Worktext (TCW) Chapter 6 Global Media Cultures-contemporary PDF

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IntroductionThis chapter explores the relationship between the media, culture and globalization. It also focuses on the past and current challenges concerning international communication and explores and problematizes the power of media representation.Learning Objectives:At the end of this chapter, ...

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Chapter 6: Global Media Cultures Introduction This chapter explores the relationship between the media, culture and globalization. It also focuses on the past and current challenges concerning international communication and explores and problematizes the power of media representation.

Learning Objectives: At the end of this chapter, learners must be able to: 1. Understand how scholars have approached the relationship between media and globalization; 2. Differentiate the paradigms that developed in international communications development; 3. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the paradigm which led to its loss of appeal; 4. Analyze how various media drive various forms of global integration; and 5. Create a stance about the film industry in the Philippines in contrast to South Korean film industry.

Discussion: Mass Media Mass Media is a term denoting that section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation-state), today including not only radio and television, which tend to be limited to the local or national level, but also the Internet, which is global. The mass media audience has been viewed by some as forming a "mass society" with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass media techniques of persuasion such as advertising and propaganda. Etymology and Usage Media (the plural of "medium") is a truncation of the term "media of communication," referring to those organized means of dissemination of fact, 1|Page

opinion, entertainment, and other information, such as newspapers, magazines, outdoor advertising, film, radio, television, the World Wide Web, books, CDs, DVDs, videocassettes, computer games, and other forms of publishing.

Advocacy

Enrichment

It can be used for both business and social concerns. This can include advertising, marketing, propaganda, public relations, and political communication.

It can take the form of education through literature for example. Entertainment is traditionally through performances of acting, music, and sports, along with light reading; since the late 1990s also through video and computer games.

Purposes of Mass Media

Journalism It involves the spread of news on a large scale.

Public service announcements Cases of state or non-governmental agencies reaching out to inform the public of a pressing event.

History The evolution of mass media is an elongated, marked with milestones journey that is still being continued. The earliest form of information for the masses was inscribed on stones, caves and pillars, there always has been necessary to pass on important information through generations along with spreading it to the masses. The modern mass communication bloomed with the printing press and it has not stopped since.

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Evolution of Mass Media Pre-Industrial Age 1041 1440 1477

Movable Clay type printing in China The First Printing Press in the world by German Goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg First Printed advertisement in a book by William Caxton

1918

First colored movie shot Cupid Angling

1920

Invention of TV by John Logie Baird and First Radio Commercial Broadcast by KDKA radio station

1923

The first news Magazine was Launched TIME First TV transmission by Philo Farnsworth

1927

Evolution of New Media (21st Century) The 1990s to 2000s

Invention of the Internet, Birth of Social Networking Sites, and Emergence of Social Media.

1991 1995 1997

World Wide Web came into being by Sir Timothy John-Berners Lee Microsoft Internet Explorer was launched DVDs replaced VCR

2001

Instant Messaging Services

2002 2004 2005 2006 2007 2010

Satellite Radio is launched Facebook YouTube Twitter Tumblr Instagram

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FORMS -

Electronic media and print media include a variety of forms:

Audio recording - using various types of discs or tape. Originally used for music, video, and computer uses followed.

Broadcasting -

in the narrow for radio and television.

sense,

Film -

most often used for entertainment, but also for documentaries.

Internet - which has many uses and presents both opportunities and challenges. Blogs and podcasts, such as news, music, pre-recorded speech, and video. Publishing - in the narrow sense, meaning on paper, mainly via books, magazines, and newspapers.

Computer games - which developed into a mass form of media with personal devices allowing people to purchase games to play in their homes.

Public Media- It is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment and other information: the newspapers, television and radio broadcasting, book publishers, and so on.

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More recently, the Internet, podcasting, blogging, and others have been added to this list. All of these public media sources have better informed the general public of what is going on in the world today.

Globalization and Mass Media HOW DOES MASS MEDIA INFLUENCE GLOBALIZATION? Through its various formats, the mass media can reach most people on earth. This is an incredible opportunity for communication and education among the peoples of the planet. As these technologies become cheaper, they are becoming universal and closing the technological divide that exists between the rich and poor. As the technology necessary for mass communication becomes cheaper and more widespread, the planet will indeed become smaller as news travels even faster among all people of the world. By this we can now define it as Global Media, “the mass communication on a global level, allowing people across the world to share and access the same information.” It is indeed that technologies made people’s lives easier all over the globe. Today people all over the world have easy access to communicate with each other and to be aware of the news all over the world. There are many advantages in global media. Now, people have easier access of television, radio, internet and in fact, they have access of others countries’ satellite TV channels.

Free flow of information: the road to Modernization? The post-World War II period would mark the prominence of the models of development through mass media and free flow of information, particularly under the leadership of the U.S. Several scholars term the model of communication and development as the Modernization Paradigm which views that the reason for the absence of modernization in the developing world is not due to the lack of natural resources. The primary hindrance to a country’s development is the lack of human resources, and education and mass media would have the fundamental tasks of human capital.

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Proponents of Communication and Development Paradigm A. Wilbur Schramm (1964)  One of the pioneering scholars of this paradigm, observed a positive association between communication components to that of the social, political and economic components in national growth. According to him, “the task of mass media of information and the “new media” of education is to speed and ease the long, slow social transformation required for economic development and, in particular, to speed and smooth the task of mobilizing human resources behind the national effort.”

B. David Lerner (1958)  Who proposed that developing societies must follow the Western concept of modernity in order to achieve development.  He emphasized the importance of empathy, stating that “as people are more exposed to media, the greater is their capability to imagine themselves as strange persons in strange situations, places and time than did people in any previous historical epoch”  He posited that mass media has the power to foster the learning of emphatic skills. The interactive and integrative capabilities of media that prevent societal disintegration are critical to the success of efforts to modernize  This view resonates with Benedict Anderson, he emphasized the role of printed communication and capitalism in instilling nationalism and the sense of belongingness among people who don’t know each other, by creating imagined communities.

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C. Everett Rogers (1965 – 1966), whose ideas were influenced by Lerner, espoused the same paradigm but forwards a nuanced relationship by treating mass media as a factor that intervenes between antecedents and consequences of modernizations. In his theoretical model, the socioeconomic antecedents would determine the capacity of mass media exposure to result to the indicators of modernization as illustrated below

CONSEQUENCE

ANTECEDENTS

PROCESS •Functional literacy •Education •Social Status •Age •Cosmo politeness

•Mass Media Exposure

•Empathy •Agricultural and Home innovativeness •Political knowledge •Achievement motivation •Educational and occupational aspirations

*NOTE: The terms “antecedents” and “Consequences” are used here in the sense of a probable time order, but not necessarily in the sense of cause-result.

Modernization Paradigm The presence of mass media in societies have been observed by modernization scholars as correlated to the social, economic, and political indices of development. The strength and power of mass media to influence societies lies in its “one-way, top-down and simultaneous and wide dissemination” and its capacity to shape social processes, make meanings, identifies, and aspirations of a community. On that tine when world influence was polarized by two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Their influence reached every sphere of the international scenario, including development. In this context, the modernization paradigm promoted by political scientists and scholars of 7|Page

Western countries became so strong and so pervasive in every dimension of social life that it became also known as the "dominant paradigm”. By the end of the 1970’s, criticism against the modernization paradigm grew in the strength and influence questioning the assumptions and conceptualizing of the paradigm especially in the context of non-Western and developing societies. This period would mark the shift to the cultural imperialism paradigm.

Demanding for the balanced flow of information: a Fight against Cultural Imperialism The cultural imperialism paradigm grew in influence from the 1960s to the 1980s in the context of the Cold War and the period of decolonization and post-colonialism. Third world countries formed the Non-Aligned Movement with a united purpose stated in the Non-Aligned Countries Declaration of 1979, also known as the Havana Declaration: “the common struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, expansionism, racism, including Zionism, apartheid, exploitation, power politics and all forms and manifestation of foreign occupation, domination, and hegemony.” The movement was also against the uneven flows of information associated with uneven development through the pretense of the free flow of information and the freedom of expression. In actuality, it “meant” “freemarket” expression, meaning those who owned the media had the right to decide what was expressed in it.

Proponents of Cultural Imperialism Paradigm A. Herbert Schiller (1976) The clearest and most influential theorists of the cultural imperialism tradition. He defines it as:  “The concept of cultural imperialism today best described the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system.”

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

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The theory takes on a macro-perspective of global power dynamics and struggles among state economic relations, particularly the concentration of control and resources at the expense of the development of the rest of the world. Cultural imperialism theory argues that global audiences are exposed to media messages dominantly deriving from Western industrialized states. The concepts “cultural imperialism” and “media imperialism” have minor differences but most of the international communication literature consider the latter as a category of the former.

B. Boyd Barret (1977)  He defined Media Imperialism as the process whereby the ownership, structure, distribution or content of the media in any one country are singly or together are subject to substantial external pressures from the media interests of any other country or countries without proportionate reciprocation of influence by the country so affected.  Media imperialism model views modern communication media has having been designed to maintain and expand dependence and domination over the world.  It is stark contradiction to the assumption of the modernization paradigm that sees communication media as tools for development. Cultural and media imperialism approaches, together with its variant concepts of “cultural dependency” and “electronic colonialism”, view media as an instrument of major powers that serve as an obstacle to steady progress between developed and developing world. C. Hesmondhalgh (2005)  The concept of imperialism means “building of empires” however the use of the term cultural imperialism implies that with the end of the age of direct political and economic control by colonial states a new form of indirect power and concern has emerged.

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Cultural domination over less-developed countries that would foster desires for western lifestyle and products among postcolonial societies that would pave the way for the entry of Western-based transnational corporations that would then dominate non- Western economies.

D. Zenith Optimedia’s annual global ranking of the largest media companies in the world. Television remains to be the most important advertising medium, but it is now followed by internet which has replaced print media as the second. Digital advertising has been on the rise, with five digital companies – Google, Facebook, Baidu, Yahoo, and Microsoft - included in the top and representing 65% of the entire internet advertising market, and accounting for more than a third of the revenues of the largest media owners listed.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), demand change in its communication policies with the goal of balancing the relationship between developed and developing states. The New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) movement was a collective resistance to pressure UNESCO to change the dynamics of news media that has been dismissive of the interest and needs of the less affluent world, to change the “one -way flow” of news, media, and cultural products of between the North and South to a “two-way” flow. 10 | P a g e

NWICO movement resulted to the report of the MacBride Commission entitled Many Voices, One World, which forwarded recommendations that aimed to promote independence, diversity, and pluralism of media and to strengthen the national media of the South. The report aimed to address the problems of unequal access and flow of communication due to media commercialization and concentration. The recommendations were fruitless and failures, USA and UK opposed the request and withdrew from UNESCO but eventually rejoined. Despite the arguments against cultural imperialism, the merits of the approach continue to recognized by scholars.

Tomlinson (1999) The paradigm maintains its relevance as it highlights the expansionist nature of capitalism and its capacity to shape global culture. Rantanen (2005) Sees the strength of the paradigm through its macro-level analysis that is based on the uneven and asymmetrical political, economic relations of the world system, and the implications of such in developing societies. Sparks (2012) Cultural imperialism framework into the current context of intensifying media corporations, and widening of gaps between North and South. Also, array of competing states of varying powers and influence compete and in some instances coordinate their political and economic power to exert control over less developed and weaker countries.

Transition from Communication and Development Cultural Imperialism to Cultural Pluralism

and

Criticisms against the cultural imperialism paradigm would eventually pave the way for the emergence of a new paradigm termed “cultural pluralism”, other scholars would also refer to the paradigm as “cultural globalization”. The paradigm shift was a departure from the “one -way” model of cultural imperialism towards a more sophisticated analysis of “multidirectional flows” among country relations. Cultural globalization refers to the transmission of ideas, meanings, and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet, popular culture media. The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social 11 | P a g e

relations that cross national and regional borders. It brings increasing interconnectedness among different populations and cultures.

Proponents of Cultural Pluralism A. Rantanen (2005), - Called the shifts of paradigm as the homogenization-heterogenization debate. Homogenization is that mighty culture has invaded local culture as well as it has become the dominant culture in local area that aims to eliminate the local culture. Society becomes homogenous. Everyone conforms to western ideal. It also results that loss of individual culture and religions. There are more market competition as well. Cultural heterogenization or multicultural society, means region culture was widely disseminated and accepted by other societies and cultures and meanwhile enhance the cultural diversity in local society. It could be resulted that richer countries gives incentive to poorer countries to protect them as well as to adopt more sustainable practices. She said that the past two paradigms, the modernization and imperialism approach as being under the homogenization. While, heterogenization is for Cultural pluralism. Paradigm

Global media seen as?

Consequences

A. Communications and development

Homogeneous

Homogeneous

B. Cultural Imperialism

Homogeneous

Homogeneous

C. Cultural Pluralism

Heterogeneous

Heterogeneous

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QUICK RECAP 

The Modernization Paradigm in the field of international communications argues that developing countries must take the Western path of development of promoting the free flow of information through the free market ideas.

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Cultural Imperialism views the notion of the free flow of information as a pretense to the one-way flow of cultural products from North to the South.

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The Cultural globalization or pluralism model employs a more optimistic perspective on the role of the audience and its capacity to react, resist, and recreate information and ideas that media exposes them

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Social Media plays a very important role in today's life, social Media are web-based online tools that enable people discover and learn new information, share ideas, interact with new people and organizations. It has changed the way people live their life today, it has made communication much easier.