Transformations - 2003 Conference Session 1

Session 1: The Transformative Power of the Media
Chair: Christopher Macallister

Transformative Role of the Journal of ‘ÜLKÜ’ in Turkish Modernisation Process in the Era of the Single Party and the Leadership of Ataturk
Banu Dagtas
Anadolu University, The School of Communication, Department of Journalism, Eskisehir, Turkey

In transforming the people from being members of various communities to being citizens of nation-state in modernisation process, the role of media is crucial by provoking, supporting and representing the social change and the new national identity.In Ottoman-Turkish modernisation process the role of newspapers, magazines and as well as novels were so important to spread the new type of thinking and living standards. After the 1923 with the establishment of the Turkish Republic such role was maintained by the governing bureaucratic elite to provoke and support the social reforms were taken under the leadership of the Kemal Atatürk. Is this period revolutionary or not is still debatable but such radical social reforms are called “Atatürk's Revolutions”.
The era between 1923-1945 is the single party state under Kemal Atatürk and his immediate successors, the period of bureaucrats, the period of “enlightenment “and the period of forming the” national identity”. Although the chosen path to reach enlightenment was the westernisation (Ottoman-Turkish modernisation means that westernisation), the governing elite also chose the breaking of the old ties with the Ottoman Empire and forming a new ties with old Turk civilisations before the islamic rule. This is the different aspect of Turkish modernisation. In this context the Thesis of Turkish History and the Thesis of Turkish Language were chosen as the new fabrics of the national identity. So the Institution of the Turkish Language , Institution of the Turkish History and the Organisation of the Public houses were established to gain the mass support for new formed national identity and for the radical social reforms. The journal of Ülkü is the press agency of the Public houses at the national level. Ülkü was published between 1933-1950, after the Atatürk's Revolutions had began to be implemented.
In this study, it is proposed that all the volumes of the Ülkü, during the era of the Atatürk's leadership(1933-1938) will be read as a media text. This reading will be made on the basis of the main components of modernisation process, that are industrialization, secularism, urbanisation , democracy and the modern Turkish man/woman. The last component is also the sum up of the new national identity. With this study, the transformative role of the one media agency in a specific period of the Turkish modernisation process will be discussed.

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Media Power And Political Transformation In Nigeria
Eric C. Oparoha-Njoku
Head, Research/Strategic Planning, International Consensus Forum, Lagos, Nigeria.

Media power has had a meaningful impact on political transformation in Nigeria over the years. Varying degrees of impact is noticeable right from the colonial era to the present post-colonial period. Different roles have also been played by the print and electronic media. Also, certain variables have tended to influence the impact of the media in Nigeria. Such variables include ownership structure, ethnicity and political environment.
This paper explores the impact of the media in the transformation process in Nigeria's body polity with a view to critically examining those variables which have tended to influence its role. It provides answer to the question of why (for instance) the Lagos Press spear-headed by the West African Pilot was regarded as confrontational by the British Colonial Administrations. The paper seeks to determine to what extent some of the media owners( like Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo) who were at the fore-front of Nigeria's decolonisation process, used their newspapers to influence the swing of the political pendulum. The paper asks whether it could be rightly said that the preference of the British Colonial Administration to align with the less radical and less vocal conservative North (resulting in the later's inheritance of political power at independence) was due to the apparent confrontational expositions and vituperations of the Lagos Media against the colonial administration and the consequent mutual distrust arising therefrom.
On the whole, the paper suggests that media power has played a fundamental role in shaping Nigeria's body polity both within the pre and post-colonial periods. Finally, the paper asserts that the ability of the media to create a saintly or monstrous image of any administration in power (civilian or military), has been a reoccurring decimal in the political equation of instability in the chequered political transformation process in Nigeria.

Print Media and the Glocalisation of Knowledge: a Case Study
Linda Venter
Monash University, Australia

The contextualisation and background provided in the paper include a brief history of the development of the printing press and how it enabled the formation of dispersed virtual communities and radical shifts in social relations caused by compression of time and space. The example of print clearly shows some of the most important enabling effects of modern communication technologies: the mobility of recorded information; the capacity to make connections between dispersed social actors in different locations; the capacity to move information through space and time at increasing speed; and the capacity to control events from a distance, i.e. utilisation as a routine administrative tool.
The main theory explored in the paper is rooted in the assumption that the convergence of media in a technology such as the Internet is accompanied by a new arrangement of cultural and economic flows. Although new communications technologies have the ability to transmit messages and electronically encoded commodity objects globally, there are still the variegated ways in which audiences and consumers both use commodities and inflect them with attributes which may resonate only in local circumstances. The term glocalisation entails an idea adopted in Japanese business for global localisation, rather than the term globalisation , which is seen as a more limiting term because of the tendency in much literature to assume that the global overrides the local, determining the conditions of the local. The term glocalisation signals the fact that the local is always embedded within the global, and vice-versa.
Applying the above concepts and principles, the aim of the paper is to utilise Monash University Australia as a case study in order to explore the question of glocalisation in the global development of universities. In exploring this complex, dynamic global-local relationship, the paper focuses on how Monash students, staff and local communities in South Africa are benefiting through the convergence of media and a global commitment to knowledge, academic development and accessibility. The consequences of subjects that are delivered via the Internet and the impact of such online delivery of course material on staffing, administration and study modes are discussed.
In conclusion the different ways in which Monash (in its capacity as a global university) can make an active contribution to sustainable academic development in South Africa - without losing sight of local conditions and cultures - are discussed.

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