TOPIC 4

• Globalization entails the spread of various cultures.
• Globalization also involves the spread of ideas.
• People who travel the globe teaching and preaching their beliefs in universities, churches, public forums, classrooms, or even as guests of a family play a major role in the spread of culture and ideas.
• But today, television programs, social media groups, books, movies, magazines and the like have made easier for advocates to reach larger audiences.
• Globalization relies on media as its main conduit for the spread of global culture and ideas.
• Lule describes media as “a means of conveying something, such as a channel of communication.”
• Technically speaking, a person’s voice is a medium.
• However, when commentators refer to ‘media”, they mean the technologies of mass communication.
• While it is relatively easy to define the term “media,” it is more difficult to determine what media do and how they affect societies.
• Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once declared that “the medium is the message.” He did not mean that ideas are useless and do not affect people. Rather, his statement was an attempt to draw attention to how media, as a form of technology, reshape societies.
• Thus, television is not a simple bearer of messages, it also shapes the social behavior of users and reorient family behavior.
• Today, the smartphone allows users to keep in touch instantly with multiple people at the same time. Consider the effect of the internet on relationships.
• The technology, and the message, makes for this social change possible.
• McLuhan added that different media simultaneously extend and amputate human senses.
• New media may expand the reach of communication, but they also dull the users’ communicative capacities.
• The question of what new media enhance and what they amputate was not a moral or ethical one, according to McLuhan.
• New media are neither inherently good nor bad.
• The famous writer was merely drawing attention to the historically and technologically specific attributes of various media.


  mcluhan
• Lule 


  describes media as “a means of conveying something, such as a channel of communication.”
• McLuhan used his analysis of technology to examine the impact of electronic media.
• Since he was writing around the 1960s, he mainly analyzed the social changes brought about by television. 


  McLuhan
• McLuhan declared that television was turning the world into a “global village.” By this, he meant that, as more and more people sat down in front of their television sets and listened to same stories, their perception of the world would contract.
• In the years after McLuhan, media scholars further grappled with the challenges of a global media culture.
• A lot of these early thinkers assumed that global media had a tendency to homogenize culture. They argued that as global media spread, people from all over the world would begin to watch, listen to, and read the same things. This thinking arose at a time when America’s power had turned it into the world’s cultural heavyweight.
• Commentators, therefore, believe that media globalization coupled with American hegemony would create a form of cultural imperialism whereby American values and culture would overwhelm all others.
• In 1976, media critic Herbert Schiller argued that not only was the world being Americanized, but that this process also led to the spread of “American” capitalist values like consumerism.
• Similarly, for John Tomlinson, cultural globalization is simply a euphemism for “Western cultural imperialism” since it promotes “homogenized, Westernized, consumer culture.”
• These scholars who decry cultural imperialism, however, have a top-down view of the media, since they are more concerned with the broad structures that determine media content.

  Moreover, their focus on America has led them to neglect other global flows of information that the media can enable.
• These scholars who decry cultural imperialism, however, have a top-down view of the media, since they are more concerned with the broad structures that determine media content.

  Moreover, their focus on America has led them to neglect other global flows of information that the media can enable.
• Proponents of the idea of cultural imperialism ignored the fact that media messages are not just made by producers, they are also consumed by audiences.
• In the 1980s, media scholars began to pay attention to the ways in which audiences understood and interpreted media messages.
• The field of audience studies emphasizes that media consumers are active participants in the meaning-making process, who view media “texts” through their own cultural lenses. 


  1980
• In 1985, Indonesian cultural critic Ien Ang studied the ways in which different viewers in the Netherlands experienced watching the American soap opera Dallas.
• Through letters from 42 viewers, she presented a detailed analysis of audience-viewing experiencing. Rather than simply receiving American culture in a “passive and resigned way,” she noted that viewers put “a lot of emotional energy” into the process and they experienced pleasure based on how the program resonated with them.


  Ang
• In 1990, Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes decided to push Ang’s analysis further by examining how viewers from distinct cultural communities interpreted Dallas.
• They argued that texts are received differently by varied interpretive communities because they derived different meanings and pleasures from these texts. 


  elihu and tamar
• Thus, people from diverse cultural backgrounds had their own ways of understanding the show. 


  elihu and tamar
• Apart from the challenge of audience studies, the cultural imperialism thesis has been belied by the renewed strength of regional trends in the globalization process.
• Asian culture, for example, has proliferated worldwide through the globalization of media.
• Given these patterns, it is no longer tenable to insist that globalization is a unidirectional process of foreign cultures overwhelming local ones.