Global Media Cultures

Global Media Cultures

• Advances in media plus migration changed human life and led to globalization.
• Appadurai's five 'scapes' explain globalization's multidimensional character:
  • Ethnoscape: Flows of people
  • Technoscape: Flows of technology
  • Finanscape: Flows of money
  • Mediascape: Flows of information
  • Ideoscape: Flows of ideas
• Globalization couldn't occur without media.
• Media and globalization have proceeded together.
• Media has shaped economics, politics, and culture.
• Globalization: Multiple, uneven historical processes, including economics, politics, and culture.
  • It creates conditions for the globe to be understood as an 'imagined community'.
• Globalization has multiple processes: economic, political, and cultural.
• Media technology is crucial to globalization.
• The globe can be seen as an ‘imagined community'.
• Media is a means of conveying something.

Evolution of Media and Globalization

• Lule outlined five major media periods that shaped globalization:
  • Oral communication
  • Script
  • Print
  • Electronic
  • Digital

Oral Communication

• Human speech is the oldest and most enduring medium.
• Language allowed humans to cooperate, share information about necessities, and spread technology.
• Language led to markets and international trade routes.

Script

• Script allowed humans to communicate knowledge and ideas over larger spaces and times.
• Scripts allowed for the written codification of economic, cultural, religious, and political practice.

Printing Press

• The 'information revolution' transformed markets, businesses, and nations.
• Reading material became cheap and easily circulated.
• Printing press encouraged literacy and the growth of schools.
• It connected and changed people and cultures.
• Printing press preserved knowledge and challenged political and religious authority.

Electronic Media

• Electronic media include telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and television.
• Corporations exchanged information, newspapers reported information, artists captured narratives, and television allowed people to view stories from across the globe.

Digital Media

• The computer facilitated globalization
  • In economics by enabling global trading, access to economic information, and streamlined research.
  • In politics by allowing access to information, even that which governments want to conceal.
  • Access to information allows people to adopt new practices.
  • Social networking sites connect people around the world in a virtual community.

The Global Village

• The "global village" is rooted in the idea that people know and imagine themselves acting in the world through media.
• The media links the globe with stories, images, and metaphors.
• Steger: Media brings about a global imaginary, where the globe is an imagined community.
• Benedict Anderson: Nation is an 'imagined community' where people imagine communion.
• Marshall McLuhan: Media have connected the world in ways that created a 'global village', envisioned as a utopia.
• Lewis Mumford: The dark side of the ‘global village' lies at how corporations use media technology for capitalism, militarism, profit, and power plays.

Media and Economic Globalization

• Media creates conditions for global capitalism and promotes the world's economy.
• Media fosters capitalism and consumerism by packing channels with product advertisements.
• McChesney: The global media system advances corporate and commercial interests and values, promoting consumerism.
• Adorno and Horkheimer: Mindless entertainment consumerist media can distract audiences from thinking critically.
• News has a disastrous influence by creating a passive apolitical populace and producing "mass production of ignorance".

Media and Political Globalization

• Journalists endure intimidation from actors contending for power and reporting about corruption.
• The global village can be a war zone where forces compete for wealth and power.
• Economic, political, and personal pressures shape news, as governments manipulate information.
• Digital media can invigorate political life by transforming political life through alternative voices.
  • Digital media can also be silenced
  • Governments can use social media to spy on protesters.

Media and Cultural Globalization

• Media produces and displays cultural products that range from pop songs to films.
• Media generates ongoing interactions among cultures
• Jan Pieterse: There are three outcomes when talking about the influence of globalization on culture:
  • Cultural differentialism: Cultures are different, strong, and resilient, maintaining cultural diversity.
  • Cultural convergence: Globalization causes a growing sameness of cultures through cultural imperialism.
  • Cultural hybridity: Globalization causes an increasing blending or mixture of cultures.

The Globalization of Religion

• Religion is an institution and facet of culture that has belief systems.
• Religions can benefit from globalization, or religious people view globalization as immoral.
• Claudio and Abinales enumerated the clash between religion and globalism regarding ideas and practices related to globalization.

Religion

• Concerned with the sacred
• Follows divine commandments
• The supreme being has a social power over human beings and judges human action in moral terms
• Less concerned with wealth.
• A religious person's duty is to live righteously such that when they die, they are assured with a place in heaven
• Religious people aspire to become saints
• Religious people detest politics
• Religious evangelization is in itself a form of globalization
• Religions are concerned with spreading holy ideas around the world

Globalism

• Places value on material wealth
• Follows human-made laws
• Globalists are focused on the realm of markets
• Globalists wish to spread goods and services

Religion-Globalization Problematic

• Victor Roudometof discusses the relationship of religion with globalization under the idea of the 'religion-globalization problematic'.
• The modern world is a secular one and people have the freedom to choose their beliefs.

Two Ideas Concerning Secularization

• Post-secular society: Jürgen Habermas says religion returns to the public sphere.
• Secularism as an active project: Secularization is a multifaceted movement and an outcome of social action.

Limits of the Secularization Paradigm

• It is unable to recognize the social and cultural power of the religious factor.
• Limited view on the study of religion
• The paradigm was drawn from the cultural elements and historical experience of the West and ignores the non-Western religions.

The Religion-Globalization Problematic

• Robertson defined globalization as “the compression of the world".
• Contemporary globalization has resulted in “religious-centered” reactions.
• The religion-globalization problematic offers two lines of theorizing:
  • The globalization of religion
  • Globalization and religion

Globalization of Religion

• The spread of religions across the globe.
• The study of secularism and its adaptation in various cultures is important.

Globalization and Religion

• The position and place of religion are problematized within globalization.
• It concerns the impact of globalization upon religion.
• Religious institutions generally tend to adopt cultural defense or active engagement with globality.
• Religion can reject globalizing trends.
• It incorporates resacralization and views transnational nationalism as cultural expressions.
  • ISIS ideals and actions are a defense against materialism
• Religion is a "pro-active force" that gives communities a new basis of identity.
  • Religious people can reshape the globalizing world.
• The relationship between religion and globalization can't be limited to the idea that the two are opposing.
• The difference in religions encourages genuine respect from one another.
  • Religion and globalization will coexist
  • Shifts shaped by culture with economics and politics