Global Justice Audiences and Performance Paradigms

The analysis of audience research in terms of performance paradigms provides a great insight into global media’s power to cultivate worldviews which then impact people’s values and ideologies on both a local and global level. Conceptualizing Global Justice Audiences of Alternative Media: The Need for Power and Ideology in Performance Paradigms of Audience Research (2005) by Joshua Atkinson, demonstrates how such analysis also encourages reflection on problems associated with dominant media cultures’ control, highlighting the need for the application of a ‘standpoint theory’ when studying the construction of values and culture within global media.

Atkinson (2005) argues that by focusing on the “othering” (Atkinson, 2005, pg. 143) of social and global justice movements and their audiences’ social construction of reality and identity, one is encouraged to realize the possibility of resistance against the power of dominant media forms which often seem to cultivate their own norms, while slowly diminishing the role of cultural difference under the umbrella of a power elite. Such power elite, which using “its economic, political and military power, are in the best position to voice their opinions, also shape public opinion” (141) on both a local and global level, “transmitting to the masses what their roles should be and how they should behave” (141).

In many cultures today, such power elite, whether in form of a private individual, corrupt government, or a major media corporation such as Time Warner or News Corporation, constantly intervene in the construction process of media audience’s identity, often without the audience’s realization of becoming what Atkinson calls “follower-like”(147) figure. First audiences learn how to view the world according to the elite, and then they become part of such world, celebrating it by direct diffusion within its structure and thus within its media system.

A perfect example would be Italy’s case where the country’s president Silvio Berlusconi, as one of the wealthiest man in the country, owns Italy’s major media corporations, including Mediaset, in addition to Italy’s most profitable soccer team, AC Milan. By being in a privilidged political and economic control, as one of such power elites, Berlusconi for instance, has direct influence on the Italian citizens’ perception of their political, socio-economic, and even cultural role in society, making them become part of the “performance of everyday life” (146) in which they start to act and perform as expected by the dominant power, in this case as it is expected by Berlusconi.

Thus, under such social and cultural control, not only countries themselves can be considered

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