Media and

Globalization
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PREPARED BY: SIR KENNETH BENEDICTO

 Media- the plural form of
medium

- or multiple mediums
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 Medium- it is a substance
or a method in which
something is communicated,
it’s vehicle for a message.
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 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 it easier for advocates to reach
larger audiences. Globalization relies on media as
its main conduit for the spread of global culture
and ideas.
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 Jack Lule was then right to ask, "Could global trade
have evolved without a flow of information on
markets, prices, commodities, and more? Could
empires have stretched across the world without
communication throughout their borders? Could
religion, music poetry, film, fiction, cuisine, and
fashion develop as they have without the
intermingling of media and cultures?" There is an
intimate relationship between globalization and
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media which must be unraveled to further

 Media and Its Functions
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.
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 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 is not a simple bearer of messages, it also
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shapes the social behavior of users and reorient family

behavior.
 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. Think about the medium of
writing. Before people wrote things down on parchment, exchanging stories
was mainly done orally. To be able pass stories verbally from one person to
another, storytellers had to have retentive memories. However, papyrus
started becoming more common in Egypt after the fourth century BCE, which
increasingly meant that more people could write down their stories. As a
result, storytellers no longer had to rely completely on their memories. This
development, according to some philosophers at the time, dulled the people's
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capacity to remember.
 ● 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.
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 The Global Village and
Cultural Imperialism
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 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." By this, he meant that, as more and more
people sat down in front of their television sets and listened to
the same stories, their perception of the world would contract.
If tribal villages once sat in front of fires to listen to collective
stories, the members of the new global village would sit in front
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of bright boxes in their living rooms.

 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.
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 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. More over 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,
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therefore, been subject to significant critique.

 Critiques of Cultural
Imperialism
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 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
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lenses.
 In 1985, Indonesian cultural critic len 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.
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
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 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."
Thus, people from diverse cultural backgrounds had their own
ways of understanding the show. Russians were suspicious of the
show's content, believing not only that it was primarily about
America, but that it contained American propaganda. American
viewers believed that the show, though set in America, was
primarily about the lives of the rich. Apart from the challenge of
audience studies, the cultural imperialism thesis has been belied
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by the renewed strength of regional trends in the globalization

process.
Thank you!
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