Lesson 1

 Global Media Cultures

Globalization of Culture Through Media

The received view about the globalization of culture is one where the entire
world has been molded in the image of Western, mainly American, culture. In popular
and professional discourses alike, the popularity of Big Macs, Baywatch, and MTV are
touted as unmistakable signs of the fulfillment of Marshall McLuhan's prophecy of the
Global Village. The globalization of culture is often chiefly imputed to international
mass media. After all, contemporary media technologies such as satellite television and
the Internet have created a steady flow of transnational images that connect audiences
worldwide. Without global media, according to the conventional wisdom, how would
teenagers in India, Turkey, and Argentina embrace a Western lifestyle of Nike shoes,
Coca-Cola, and rock music? Hence, the putatively strong influence of the mass media
on the globalization of culture.

The role of the mass media in the globalization of culture is a contested issue in
international communication theory and research. Early theories of media influence,
commonly referred to as "magic bullet" or "hypodermic needle" theories, believed that
the mass media had powerful effects over audiences. Since then, the debate about
media influence has undergone an ebb and flow that has prevented any resolution or
agreement among researchers as to the level, scope, and implications of media
influence. Nevertheless, key theoretical formulations in international communication
clung to a belief in powerful media effects on cultures and communities. At the same
time, a body of literature questioning the scope and level of influence of transnational
media has emerged. Whereas some scholars within that tradition questioned cultural
imperialism without providing conceptual alternatives, others have drawn on an
interdisciplinary literature from across the social sciences and humanities to develop
theoretical alternatives to cultural imperialism.

Cultural Imperialism and the Global Media Debate

In international communication theory and research, cultural imperialism theory

argued that audiences across the globe are heavily affected by media messages
emanating from the Western industrialized countries. Although there are minor
differences between "media imperialism" and "cultural imperialism," most of the
literature in international communication treats the former as a category of the latter.
Grounded in an understanding of media as cultural industries, cultural imperialism is
firmly rooted in a political-economy perspective on international communication. As a

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school of thought, political economy focuses on material issues such as capital,
infrastructure, and political control as key determinants of international
communication processes and effects.

In the early stage of cultural imperialism, researchers focused their efforts

mostly on nation-states as primary actors in international relations. They imputed rich,
industrialized, and Western nation-states with intentions and actions by which they
export their cultural products and impose their sociocultural values on poorer and
weaker nations in the developing world. This argument was supported by a number of
studies demonstrating that the flow of news and entertainment was biased in favor of
industrialized countries. This bias was clear both in terms of quantity, because most
media flows were exported by Western countries and imported by developing nations,
and in terms of quality, because developing nations received scant and prejudicial
coverage in Western media.

These concerns led to the rise of the New World Information Order (NWIO)
debate, later known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO)
debate. Although the debate at first was concerned with news flows between the north
and the south, it soon evolved to include all international media flows. This was due to
the fact that inequality existed in news and entertainment programs alike, and to the
advent of then-new media technologies such as communication satellites, which made
the international media landscape more complex and therefore widened the scope of
the debate about international flows.

The global media debate was launched during the 1973 General Conference of
the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in
Nairobi, Kenya. As a specialized agency of the United Nations, the mission of UNESCO
includes issues of communication and culture. During the conference, strong
differences arose between Western industrialized nations and developing countries. Led
by the United States, the first group insisted on the "free flow of information" doctrine,
advocating "free trade" in information and media programs without any restrictions.
The second group, concerned by the lack of balance in international media flows,
accused Western countries of invoking the free flow of information ideology to justify
their economic and cultural domination. They argued instead ·for a "free and balanced
flow" of information. The chasm between the two groups was too wide to be reconciled.
This eventually was one of the major reasons given for withdrawal from UNESCO by the
United States and the United Kingdom-which resulted in the de facto fall of the global
media debate.

A second stage of research identified with cultural imperialism has been

associated with calls to revive the New World Information and Communication Order
debate. What differentiates this line of research from earlier cultural imperialism
formulations is its emphasis on the commercialization of the sphere of culture. Research
into this area had been a hallmark of cultural imperialism research, but now there is a

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deliberate focus on transnational corporations as actors, as opposed to nation-states,
and on transnational capital flows, as opposed to image flows. Obviously, 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. Therefore, the
evolution of the debate is mainly a redirection of emphasis rather than a paradigm
shift.

It has become fashionable in some international communication circles to dismiss

cultural imperialism as a monolithic theory that is lacking subtlety and increasingly
questioned by empirical research. Cultural imperialism does have some weaknesses,
but it also continues to be useful. Perhaps the most important contribution of cultural
imperialism is the argument that international communication flows, processes, and
effects are permeated by power. Nevertheless, it seems that 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.

Media, Globalization, and Hybridization

Several reasons explain the analytical shift from cultural imperialism to

globalization. First, the end of the Cold War as a global framework for ideological,
geopolitical, and economic competition calls for a rethinking of the analytical
categories and paradigms of thought. By giving rise to the United States as sole
superpower and at the same time making the world more fragmented, the end of the
Cold War ushered in an era of complexity between global forces of cohesion and local
reactions of dispersal. In this complex era, the nation-state is no longer the sale or
dominant player, since transnational transactions occur on subnational, national, and
supranational levels. Conceptually, globalization appears to capture this complexity
better than cultural imperialism. Second, according to John Tomlinson (1991),
globalization replaced cultural imperialism because it 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. Finally, globalization has emerged as a key
perspective across the humanities and social sciences, a current undoubtedly affecting
the discipline of communication.

In fact, the globalization of culture has become a conceptual magnet attracting

research and theorizing efforts from a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary
formations such as anthropology, comparative literature, cultural studies,
communication and media studies, geography, and sociology. International
communication has been an active interlocutor in this debate because media and
information technologies play an important role in the process of globalization.
Although the media are undeniably one of the engines of cultural globalization, the size
and intensity of the effect of the media on the globalization of culture is a contested
issue revolving around the following question: Did the mass media trigger and create

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the globalization of culture? Or is the globalization of culture an old phenomenon that
has only been intensified and made more obvious with the advent of transnational
media technologies? Like the age-old question about whether the egg came before the
chicken or vice versa, the question about the relationship between media and the
globalization of culture is difficult to answer.

One perspective on the globalization of culture, somewhat reminiscent of

cultural imperialism in terms of the nature of the effect of media on culture, but
somewhat different in its conceptualization of the issue, is the view that the media
contribute to the homogenization of cultural differences across the planet. This view
dominates conventional wisdom perspectives on cultural globalization conjuring up
images of Planet Hollywood and the MTV generation. One of the most visible proponents
of this perspective is political scientist Benjamin Barber, who formulated his theory
about the globalization of culture in the book Jihad vs. McWorld (1996). The subtitle,
"How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World," betrays Barber's reliance on a
binary opposition between the forces of modernity and liberal democracy with tradition
and autocracy.

Although Barber rightly points to transnational capitalism as the driving engine

that brings Jihad and McWorld in contact and motivates their action, his model has two
limitations. First, it is based on a binary opposition between Jihad, what he refers to
as ethnic and religious tribalism, and McWorld, the capital-driven West. Barber (1996,
p. 157) seemingly attempts to go beyond this binary opposition in a chapter titled
“Jihad Via McWorld," in which he argues that Jihad stands in "less of a stark opposition
than a subtle counterpoint." However, the evidence offered in most of the book
supports an oppositional rather than a contrapuntal perspective on the globalization of
culture. The second limitation of Barber's book is that he privileges the global over the
local, because, according to him, globalization rules via transnational capitalism. "[T]o
think that globalization and indigenization are entirely coequal forces that put Jihad
and McWorld on an equal footing is to vastly underestimate the force of the new
planetary markets .... It's no contest" (p. 12). Although it would be naive to argue that
the local defeats the global, Barber's argument does not take into account the dynamic
and resilient nature of cultures and their ability to negotiate foreign imports.

Another perspective on globalization is cultural hybridity or hybridization. This

view privileges an understanding of the interface of globalization and localization as a
dynamic process and hybrid product of mixed traditions and cultural forms. As such,
this perspective does not give prominence to globalization as a homogenizing force, nor
does it believe in localization as a resistive process opposed to globalization. Rather,
hybridization advocates an emphasis on processes of mediation that it views as central
to cultural globalization. The concept of hybridization is the product of interdisciplinary
work mostly based in intellectual projects such as postcolonialism, cultural studies, and
performance studies. Hybridization has been used in communication and media studies

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and appears to be a productive theoretical orientation as researchers in international
media studies attempt to grasp the complex subtleties of the globalization of culture.

One of the most influential voices in the debate about cultural hybridity is
Argentinean-Mexican cultural critic Nestor Garcia-Candini. In his book Hybrid Cultures
(1995), Garcia-Candini advocates a theoretical understanding of Latin American nations
as hybrid cultures. His analysis is both broad and incisive, covering a variety of cultural
processes and institutions such as museums, television, film, universities, political
cartoons, graffiti, and visual arts. According to Garcia-Candini, there are three main
features of cultural hybridity. The first feature consists of mixing previously separate
cultural systems, such as mixing the elite art of opera with popular music. The second
feature of hybridity is the deterritorialization of cultural processes from their original
physical environment to new and foreign contexts. Third, cultural hybridity entails
impure cultural genres that are formed out of the mixture of several cultural domains.
An example of these impure genres is when artisans in rural Mexico weave tapestries of
masterpieces of European painters such as Joan Miro and Henri Matisse, mixing high art
and folk artisanship into an impure genre.

In media and communication research, the main question is "Have transnational

media made cultures across the globe hybrid by bringing into their midst foreign cultural
elements, or have cultures always been to some extent hybrid, meaning that
transnational mass media only strengthened an already-existing condition?" There is no
obvious or final answer to that question, because there is not enough empirical research
about media and hybridity and because of the theoretical complexity of the issue. What
does exist in terms of theoretical understanding and research results points to a middle
ground? This position acknowledges that cultures have been in contact for a long time
through warfare, trade, migration, and slavery. Therefore, a degree of hybridization in
all cultures can be assumed. At the same time, this middle ground also recognizes that
global media and information technologies have substantially increased contacts
between cultures, both in terms of intensity and of the speed with which these contacts
occur. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that transnational mass media intensify
the hybridity that is already in existence in cultures across the globe. Consequently,
the globalization of culture through the media is not a process of complete
homogenization, but rather one where cohesion and fragmentation coexist.

GECC 107 – The Contemporary World -Module III-

 Cultural Globalization vs. Cultural Imperialism

Instruction: Compare and contrast Cultural Globalization and Cultural Imperialism.

You may also use different graphic organizer. (15 pts)

Cultural Cultural
Globalization Imperialism

GECC 107 – The Contemporary World -Module III-

 Political Cartoon

Direction: Explain the theme of this political cartoon. (30 pts)

GECC 107 – The Contemporary World -Module III-