Seeking Ontological Security beyond the Nation

Introduction

When the “Arab Spring” grasped the world’s imagination, there was little talk about the role of television in the uprisings. Instead, global media almost instantly branded the events as the “Facebook revolution” and the “Twitter revolution.” There is something significant in the little attention television attracted during these events: television was old news. Satellite television has become such an ordinary and banal element of Arab audiences’ daily media consumption that there was little more to say about it as these media events unfolded. The lack of satellite television’s newsworthiness and its ordinariness is at the core of this article. The discussion revisits Silverstone’s (1993, 1994) analysis on television supporting audiences’ ontological security in a world of information, risk, interconnected spaces but fragmented social relations. It explores the relevance of this analysis in the context of intense migration, satellite television’s omnipresence, and the diversification of mediascapes. Drawing from a study that recorded television’s remarkable popularity, the article looks at the continuities and changes in the ways transnational subjects locate their sense of self in a media-saturated, risk-ridden world. How can television still be so popular? In what ways has television’s sociopsychological role for audiences changed, if at all, in the context of diversified, transnational, and fragmented mediascapes? Moreover, does television advance or challenge global subjects’ ontological security?

In recent years, television has changed from being primarily a national medium, as it was when Silverstone developed his thesis, to being as much national as transnational. Television’s transnationalization presents a new challenge in understanding the relation between television, global risks, and audiences’ sense of security. Transnational television, now available across millions of households in the world due to satellite and digital technologies (Chalaby 2005), has challenged the boundedness of spaces of identity as contained within the nation-state. This shift is particularly important to migrant and diasporic groups, who have for long sustained links to people and communities across boundaries and who have been particularly vulnerable to global risks. Arabs in Europe represent no exception. A diverse group of people, established through various waves of migration and exile, regularly experience anxieties associated with politics that affect not only their region of origin but also their lives in Europe. In a cross-European project with Arab speakers, participants spoke about many of those anxieties and the ways in which they try to manage them. Importantly, television was a regular reference in these efforts. In an inductive analysis driven by the participants’ own words and practices, this article argues that television remains a powerful tool for transnational subjects’ attempt to find ontological security. As shown below, television sustains this role more than other media because of its ordinariness and its ability to adapt to the new media environment.

The analysis is organized in three main sections, each revealing one of the ways in which television supports participants’ ontological security: as a cultural system that reinforces a sense of homeliness, as an everyday companion providing daily reassurance, and as a supporter of efforts to manage transnational anxieties. The audiences discussed here, like other audiences, occupy highly mediated and globally connected spaces characterized by internal heterogeneity. With the “ordinariness” of audiencehood as a starting point, the discussion examines what is particular about these audiences, especially with regard to migration and transnational life. Empirically, the discussion draws from a European Union–funded cross-European project with Arab audiences of transnational television in seven European capital cities.

Revisiting Ontological Security

As all global subjects, migrants and diasporas are increasingly aware of risks to humanity and to their own well-being as a result of conflict, environmental disasters, and financial transactions that take place close-by and in distant places (Giddens 1990). Yet, migrants and diasporas experience some of those risks in great intensity. In sustaining emotional attachments to distant places and people, geographically distant suffering (Chouliaraki 2006) becomes proximate, familiar, and intimate. At the same time, the precarious life that many lead, as a result of social exclusion and the politics of migration, turn global risks into personal experience. As risks, and awareness of risks associated with globalization, intensify in the context of migration and transnational communication, Giddens’s (1990) and Silverstone’s (1993, 1994) analysis of ontological security becomes more relevant than ever. For Giddens, ontological security refers to

the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action. A sense of the reliability of persons and things, so central to the notion of trust, is basic to feelings of ontological security. (1990, 92)

Giddens grounds his analysis in modernity’s realities and draws from “object-relation” theory in explaining how individuals manage conditions of high risk. As he argues, threats to humans’ ontological security have intensified as technological and industrial change brought about new risks that humans are more aware of. At the same time, technological change and industrialization have changed most humans’ significant relations from being primarily face-to-face to being increasingly mediated and dependent on abstract systems of effective management of risks. As a consequence, systems of trust have been reconfigured with time–space distanciation and individuals have increasingly grounded their sense of ontological security on relational networks, which are often dislocated from the immediate locality.

In Giddens’s analysis, ontological security provides a dialogical system of management of the self within social systems; it represents an attempt to explain how individuals are not constantly anxious, even when risks are all around them. As Bauman argues, without a sense of security, human subjects “are stripped of the confidence without which freedom can hardly be exercised” (2005, 36). Ontological security starts developing in childhood and is achieved through a system of trust that the infant develops through his or her knowledge that his or her caretaker is reliable but also through the understanding that there is a space between himself or herself and the caretaker that allows the development of a distinct identity (Giddens 1990). Absence is central to an infant’s ability to develop social capabilities, which Giddens applies to global subjects’ experience of time–space distanciation within late modernity. Transitional objects provide the infant with a sense of security when separated from the caretaker, and for many global subjects the transitional object is television, writes Silverstone:

Media, television perhaps preeminently, occupy the potential space released by blankets, teddy bears and breasts (Young 1996) and function cathectically and culturally as transitional objects. As such, they are, of course, vulnerable to the exigencies of our own individual upbringing as well as to the environments in which they are both produced and consumed. (1994, 13)

While Giddens emphasizes the threat to ontological security resulting from the dissolution of face-to-face and intimate relations, Silverstone (1994) brings relations of trust back into the home. He argues that television bridges the abstract-mediated knowledge with the familial and face-to-face interaction around the consumption of television, especially news, and turns abstract and distant symbols such as those associated with disasters into elements of everyday life. Television, thus, contributes to ordering everyday life, especially in its embeddedness in routines and rituals. As a medium, television extends our reach and our security in a world defined by information; it is an entertainer and an informer, both reinforcing and containing the temporalities of the everyday:

Routines and rituals of television “disturb but also regulate everyday life” and thus manage crises and insecurities. Ontological security is sustained through the familiar and the predictable. Our common sense attitudes and beliefs express and sustain our practical understandings of the world, without which life would quickly become intolerable. (Silverstone 1994, 19)

Broadcast schedules reproduce the domestic and familiar time and space organization, whereas crises and catastrophes are “managed” by the highly ritualized and regularized structures and flows of news. Silverstone’s (1994) analysis bridges the home (local/micro) and the global risks (global/macro). Global risks “come home” via television, and families find ways to make sense and manage the knowledge they get through mechanisms associated with the domestic economy and morality. But what happens when “home” and family expand across boundaries, as much as global risks? What if television does not just mediate distance between the local and the global but also maintains it? And how much does television matter in a world saturated by different kinds of media?

The ever presence of satellite television in many households demonstrates both the continuing relevance of Silverstone’s thesis and the need to update it. The global and domestic environment where television is consumed is changing. Most of the households we studied are media rich and include numerous media and communication technologies: television sets, computers, and a range of personal media, such as mobile phones, iPods, and game consoles. Many of these households are multilingual and so are the media environments, with participants using Arabic, English, French, and other languages. But one of the things that surpass diversity is the intensity of mediation: media are everywhere and they are used and talked about regularly. In this media-rich environment, it is no surprise that television counts.

Television is a particular kind of medium as well as one of the core technologies within media culture. Its role is important but increasingly conditional and subject to the continuities and discontinuities that a diverse, fragmented, and decentralized system of mediated communication sustains. As shown below, television has not been marginalized by social and personal media, but rather it has become a more complex medium itself, available on different platforms and drawing from information available on other digital media. The persistence of television’s popularity, through change, makes Silverstone’s thesis a reference of sustained relevance.

Instantaneity, simultaneity, and vastness of shared information circulated on television as well as on other digital platforms redefine symbolic spaces of belonging beyond geographical boundaries. The success of satellite television reaffirms the relevance of television as a technology and as a cultural reference; television supports a sense of continuity in migrant and diasporic populations’ symbolic space of belonging and a shared imagination of a hybrid transnational community (Georgiou 2006). As Naficy (1993) writes, exilic television can become the transitional object between the world that vanished for the exilic subjects and their new environments. In many ways, the loss that Giddens recognizes as historical becomes spatial. Even when they have not experienced violent uprooting, migrant and diasporic people often face the fragmentation of intimate relations and the dissolution of grounded in single-place realities.

Transnational Television fora Transnationally Connected World

Satellite television is the ultimate transnational medium, only comparable with the Internet in its reach and richness. It is also a converged medium in a number of ways, at least two of them being significant: it is usually available on different platforms and it has increasingly benefited from cross-fertilization with social media. This cross-fertilization was well recorded when Al Jazeera repeatedly reproduced video footage recorded on Tahrir Square demonstrators’ mobile phones. Less widely known is the use of Facebook and Twitter to sustain the popularity of channels or programs through fan clubs, Facebook events, and other regular feeds.

For many transnational audiences, television represents a particular cultural symbol of association and community and this is what makes it significant; the platform where it is consumed is often less important. This is a kind of television consumed by dispersed populations who often share certain distinct commonalities—language being the most basic (Georgiou 2006). Satellite television, as all television, is embedded in everyday life; it is used regularly and discussed not only in familial but also in public settings and reflects interests and preferences in entertainment, information, and politics as much as it reflects the domestic economy and family dynamics (Morley 2000; Silverstone 1994).

As an ultimately transnational medium, satellite television broadcasts representations of distant places and people, with a speed and vibrancy rarely observed in most other media. For example, satellite television constantly reminds its audiences of cultural and political interconnections across physical boundaries, such as those between Middle Eastern and American politics. Popular programs, such as X-Factor and Pop Idol, are regularly consumed in various linguistic and regional versions, whereas interactive programs, such as phone-in talk shows, are integral to media consumption among audiences spread across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa (Kraidy 2010).

Arabic satellite television’s huge expansion, which currently includes more than five hundred channels (Slade 2010), has been studied within a cross-national research project on Arabic television audiences across Europe. ¹ Data emerging in this project inform this article. The study was conducted between 2008 and 2011 in seven European capital cities and included four main phases: a survey on media uses with approximately four hundred self-identified Arab speakers in each of six capital cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, and Stockholm); media diaries filled in by approximately hundred participants in each of those cities demonstrating their specific media choices over one week; six single-gendered focus groups with adult men and women self-identified as Arabic speakers in the six capital cities above and additionally in Nicosia, Cyprus; and a public engagement event in each of the seven cities, which provided an open forum for debating the relationship between citizenship and the media.

Arabic television has benefited from a transnational audience that spreads across continents (Sakr 2008) and the participants in our study confirmed its success. The study recorded very high levels of transnational television consumption; television is the most popular medium consumed across age, class, ethnicity, and location. Although media preferences vary across this diverse transnational group, the majority of respondents in the survey said that television represents their most important source of news (68.9% among those aged above 30 and 58.2% among those aged below 30). For 25.6 percent of those below 30, Internet represents the most important medium for news; this is the case for 11.6 percent of those above 30. For the remaining respondents, newspapers, radio, and word of mouth represent the most important source of news.

Part of television’s success is associated with the fact that as a medium it requires only basic media literacy and low linguistic skills to consume compared with other media. These are both important elements when it comes to transnational audiences who have different levels of literacy in Arabic. Although shared trends were observed across countries, differences in migration experiences and in personal histories also emerged as important parameters. The group consist of people with origins across the Middle East, North Africa, and other Arabic-speaking African regions and it is characterized by extensive internal diversity in terms of cultural, religious, and class identities (El Kenzand and Amin 2005; Fargues 2004). Among the 2,470 participants in the survey conducted in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, and Stockholm, 23 percent were born in Europe, 30.9 percent in Morocco, 13.8 percent in Iraq, and the remaining participants were spread across more than twelve countries. These percentages vary per country, with the sample in Amsterdam, Madrid, and Paris being primarily Moroccan, the London sample being characterized by a diversity of origins, Nicosia bringing together a rather cosmopolitan group of sojourners, and the Stockholm group consisting predominantly by Iraqi refugees (56.9%). Some of the most important differences in patterns of media choices are related to gender, ethnicity, and generation. Men chose news more often than women, while different ethnic groups had varied preferences when it came to Arabic and European television: on one end of the spectrum, 50 percent of Arabs born in Europe watched only European channels, and on the other end, people born in Iraq were the most likely group to only watch Arabic channels (43.8%). In addition, first-generation migrants were more likely to depend on Arabic television compared with second and third generation. As focus group data also show, engagement with Arabic television becomes more intense at times of crisis and other major events; at such periods, television consumption peaks. The findings discussed here represent only a snapshot of the richness and diversity characterizing media use among participants, as recorded in the project; the limited space available poses inevitable limitations in the discussion.

Transnational Subjects, Transnational Insecurities

This article locates the particularities of a transnational audience, Arabs in Europe, within the broader context of globalization and intense mediation. On one hand, television’s persistence in everyday life—this being transnational or national, digital or analog—points toward media’s power to contain practices and discourses of identity. This persistence applies as much to transnational subjects as it does to other global subjects.² Thus, many of the patterns associated with media use among participants represent elements of global media culture and less so ethnic particularity. Television provides access to the world “out there,” and the world “out there” can be in the same city or at a different continent. Moreover, television condenses the realities of everyday life in representing and in reaffirming social relations and value systems. On the other hand, there are certain distinct characteristics associated with migrant and diasporic experience, such as the anxieties associated with diasporic life. For many, these anxieties derive from antimigration and Islamophobic sentiments currently on rise across Europe:

I feel an immigrant in Spain because when you want to practice your religion in public, people look at you as if you were an alien. (Madrid, Males, 26–45)

My son who is born here and is only 18 is constantly stopped under the Anti-terrorism Act . . . I always say to him: “You are English and Egyptian, Egyptian and English” . . . He says “yeah” but inside I know he feels like a persona non grata. (London, Males, 46–65)

Anxieties as those expressed above represent powerful discourses and turn “big” politics into personal experience and emotional pain. The in-betweeness that is a condition of migration and diasporic life is often experienced as angst and uncertainly around self-identity.

Once we were on a course and everyone was asked to say where he/she is from. No one would have believed me if I said “I’m from Spain.” On the contrary they would think that I’m ashamed of my origin. (Madrid, Females, 18–25)

I am an Iraqi refugee because I cannot go back to my country. If I go back to Iraq, I need a good school, safety, freedom, everything I have here, the same lifestyle . . . I cannot say I am Iraqi Cypriot, I am only Iraqi but I can say Cyprus is my second country. (Nicosia, Females, 18–25)

For others, even when not expressed as a constant source of anxiety, like for the woman below, migration leads to uncertainty and a sense of rootlessness.

I feel I am Lebanese and Palestinian but only a part of me. I am Cypriot but only in a part of me. I don’t feel I completely belong to one place. (Nicosia, Females, 26–45)

Although identities are always incomplete and in process (Hall 2009), at times where assimilationist ideologies predominate, transnational subjects are more likely to feel apologetic or in need to retreat to essentialist positions. As an example from Madrid shows,

My feeling, if you ask me “Do you love Syria or Spain more?” I’ll be upset with myself and say Syria. I get upset because I live here [Spain] and I was born here. I lived 21 years here but I love Syria more. (Madrid, Females, 18–25)

Hall interprets the retreat to essentialist identities as a result of insecurities associated with attack to certain identities:

[Y]ou are driven into the exact opposite alternative, which is to defend yourself against the loss of identity which wholesale assimilation as a strategy entails, and retreat defensively back to where you came from, into that sphere called “tradition,” as if that has remained the same, untouched by history. (2009, 348)

Retreat to essentialist identities was observed in a number of cities. In Madrid, it was primarily associated with a reaction to xenophobia and Islamophobia; in London primarily with Islamophobia and the “war on terror”; and in Paris primarily responded to a powerful and hegemonic discourse of a homogeneous “Frenchness.” Most often, identities were observed as being unsettled, and participants were often anxious in trying to define “who they are” and “where they belong.”

Transnational Television and Ontological Security

It is in the context of the repeatedly expressed anxieties across different European cities that the present analysis takes place. At times, when participants struggle with anxieties, satellite television comes into domestic life as a permanent, reliable, easily accessible, and ever-present point of reference. As television sustains a changing, yet lasting, role in everyday life, Silverstone’s thesis remains relevant in at least two ways: television supports links between individuals’ realization of the self through being part of the world and it has the ability to reproduce the familiar and ordinary at times of intense global risks. As a medium, transnational television has a complex and contradictory role: it intensifies insecurities through its regular broadcasts of news associated with conflict and risks, and, at the same time, it contains insecurities by integrating such news into the discourses and routines of everyday life.

The ways in which television supports transnational subjects’ ontological security are discussed around three subthemes that revisit Silverstone’s analytical framework: television’s role in sustaining a sense of homeliness, television as a system of daily reassurance supporting individuals’ confidence that there is more continuity than disruption in their life, and television as a system of management of insecurities associated with transnational condition. The transnationality of everyday life is reflected in the richness of media consumption, which for most participants in all cities includes an eclectic mix of Arabic and British television channels ranging from BBC1 and Al Jazeera all the way to Al Manar (Hezbollah’s channel) and Iqraa TV (Islamic religious channel). The use of different channels and genres reflects not only the diversification of media consumption for most audiences but also the negotiation of proximity and distance that takes place in diasporic everyday life and as participants try to make sense of the world and their place in the world.

A Transnational Space . . . with Some Security

The above analysis has demonstrated transnational television’s core role in supporting Arab audiences’ sense of ontological security. Transnational communal consumption becomes a ritualized act that mobilizes and supports Arabic communities, while reaffirming shared morality across geographical boundaries. In its images, stories and narratives associated with a community and a homeland—partly imagined, partly experienced—satellite television reproduces sentiments of attachment and sentiments of continuity of a world, which might be fragmented but somehow works through this fragmentation. In its mediation. When young participants said that they found a peculiar attraction in the slide shows of still images representing landmarks often on a loop on Egyptian and Libyan television, they demonstrated a deep sense of association with places, with the familiar and the predictable. The predictability and the ritualized repetition associated not only with satellite television’s content but also with the act of consumption nest a sense of security, of continuity.

Satellite television has sustained such a powerful role within the rich and competitive environment where it functions for yet another reason: it locates migrant and diasporic audiences firmly within a media culture that is not ethnically or religiously specific. It is as much local as it is transnational. It is ordinary and banal not only for Arabs but also for most people living across the globe. Images regularly consumed on television, dull and familiar, as much as the disturbing images in the news, shocking, upsetting, but represented within a recognizable framework of televisual broadcasts, integrate “these paradoxically ‘daily’ rituals . . . into the structure of everyday life” (Silverstone 1994, 21). The awareness of television’s everydayness can provide some comfort and some sense of security to individuals living in societies where they often have to defend their particularity.

The transnational homology of diaspora and satellite television can support and expand transnational ordinariness beyond television consumption: in everyday life, in political engagement, and in religious practice. There is nothing extraordinary in sustaining links here and there, in being emotionally attached to various communities, in being politically engaged with multiple public spheres, and in the same way as there is nothing extraordinary in watching and enjoying different programs, different channels, and different languages. The ability to see one’s self-represented on the screen as ordinary, not as a subject associated with terrorism, migration problems, and “the veil,” was repeatedly highlighted as important by many participants. The ever presence of satellite television makes it a powerful and attractive reference, a companion of everyday life. As such, and through the continuity and change associated with the technology and its transnational character, television becomes a symbol of continuity not only of particularity but also of modernity. A technology, a tool, and an environment well rooted in everyday life, it captures the banality and the tensions associated with transnational life. From enabling engagement with painful and unsettling realities to entertaining, transnational television supports Arab audiences’ sense of self through participation across and beyond singular systems of cultural and political representation.