Timothy Havens - Popular television in Eastern Europe during and since socialism

.

The number of conferences, workshops and articles devoted to Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture has exponentially increased in the past 15 years. This attention follows Eastern Europes transition from state-controlled, relatively isolated national media systems to a progressively integrated European media sphere permeated by processes of globalization and media convergence. Such a transition, characterized by geographically uneven processes of democratization, marketization, the transformation of state institutions and civic nation-building within the region, has also been fueled by the staggered enlargement of the European Union. Televisions transformation has been especially spectacular, shifting from a state-controlled broadcast system delivering national, regional and heavily filtered Western programming to a deregulated, multiplatform, transnational system delivering predominantly American and Western European entertainment programming. Consequently, the nations of Eastern Europe provide opportunities to examine the complex interactions among economic and funding systems, regulatory policies, globalization, imperialism, popular culture and cultural identity.

At the same time, many of the changes currently sweeping Eastern Europethe globalization of media industries and programming, the collapse of non-commercial broadcasting, the impact of digitization and channel fragmentationhave also profoundly affected Western European nations. Despite these epochal changes in television, however, books and anthologies about European television continue to identify Europe with Western Europe and contain only a few references to Europes Eastern peripheries. Even recent volumes such as Television Across Europe: A Comparative Introduction (Wieten, Murdock and Dahlgren, 2000), Worlds in Common? Television Discourses in the Changing Europe (Meinhof and Richardson, 1999), Transnational Television In Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks (Chalaby, 2009), Imaginary Dream-scapes: Television Fiction in Europe (Buonanno, 2005) and A European Television History (Bignell and Fickers, 2008) only minimally address Eastern European societies, if at all.

By implication, anthologies and monographs that purport to cover European television and media, while consistently excluding or marginalizing Eastern Europe, perpetuate Western-centric perspectives and generalizations in their approaches, many of which simply do not apply to the very different economic, political and cultural trajectories of socialist and post-socialist television, which we explore below. Similarly, volumes on media globalization tend to bypass Eastern Europe: without meaning to trumpet our own horns, we nevertheless believe it is accurate to say that our own prior work offers some of the only exceptions to this tendency.