etc... Processes of cultural maintenance can involve similar processes, although the motivations and knoweldges involved are likely to be more deeply rooted, especially where cultural identity is involved. Media use by the family as a whole can involve appropriations that reinforce collective family and cultural identity. Indeed an important function of the moral economy of the household can be value creation. Appropriate media texts are used, and mediated to help instill children with values important to the parents and their culture. It is likely that children raised within frameworks of resistance identity will have a better grasp on what their culture or cultural identity is, because their parents and other community members emphasize (both consciously and unconsciously) teaching this to their children.

For marginalized groups, after all, many cultural spaces are dominated by the products of another culture. Personal identity construction involves the recognition that ones social and cultural group are devalued in society. Thus, collective identification is built upon the group's psychological, cultural and social resistance against oppression (both real and immagined). I would venture to guess that a general survey of US peoples would find that a far greater number of members of the dominant society (Caucasian, middle to upper class, Christian, heterosexual) do not have a very cohesive idea of what their cultural identity may be. Castells argues that most members of a dominant society share a collective legitimizing identity that is part of their individual personal identities and is constructed upon the values, culture and social institutions of the dominant society. Collective identification with members of the dominant group and the dominant culture as a whole are not as strong since there are no obstacles or struggles through which such bonds could form. This is not to say that there are not collective group identities to which members of the dominant society are firmly bound. Identification with religious and sub-cultural groups are examples of collective group identities that are important to some members of the dominant society and which can also be partially maintained through the use of television and other media texts.

In summary, television can be used culturally in many different ways. In general, television can be important for both personal identity maintenance and for collective cultural identity. Every time the TV is turned on a new cultural product is being introduced into the household, although it may be used in a wide variety of ways. For many US Latinos, collective knowledge, ways of being and symbols that are important to their cultural identity are found both here and there. Parents, relatives and community members are vital in the process of teaching language, customs, beliefs, values and other pieces of heritage. Other aspects of culture, however, are to be found within one or more Latin American countries, and other parts of the USA. One of the main advantages of global television for dispersed cultural groups is that it can provide a space for aspects of a culture, or a mixture of cultures, to be accessed. Although some US Latinos do not chose to use Spanish-language television, it can provide texts for households to appropriate, decode and mediate in ways that affect personal identities and help with the construction and maintenance of cultural identity.

US Spanish-language television does not provide all of the cultural information that all US Latinos could possibly want. As discusses earlier, there are many diverse groups in the US that can be classified as Latino. Furthermore, there are only two main Spanish-language networks in the USA. The following section will to contextualize the industry which is responsible for encoding/producing the majority of Spanish-language television products available in the USA. This industry is situated within, and is indeed a part of, the political-economy of late-capitalism. Cultural texts that are important to many US Latinos are produced within this environment according to the logic of capitalism and commercial television. This is not to say that the producers and journalists who produce these text do not feel any responsibility to their audiences. Yet, only a limited number of texts are produced, and these must cater to multicultural US Latino groups. The final section in this chapter will discuss research that addresses more specifically US Latinos' use of these texts for cultural maintenance.

US Spanish-language Television

This thesis has worked so far to describe television as a cultural space important to the construction and maintenance of various identities. The US Spanish-language television industry is particularly interesting because it produces a mainstream cultural space although it caters to a marginalized set of groups in the US. In some ways, both English-language and Spanish-language television producers in the US face similar obstacles in that they are creating texts for increasingly multicultural societies that are made up of groups with varying amounts of economic power. The success of Spanish-language television in the USA has come about due to its ability to provide cultural programming to a growing market that the English-language networks have chosen to ignore (i.e. US Latinos).

The Spanish-language market was developed and dominated at first by the Mexican media conglomerate Televisa, whose skill in producing high quality products corresponded with the language and cultural preferences of many US Latinos. In the 1960s, with boosted investment, technological development and success in selling advertisement, TSM (Televisa's predecessor) was able to expand its television assets into the US, beginning with the purchase of San Antonio Channel 41. Starting here, Emilio Azcarraga, the primary owner of TSM, carefully built a US Spanish-language monopoly. To by-pass the FCC law prohibiting "alien" ownership of broadcast facilities, Azcarraga became one of the primary investors in Rene Anselmo's Spanish International Communications Corporation (SICC). Emilio subsequently set up the Spanish International Network (SIN) which purchased and provided programming (mostly TSM products made in Mexico) and arranged advertising for SICC (Subervi-Velez, 1994:336). Mergers, expansions and reorganizations ensued in the later 60s and 70s, which included SIN's control of Televisa station broadcasts across the Mexican-US border to major US cities in the Southwest where a large Mexican-American market was already established. In these early days of Spanish-language television, SIN and the local broadcasters struggled to make a profit, and were continually bankrolled by Azcarraga.11 Unlike Mexico, where the majority of revenues came from government advertising coffers, commercial advertising is basically the sole means of support for the television industries in the US. Thus, SIN and the SICC stations had to work hard to show major US ad agencies that they could attract sizable Latino audiences/consumers.

The year 1976 was a watershed for SIN and its parent organization Televisa in furthering their dominance in US Spanish-language television. In that year, SIN moved ahead of the US English-language networks to became the first company to distribute programming to its broadcasting affiliates directly from satellite. Before this time video-taped programs where shipped to Spanish-language stations affiliated with SIN. By the early 80s, SIN found that paying cable companies to carry these satellite signals was another effective strategy for increasing their exposure to audiences where Spanish-language broadcasts were not available or of poor quality. By 1983, the SIN network reached 3.3 million Spanish-speaking households in the US. Gutierrez and Schement state that at that time 90% of Latinos in the US could receive SIN material on television (Gutierrez and Schement, 1984:249). Furthermore, 1976 also saw Televisa's creation of Univision to provide live, direct Spanish-language programming to word-wide audiences. A main focus of Univision was the US market. By 1977, Univision was broadcasting through urban stations about 20 hours a week of live variety shows, sports and daily late-night newscasts of "24 Horas" from Mexico City (Gutierrez and Schement, 1984). Audience researched showed that about two-thirds of Univision's audience in the 1980s were Mexican-Americans (Rodriguez, 1997).

SIN's major role was importing Televisa's programming to feed to Spanish-language broadcasters, primarily the SICC stations in urban centers in the southwest and also cable companies (Gutierrez and Schement, 1984). In 1979, for example, every 50 of 64 hours of programming distributed by SIN was produced in Televisa's studios in Mexico city. These programs were ultimately created for Mexican audiences. Both SIN and Univision sold advertising in Mexico with the bonus of the ads being shown in the US as part of the deal. By the 1970s, SIN and the SICC stations were turning a sizable profit. Spanish-language television revenues jumped from around $40 million in 1972 to between 60 and 70 million in 1977 and over 160 million by the early 80s (Gutierrez and Schement, 1984:253). SIN's ad revenues for the US market in 1982 were over $35 million (Walker, 1983). This success gave SIN the financial resources needed to upgrade its US news and public affairs programs to focus more on the concerns of US Latinos and the political unity of these communities.

In the 1980s, many US Latinos voiced concerns about the domination of Mexican programming and Mexican employees in the SIN and Univision networks (Gutierrez and Schement, 1984). Latino journalists, for example, have been particularly active in combating Televisa's influence in setting any agenda or Mexican/Televisa model of news gathering and news casting. "Noticiero SIN" SIN's news program worked hard to produce comprehensive newscasts through US modeled journalistic practices, covering Latin America (approx.45% of all stories), US Latino (33%) and more mainstream US issues (Rodriguez, 1997). In 1986 over 35 employees of "Noticiero SIN" resigned when Jacobo Zabludovsky, Televisa's longtime news anchor on "24 Horas" was appointed to take over SIN's US news operations (Subervi-Velez, 1994:338). Noticiero's efforts were successful in keeping Zabludovsky and Televisa's news agendas in Mexico.

SICC was denied a broadcasting license renewal in 1986 by an FCC appointed judge who felt that Televisa's influence on these stations superseded US broadcast laws. In January of 1987, SICC and SIN were merged into Univision, and the headquarters and production studios of this conglomeration was moved to Miami. Galavision (cable), which was part of the old Univision was separated into its own company so that Televisa could maintain control after selling its SICC interests and SIN to Hallmark cards, Inc. later that year (Subervi-Velez, 1994:339). Under Hallmark, Univision continued to expand its facilities in Miami amid protests from Mexican-Americans who feared increased Cuban-American influences and news bias.

Although Univision made strides in producing domestic programming, Hallmark was never satisfied with the company's profit margins. In 1992 Hallmark, announced that it was negotiating a sale of Univision to an investor group that included Emilo Azcarraga and Gustavo and Ricardo Cisneros (owners of the most powerful broadcast corporation in Venezuela, Venevision) (Subervi-Velez, 1994). Both Univision employees, who attempted a counter buyout bid, and others in US Latino communities protested the sale fearing increased encroachment of foreign control, employees and programming. These groups lobbied the FCC not to approve the sale (Subervi-Velez, 1994). Several of Univision's top executives moved to Telemundo before the transfer. The new Univision did cut US productions of programs that did not do well in the Nielson Hispanic Television Index. These slots were mostly filled with Televisa shows from Mexico. With the Televisa corporation and Venevision's greater interests and assets in Latin America, by 1994 Univision was accessible in 17 Latin American countries. In the US, Univision reached 91% of the Hispanic population through over 600 cable affiliates and 36 broadcast stations (Subervi-Velez, 1994:349).

Univision's major competitor in the 1990s, Telemundo, was founded under the initiative of the Reliance Capital Group, headed by Saul Stienberg and Henry Silverman (who was eventually the president of Telemundo). Realizing the potential profitability of the "Hispanic" television market, Reliance acquired floundering television stations in San Juan Puerto Rico, Miami, Houston, San Antonio, San Francisco, Los Angles and the greater NYC metropolitan area (Subervi-Velez, 1994). By 1990, Telemundo was potentially accessible by over 80% of the US Hispanic population. Although a majority of the network's programming was at first imported telenovelas, Telemundo was also innovative in its domestic programming. Examples of original programming include "MTV-International" and "Angelica, Mi Vida," a telenovela made in Puerto Rico which wove the lives of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Cuban families into a US Latino setting (Subervi-Velez, 1994). Despite financial difficulties due to a large debt left over from the company's acquisition phase, Telemundo has joined Univision in seeking to become a diversified global player in Spanish-language markets. In 1993, Telemundo began working with Reuters to produce a 24 international television news service in Spanish (Subervi-Velez, 1994:35).

The expansion of US Spanish-language networks in the 1990s represents their interests in creating a larger profit margin as opposed to offering an cultural resource for Latino communities. In areas where Latino populations are small there is little motive for cable companies to include a Spanish-language channel in local services. Recent research has showed that Spanish-language television can be especially important for recent Latino immigrants who speak little or no English. This medium is an important cultural resource, even if there are other Latino media available in a certain area. We live in an era when many children and adults alike use television for a variety of purposes. Television is both part of our culture(s) and an important conveyor of cultural texts. As the Kerner comission found, one of our greatest failures as a multicultural society has been to demand and mandate that the cultural resources within our communities, particularly television, begin to mirror the cultural diversity of our communities. This failure is largely the responsibility of the dominant society, the corporate media and law-makers at each level of government.
 

Spanish-language Television and US Latinos
 

Not much research has been conducted concerning the media use of different US Latino groups. Of the work covered here, one of the principal conclusions is that television use can vary greatly depending on the length of time a family has lived in the US. For groups that have only recently arrived in the US, Spanish-language television, if available, is likely to be one of the few sources of Latino culture(s) that is accessible. This is particularly true for mono-lingual immigrants. It is possible that while immigrant Latinos use Spanish-language television for cultural maintenance, that this use also facilitates acculturation into a broader US Latino culture. In general, however, longitudinal acculturation studies have failed to identify whether certain media choices increase acculturation, or whether various sources of acculturation influence media choices (Johnson, 1996).

In an analysis of the "Impact of Gender and Ethnic Subgroup Membership on Mexican-Americans' Use of Mass Media for Cultural Maintenance," Diana Rios and Stanley Gains argue against the notion of Latinoization (they refer to de-ethnicization). Instead, they posit that Mexican-Americans get the most out of mainstream broadcasts that is possible through selective exposure, while also turning to alternatives for cultural resources that are more detailed and relevant to their experiences and cultural identities. These uses can vary greatly even within ethnic, national, cultural, class and gender groups. Some US Latinas, for example, have reported that both English- and Spanish-language television use helps them to ameliorate and to adapt to "language barriers, discrimination, lack of employment, and financial strains" which exacerbate acculturation stress, i.e. culture shock and lack of cultural competencies" (Johnson, 1996). Several scholars have suggested that some Mexican-American women see themselves as caretakers of Mexican heritage and culture and have used Spanish-language television as resources for exposing their children to Mexican symbols.12 Until recently, Mexican media products were commonly, and still to some extent are, broadcast on US Spanish-language channels. Thus, certain types of media uses for cultural maintenance might be more common within Mexican-American households than for other Latino groups due to the prevalence of Mexican cultural products on some Spanish-language channels (such as Univision). Some local stations cater to sizable Latino populations within their broadcasting area, such as Puerto Ricans and Dominican-Americans in New York and Cuban-Americans in southern Florida.

Rios and Gains' report in their conclusions that cluster analysis subjects identified as having "high Mexican cultural heritage" found Spanish-language television very useful (Rios and Gains, 1997:212). Members of the high heritage cluster were more likely to be recent immigrants and of lower sauce-economic class than the bicultural and low heritage groups. Some of the uses described here are therefore better understood as more likely for recent immigrants from the South Ð groups that can be considered part of a Latin American Diaspora.

This term has been used increasingly to describe various historic migrations from national or regional "homelands" to dispersed parts of the world, usually for reasons of political and economic hardships. Although immigrants from Latin American nations to the USA in the past few decades represent heterogeneous backgrounds, similarly diverse Diasporas have been studied in this manner. The Australian research team mentioned earlier, for example, analyzed the media uses of Australian Chinese communities originating from Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and mainland China, etc.. These researchers see globalization of national media industries as responding to mass migrations: "Like flows of people, media flows travel not just from the metropolises to their peripheries, but can originate within and even help to define major world regions, including 'geolinguistic regions', that is, regions across which there are linguistic and cultural similarities" (Sinclair, Pookong, Fox, Yue, 1997:2).

In the next chapter, some of the cultural implication of Internet use will be discussed. The increased proleferation of the Internet and the integration of domestic electronic information and communication technologies necesitates the synthasis of new, or revised, theoretical (and methodological) models for understanding how and why people use these new media. One of the principal goals of this thesis is to work out what some of the main differences in the cultural uses of television and Internet are. By drawing from the many useful concepts that have been developed through television and media use studies, we can begin to explore how new media such as the Internet are being used in similar and unique ways. The concepts discussed in this chapter and those preceeding it will be used along with the results of the poilet study to suggest the begginings of a theoretical model concerning the cultural uses of the Internet.

There are two central themes with which the concepts that this thesis deals with are concerned. The first is the nature of processes of cultural identification. This process has undoubtedly either evolved (due to), or been affected by, the increasing prevelance of multicultural societies and varrous cultural spaces (information and communication technologies) available. Castells' catagories of collective identity formation is particularly helpful in understanding how different