Media, Culture, and Globalization

• Chapter 6 explores the relationship between media, culture, and globalization.
• It focuses on international communication challenges and examines media representation.

Learning Objectives

• Understand scholarly approaches to the relationship between media and globalization.
• Differentiate paradigms in international communications development.
• Explain the strengths and weaknesses of paradigms that lost appeal.
• Analyze how various media forms drive global integration.
• Take a stance on the film industry in the Philippines compared to South Korea.

Mass Media

• Mass media is designed to reach a very large audience, typically the entire population of a nation-state.
• It includes radio, television, and the Internet.
• The mass media audience is viewed as a "mass society" susceptible to persuasion through advertising and propaganda.

Etymology and Usage

• "Media" is a truncation of "media of communication", referring to organized means of disseminating facts, opinions, and entertainment. This includes newspapers, magazines, film, radio, television, the Internet, books, and computer games.

Purposes of Mass Media

• Advocacy: Used for business and social concerns, including advertising, marketing, propaganda, public relations, and political communication.
• Enrichment: Takes the form of education through literature and entertainment through performances, sports, and video games.
• Journalism: Involves spreading news on a large scale.
• Public Service Announcements: State/non-governmental agencies inform the public about pressing events.

History

• The earliest form of mass communication was inscribed on stones, caves, and pillars.
• Modern mass communication bloomed with the printing press.

Evolution of Mass Media (Pre-Industrial Age)

• 1041: Movable clay type printing in China.
• 1440: The first printing press in the world by Johannes Gutenberg
• 1477: First printed advertisement in a book by William Caxton
• 1918: First colored movie shot, "Cupid Angling"
• 1920: TV was invented by John Logie Baird, and the first radio commercial was broadcast by KDKA.
• 1923: TIME, the first news magazine, was launched.
• 1927: First TV transmission by Philo Farnsworth.

Evolution of New Media (21st Century)

• 1990s-2000s: Invention of the Internet, birth of social networking sites, and the emergence of social media.
• 1991: The World Wide Web was created by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee.
• 1995: Microsoft Internet Explorer was launched.
• 1997: DVDs replaced VCRs.
• 2001: Instant messaging services
• 2002: Satellite radio
• 2004: Facebook.
• 2005: YouTube.
• 2006: Twitter.
• 2007: Tumblr.
• 2010: Instagram.

Forms of Media

• Audio Recording: Uses discs or tapes, originally for music, video, and computer uses.
• Broadcasting: Radio and television.
• Film: Used for entertainment and documentaries.
• Internet: Used for news, blogs, music, pre-recorded speech, and video.
• Publishing: Books, magazines and newspapers
• Computer Games: Games played at home

Public Media

• Public media can be defined as the sum of news distributors, entertainment and information which includes newspapers, book publishers, television and radio broadcasting.

Globalization and Mass Media

• Mass media can reach most people, offering opportunities for global communication and education.
• Cheaper technologies are making mass communication more universal, closing the technological divide.
• Global Media: Mass communication on a global level, allowing worldwide information sharing.

Free Flow of Information: The Road to Modernization?

• The post-World War II period emphasized mass media and the free flow of information, led by the U.S.
• Modernization Paradigm: Absence of modernization in developing countries is due to a lack of human capital.
• Mass media and education are fundamental for developing human capital.

Proponents of Communication and Development Paradigm

• Wilbur Schramm (1964): Observed a positive association between communication components and national growth.
• Mass media speeds up social transformation and mobilizes human resources.
• David Lerner (1958): Proposed that developing societies must follow the Western concept of modernity to achieve development.
• Emphasized the importance of empathy.
• Media fostered the learning of emphatic skills.
• Benedict Anderson: Emphasized the role of printed communication and capitalism in instilling nationalism.
• Everett Rogers (1965-1966): Espoused a nuanced relationship by treating mass media as a factor that intervenes between the antecedents and the consequences of modernization.
• The strength of mass media lies in its "one-way, top-down and simultaneous and wide dissemination" and its capacity to shape social processes, meanings, identifies and aspirations of a community.

Demanding the Balanced Flow of Information: A Fight Against Cultural Imperialism

• The cultural imperialism paradigm grew from the 1960s-1980s, amid decolonization and the Cold War.
• The Non-Aligned Movement, including countries that formed the Havana Declaration was against imperialism, colonialism, racism, and hegemony.
• The movement opposed uneven information flows through the pretense of free flow of information.

Proponents of Cultural Imperialism Paradigm

• Herbert Schiller: American communications manipulate, resulting in individual passivity.

• Argues the modern world system attracts and pressures societies into shaping their institutions to promote the values of the dominating center.

• Boyd Barret (1977): Media Imperialism is 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; it maintains and expands dependence and domination over the world.

• Hesmondhalgh (2005): Cultural Imperialism implies Empires are built.

• Colonial states are ending the age of direct control.

• Cultural domination would foster desires for Western lifestyles among post-colonial countries, paving the way for corporations.

Zenith Optimedia

• Rankings state that Television remains the most important advertising medium, followed by the internet.
• Digital advertising is rising, with companies like Google and Facebook representing 65% of the internet advertising market.
• UNESCO demands a change in communication policies to balance the relationship between developed and developing states.
• NWICO was a resistance movement pressuring UNESCO to change news media dynamics that dismissed the needs of less affluent countries.

Other Theorists

• Tomlinson (1999): Argued that the paradigm of cultural imperialism maintained relevance by highlighting the expansionist nature of capitalism to shape global culture.
• Rantanen (2005): Found strength in the paradigm through the macro-level analysis of uneven political and economic relations.
• Sparks (2012): Put the framework into the current context of intensifying media corporations, of widening gaps between North and South, and states of power.
• Criticisms of cultural imperialism paved the way for "cultural pluralism" or "cultural globalization".

Cultural Globalization

• The transmission of ideas and meanings extends and intensifies social relations.
• The common consumption of cultures is diffused by the Internet.

Proponents of Cultural Pluralism

• Rantanen (2005): Recognized shifts of paradigm as the homogenization-heterogenization debate.
• Homogenization refers to the invasion of local culture that eliminates the local culture; society becomes homogenous.
• Cultural heterogenization refers to region culture can be widely disseminated in other societies; however, the past two paradigms are under homogenization.

Quick Recap

• The Modernization Paradigm argues that developing countries must take the Western path of development.
• Cultural Imperialism views the free flow of information as a pretense coming from the "North" media.
• The Cultural globalization or pluralism model employs a more optimistic perspective that people exposed to different media can react, resist, and recreate their own ideas.
• Social media allows for the exchange of information; this enables people to discover, learn and interact with new information and organizations.