Final Draft Media Globalisation Indie Essay

Nikos Koulousios 0319716 Media Globalization from a € and $ Perspective
Introduction
In the era of late modernity we are being constantly reminded of how international the
media have become and how the flow of news and culture encompasses the globe and
draw us into a single ‘global village’, to use the words of McLuhan (1964). Features
of the current media situation point without much doubt to an accelerating trend of
trans-nationalisation affecting news, music, film, entertainment and sport, and
virtually all forms of media (McQuail, 2003: 217). Most of the issues surrounding
global mass communication have a direct or indirect connection with the thesis of
‘cultural imperialism’, or the more limited notion of ‘media imperialism’. Both
concepts imply a deliberate attempt to dominate the ‘cultural space’ of other, and
suggest an asymmetrical international media flow and a disproportionate dominance
of particular national agendas and spheres of influence within media content. The
theory of cultural (and media) imperialism is similar to ideas developed by the
Frankfurt School in Germany insofar as it presupposes a relatively homogenous mass
culture that is accepted passively and uncritically by mass audiences (Crane, 2001:
p.3). The discussion of global media was for years –and still is- influenced by the
argument that media products of the West, especially of the United States, so
dominated the rest of the world that they amounted to the form of cultural imperialism
described above, and resulted in homogenizing an otherwise diverse and
polymorphous cultural spectrum. However, and as the spark by the anthropologist
Arjun Appadurai suggests, the argument that US-owned media hardware and
programs were part of a plan to subjugate the world now seems (partially at least)
overdrawn. There is a growing awareness of the inadequacy of conceptualizing global
cultural flows as unidirectional (or flowing exclusively from dominant “cores” to
formerly colonized dependents) (Griffin, 2002); this has sparked a growing interest in
the many forms of trans-cultural hybridization that seemed to result from multi-
directional cultural influences.
In this essay I will to try juggle with the two opposing discourses in order to
find the truth behind the quote of A. Appadurai.
1

Global cultural (media) economy – the Image of Neoliberalism
Arjun Appadurai (1996:33) posits five somewhat parallel dimensions of global
cultural flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and
ideoscapes; these dimensions represent interrelated, but not synchronous or uniform
networks of influence and activities concerning diaspora and immigration, electronic
capabilities to produce and disseminate information/images, distribution of
technologies, disposition of global capital, and ideologies respectively. Appadurai
chooses the suffix –scape in order to suggest that these dimensions represent
“irregular landscapes” of perspective, the building blocks of “imagined worlds,”
rather than objectively given relations (1996: 33). Elaborating multiple dimensions of
globalization opens the way for studying the uneven and even disjointed nature of
global flows, economic and cultural interaction, bureaucratic and cultural
homogenization and what Appadurai calls “the production of locality” (1996: 178-
199). Media production (following other sectors of commercial manufacturing)
became less easily identified with a few “core” metropolises. Regional centers of
media production arose and/or expanded in such places as India, Brazil, Mexico,
Egypt, and Hong Kong, along with regional, “geocultural” markets for their cultural
products (Griffin, 2002) pushing the point for trans-cultural hybridization (stemming
from multi-directional cultural influences) versus unidirectional homogenization. For
example, in the television and motion picture industry, the regional and global
distribution of Latin American telenovelas, Hong Kong martial arts actions films,
Hindi musical melodramas, and other regional cinema products (from locations as
varied as Senegal, Iran, China, Australia, Turkey, and Japan) reveals a cross-cultural
traffic in media that clearly transcends Western media impact on the rest of the world
(Griffin, 2002).
However, according to Biltereyst and Meers (2000: 408-409) Latin American
fiction is (still) defeated by material from the United States and from other big
production centers, making the contra-flow (or multi-directional flow) argument seem
pretty weak. Biltereyst and Meers maintain that the European findings (on the
successful distribution of Telenovelas) hardly justify euphoric arguments about a
more balanced flow (p.409). They go as far as rejecting the thesis that regional media
operations such as the Televisa in Mexico and Globo TV in Brazil could be
2

considered as a form of reverse cultural imperialism. These two media production
companies (as well as India Sky Broadcasting and Zee Telefilms in India) have been
acquired by, or entered into joint ventures with, transnational giants such as News
Corporation. This is not to say that yet another regional source of images is in the
hands of Western media imperialists, and is necessarily doomed to homogenization;
rather, it is indicative of the corporate culture of conglomeration and concentration of
media power, which is the new, real facet of cultural imperialism based on the
economies of scale thesis and on the notion of media products being produced as any
other product in order to be consumed world-wide by largely heterogeneous
consumers, but not by largely heterogeneous viewers nor citizens.
What Televisa or Globo can offer News Corporation, for example, is local
domination of the politicians and the impression of local control over their joint
ventures (McChesney 2001). And like second-tier media firms elsewhere, they are
also establishing global operations, especially in nations that speak the same
language. As a result, the second-tier media firms in the developing nations tend to
have distinctly pro-business political agendas and to support expansion of the global
media market, which puts them at odds with large segments of the population in their
home countries (McChesney 2001).
Even the confluence of Appadurai’s irregular “scapes” of global
interconnection seems to support a consistent trend: the extension and promotion of
commercial consumerism as a nearly universal reference for symbolic interaction. In
other words, the continuing strength of the metaphor of imperialism lies in the fact
that the imaginary cultural landscapes described by Appadurai are largely the product
of corporate marketing practices and the repetitive consumption patterns (and patterns
of desire and aspiration) that global media marketing and transnational corporate
systems encourage and support (Griffin, 2002). Hence, the United States, as the home
base of a disproportionately large share of multinational business, media, and
communications is in a uniquely advantageous position to assume leadership in this
new global technetronic society (Brzezinski, 1970: 23). And the operations of
technology and marketing seem to reinforce, rather than diminish, continuing
inequalities between historical colonizers and the historically colonized (Golding,
1998), making the United States a major global player in media production, rather
than just ‘one mere node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary
landscapes’.
3

As multinational media conglomerates grow larger and more powerful many
believe that it will become increasingly difficult for small, local media outlets to
survive. A new type of imperialism may thus occur, making many nations subsidiary
to the media products of some of the most powerful countries or companies.
Significant writers and thinkers in this area include Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky
Edward Herman and Robert McChesney. Mc Chesney says “ The global media
market has come to be dominated by seven multinational corporations: Disney, AOL-
Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann […]
deregulation has laid the foundation for the creation of the global media system,
dominated by the afore-mentioned conglomerates (which) press for policies to
facilitate their domination of markets throughout the world”(McChesney 2001). As
McChesney reports, of the seven multinational corporations, only three are truly U.S.
firms, though all of them have core operations there. Between them, these seven
companies own the major U.S. film studios; all but one of the U.S. television
networks; the few companies that control 80-85 percent of the global music market;
the preponderance of satellite broadcasting worldwide; a significant percentage of
book publishing and commercial magazine publishing; all or part of most of the
commercial cable TV channels in the U.S. and worldwide; a significant portion of
European terrestrial (traditional over-the-air) television; and on and on and on.
The global media market is rounded out by a second tier of six or seven dozen
firms that are national or regional powerhouses, or that control niche markets, like
business or trade publishing. Between one-third and one-half of these second-tier
firms come from North America; most of the rest are from Western Europe and Japan.
Second-tier media firms are hardly “oppositional” to the global system, as the
examples of Televisa and Globo suggest, since they follow the same neoliberal values
as their giant ‘counterparts’ from North America, Europe and Japan.
To conclude on this argument, cultural imperialism may be outdated, or
replaced by media imperialism. It would be naive, as well as difficult to prove, that
there is any conspiracy on behalf of media giants to take over the world and impose a
homogenizing set of images and ideologies that claims to be universal. However,
neoliberalism and obsessive commercialism seem to be ideologies that prevail in the
media field, as it does in pure economics. Television, which had been a
noncommercial preserve in many nations, suddenly became subject to transnational
commercial development. Media output is being reduced to being a product for large-
4

scale consumption (the social imaginaire of commercial consumerism of which media
products are a part) and images are being commodified to serve the market and its
imperatives. And it is not just entertainment. The global corporate media have the
additional advantage of controlling the very news media that would be the place
citizens would expect to find criticism and discussion of media policy in a free
society. The track record is that the corporate media use their domination of the news
media in a self-serving way, hence cementing their political leverage (McChesney
2001). The role of the United States (and the rest of the West) is not that of ‘only one
node of a complex trans-national construction of imaginary landscapes’ but is to be at
the forefront of global imaginary landscapes that produce media products to sell them
to consumers, and to sell consumers to advertisers; to eventually establish a way of
‘consuming media products’ that draws heavily on the neoliberal paradigm and
ignores the other functions – or even duties- of democratic media. It is the system of
neoliberal capitalism itself, dependent upon imagined myths of the market as panacea,
and dreams of future acquisition, upward social mobility and cultural and personal
autonomy, that is spreading inexorably, though unevenly, to affect people to varying
degrees in nearly every part of the planet (Griffin 2002) heavily supported by big
players such as the United States.
U.S.A.: Our universal storyteller?
The film industry is a large part of what we call global cultural flow. Hollywood has
been called the Mecca of the Motion Picture, and is a major global player in most of
the blockbuster undertakings. American products have made up 40 percent of the
European film market and nearly a quarter of the TV market (Croteau & Hoynes,
2003: 260), while U.S. media corporations also control 60 percent of the film
distribution networks in Europe (Hirsch & Petersen, 1992). These facts alone,
however, do not support the case of U.S. sponsored cultural imperialism. The political
economy of the film industry suggests a “disposition of global capital that is now
more mysterious and disorganized than ever before” (Appadurai, 1996: 34). Joint
ventures and fused disposition of global capital make up the grounds for movies to be
co-produced and co-financed by a number of different countries, with the U.S. being a
more or less ‘permanent partner’. This is not to suggest that all countries have the
5

same access to these joint ventures, but compared to the situation 30 to 40 years ago
more countries today, including developing countries, have the relative power to put
their own images/output across to a global audience and to test the globality of their
culture.
Diana Crane, analyzing the process of cultural globalisation, argues that
national and local cultures are transformed in order to make them more attractive and
meaningful to foreign visitors or foreign consumers (Crane, 2001: 15-16), or foreign
investors. Crane maintains that through the processes of either reframing,
disneyfication or negotiated modification, local or national cultural items and
practices, such as traditional arts and performances, martial arts and the like, are being
reframed, edited or revised to “suit the tastes of consumers in other countries” and to
make the new products interesting and understandable to tourists and spectators. And
as Crane reports, these negotiated modifications are worked out at annual sales
meetings where media companies present their wares for purchase on the international
market (Crane, 2001: 16). This is where the danger lurks; market imperatives take
charge of how a national or ethnic myth will be revised and re-served; market
executives have a strong say in how, for example, an ancient Egyptian or Greek story
should be modified or completely altered in order to be digestible for the global
audience. Through this process of modification and appropriation, significant
elements of myths and stories maybe reduced or simplified so that they do not
contradict, neither challenge the Western values that the dominant global media and
the social and political system support.
The United States, already “the first global society in history,” having endured
itself the process of repackaging myths and stories to reach the hearts of its own
diverse and ethnically-heterogenous cosmos, is easily relying on its media industries
to do the same job only in a true global scale. So far we have seen the U.S. film
studios producing movies such as the Last Emperor, The Last Samurai, Gladiator,
Braveheart, Robin Hood, Hercules, Passion of Christ as well as the latest epic movie
of Troy and the two forth-coming Alexander The Great movies. By adapting these
local/national myths and heroes to a one to two hours cinematic spectacle the U.S.
studios are shaping the so-called ‘global culture’ and to assume the role of the
universal storyteller within a globalised media environment. Even when these
productions are an assemble of international co-producers, actors, studios, sponsors,
and advertisers, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock claim that the resulting bargain
6

among all these actors may still produce an americanised product which is fast-
moving, based on simple characterizations, works with a tried and tested action
format and offers an unambiguous ending (Golding and Murdock, 1996: 25), all of
which are quintessential of the culture of American motion pictures.
Wolfgang Petersen, the German-born director of Troy, in a recent interview
about the movie admitted that he took a lot of artistic license in order to enlighten
parts of the story that were (according to him) rather obscure; not to mention that the
movie’s script has revised Homer’s sequence of events, having Achilles killed by
Paris after the Trojan Horse incident, whereas in Homer’s Iliad Achilles dies well
before Odysseus devised the Trojan Horse. The movie Troy is a good example of how
much artistic license the producers and director of such ‘universal storytelling’ can
take in order to make their own point. The whole movie is an ode to the hero Achilles,
blowing the super star Brad Pitt out of proportion. The story of Troy becomes
synonymous to (if not overshadowed by) the splendor and the grandeur of one man,
Achilles, because this may serve the market imperatives that want Brad Pitt to be
attracting most of the audience, or (the market imperatives) that call for another
superhero (like Rabo, or Schwarzeneger) to make this movie a success, or even – to
take this point to the next level- the same market imperatives that may support
individualism and self-accomplishment as the one universal value, fundamental to the
notion of capitalism. Who ever reads the Iliad will realize that the story is not about
one man’s achievement, but rather the opposite; it is a story of a collective battle for
vanity and glory. And that is not to say that Wolfgang Petersen has deliberately
modified the story in order to promote individualism, but rather he followed the “what
sells” imperative to help him revise the story and make it adaptable to a world-wide
audience.
This is the core of the argument of universalism that follows, or precedes,
cultural globalisation. The West media industries are more than willing to incorporate
myths and stories from indigenous, ethnic and ancient cultures and make them
globally recognizable; but is the industry ready to embrace also the values and beliefs
that these stories bear if these are seen as controversial? Achilles was known to have a
male lover, Patroklos. Patroklos in Wolfgang Petersen’s epic saga is presented as
Achilles’ cousin, avoiding taking the risk and confronting at least the puritanist
American audience with the truth. Is this what cultural adaptation/aberration,
negotiated modification and artistic licence have come to? Isn’t it almost like
7

rewriting history (through popular culture) to whatever is less controversial and
morally acceptable? Will people ever know that this movie is just an adaptation of the
myth?
On the other side of the argument, Appadurai reminds us that “particular
conjunctures of commodity flow and trade can create unpredicted changes in value
structures” (1996). This is particularly true in the arena of what he calls
“mediascapes,” the technologies to produce and disseminate information and the
“images of the world created by these media” (1996, 35). David Hesmondhalgh talks
about the contradiction within industrial, commercial production, and the agency and
creative input of the diverse personnel of the media industry such as writers, directors,
producers and performers (Hesmondhalgh, 2002: 33-34). He claims that the
McChesney and Schiller paradigm of political economy fails to account for a number
of actors in the synergetic process of making multi-nationally sponsored and
cultivated movies. Peter Golding and Graham Murdock also talk about the relative
autonomy of those who work in the media (Golding & Murdock, 1996: 23) to create
their own meaning that may contradict the meaning that is supposedly imposed from
above.
It rests on the debate between structure and agency; the debate between the
Schiller –McChesney tradition of political economy (of cultural industries) that comes
from North America exemplified in the work of N. Chomsky, H. Schiller, E. Herman
and R. McChesney; and the cultural industries approach initiated in Europe by
Bernard Miege and Nicholas Garnham. The Schiller- McChesney tradition
emphasizes structure over agency, and has a strong instrumentalist/structuralist
approach on how private media in the U.S. (operating largely outside the U.S. as well)
use their economic power and influence to manipulate public opinion, set agendas for
public discourse and hegemonise over culture, politics and the economy, based on a
rigidly set structure of late capitalism. The cultural industries approach,on the other
hand, talks of structures as being dynamic formations constantly reproduced and
altered through practical action. Within the same stream of argument, Peter Golding
and Graham Murdock, outlining their version of critical political economy, also talk
of structures as being constituted through action, adding though to this argument that
action is reciprocally constituted structurally as well (Golding & Murdock, 1996: 15).
Ronald A. Lukens-Bull from the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, has
another testimony to make. He writes: “In the early 1990s, the U.S. required
8

Indonesia to import American films and television shows in order to continue to
export textiles to the U.S. (Barber 1995, 91). Repeatedly I heard concerns from
pesantren people about the American movie industry’s purported intention of
destroying Islam and corrupting the values of Islamic societies such as Indonesia.
Many were concerned with the portrayal of scantily clad women (with bare shoulders
and knees). Such concerns persist even though Appadurai asserts that ‘the United
States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of
a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes’ (1996, 31).” (Lukens-
Bull, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies). Appadurai himself talks about the
enhanced role of American domination when he reports on the “American
missionisation and political rape of the Philippines, one result of which has been the
creation of a nation of make-believe Americans […]”. Maybe the era of American
missionisation of that kind is over, but media missionisation largely controlled by
corporate West still exists; the question that remains now is: Does the audience really
‘buy it’?
The case of active audience
According to Diana Crane, reception theory has been used to explain responses to
cultural globalisation by audiences of different origins. “This theory hypothesizes that
audiences respond actively rather than passively to mass-mediated news and
entertainment and that different national, ethnic, and racial groups interpret the same
materials differently” (Crane, 2001: 4). As well as Stewart Hall’s theory of encoding
and decoding, Croteau and Hoynes also talk about how U.S. media products’s impact
varies from country to country; “the programs might be the same, but the local
meaning of the program in two countries could be quite different” (Croteau &
Hoynes, 2003: 260). In the same line of argument, Appadurai maintains that “[…]
many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds and thus are able to contest
and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the
entrepreneurial mentality that surround them” (1996: 33). However, he is in no
position to give any clear evidence of how many (or of what status and background)
people are able or willing to perform ‘oppositional readings’ of media texts, and, of
course, he cannot prove that such oppositional readings are taking place in a scale
9

wide enough to make this argument credible. The political economy of media
industries around the world shows that neoliberalism and
commercialism/consumerism are not seriously challenged in praxis by anyone; rather
these paradigms are being followed religiously in order to bring global success to
actors from the so-called periphery of the media world. Even the term ‘oppositional
reading’ connotes that this sort of reading is only an alternative to the widely accepted
or established ‘mainstream reading’, rendering ‘oppositional reading’ as an exception
to the rule.
It is true that there is no simple ‘cause and effect’ process whereby media
products from the West are being interpreted and embraced by diverse audiences.
Michael Griffin (2002) makes his point: “Specific audience responses to the products
of such a system (transnational concentrated media system) would be expected to
vary from culture to culture and context to context. But latitude in reception does not
alter the fundamental conditions under which oligarchic communications industries
(in conjunction with specific government interests) dominate media production and
distribution, constrain diversity, or limit access to mediated symbolic expression. In
short, demonstrating the active nature of audience reception did not make the issues
and concerns of cultural imperialism disappear. And the presentation of audience
studies as a kind of refutation of cultural imperialism led to fears that such research
might effectively shift attention away from the structural aspects of media systems and
their control”. Herbert Schiller (1991: 25) expressed this position when he wrote,
“There is much to be said for the idea that people do not mindlessly absorb
everything that passes before their eyes. Yet much of the current work on audience
reception comes uncomfortably close to being apologetics for present-day structures
of cultural control”. The fact that the audience will not eventually ‘buy it’, does not
automatically mean that those dedicated to market imperatives and those who let this
market-driven logic dictate cultural production and distribution will change their
course and opt for risk-taking cultural undertakings or independed/controversial
themes and stories, values and beliefs. The market cannot risk eating its own flesh. It
is difficult to defy the “bottom line” logic in such a volatile and neoliberalist media
market. It is still hard for images that transcend the mainstream to have the access to
media outlets that pure mainstream lowest-common-denominator images enjoy. It is
simply difficult for alternative images to claim any universality, the same way that the
10

images of corporate and consumerist Western modernity does, because that would
negate the whole notion of being alternative.
Conclusion
There are certain features of the American or Western media system that are being
embraced by the vast majority of the countries. The global spread of world systems of
market capitalism and conglomeration; the spread of the culture of modernity itself,
encompassing not only the economic practices of capitalism but the Weberian
rationalization of ways of life, scientific approaches to the natural environment, etc.,
and the spread of commercial culture and consumerism specifically, and its potential
impacts on local environments and cultures (Budd, Craig, & Steinman, 1999). These
features are not specifically American, but American images and American media in
general championed them as the only way to go about things, and supported them
heavily for so long that it is hard to deny their role in establishing such an imagery
and vocabulary with global dimensions. If no longer puppeteers, certainly the
American image makers still create images of, and models for, “modernity” that must
be contended with in other nations. Cultural imperialism could be seen as the spread
of the culture of modernity itself, within a discourse of a global movement towards,
among other things, an everyday life governed by commodity capitalism.
Maybe, after all, J. Baudrillard is right in claiming that the U.S.A. is as much a
victim of globalisation as any other country (2002: 523). It is, however, an
understatement, if one considers what countries comprise the ‘any other country’
concept. Because one can only agree with the fact that it takes immense capital to
enter the global media market, let alone compete with the corporate media giants that
the West (and the U.S. system) has created.
11

References
- An Interview with Jean Baudrillard (2002). ‘Europe, Globalisation and the
Destiny of Culture’. European Journal of Social Theory 5(4): 521-530. Sage
Publications.
- Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Biltereyst, D. & Meers, Ph. (2000). “The international telenovela debate and
the contra-flow argument: a reappraisal” In Media, Culture & Society. Vol. 22:
393- 413. London: Sage.
- Brzezinski, Z. (1970). Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the
Technetronic Era. New York: Viking Press.
- Budd, M., Craig, S. & Steinman, C. (1999). Consuming Environments:
Television and Commercial Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
- Crane, D. (2001). Culture and Globalisation: Theoretical Models and
Emerging Trends. Cultural Dynamics Conference, Princeton University,
Princeton.
- Croteau, D. & Hoynes, W. (2003). Media society. London: Sage
- Golding, P. (1998). “Global Village or Cultural Pillage? The Unequal
Inheritance of the Communication Revolution”. In McChesney, R. W., Wood,
E. M. &Foster, J. B. (eds.) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political
Economy of the Global Communication Revolution. pp. 69-86. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
- Golding, P. & Murdock, G. (1996) “Culture, Communications, and Political
Economy” In Curan, J. & Gurevitch, M. (eds.) Mass Media & Society.
London: Arnold. pp 11-31.
- Griffin, M. (2002) “From Cultural Imperialism to Transnational
Commercialization: Shifting Paradigms in International Media Studies”
In Global Media Journal.
12

http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/SubmittedDocuments/archivedpapers/F
all2002/Griffin.htm
- Hesmondhalgh, D. (2002). The Cultural Industries, London: Sage
- Hirsch, M. & Petersen, V. G. (1992). “Regulation of Media at the European
Level.” In Siune, K. & Truetzschler, W., (eds.) Dynamics of Media Politics:
Broadcast and Electronic Media in Western Europe. pp. 42-56. London: Sage
- McChesney, R. W. (2001). Global Media, Neoliberalism and Imperialism.
Monthly Review March 2001. http://www.monthlyreview.org/301rwm.htm
- McQuail, D. (2003) McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory. 4th
Edition.
London: SAGE
- Schiller, H. I. (1991). “Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era”. Critical Studies in
Mass Communication 8 (1) pp. 13-28.
13

Final Draft Media Globalisation Indie Essay

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Final Draft Media Globalisation Indie Essay

Similar to Final Draft Media Globalisation Indie Essay (20)

More from Nikos Koulousios

More from Nikos Koulousios (17)

Final Draft Media Globalisation Indie Essay