Seeking ontological security beyond the nation: the role of transnational television

This article examines the role of transnational television in supporting transnational subjects’ ontological security in a world of information, risk, interconnected spaces but fragmented social relations. The discussion draws from Silverstone’s and Giddens’s work on ontological security and modernity. It revisits Silverstone’s analysis of television as a core system for managing modern subjects’ insecurities and relocates this thesis in a transnational context. Enabling symbolic as well as physical co-presence, the space around television becomes a contradictory, yet important, frame for managing everyday anxieties shared by many migrants and diasporic subjects. This is particularly the case for people torn by anxieties associated with separation, political instability in their region of origin, and the precariousness of migrant life. With reference to empirical research with Arab audiences across Europe, the article shows that television sustains its central role, even when new media make significant advances.