Pluralist view✅

Pluralist view of the media and globalisation of popular culture

  • Pluralists argue that there is no such thing as popular or mass culture.

  • The internet, cable, satellite and digital television, and the global reach of modern media technology all offer a huge range of media products.

  • This gives consumers across the world a wide diversity of cultural choices.

  • Compaine (2005) argues that global competition is expanding sources of information and entertainment, rather than restricting them or dumbing them down.

  • Tomlinson 1999) argues that globalisation does not involve direct cultural imposition from the Western world, but that there is a hybridisation or mixing of cultures.

  • People pick 'n' mix and draw on both Western/global cultures and their own local cultures. Increased choice promotes different cultural styles around the world in which a range of local and westernised global cultural influences are combined into new hybrid cultures.

  • For example, though there may be globalized TV formats, many TV programmes, such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, are 'glocalized' - merging the global and the local - as they are adapted to suit the tastes of local cultures, as was shown in the film Slumdog Millionaire. This means there is more, not less, cultural diversity in the world.

  • New media technology like smartphones and the internet, enables consumers to create and distribute their own media products, and enables people to generate their own popular culture, rather than being the passive victims of Western media conglomerates.

  • Even if media conglomerates are spreading Western ideas, values and cultures, this does not mean that all cultures will react in the same way or necessarily adopt the Western culture and consumer lifestyles the global media promotes.

  • Rather than being doped into passivity, with people simply and uncritically swallowing what they see or hear, as some Marxists argue, consumers now have more choices and knowledge available to them than ever before in history.

  • This, pluralists claim, makes it ever more difficult for any one set of ideas or culture to dominate in the world, leading to a promotion of democracy, growing cultural diversity through hybridisation, and the blossoming of ideas that were never before possible.

Key terms

  1. Hybridisation - Process of creation of a new, hybrid culture when aspects of two or more different cultures combine

  2. Hybrid culture - A new culture formed from a mix of two or more other cultures