A Rupture in the Air
Most diaspora studies emphasize how media maintain the cultural, social and often political cohesion of those groups scattered across several national spaces. But are all the media in the diasporic group’s own language always entailing cohesion ? The case of satellite television in the Tibetan community of Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh, India) is particular, in that the Tibetans have been exposed, for the last dozen years only, to a wealth of satellite programs that are diverse in both origins and ideological content. On top of the sixty or so channels that are part of the STAR, G and Sony packages, they have access to both diasporic media (two Tibetan programs broadcasted from Dharamsala and Washington) and transnational media from Tibet (three channels in Tibetan and three in Chinese). Observations reveal that the differential consumption of those media brings to light the internal fractures of this community, in terms of age and mostly of routes of migration. Moreover, the impact of the continuous exposure of the much politicized exiles to the Chinese media is either ignored officially or denied by local Tibetans, who over-emphasize the discursive content of both their own identity and the language of television. However, television is not merely a pedagogical tool, it is a machine to create desire as well, either in consumption or in affect, and these two dimensions are overlooked locally.