Global Media Culture

• Globalization - vague, opaque, and difficult word.
• Global economy, international trade, growing prosperity, international travel and communication, immigration, migration, foreign films, foods, global problems.
• Globalization and Media: global imaginary of living in a global village (McLuhan 1962)
• Media act in concert and cohort.
• Late 1900s: began few decades ago, advances in media, transportation, and technology.
• Arjun Appadurai (1996): rupture within social life. Two diacritics: media and migration.
• Columbus reaching America
• Beginning of humanity: First Homo Sapiens set out in search for food, water, and adventure.
• Nayan Chanda: Process that work silently for millennia without being given a name
• Media is the plural form of medium.
• Media is the channel of communication.
• Media - the word became popular because a word is needed to talk about new social issues.
• Phenomena were grouped together to debate about "mass media"/
• Oral Communication - the oldest and most enduring of all media.
• Speech has practiced 200,000 years.
• Script has been practiced less than 7,000 years.
• Print started less than 600 years
• Digital Technology is less than 50 years.
• Oral Communication - Aid globalization through allowing humans to cooperate.
• Oral Communication - Coordination, sharing of information about land, water, climate, weather, tools, weapons, technology.
• Oral Communication - Stored and transmitted agricultural information.
• Oral Communication - Development of markets, trade of goods and services.
• Oral Communication - Created first civilization Sumer in Middle East.
• Sumer in middle east is the cradle of civilization - birthplace of wheel, plow, irrigation, and writing.
• Script - first writing: allowed humans to communicate and share knowledge and ideas over much larger spaces and cross much longer times.
• Script - Evolution: cave paintings, petroglyphs, and hieroglyphs.
• The Printing Press - started the information revolution.
• The Printing Press - Transformed market, business, nations, schools, churches, governments, armies, and more.
• What are the two consequences of the Printing Press?

  1. preserved and standardized knowledge 2. encouraged the challenge of political and religious authority.
• Electronic Media - The use of electronic devices to deliver information, entertainment, and communication.
• Electronic Media - E.g. Telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and television.
• Telegraph: Rail travel was more efficient, corporations and business were able to exchange information.
• Telephone: Transmitted speech over distance was the next breakthrough. Become the world's dominant communication device.
• Electronic Media - this generation also includes radio and film.
• Creation of television brought together visual and aural power of film with the accessibility of radio.
• Digital Media - The use of digital technology to create, communicate, and distribute content.
• Digital : Computers have revolutionize work in every industry and trade. this open up new areas and methods of research.
• Digital Media: Some of the largest companies i.e. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and more arose in the digital era and have been instrumental to globalization.
• What are the consequences of Digital Media?

  Through media, the people of the world came to know of the world. People have need to be able to truly imagine the world - imaging themselves acting in the world - for globalization to proceed.
• Manfred Steger (2008) "global imaginary" - the globe itself as imagined community.