To return to the concern that motiv

To return to the concern that motivated this chapter, I want to underscore the way that the term Digital Age stratifies media hierarchies for those who are out of power and are struggling to become producers of media representations of their lives. It is an issue that is particularly salient for indigenous people, who, until recently, have been the object of other people’s image-making practices in ways that have been damaging to their lives. And, unlike other minorities, questions of the Digital Age look different from the perspective of people struggling to control land and traditions that have been appropriated by now dominant settler societies for as long as 500 years. In an effort to underscore what their work is about, I use the term cultural activist to describe the conscious way in which they are – like many other people – using the production of media and other expressive forms as a way not only to sustain and build their communities but also as a means to help transform them through what one might call a ‘strategic traditionalism’ (to borrow from Bennett and Blundell 1995). This position is crucial to their work but is effaced from much contemporary cultural theory addressing new media that emphasises dislocation and globalisation. The cultural activists creating these new kinds of cultural forms have turned to them as a means of revivifying relationships to their lands, local languages, traditions and histories and articulating community concerns. They also see the media as a means of furthering social and political transformation by inserting their own stories into national narratives as part of ongoing struggles for Aboriginal recognition and self-determination.

Increasingly, the circulation of these media globally – through conferences, festivals, co-productions, and the use of the internet – has become an important basis for nascent but growing transnational network of indigenous media makers and activists. These activists are attempting to reverse processes through which aspects of their societies have been objectified, commodified, and appropriated; their media productions and writings are efforts to recuperate their histories, land rights, and knowledge bases as their own cultural property. These kinds of cultural production are consistent with the ways in which the meaning and praxis of culture in late modernity have become increasingly conscious of their own project, an effort to use imagery of their lives to create an activist imaginary. One might think of media practices as a kind of shield against the often unethical use or absolute erasure of their presence in the ever-increasing circulation of images of other cultures in general, and of indigenous lives in particular, as the indigenous position paper for the World Summit on the Information Society makes clear. At every level, indigenous media practices have helped to create and contest social, visual, narrative, and political spaces for local communities and in the creation of national and other kinds of dominant cultural imaginaries that, until recently, have excluded vital representations by First Nation peoples within their borders. The capacity of such representations to circulate to other communities – from indigenous neighbours to NGOs – is an extension of this process, across a number of forms of mediation, from video and film to cyberspace (Danaja and Garde 1997).

Indigenous digital media have raised important questions about the politics and circulation of knowledge at a number of levels; within communities this may be about who has had access to and understanding of media technologies, and who has the rights to know, tell, and circulate certain stories and images. Within nation-states, the media are linked to larger battles over cultural citizenship, racism, sovereignty, and land rights, as well as struggles over funding, air space and satellites, networks of broadcasting and distribution, and digital broadband, that may or may not be available to indigenous work. The impact of these fluctuations can be tracked in a variety of places – in fieldwork, in policy documents and in the dramas of everyday life in cultural institutions. I explore the term Digital Age because it so powerfully shapes frameworks for understanding globalisation, media, and culture, creating the ‘commonsense’ discourse for institutions in ways that disregard the cultural significance of the production of knowledge in minoritised communities, increasing an already existing sense of marginalisation. Rather than mirroring the widespread concern over increasing corporate control over media production and distribution, and the often parallel panic over multiculturalism (Appiah 1997), can we illuminate and support other possibilities emerging out of locally based concerns and speak for their significance in contemporary cultural and policy arenas? Institutional structures are built on discursive frameworks that shape the way in which phenomena are understood, naturalising shifts in support for a range of cultural activities. In government, foundations, and academic institutions, these frameworks have an enormous impact on policy and funding decisions that, for better or worse, can have a decisive effect on practice.

Other scholars who recognise, more generally, the significance of locally situated cultural practices in relation to dominant models point instead to the importance of the productions/producers who are helping (among other things) to generate their own links to other indigenous communities through which local practices are strengthened and linked. For example, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake point to such processes as part of ‘an aesthetic of rearguard resistance, rearticulated borders as sources, genres, and enclaves of cultural preservation and community identity to be set against global technologies of modernisation or image-cultures of the postmodern’ (1996: 14). Indeed, simultaneous to the growing corporate control of media, indigenous producers and cultural activists are creating innovative work, not only in the substance and form of their productions, but also in the social relations they are creating through this practice, that can change the ways we understand media and their relation to the circulation of culture more generally in the twenty-first century.

Such efforts are evidence of how indigenous media formed over the last decades now find themselves at the conjuncture of a number of historical developments: these include the circuits opened by new media technologies, ranging from satellites to compressed video and cyberspace, as well as the ongoing legacies of indigenous activism worldwide, most recently by a generation comfortable with media and concerned with making their own representations as a mode of cultural creativity and social action. They also represent the complex and differing ways that states have responded to these developments – the opportunities of media and the pressures of activism – and have entered into new relationships with the indigenous nations that they encompass.

I conclude on a note of cautious optimism. The evidence of the growth and creativity of indigenous digital media over the last two decades, whatever problems may have accompanied it, is nothing short of remarkable. Formations such as these, working out of grounded communities or broader regional or national bases, offer an important elaboration of what the Digital Age might look like, intervening in the ‘left behind’ narrative that predominates. While indigenous media activism alone certainly cannot unseat the power asymmetries which underwrite the profound inequalities that continue to shape their worlds, the issues their digital interventions raise about the politics of culture are on a continuum with the broader issues of self-determination, cultural rights, and political sovereignty, and may help bring some attention to these profoundly interconnected concerns.17 Indigenous media offer an alternative model of grounded and increasingly global relations created by indigenous people about their own lives and cultures. As we all struggle to comprehend the remapping of social space that is occurring, indigenous media offer some other co-ordinates for understanding. Terms such as ‘the Digital Age’ gloss over such phenomena in their own right or as examples of alternative modernities, resources of hope, new dynamics in social movements, or as part of the trajectory of indigenous life in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it is time to invent new terms to remind us of the issues of power at work from a position that interrogates the hegemonic order implied in the language of the Digital Age.

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 1:

Untuk kembali ke perhatian yang memotivasi bab ini, saya ingin menggaris bawahi cara bahwa istilah era Digital stratifies media hierarki bagi mereka yang berada di luar kekuatan dan berjuang untuk menjadi produsen media representasi dari kehidupan mereka. Itu adalah sebuah isu yang sangat penting untuk masyarakat adat, yang, sampai saat ini, telah objek penerapan pencitraan pada Pilpres orang lain dengan cara yang telah merusak kehidupan mereka. Dan, tidak seperti minoritas lainnya, pertanyaan era Digital terlihat berbeda dari sudut pandang orang-orang yang berjuang untuk mengontrol tanah dan tradisi yang telah dicocokkan oleh masyarakat dominan pemukim sekarang selama 500 tahun. Dalam upaya untuk menekankan apa pekerjaan mereka adalah tentang, saya menggunakan aktivis budaya istilah untuk menggambarkan sadar cara di mana mereka-seperti banyak orang lain-menggunakan produksi media dan bentuk-bentuk lain ekspresif sebagai cara yang tidak hanya untuk mempertahankan dan membangun komunitas mereka tetapi juga sebagai sarana untuk membantu mengubah mereka melalui apa yang mungkin panggilan 'tradisionalisme strategis' (untuk meminjam dari Bennett dan Blundell 1995). Posisi ini sangat penting untuk pekerjaan mereka tetapi hilang dari banyak teori budaya kontemporer yang menangani media baru yang menekankan dislokasi dan globalisasi. Para aktivis budaya yang menciptakan jenis baru bentuk-bentuk budaya telah berpaling kepada mereka sebagai sarana revivifying hubungan tanah, bahasa lokal, tradisi dan sejarah mereka dan mengartikulasikan keprihatinan masyarakat. Mereka juga melihat media sebagai sarana untuk melanjutkan transformasi sosial dan politik dengan memasukkan cerita mereka sendiri ke dalam narasi nasional sebagai bagian dari perjuangan-perjuangan yang sedang berlangsung untuk pengakuan Aborigin dan penentuan nasib sendiri.Increasingly, the circulation of these media globally – through conferences, festivals, co-productions, and the use of the internet – has become an important basis for nascent but growing transnational network of indigenous media makers and activists. These activists are attempting to reverse processes through which aspects of their societies have been objectified, commodified, and appropriated; their media productions and writings are efforts to recuperate their histories, land rights, and knowledge bases as their own cultural property. These kinds of cultural production are consistent with the ways in which the meaning and praxis of culture in late modernity have become increasingly conscious of their own project, an effort to use imagery of their lives to create an activist imaginary. One might think of media practices as a kind of shield against the often unethical use or absolute erasure of their presence in the ever-increasing circulation of images of other cultures in general, and of indigenous lives in particular, as the indigenous position paper for the World Summit on the Information Society makes clear. At every level, indigenous media practices have helped to create and contest social, visual, narrative, and political spaces for local communities and in the creation of national and other kinds of dominant cultural imaginaries that, until recently, have excluded vital representations by First Nation peoples within their borders. The capacity of such representations to circulate to other communities – from indigenous neighbours to NGOs – is an extension of this process, across a number of forms of mediation, from video and film to cyberspace (Danaja and Garde 1997).Indigenous digital media have raised important questions about the politics and circulation of knowledge at a number of levels; within communities this may be about who has had access to and understanding of media technologies, and who has the rights to know, tell, and circulate certain stories and images. Within nation-states, the media are linked to larger battles over cultural citizenship, racism, sovereignty, and land rights, as well as struggles over funding, air space and satellites, networks of broadcasting and distribution, and digital broadband, that may or may not be available to indigenous work. The impact of these fluctuations can be tracked in a variety of places – in fieldwork, in policy documents and in the dramas of everyday life in cultural institutions. I explore the term Digital Age because it so powerfully shapes frameworks for understanding globalisation, media, and culture, creating the ‘commonsense’ discourse for institutions in ways that disregard the cultural significance of the production of knowledge in minoritised communities, increasing an already existing sense of marginalisation. Rather than mirroring the widespread concern over increasing corporate control over media production and distribution, and the often parallel panic over multiculturalism (Appiah 1997), can we illuminate and support other possibilities emerging out of locally based concerns and speak for their significance in contemporary cultural and policy arenas? Institutional structures are built on discursive frameworks that shape the way in which phenomena are understood, naturalising shifts in support for a range of cultural activities. In government, foundations, and academic institutions, these frameworks have an enormous impact on policy and funding decisions that, for better or worse, can have a decisive effect on practice.
Other scholars who recognise, more generally, the significance of locally situated cultural practices in relation to dominant models point instead to the importance of the productions/producers who are helping (among other things) to generate their own links to other indigenous communities through which local practices are strengthened and linked. For example, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake point to such processes as part of ‘an aesthetic of rearguard resistance, rearticulated borders as sources, genres, and enclaves of cultural preservation and community identity to be set against global technologies of modernisation or image-cultures of the postmodern’ (1996: 14). Indeed, simultaneous to the growing corporate control of media, indigenous producers and cultural activists are creating innovative work, not only in the substance and form of their productions, but also in the social relations they are creating through this practice, that can change the ways we understand media and their relation to the circulation of culture more generally in the twenty-first century.

Such efforts are evidence of how indigenous media formed over the last decades now find themselves at the conjuncture of a number of historical developments: these include the circuits opened by new media technologies, ranging from satellites to compressed video and cyberspace, as well as the ongoing legacies of indigenous activism worldwide, most recently by a generation comfortable with media and concerned with making their own representations as a mode of cultural creativity and social action. They also represent the complex and differing ways that states have responded to these developments – the opportunities of media and the pressures of activism – and have entered into new relationships with the indigenous nations that they encompass.

I conclude on a note of cautious optimism. The evidence of the growth and creativity of indigenous digital media over the last two decades, whatever problems may have accompanied it, is nothing short of remarkable. Formations such as these, working out of grounded communities or broader regional or national bases, offer an important elaboration of what the Digital Age might look like, intervening in the ‘left behind’ narrative that predominates. While indigenous media activism alone certainly cannot unseat the power asymmetries which underwrite the profound inequalities that continue to shape their worlds, the issues their digital interventions raise about the politics of culture are on a continuum with the broader issues of self-determination, cultural rights, and political sovereignty, and may help bring some attention to these profoundly interconnected concerns.17 Indigenous media offer an alternative model of grounded and increasingly global relations created by indigenous people about their own lives and cultures. As we all struggle to comprehend the remapping of social space that is occurring, indigenous media offer some other co-ordinates for understanding. Terms such as ‘the Digital Age’ gloss over such phenomena in their own right or as examples of alternative modernities, resources of hope, new dynamics in social movements, or as part of the trajectory of indigenous life in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it is time to invent new terms to remind us of the issues of power at work from a position that interrogates the hegemonic order implied in the language of the Digital Age.

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 2:

Untuk kembali ke kekhawatiran bahwa termotivasi bab ini, saya ingin menggarisbawahi cara bahwa istilah Era Digital stratifies hierarki Media bagi mereka yang berada di luar kekuasaan dan berjuang untuk menjadi produsen media representasi dari kehidupan mereka. Ini adalah masalah yang sangat penting bagi masyarakat adat, yang, sampai saat ini, telah menjadi objek dari praktik gambar-membuat orang lain dengan cara-cara yang telah merusak kehidupan mereka. Dan, tidak seperti minoritas lainnya, pertanyaan dari Era Digital terlihat berbeda dari sudut pandang orang yang berjuang untuk mengendalikan tanah dan tradisi yang telah diambil oleh masyarakat pemukim sekarang dominan selama 500 tahun. Dalam upaya untuk menggarisbawahi apa pekerjaan mereka adalah tentang, saya menggunakan aktivis budaya istilah untuk menggambarkan cara sadar di mana mereka - seperti banyak orang lain - menggunakan produksi media dan bentuk-bentuk ekspresif lainnya sebagai cara tidak hanya untuk mempertahankan dan membangun komunitas mereka tetapi juga sebagai alat untuk membantu mengubah mereka melalui apa yang mungkin sebut 'tradisionalisme strategis' (meminjam dari Bennett dan Blundell 1995). Posisi ini sangat penting untuk pekerjaan mereka tetapi dihapuskan dari teori budaya kontemporer banyak menangani media baru yang menekankan dislokasi dan globalisasi. Para aktivis budaya menciptakan ini jenis baru dari bentuk-bentuk budaya telah berpaling ke mereka sebagai sarana hubungan revivifying ke tanah mereka, bahasa daerah, tradisi dan sejarah dan kekhawatiran masyarakat mengartikulasikan. Mereka juga melihat media sebagai sarana memajukan transformasi sosial dan politik dengan memasukkan cerita mereka sendiri ke dalam narasi nasional sebagai bagian dari perjuangan yang sedang berlangsung untuk pengakuan Aborigin dan penentuan nasib sendiri. Semakin, sirkulasi media ini secara global - melalui konferensi, festival, co -productions, dan penggunaan internet - telah menjadi dasar penting bagi lahir tapi tumbuh jaringan transnasional pembuat media masyarakat adat dan aktivis. Aktivis ini sedang berusaha untuk membalikkan proses melalui mana aspek masyarakat mereka telah objektifikasi, komodifikasi, dan disesuaikan; produksi media dan tulisan-tulisan upaya untuk memulihkan sejarah mereka, hak atas tanah, dan basis pengetahuan sebagai kekayaan budaya mereka sendiri. Jenis-jenis produksi budaya konsisten dengan cara di mana makna dan praksis budaya pada akhir modernitas telah menjadi semakin sadar proyek mereka sendiri, upaya untuk menggunakan citra hidup mereka untuk membuat seorang aktivis imajiner. Orang mungkin berpikir praktik media sebagai semacam perisai terhadap penggunaan sering tidak etis atau penghapusan mutlak kehadiran mereka dalam sirkulasi yang terus meningkat dari gambar budaya lain pada umumnya, dan kehidupan masyarakat adat khususnya, sebagai kertas posisi adat untuk World Summit on Information Society membuat jelas. Pada setiap tingkat, praktik media masyarakat adat telah membantu untuk membuat dan kontes sosial, visual, narasi, dan ruang politik bagi masyarakat lokal dan dalam penciptaan jenis nasional dan lain imaginaries budaya dominan yang, sampai saat ini, telah dikeluarkan representasi penting oleh Nation Pertama masyarakat dalam perbatasan mereka. Kapasitas representasi tersebut beredar ke masyarakat lainnya - dari tetangga adat untuk LSM - merupakan perpanjangan dari proses ini, di sejumlah bentuk mediasi, dari video dan film untuk dunia maya (Danaja dan Garde 1997). Media digital Adat telah mengangkat pertanyaan penting tentang politik dan sirkulasi pengetahuan di sejumlah tingkat; dalam masyarakat ini mungkin tentang yang telah memiliki akses dan pemahaman tentang teknologi media, dan yang memiliki hak untuk mengetahui, tahu, dan mengedarkan cerita dan gambar-gambar tertentu. Dalam negara-bangsa, media terkait dengan pertempuran yang lebih besar lebih kewarganegaraan budaya, rasisme, kedaulatan, dan hak atas tanah, serta perebutan dana, ruang udara dan satelit, jaringan penyiaran dan distribusi, dan broadband digital, yang mungkin atau mungkin tidak tersedia untuk pekerjaan adat. Dampak dari fluktuasi ini dapat dilacak di berbagai tempat - di lapangan, dalam dokumen kebijakan dan dalam drama kehidupan sehari-hari di lembaga kebudayaan. Aku menjelajahi jangka Era Digital karena begitu kuat membentuk kerangka kerja untuk memahami globalisasi, media, dan budaya, menciptakan 'akal sehat' wacana untuk lembaga dengan cara yang mengabaikan signifikansi budaya produksi pengetahuan dalam masyarakat minoritised, meningkatkan rasa sudah ada marjinalisasi. Daripada mencerminkan kekhawatiran yang meluas atas meningkatnya kendali perusahaan atas produksi dan distribusi media, dan kepanikan sering paralel lebih multikulturalisme (Appiah 1997), dapat kita menerangi dan mendukung kemungkinan lain muncul dari keprihatinan berbasis lokal dan berbicara untuk signifikansi mereka dalam budaya kontemporer dan arena kebijakan? Struktur kelembagaan yang dibangun di atas kerangka diskursif yang membentuk cara di mana fenomena dipahami, naturalising pergeseran dukungan untuk berbagai kegiatan budaya. Dalam pemerintahan, yayasan, dan lembaga akademis, kerangka kerja ini memiliki dampak yang besar terhadap keputusan kebijakan dan pendanaan itu, untuk lebih baik atau lebih buruk, dapat memiliki efek yang menentukan pada praktek. Ulama lain yang mengakui, lebih umum, pentingnya praktek-praktek budaya yang terletak secara lokal dalam kaitannya dengan model yang dominan menunjukkan bukan untuk pentingnya produksi / produsen yang membantu (antara lain) untuk menghasilkan link mereka sendiri untuk masyarakat adat lain di mana praktek-praktek lokal diperkuat dan terkait. Misalnya, Rob Wilson dan Wimal Dissanayake titik untuk proses seperti bagian dari 'estetika perlawanan barisan belakang, rearticulated perbatasan sebagai sumber, genre, dan kantong-kantong pelestarian budaya dan identitas masyarakat harus ditetapkan terhadap teknologi global modernisasi atau gambar-budaya postmodern '(1996: 14). Memang, simultan dengan kontrol perusahaan berkembang media, produsen adat dan aktivis budaya menciptakan karya inovatif, tidak hanya dalam substansi dan bentuk produksi mereka, tetapi juga dalam hubungan sosial mereka menciptakan melalui latihan ini, yang dapat mengubah cara kita memahami media dan hubungannya dengan sirkulasi budaya lebih umum di abad kedua puluh satu. Upaya tersebut merupakan bukti bagaimana adat media yang terbentuk selama dekade terakhir sekarang menemukan diri mereka di konjungtur dari sejumlah perkembangan sejarah: ini termasuk sirkuit dibuka oleh teknologi media baru, mulai dari satelit untuk kompresi video dan dunia maya, serta warisan berkelanjutan aktivisme adat di seluruh dunia, baru-baru ini oleh generasi nyaman dengan media dan prihatin dengan membuat representasi mereka sendiri sebagai modus kreativitas budaya dan aksi sosial . Mereka juga mewakili cara yang kompleks dan berbeda bahwa negara telah merespon perkembangan ini - peluang media dan tekanan dari aktivisme -. Dan telah memasuki hubungan baru dengan negara-negara adat yang mereka mencakup saya menyimpulkan pada catatan optimisme hati-hati. Bukti dari pertumbuhan dan kreativitas media digital adat selama dua dekade terakhir, apa pun masalah mungkin menyertainya, tidak kekurangan yang luar biasa. Formasi seperti ini, bekerja dari komunitas membumi atau basa regional atau nasional yang lebih luas, menawarkan elaborasi penting dari apa Era Digital mungkin terlihat seperti, intervensi di 'tertinggal' narasi yang mendominasi. Sementara adat aktivisme media saja tentu tidak bisa menggeser asimetri kekuasaan yang menanggung kesenjangan mendalam yang terus membentuk dunia mereka, masalah intervensi digital mereka menaikkan tentang politik budaya berada di kontinum dengan isu-isu yang lebih luas untuk menentukan nasib sendiri, hak budaya, dan kedaulatan politik, dan dapat membantu membawa perhatian ke ini mendalam saling concerns.17 Media Adat menawarkan model alternatif dari hubungan global membumi dan semakin dibuat oleh masyarakat adat tentang kehidupan dan budaya mereka sendiri. Seperti yang kita semua berjuang untuk memahami remapping ruang sosial yang terjadi, media adat menawarkan beberapa koordinat lainnya untuk pemahaman. Istilah-istilah seperti gloss 'Era Digital' lebih fenomena seperti di kanan mereka sendiri atau sebagai contoh modernitas alternatif, sumber pengharapan, dinamika baru dalam gerakan sosial, atau sebagai bagian dari lintasan kehidupan asli di abad kedua puluh satu. Mungkin sudah saatnya untuk menciptakan istilah baru untuk mengingatkan kita tentang isu-isu kekuasaan di tempat kerja dari posisi yang menginterogasi urutan hegemonik tersirat dalam bahasa Era Digital.