| This dissertation offers a study of a particular East European country as a means of addressing the volatile relationship between local cultures and the forces of Westernization and globalization after the fall of socialism. Lithuania stands at an economic, political, and cultural crossroads, as it moves from a single-party system to democracy, from a centralized economy to a free market, and as its peoples mix their identification with both local folk and Soviet culture with new experiences with world cultures and media. The dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodology and the study of multiple media (including film, television, and popular music) as a means of reaching a more comprehensive understanding of the consumption of popular media texts in Lithuania. My work explores the processes of textual production and regulation, as well as the relationship between consumption and issues of representation and identity. I study reading/consumption strategies by means of ethnographic interviews, drawing upon fieldwork with subjects from central Lithuania. I supplement this fieldwork with analyses of media texts, interviews with producers, and an examination of surrounding media discourses found in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet. Lithuania's "mediascape" is found to offer a particularly rich entry point into broader issues of media consumption, globalization tendencies, and ongoing post-socialist transition as they are animated by local, regional, and transnational forces. Not only does this dissertation articulate the contested nature of national identity through its media consumption, it also points out the ways in which understandings of the Soviet past and European future factor into how Lithuania continues to be "imagined" in the 21st Century. |
