Globalization and Media

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• One of the fuels, consequences, and manifestations of globalization is
the flow of culture from one geographic area to another.
• Culture is the way we feel, the way we think, and the way we act. In
short, culture is our way of life.
• This way of life manifests in tangible objects called material culture as
well as in intangible objects called non-material culture.

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• Culture is articulated in symbols, which are signs, sounds, emblems
and other things that represent something else in a meaningful way.
• Culture is also found in our values (what we deem good, desirable,
and important), in our beliefs (what we deem true), and in our norms
(rules, roles, and expectations that we have and others have relative
to our membership in society).

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• We humans are carriers of our cultures. Through enculturation, we
learn culture from our homes and our communities.
• Through cultural exchange, we experience a new culture by
interacting with people from other groups.
• By interacting with another culture, different peoples have different
responses. For some, they adopt certain values and practices of the
new culture (acculturation). Some people tend to adopt the new
culture when they are in public (accommodation), while some people
adopt the new culture to a large degree that they resemble the
people in the other group (assimilation).

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Globalization and Culture
• Globalization facilitates sharing of attitudes, ideas, and values across
national borders due to increased contact between peoples and their
cultures.
• Cultural flows is term used to refer to the dynamics of culture in the
age of globalization.
• One way of looking at cultural flows is through the lens of cultural
differentialism, which says that cultures are inherently and strongly
unique and are not significantly affected by input from other cultures
in the process of globalization.

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• Another view is cultural hybridization, which views global flows as a
creative process which yields combinations of global and local
cultures when external inputs interact with internal inputs.
• Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) concept of scapes hints that global flows
bring forth unique cultural realities everywhere. According to
Appadurai, these global flows are ethnoscapes (movement of
people), technoscapes (flow of technology), financescapes (flow of
huge amounts of money across countries), mediascapes (flow of
media across borders), and ideoscapes (flow of ideas).

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• Instead of clashing and conflicting, cultures, amidst these global
flows, integrate or interpenetrate one another, giving birth to a
hybridized form that is unique from both its global and local origins.
This process is called glocalization.

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Media Cultures
• The intersection between globalization and media can be seen in five
distinct eras: 1) oral communication, 2) script, 3) printing press, 4)
electronic media, and 5) digital media.
• Stevenson (2002), in his book Understanding Media Cultures, explains
why he chose the term media cultures. According to him, “much of
modern culture is transmitted by the media of mass communication.”

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• The digital media has become a phenomenon in recent years, with
the wide use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.
• A 2018 Pew Research Center study shows that 95% of adolescents
have smartphone access and almost half of these adolescents are
constantly online.
• The same study reveals YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are the
most used social media platforms by adolescents.

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• A Kantar Media survey done in 2016 shows that 96% of Filipinos
watch television, devoting 3.7 hours in watching their favorite shows.
• The same study shows increasing consumption of digital media due to
net connectivity.
• A separate study done in 2019 shows Filipinos are the world’s top
social media users, spending a little more than 10 hours online daily
(the world’s average is six hours and 42 minutes).

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