TCWD Lesson 8: Global Media Cultures

• Expectations for students


  • Discuss how various media drives affect global Integration
  • Enumerate the advantages of local and global media in creating a global village
  • Appreciate the dynamics between local and global cultural production by creating a slogan or info graphics
• The infographic reveals:
• Cultural Imperialism


  The theory that audiences across the globe are heavily affected by media messages emanating from the Western industrialized countries
• Media Imperialism


  A category of cultural imperialism
• Cultural Imperialism


  • Grounded in an understanding of media as cultural industries
  • Firmly rooted in a political-economy perspective on international communication
• In the early stage of cultural imperialism, researchers focused their efforts mostly on nation-states as primary actors in international relations
• The flow of news and entertainment was biased in favor of industrialized countries
• The inequality existed in news and entertainment programs alike, and to the advent of then-new media technologies such as communication satellites
• The global media debate was launched during the 1973 General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• Positions in the global media debate

  • Western industrialized nations insisted on the "free flow of information" doctrine, advocating "free trade" in information and media programs without any restrictions
  • Developing countries accused Western countries of invoking the free flow of information ideology to justify their economic and cultural domination, and argued instead for a "free and balanced flow" of information
• The chasm between the two groups was too wide to be reconciled, which was one of the major reasons given for withdrawal from UNESCO by the United States and the United Kingdom
• Second stage of cultural imperialism research

  Emphasis on the commercialization of the sphere of culture, with a focus on transnational corporations as actors and on transnational capital flows
• It is hard to separate the power of transnational corporations from that of nation-states, and it is difficult to distinguish clearly between capital flows and media flows
• The concept of globalization has in some ways replaced cultural imperialism as the main conceptual umbrella under which much research and theorizing in international communication have been conducted
• Reasons for the analytical shift from cultural imperialism to globalization

  • The end of the Cold War, making the world more fragmented and the nation-state no longer the sole or dominant player
  • Globalization conveys a process with less coherence and direction, which will weaken the cultural unity of all nation-states, not only those in the developing world
  • Globalization has emerged as a key perspective across the humanities and social sciences
• Homogenization of cultural differences across the planet

  A perspective on the globalization of culture, somewhat reminiscent of cultural imperialism
• Benjamin Barber's theory on the globalization of culture

  • Based on a binary opposition between Jihad (ethnic and religious tribalism) and McWorld (the capital-driven West)
  • Privileges the global over the local, arguing that globalization rules via transnational capitalism
• Cultural hybridity or hybridization


  • Privileges an understanding of the interface of globalization and localization as a dynamic process and hybrid product of mixed traditions and cultural forms
  • Emphasizes processes of mediation as central to cultural globalization
• Features of cultural hybridity


  • Mixing previously separate cultural systems
  • Deterritorialization of cultural processes from their original physical environment to new and foreign contexts
  • Formation of impure cultural genres out of the mixture of several cultural domains
• There is no obvious or final answer to the question of whether transnational media have made cultures across the globe hybrid or if cultures have always been to some extent hybrid
• Cultures have been in contact for a long time through warfare, trade, migration, and slavery, so a degree of hybridization in all cultures can be assumed
• Global media and information technologies have substantially increased contacts between cultures, both in terms of intensity and speed, so they intensify the hybridity that is already in existence in cultures across the globe
• The globalization of culture through the media is not a process of complete homogenization, but rather one where cohesion and fragmentation coexist