Grounding the Displaced: Local Media Reception in a Transnational Context

Local media perform a linking function for displaced audiences in a global landscape. Consumption of home-based press when one is in a foreign context is mainly a ritualistic cultural practice in securing personal identity, familiar formulations of cultural spaces, and communities of origin. Ethnographic research revealed that national newspapers allowed readers to (re)produce situated identity marks menaced by globalization. Audiences may use local media to ground themselves in symbolic environments in which external and internal boundaries are reassured through time and space. In this local cultural setting, individual and collective identities acquire stability and self-confidence.