Global Media Cultures Notes
- Discuss the emergence of media networks in human civilization.
- Explore the significance of different media platforms as a net connector towards globalized culture.
- Analyze the pros and cons, as well as the advantages and disadvantages, of global media.
- Commit to honest and responsible social media usage.
Essential Question
- How significant are different social media platforms in understanding global cultures?
- The media significantly impacts cultural globalization in two interdependent ways:
- Extensive transnational transmission of cultural products.
- Contribution to the formation of communicative networks and social structures.
- The increasing supply of media products from international media culture challenges local and national cultures.
- The volume of supply, technological infrastructure, and financial capital significantly impact local cultural consumption and independent cultural production.
- Global media cultures create continuous cultural exchange, challenging aspects like identity, nationality, religion, behavioral norms, and lifestyle.
- These encounters often involve transnational commercial cultural industries meeting national, publicly regulated cultural industries.
Restructuring of Cultural and Social Communities
- Global media promote the restructuring of cultural and social communities.
- The Internet facilitates worldwide communication and supports new social communities.
- Satellite television and radio allow immigrants to stay connected to their homeland's language and culture while adapting to a new environment.
- International media serves as an independent cultural and social globalization agency, continually restructuring and redefining cultural communities.
- People live in dense media communication networks: postal, telephone, mobile phone, Internet, and more.
- Interactive media have become important in all areas of life, changing the construction of world knowledge and its meaning.
- Impact on people's identities, social relations, institutions, organizations, culture, and society as a whole (Krotz, 2007).
- Media and culture are interconnected because the level of understanding among different cultures influences media content.
- Media platforms and content impact cultural and daily practices.
- Culture includes norms, beliefs, behaviors, values, traditions, languages, myths, lifestyles, etc.
- Through media, groups can create and represent cultural identities.
- Media narratives and discourses are created in various forms of texts and images linked to cultural perceptions and practices.
- Encoding and decoding: message producers encode, and the audience decodes.
- Media globalizes lives in both western and eastern hemispheres.
- Media is allegedly a key element of time and space compression, a prominent feature of globalization.
Historical Context
- During the navigation age, people relied on newspapers, books, and sketches to understand different cultures.
- Exaggerated legends often led to misunderstandings and perceptions of superiority/inferiority among groups.
- Books, encyclopedias, radio, television, computers, and the Internet have opened minds to the world's reality, contributing to globalization's fluidity.
- Communication technologies, particularly the media, are essential ingredients in the globalization process.
- Media provides transnational transmission of cultural products and contributes to communicative networks and social structures.
- The increasing supply of media products from international media culture poses a challenge to local and national cultures.
- Global media cultures create continuous cultural exchange, challenging aspects such as identity, nationality, religion, behavioral norms, and lifestyle.
- Cultural encounters often involve transnational commercial cultural industries and national, publicly regulated cultural industries (Hjarvar, 2001).
- Globalization, individualization, mediatization, and commercialization influence democracy, society, culture, politics, and other conditions of life.
- These metaprocesses are crucial for future forms of life and life chances at the micro, meso, and macro levels.
- Analyzing these metaprocesses helps in understanding social and cultural change.
Globalization
- Globalization initially described the development of financial markets but has evolved into a theory of financial, economic, political, social, and cultural developments.
- It can be seen as the height of human achievement or a reawakening of imperial dominance.
Individualization
- Individualization, studied by Emile Durkheim and Ulrich Beck, has three levels:
- People are increasingly free from being integrated into social aggregates.
- People are increasingly free from the influence of traditional conventions.
- New forms of reintegration occur as individuals become dependent on market conditions and societal institutions.
- Mediatization encompasses all processes of change that are media-induced or related to changes in the media landscape over time.
- It includes changes in the media ecology that are linked to other large-scale social changes.
Commercialization
- Commercialization means the economy becomes more important for culture, society, organizational strategies, and individual actions.
- Media Imperialism occurs when one society's media dominates another country's culture.
- Cable television illustrates the effect of media imperialism, making the world a global village but saturated with foreign influence.
- Media globalization is seen as a modern form of imperialism, potentially destroying individual cultures and diversity.
- Culture domination refers to national cultures being overwhelmed by imported news and entertainment, mainly from the United States (Hollywood) and other industrialized nations.
- Many countries are concerned that their heritage will be replaced by a global culture dominated by other countries' values.
- Quotas are placed on foreign material in broadcasting systems in countries like Canada, Spain, and France.
- The culture domination also spills over into the news area.
K-Pop Example in the Philippines
- The Philippines has experienced a "Hallyu wave" (South Korean entertainment cultures) invasion.
- Filipinos, especially younger generations, are avid fans of K-pop telenovelas and music.
- K-pop stars influence Filipino fanatics with foreign entertainment sounds and music.
- For many years, representatives of developing countries have been arguing for a new world information order.
Theoretical Models of Cultural Globalization
Theory of Cultural Imperialism
- This theory argues that advanced countries dominate the global economic system, while Third World countries remain on the periphery.
- Multinational corporations are key players, controlling markets and distributing products using similar techniques.
- Cultural imperialism is defined as cultural domination by powerful nations over weaker nations.
- This domination reflects the attitudes and values of Western societies, particularly American capitalist societies, leading to the homogenization of global culture.
- Critics argue that the term "imperialism" implies a degree of political control that no longer exists.
- Despite its weaknesses, cultural imperialism remains useful for analyzing the extent to which some national actors have more impact on global culture.
Cultural Flows or Network Models
- Contrary to cultural imperialism, this model offers an alternative view where influences do not necessarily originate in the same place.
- Receivers can also be originators.
- Cultural globalization corresponds to a network without a clearly defined center or periphery.
- Globalization is an aggregation of cultural flows or networks, less coherent and uniform than cultural imperialism, with cultural influences moving in many directions.
Thematic Areas of Cultural Globalization
- Research organized around thematic areas relevant to cultural globalization:
1. The Experience of Modernity in a Global Culture
- Loosening of time and space from locality and tradition is key in analyzing modernity.
- Disassociation of cultural and social activity from local constraints has radical consequences.
- Globalization significantly influences or challenges institutions that ensured a modern structure of cultural and social experience during the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Media have become an independent institution for socialization and cultural identity development.
- International communication flow brings foreign cultures into local cultural environments, changing cultural metabolism and increasing cultural reflexivity.
- Media and communication technologies facilitate the formation of collective communities.
- Communities are established through media cultures (e.g., fan clubs, chat groups).
- Medialization of cultural communities impacts interaction, making it more abstract and symbolic.
4. Democracy and Political Culture
- Globalization leads to multicultural societies where different cultural backgrounds coexist.
- Groups must address collective problems in a common political/public sphere, balancing universal concepts of democracy with culturally specific perceptions.
- Globalization is a multidimensional process affecting economy, politics, environment, technology, and culture.
- In economics, it refers to economic internationalization and the spread of capitalist markets.
- In international relations, it focuses on interstate relations and global politics.
- In sociology, it concerns worldwide social densities and the emergence of a "world society."
- In cultural studies, it focuses on global communication and cultural standardization.
- In history, it deals with conceptualizing "global history."
- Central to globalization is the rise of the global market and the role of transnational corporations (TNCs).
- Economic exploitation has led to increased mercantilism and widening socio-economic gulfs.
- Murdock (2004) writes that globalization of capitalism has deepened class inequalities and internationalized class relations.
- Global media developed haltingly in the 19th century.
- Newspapers and periodicals were mainly for domestic audiences due to language issues.
- The telegraph and underwater cables in the mid-19th century marked the beginning of the telecommunication age.
- Rapid communication of world news via wires had great commercial value.
- International news agencies based on the wire were the first major global media.
- French Havas, German Wolf, and British Reuters were commercial news agencies with a special interest in foreign news.
Influence of Globalization
- Globalization influences social, political, economic, and cultural spheres.
- It occurs through cross-cultural trade, religious organizations, knowledge networks, multinational corporations, banks, international institutions, technological exchange, and transnational social networks.
- Mass-mediated communication, a global telecommunication industry, banking and financial markets, multinational corporations, international nongovernment organizations, global warming, and the notion of Chernobyl contribute to the idea of a global society.
- Today's Internet is a broad information infrastructure.
- Its history is complex, with technological, organizational, and community aspects.
- Its influence extends to computer communications, e-commerce, information acquisition, and community operations (Leiner et al., 1997).
Thematic Areas (Repetition)
- Thematic areas include:
- Experience of modernity.
- Socialization and formation of cultural identity.
- Mediated communities and action.
- Democracy and political culture.
- These involve cultural globalization at the general cultural and societal level, institutional level, social group level, and individual level.
1. The Experience of Modernity in a Global Culture (Repetition)
- The loosening of time and space from locality and tradition is key to analyzing modernity.
- Dissociation of cultural and social activity from local constraints has radical consequences.
- Globalization significantly influences or challenges institutions that ensured a modern structure of cultural and social experience during the 19th and 20th centuries.
- The family, the national educational system, the arts, the political system, and the mode of industrial production are influenced by transnational networks and institutions.
- Experience of modernity is not a unified phenomenon, with differences among the well-educated elite and immigrants or people in the third world.
- Media plays an important role in both homogenization and differentiation.
- Media have become an independent institution for socialization and cultural identity development.
- International communication flow brings foreign cultures into local cultural environments, changing cultural metabolism and increasing cultural reflexivity.
- Global media cultures can represent a cultural difference or a threat to tradition but also contribute to the development of local cultures.
- Attention is paid to how media contribute to differentiating the exchange between local and global culture and its impact on socialization and cultural identity formation.
- Media and communication technologies facilitate the formation of collective communities and enable social action across time and space.
- Communities are established through media cultures (e.g., fan clubs, chat groups).
- Medialization of cultural communities impacts interaction, making it more abstract and symbolic.
- Social action increasingly takes place on a global scale through media and communication technologies (e.g., international news media, interactive exchange services).
4. Democracy and Political Culture (Repetition)
- Globalization results in multicultural societies where different cultural backgrounds coexist.
- Groups must address collective problems in a common political/public sphere.
- This has exacerbated the contradiction between universal concepts of democracy and culturally specific political norms.
- Growth of multicultural societies makes analyzing the relationship between universal ideals of democracy and culturally specific norms relevant.
- Globalization involves a new stratification of political and cultural spheres with the establishment of local, regional, and transnational public spheres.
- The impact of globalization on democracy and political culture is considered theoretically and analytically.
Globalization of Television
- Analyzes the internationalization of television and its impact on the cultural role of television.
- Investigates whether internationalization leads to homogenization and commercialization or to more diversity.
- Attention is given to the communicative structure of television and its function as a meeting place for different areas and genres.
- Internationalization is often seen as program imports due to satellite broadcasting, but this is a narrow perspective.
- National broadcasters adapt foreign program formats, and there's transnational cooperation between broadcasters.
- The study focuses on:
- Institutions: Cooperation and joint ventures.
- Program production: Impact of new forms of standardized output.
- Program output and scheduling: Impact of internationalization on program policy.
- Media culture: Interplay between transitional television programs and the national context.
Global Communication
- Describes ways in which geographical, political, economic, social and cultural divisions can be connected, shared, related, and mobilized.
- It redefines soft and hard power, as well as the power of information and diplomacy.
- Global Communication involves transferring knowledge and ideas from power centers to peripheries and imposing a new intercultural hegemony through worldwide news and entertainment's "soft power."
- Global communication study is an interdisciplinary field that studies the continuous flow of information used to transfer values, opinions, knowledge, and cross-border culture.
International vs. Global Communication
- Significant changes are taking place in the global arena and the field of international communication.
- The term global communication is used as it goes beyond the boundaries of individual states and emphasizes cross-border communication.
- Traditionally, international communication refers to communication between nation-states and connotes issues of national sovereignty.
- Earlier theories of international communication have failed to develop models that match the reality of global communication.
Implications of "Global"
- The term "global" implies a declining role of state sovereignty and a weakening of the state.
- "Global" can be seen as an aspiration as well as a fear.
- Global may imply something more omnipresent and inclusive geographically than international.
History of Global Communication Study
- Due to military considerations, the study of global communication increased dramatically after World War II.
- Most of the 1950s research dealt with propaganda and the Cold War.
- By 1970, global communication research had grown to include a wide variety of topics.
- Previous theories of modernization, dependency, and cultural imperialism have failed to explain global communication satisfactorily.
Technological Development
- The emergence of global communication technologies in the nineteenth century is considered the origin of the global communication field.
- Numerous technical advances such as convergence, digital environments, and the Internet are some of the major engines driving the shift from international to global communication.
News Agencies and Propaganda
- The founders of international news agencies are usually recognized as Charles-Louis Havas, Bernhard Wolff, and Paul Julius Freiherr von Reuter.
- Reuter, Havas, and the German Wolff Agency reached an agreement in 1859 to exchange news from all over the world, known as the Allied Agencies League, or the "Ring Combination."
- The American News Agency Associated Press was formally admitted to the 1887 "Ring Combination."
Factors Affecting Communication
- Major factors point to the growing importance of global communication in the twenty-first-century world:
- World population explosion and increased cross-cultural communication.
- Changing community concept
- Increasing the centralization of control of information explosion
- Changes in technologies that are more dependent on global communication.
Theoretical Approaches and Perspectives
Transcultural Political Economy
- Transcultural Political Economy is a concept presented by Paula Chakravartty and Yuezhi Zhao in Global Communications.
- Focuses on global communications and media studies in three main areas: global information and culture flow, decentralization of the conceptual parameters of global information and media studies, and normative debates in global neoliberal communications.
- Transcultural Political Economy is a multidisciplinary study focusing on the tensions between political economy and studies of culture.