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 .
 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.
 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.”
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 produced 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.
 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.
 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, ntes 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.
 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.