Media and

Globalization
 Globalization entails the spread of
various cultures. When a film is made in
Hollywood, it is shown not only in the United
States, but also in other cities across the
globe. Globalization also involves the spread
of ideas. People who travel the globe teaching
and preaching their beliefs in universities,
churches, public forums, classroom, 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 it easier for
advocates to reach larger audiences.
Globalization relies on media as its main
conduit for the spread of global culture and
ideas. Jack Lule was then right to ask,
“Could global trade have evolved without a
flow of information on markets, prices,
commodities, and more?
 There is an intimate
relationship between
globalization and media
which must be unraveled to
further understand the
contemporary world.
 The point of departure is the crucial role played
by media cultures in particular electronic and
audiovisual media, in the cultural, political,
economic and social processes that together
constitute the process of globalization. By
globalization is meant a development through
which the constraints of geography on social and
cultural structures are reduced, an increased social
and cultural interconnectivity across time and
space is created, and a heightened consciousness is
developed about this secession of social and
cultural interaction from geographical constraints.
 The media have an important impact on
cultural globalization in two mutually
interdependent ways: Firstly, the media
provide an extensive transnational
transmission of cultural products and,
secondly, they contribute to the formation of
communicative networks and social
structures. The rapidly growing of media
products from an international media culture
presents a challenge to existing local and
national cultures.
 Global media cultures create a continuous
cultural exchange, in which crucial aspects such as
identity, nationality, religion, behavioral norms
and way of life are continuously questioned and
challenged. These cultural encounters often
involve the meeting of cultures with a different
socio-economic base, typically a transnational and
commercial cultural industry on one side and a
national, publicly regulated cultural industry on
the other side. Due to their very structure, global
media promote a restructuring of cultural and
social communities .
Media and Its Function
 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” (the plural of medium), they mean the
technologies of mass communication. Print
media include books, magazines, and
newspapers. Broadcast media involve radio,
film, and television. Finally, digital media
cover the internet media, there are the email,
internet sites, social media, and internet-based
video and audio.
 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
(“messages”) 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 (it was
introduced in the 1960s) is not
a simple bearer of messages, it
also shapes the social behavior
of users and reorient family
behavior.
The technology (medium),
and not the message,
makes for this social change
possible.
 McLuhan added that different
media simultaneously extend and
amputate human senses.
However, papyrus started
becoming more common in Egypt
after the fourth century BCE, which
increasingly meant that more people
could write down their stories.
 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.
 The Global
Village and
Cultural
Imperialism
 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 declared that television was turning the
world into a “global village.”

Global village, was defined by Marshall Mcluhan, is

that the world became like a small world through
technology. People can share, communicate, and
get information wherever they are and where they
are.
 The most prominent of McLuhan's predictions
was that of a global village, that would connect all
people everywhere thanks to technology.
McLuhan's concept was based on the idea that
culture would move toward greater personal
interactions, after leaving behind earlier eras of
humanity that focused on the spoken and written
word.

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.
Localizing the Material

If cultural globalization merely entails the spread of a

western monoculture, what explains the prevalence of
regional cultural trends? For example, the regionalization
of culture was a boon to Filipino telenovelas. From 2000 to
2002, ABS-CBN aired Pangako Sa’yo starring Jericho
Rosales and Kristine Hermosa. The show soon became a hit
in Singapore and Malaysia, and its two stars became
household names. In 2013, Cambodian TV even purchased
the rights to produce its own version of the show. Until
now, Filipino telenovelas like Be Careful with My Heart find
audiences across Southeast Asia.
 Commentators, therefore, believed 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.
This media/cultural imperialism theory
has, therefore, been subject to significant
critique.
 The term cultural imperialism refers
most broadly to the exercise of
domination in cultural relationships in
which the values, practices, and meanings
of a powerful foreign culture are imposed
upon one or more native cultures.
Cultural imperialism has sometimes been
described as a theory, especially where
scholars build a case that the cultural
influence of the stronger entity has had a
pervasive, pernicious impact on the
weaker.
Critiques of
Cultural
Imperialism
 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” (in media studies, a “text” simply refers
to the content of any medium) through their
own cultural lenses.
 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
experiences. Better 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.
 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.
 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.
 Given these patterns, it is no longer
tenable to insist that globalization is a
unidirectional process of foreign cultures
overwhelming local ones.
Globalization, as noted in Lesson 1,
will remain an uneven process, and it
will produce inequalities. Nevertheless,
it leaves room for dynamism and cultural
change. This is not a contradiction; it is
merely a testament to the
phenomenon’s complexity.
Social Media and
the Creation of
Cyber Ghettoes
 Apart from the nature of diverse audiences
and regional trends in cultural production, the
internet and social media are proving that the
globalization of culture and ideas can move in
different directions.
While Western culture remains powerful
and media production is still controlled by a
handful of powerful Western corporations, the
internet, particularly the social media, is
challenging previous ideas about media and
globalization.
 As with all new media, social media have
both beneficial and negative effects. On the
one hand, these forms of communication have
democratized access. Anyone with an internet
connection or a smart phone can use Facebook
and Twitter for free.
These media have enabled users to be
consumers and producers of information
simultaneously. The democratic potential of
social media was most evident in 2011 during
the wave of uprisings known as the Arab
Spring.
 Without access to traditional broadcast
media like TV, activists opposing
authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and
Libya used Twitter to organize and to
disseminate information.
Their efforts toppled their respective
governments. More recently, the “women’s
march” against newly installed US President
Donald Trump began with a tweet from a
Hawaii lawyer and became a national, even
global, movement.
 However, social media also have their dark side. In
the early 2000s, commentators began referring to the
emergence of a “splinternet” and the phenomenon of
“cyberbalkanization” to refer to the various bubbles
people place themselves in when they are online.
In the United States, voters of the Democratic
Party largely read liberal websites, and voters of the
Republican Party largely read conservative websites.
This segmentation, notes an article in the journal
Science, has been exacerbated by the nature of social
media feeds, which leads users to read articles,
memes, and videos shared by like-minded friends.
 Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has hired armies
of social media “trolls” (paid users who harass
political opponents) to manipulate public opinion
through intimidation and the spreading of fake news.
In places across the world, Putin imitators replicate
his strategy of online trolling and disinformation to
clamp down on dissent and delegitimize critical
media.
This dark side of social media shows that even a
seemingly open and democratic media may be
co-opted towards undemocratic means. Global online
propaganda will be the biggest threat to face as the
globalization of media deepens.
 As consumers of media, users must remain
vigilant and learn how to distinguish fact from
falsehood in a global media landscape that
allows politicians to peddle what President
Trump’s senior advisers now call “alternative
facts.” Though people must remain critical of
mainstream media and traditional journalism
that may also operate based on vested interest,
we must also insist that some sources are more
credible than others.
Conclusion
 This lesson showed that different media
have diverse effects on globalization processes.
At one point, it seemed that global television
was creating a global monoculture. Now,
it seems more likely that social media will
splinter cultures and ideas into bubbles of
people who do not interact. Societies can never
be completely prepared for the rapid changes
in the systems of communication. Every
technological change, after all, creates multiple
unintended consequences.
 Consumers and users of media will
have a hard time turning back the clock.
Though people may individually try to
keep out of Facebook or Twitter, for
example, these media will continue to
engender social changes. Instead of
fearing these changes or entering a state of
moral panic, everyone must collectively
discover ways of dealing with them
responsibly and ethically.
 THANK YOU FOR
LISTENING AND
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