Chapter 7: Global Media Cultures PDF

**Chapter 7: World of Ideas -Global Media Cultures** **Globalization and Media: Creating the Global Village** Globalization is a vague, opaque, and difficult word. Indeed, many people have trouble defining globalization. The word seems to mean many things -- a global economy, international trade,...

**Chapter 7: World of Ideas -Global Media Cultures** **Globalization and Media: Creating the Global Village** Globalization is a vague, opaque, and difficult word. Indeed, many people have trouble defining globalization. The word seems to mean many things -- a global economy, international trade, growing prosperity in China and India, international travel and communication, immigration, migration, more foreign films and foods, McDonald\'s in Paris, Starbucks in Africa, mosques in New York, an increase in 'global' problems such as climate change and terrorism. The word can mean everything and nothing. Many scholars study globalization by pairing it with another concept, such as globalization and identity, globalization and human rights, globalization and culture, or globalization and terrorism. Such studies are extremely important. However, the pairing of globalization and media offers especial insights. In fact, this chapter will suggest that globalization could not occur without media, that globalization and media act in concert and cohort, and that the two have partnered throughout the whole of human history. From cave paintings to papyrus to printing presses to television to Facebook, media have made globalization possible. **Media** In contrast to globalization, media do not seem hard to identify or define. The word is plural for medium -- a means of conveying something, such as a channel of communication. The plural form -- media -- only came into general circulation, however, in the 1920s. Like globalization, the word 'media' came into popular usage because a word was needed to talk about a new social issue. In the 1920s, people were talking about their fears over the harmful influence of comic books, radio, and film. They were worried about young people reading violent comics, voters hearing propaganda over the radio, couples disappearing into dark movie theaters. They grouped these phenomena together with debates over 'the mass media'. Though the word is relatively modern, humans have used media of communication from their first days on earth, and, we will argue, those media have been essential to globalization. **Globalization: A Definition** We are maintaining that historical, political, cultural, and economic forces, now called globalization, have worked in concert with media from the dawn of time to our present day, and that globalization and media -- two words that only came into usage in the twentieth century -- capture practices that have roots deep in the history of humanity. Humans have always been globalizing, though they have not used that word. And humans have always been communicating with media, though they have not used that word. Globalization is defined as a set of multiple, uneven, and sometimes overlapping historical processes, including economics, politics, and culture, that have combined with the evolution of media technology to create the conditions under which the globe itself can now be understood as 'an imagined community'. **Evolution of Media and Globalization** Scholars have found it logical and helpful to organize the historical study of media by time periods or stages. Each period is characterized by its dominant medium. For example, the Canadian theorist Harold Innis (1950), Marshall McLuhan\'s teacher, writing in the 1940s and 1950s, divided media into three periods: oral, print, and electronic. James Lull (2000), writing at the close of the twentieth century, added digital to those three. Terhi Rantanen (2005) places script before the printing press and breaks down the electronic period into wired and wireless, for six periods. For our purposes, five time periods usefully capture the study of globalization and media: oral, script, print, electronic, and digital. We will look at the different time periods and point out how the media of each time period contributed to the globalization of our world. This accounting isolates and highlights the essential role of media in globalization over time and firmly establishes the centrality of media for studies of globalization. **Oral Communication** Speech is often the most overlooked medium in histories of globalization. Yet the oral medium -- human speech -- is the oldest and most enduring of all media. Over hundreds of thousands of years, despite numerous changes undergone by humans and their societies, the very first and last humans will share at least one thing -- the ability to speak. Speech has been with us for at least 200,000 years, script for less than 7,000 years, print for less than 600 years, and digital technology for less than 50 years. When speech developed into language, Homo sapiens had developed a medium that would set them apart from every other species and allow them to cover and conquer the world. How did the medium of language aid globalization? Language allowed humans to cooperate. During a hunt, the ability to coordinate was a considerable advantage. And there were other advantages. Sharing information about land, water, climate, and weather aided humans\' ability to travel and adapt to different environments. Sharing information about tools and weapons led to the spread of technology. Humans eventually moved to every corner of the world, encountering new environments and experiences at each turn. Language was their most important tool (Ostler, 2005). Language helped humans move, but it also helped them settle down. Language stored and transmitted important agricultural information across time as one generation passed on its knowledge to the next, leading to the creation of villages and towns. Language also led to markets, the trade of goods and services, and eventually into cross-continental trade routes. Organized, permanent, trading centers grew, giving rise to cities. And perhaps around 4000 BCE, humans\' first civilization was created at Sumer in the Middle East. Sometimes called the 'cradle of civilization', Sumer is thought to be the birthplace of the wheel, plow, irrigation, and writing -- all created by language. **Script** Some histories of media technology skip this stage or give it brief mention as a transition between oral cultures and cultures of the printing press. But the era was crucial for globalization and media. Language was essential but imperfect. Script needed to be written on something. Writing surfaces even have their own evolution. Writing was done at first as carvings into wood, clay, bronze, bones, stone, and even tortoise shells. With script on sheets of papyrus and parchment, humans had a medium that catapulted globalization. Script allowed for the written and permanent codification of economic, cultural, religious, and political practice. These codes could then be spread out over large distances and handed down through time. The great civilizations, from Egypt and Greece to Rome and China, were made possible through script (Powell, 2009). If globalization is considered the economic, cultural, and political integration of the world, then surely script -- the written word -- must be considered an essential medium. **The Printing Press** It started the 'information revolution' and transformed markets, businesses, nations, schools, churches, governments, armies, and more. All histories of media and globalization acknowledge the consequential role of the printing press. Many begin with the printing press. It\'s easy to see why. Prior to the printing press, the production and copying of written documents was slow, cumbersome, and expensive. The papyrus, parchment, and paper that spread civilizations were the province of a select, powerful few. Reading and writing, too, were practices of the ruling and religious elite. The rich and powerful controlled information. With the advent of the printing press, first made with movable wooden blocks in China and then with movable metal type by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, reading material suddenly was cheaply made and easily circulated. Millions of books, pamphlets, and flyers were produced, reproduced, and circulated. Literacy followed, and the literacy of common people was to revolutionize every aspect of life. The explosive flow of economic, cultural, and political ideas around the world connected and changed people and cultures in ways never before possible. **Electronic Media** Beginning in the nineteenth century, a host of new media would revolutionize the ongoing processes of globalization. Scholars have come to call these 'electronic media' because they require electromagnetic energy -- electricity -- to use. The telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and television are the usual media collected under electronic media. The vast reach of these electronic media continues to open up new vistas in the economic, political, and cultural processes of globalization. The ability to transmit speech over distance was the next communication breakthrough. Though not always considered a mass medium, the telephone surely contributed to connecting the world. Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone in 1876. It quickly became a globally adopted medium. By 1927, the first transatlantic call was made via radio. The creation of the cell phone in 1973 was especially crucial in the context of globalization and media. Radio developed alongside the telegraph and telephone in the late 1890s. The technology was first conceived as a 'wireless telegraph'. By the early 1900s, speech indeed was being transmitted without wires. By the 1920s, broadcast stations were 'on the air', transmitting music and news. Radio quickly became a global medium, reaching distant regions without the construction of wires or roads. For much of the twentieth century, radio was the only mass medium available in many remote villages. Along with the telegraph, telephone, and radio, film arose as another potent medium. Silent motion pictures were shown as early as the 1870s. But as a mass medium, film developed in the 1890s. Television brought together the visual and aural power of film with the accessibility of radio: people sat in their living rooms and kitchens and viewed pictures and stories from across the globe. The world was brought into the home. The amount, range, and intensity of communication with other lands and cultures occurred in ways simply not possible before. For some scholars, the introduction of television was a defining moment in globalization. Marshall McLuhan proclaimed the world a 'global village', largely because of television. **Digital Media** Digital media are most often electronic media that rely on digital codes -- the long arcane combinations of 0s and 1s that represent information. Many of our earlier media, such as phones and televisions, can now be considered digital. Indeed, digital may even be blurring the lines among media. If you can watch television, take photographs, show movies, and send e-mail on your smart phone or tablet, what does that mean for our neat categorization of media into television, film, or phone? The computer, though, is the usual representation of digital media. The computer comes as the latest and, some would argue, most significant medium to influence globalization. **Global Imaginary and Global Village** As we have seen, one of the most important consequences of communication media for globalization has been: through media, the people of the world came to know of the world. That is, people have needed to be able to truly imagine the world -- and imagine themselves acting in the world -- for globalization to proceed. In this perspective, the media have not only physically linked the globe with cables, broadband, and wireless networks, but have also linked the globe with stories, images, myths, and metaphors. The media are helping to bring about a fundamentally new imaginary, what scholar Manfred Steger (2008) has called a rising global imaginary -- the globe itself as imagined community. In the past, only a few, privileged people thought of themselves as 'cosmopolitan' -- citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism is now a feature of modern life. People imagine themselves as part of the world. **Media and Economic Globalization** The media have been essential to the growth of economic globalization in our world. Indeed, the media have made economic globalization possible by creating the conditions for global capitalism and by promoting the conceptual foundation of the world\'s market economy. Economic globalization, from this perspective is not just dollars and cents, but story and myth -- narratives that make natural the buying and selling of products across borders and boundaries and mythic celebrations of products and consumption. The media foster the conditions for global capitalism. They fill our days with invitations and exhortations for consumption, from ceaseless commercials on radio and television, to product placement in films, to digital billboards, to pop-up ads, to broadsheets in bathroom stalls. **Media and Political Globalization** Globalization has transformed world politics in profound ways. It led to the formation and then the overthrow of kingdoms and empires. It led to the creation of the nation-state. And now some argue that the nation-state is being weakened as people and borders become ever more fluid in our globalized world. Some argue that transnational political actors, from NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like Greenpeace to corporations to the United Nations, now rise in prominence in our age of globalization. When we add the media to the admixture of globalization and politics, we touch upon some key features of modern life. In an age of political globalization, the opposite hypothesis appears to be true: governments shape and manipulate the news. It is another key feature of media and political globalization. Officials around the world are extremely successful at influencing and molding the news so that it builds support for their domestic and foreign policies. All of humankind\'s considerable persuasive techniques -- from cajoling to coddling to conniving to coercing -- are put into play so that news media report favorably on government actions and initiatives. Some scholars have suggested that new media -- digital media, such as computers, tablets, and cell phones -- have the potential to invigorate and transform political life in the modern world. They feel that new media can allow alternative voices within and across borders. They hope that new media will enlarge the public sphere. They feel that new media can offer the opportunity for more people to be involved with political action and civil society. New media do indeed complicate politics. These new media have characteristics -- mobile, interactive, discursive, and participatory -- with dramatic political implications. Because of the low cost and ease of posting text, photos, video, music, and other material online, digital media allow for the possibility of multiple, varied voices and views that can challenge and question those in power (Shirky, 2008). Citizens worldwide can post photos and dispatches from breaking news events via cell phones, computers, and webcams. Activists around the globe can exchange information online and coordinate plans. Bloggers and online newspapers can find new outlets and audiences to challenge government and authority. **Media and Cultural Globalization** The media, on one level, are the primary carriers of culture. Through newspapers, magazines, movies, advertisements, television, radio, the Internet, and other forms, the media produce and display cultural products, from pop songs to top films. They also generate numerous and ongoing interactions among cultures, such as when American hip hop music is heard by Cuban youth. Yet, the media are much more than technology, more than mechanical conveyors of culture, more than simple carriers of editorial cartoons or McDonalds\' advertisements. The media are people. These people are active economic agents and aggressive political lobbyists on matters of culture. They market brands aggressively. They seek out new markets worldwide for their cultural products. They actively bring about interactions of culture for beauty, power, and profit. Many scholars have considered the varied outcomes that can come from the commingling of media, culture, and globalization. In his wise book, Globalization Culture: Global Mélange, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2004: 41--58) argues that there are actually three, and only three, outcomes with which to consider the influence of globalization on culture. Cultural differentialism suggests that cultures are different, strong, and resilient. Distinctive cultures will endure, this outcome suggests, despite globalization and the global reach of American or Western cultural forms. For some, this outcome is ominous for our era of globalization. It can suggest that cultures are destined to clash as globalization continually brings them together. US political scientist Samuel Huntington\'s classic though contested work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, argues, for example, that the West and Islam will be locked in conflict (Huntington, 1996). Cultural convergence suggests that globalization will bring about a growing sameness of cultures. A global culture, likely American culture, some fear, will overtake many local cultures, which will lose their distinctive characteristics. For some, this outcome can suggest 'cultural imperialism', in which the cultures of more developed nations 'invade' and take over the cultures of less developed nations. The result, under this outcome, will be a worldwide, homogenized, Westernized culture (Tomlinson, 1991). Cultural hybridity suggests that globalization will bring about an increasing blending or mixture of cultures. This mélange will lead to the creation of new and surprising cultural forms, from music to food to fashion. For Pieterse -- the subtitle of his book is Global Mélange -- this outcome is common, desirable, occurs throughout history, and will occur more so in an era of globalization. The three outcomes do a splendid job of organizing what could be thousands of distinct examples of the meeting of global and local culture. In reality, all three outcomes occur regularly. The worldwide violence surrounding the publication of Danish editorial cartoons that mocked Mohammed can be understood as cultural differentialism. The disappearance of hundreds of languages, as a few languages become dominant, can be seen as cultural convergence. Jazz is an archetypal example of cultural hybridity. As globalization has increased the frequency of contact among cultures, the world has been given another awkward term -- glocalization. In this perspective, the media and globalization are facts of life in local cultures. But local culture is not static and fixed. Local culture is not pliable and weak, awaiting or fearing contact from the outside. Local culture is instead created and produced daily, drawing from, adopting, adapting, succumbing to, satirizing, rejecting, or otherwise negotiating with the facts, global and local, of the day. The local is built and understood anew each day in a globalized world. Sometimes the media can be sites of glocalization. For example, the British television show, Pop Idol, spawned the hit American show, American Idol, which inspired other Idol shows worldwide. The global takes local form. Other times, the media are agents of glocalization. Cuban youths excitedly listened to black popular music from Miami radio and television shows during the 1970s, later learned of the emerging US rap and hip hop scene, and eventually developed their own style of Cuban hip hop. In and through media, from music to video games to film to advertising and more, local people adapt global culture to everyday life. Our very understanding of local culture actually benefits from the long, historical lens of globalization. Local culture is likely the historical product of countless previous interactions with other cultures. That is, local culture in our time is a product of negotiation between local and global cultures of previous times. Country to country, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood, the negotiation of local culture and other cultures has taken place and will take place daily over time. Rather than being fixed and static, local culture is continually produced and reproduced every day. The daily 'negotiation' between local culture and other cultures is key to understanding globalization, media, and culture. Globalization allows the intersections of cultures in ways and amounts unknown to other eras. Western culture, carried by global media, is a potent force and is powered by vast political and economic engines looking for influence and markets. But local culture has its own traditions, strengths, resources, and resistance on which to draw. Finally, the emphasis on the negotiation of cultural forms at the local level is of theoretical but also of methodological importance. Scholars and writers who wish to write about globalization and culture need to be grounded -- literally. Cultures converge not in the abstract but in newsrooms, cabarets, churches, mosques, movie theaters, and living rooms -- as well as in chat rooms and McDonalds\' restaurants. **Popular Music and Globalization** Popular music serves here as the gateway to explore the representations and meanings associated with music making in the time of globalization. A brief overview of the literature in the social sciences and humanities on the relationship between music, place, identity and society and how they are intertwined in the context of globalization will act as a starting point. Qualifying music as popular is a value judgment indicating the important place music occupies in everyday life, as a highly subjective aesthetic experience, as an essential part of shared social activities, as a mediated and mass-produced cultural product and as a means for engagement with power and with Otherness (Harrington and Bielby, 2001). When examined through the prism of contact, friction and capital, popular music is therefore better understood as an umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of genres, practices and meanings that goes beyond its general association with Anglo-American inspired pop culture. **Popular Music and Musicians in Society**: From the Local to the Global, When the terms globalization and music are put together, they tend to conjure up critical reflections regarding the notions of culture, place and identity. They also underline anthropological and ethnomusicological understandings of music making as an important catalyst in the generating of various representations and ideologies associated with such notions. Indeed music participates at once in the reinforcing of boundaries of culture and identity and in subverting them. It is no surprise, then, that music should be just as implicated in subject formation and identity politics, particularly in 'playing out' a sense of common nationhood or belonging in a context marked by uneven transnational social, cultural, political and economic transactions. Taking that into account, popular music makes a compelling case for elucidating the complex dynamics of globalization, not only because it is popular, but because music is highly mediated, is deeply invested in meaning, and has proven to be an extremely mobile and resourceful form of capital. Sociologists have been ahead of the game in this. Engaging critically with Adorno\'s (1991) seminal work on the intimate relationship between musical structure and social structure, they paved the way for what Tia DeNora has termed, 'the production of culture' approach which 'signalled a shift in focus from aesthetic objects and their content to the cultural practices in and through which aesthetic materials were appropriated and used to produce social life' (DeNora, 2000: 6). Paul Willis\' (1978) work on the music bike boys listened to, for instance, and Antoine Hennion\'s (2007) exploration of the mediating qualities of music, highlight the many ways music at once echoes, enacts, communicates and comments on values and social formations Hall and Jefferson (1976) and Simon Frith (1981), among others, emphasize the links between popular music and social change. The musics of youth, in particular, precisely because youth is conceived as liminoidal (Turner, 1970) -- that is, representing a moment of ambiguity, transition, even crisis -- have been central to investigating the class, racial, and generational tensions that permeate and inevitably lead to change in society. These groundbreaking studies lead the way for the socio-cultural analysis of other genres of music like reggae (Martin, 1982), rock\'n\'roll (Frith, 1981), heavy metal (Walser, 1993), rap and hip-hop (Mitchell, 2001), all of which would eventually become globalized, prompting further studies on their transformation as they are performed in new contexts and are appropriated by musicians and audiences carrying increasingly transnational biographies and transcultural references (Davis and Simon, 1982; Maira and Shihade, 2012). Other sociologists opted to focus on the concrete, step-by-step, work of making art and music happen. Howard Becker (1982) demonstrates in Art Worlds how any form of cultural production, including music, even that which is individual in appearance, results from the interaction of a large network of actors, hence providing a sense of community and identity through the collective work of producing music and other forms of art. Taking this analysis further in Producing Pop, Keith Negus (1992) unravels the mechanisms and strategies multinational record companies employ to produce popular music and to develop and promote successful new artists. He sheds light on the internal organization, logistics and interrelations between the various branches of the industry (recruiters, managers, promoters, producers, broadcasters, etc.), offering a critique of the way value-laden notions such as musical talent and authenticity are constructed and then legitimized on a global scale through the branding and marketing of new artists. Today, the dynamics of centrality and marginality, power and submission that continuously shape the lives and livelihood of musicians, perceptions of their work and the social place it occupies play out on a much larger scale, compounded by the asymmetrical encounters made possible by globalization, postcolonial identity politics and the commoditization of music. Some of these issues have been raised through ethnographies of the marketing and performance of African music's and musicians on the world stage (Klein, 2007; Meintjes, 2003; Taylor, 1997). **Capital: The Technologies and Ethics of World Music** Legend has it that 'world music' came to be as a label in 1987 following a series of meetings by music industry actors in the United Kingdom in order to decide on how to identify and then market a growing number of recordings fusing Western and different types of non-Western musics that defied the categories of genre that were established then; recordings whose sales were demonstrating an increasing interest by audiences for 'third world' artists. Anthropologist Bob White defines world music today as 'the umbrella category under which various types of traditional and non-Western music are produced for Western consumption' (White, 2012). Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld goes further considering it a 'label of industrial origin that refers to an amalgamated global marketplace of sounds as ethnic commodities' (Feld, 2012). In their critique, both underline the interplay of capital with historical inequalities and violent encounters as central to the making and marketing of world music. As such, world music as capital does not only concern globalization\'s consuming cosmopolitan elite but also the music makers themselves. It raises ethical questions of opportunity versus exploitation, mutuality and reciprocity versus hegemony. Much like AfricanAmerican musics, it also continues to provoke debate around identity, authenticity, pluralism and belonging which have divided scholars, industry actors, consumers and music makers alike. With regards to music, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh argue, cosmopolitanism as a concept has led to the mystification of plurality as embodied in the increasing fusion of musical styles and traditions. 'The implication is', they remark, 'that these hybrid aesthetics and movements are free of earlier hierarchical consciousness and practice, that there are no significant "core-periphery' structures at work, and thus that these aesthetics are free also of the asymmetrical relations of representation and the seductions of the exoticisms, primitivisms, and Orientalisms that paralleled colonial and neocolonial relations. In this view, then, "all differences" are being levelled. Hybridity can rebound from its discursive origins in colonial fantasies and oppressions and can become instead a practical and creative means of cultural rearticulation and resurgence from the margins' (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000: 19). In addition, by considering the deterritorialization and denationalization of identity as an end in itself, the proponents of cosmopolitanism tend to turn globalization into a place of belonging instead of address globalization as a condition that produces possibly a variety of new forms of belonging. 'There is a world of difference', Hedetoft and Hjort remind us, 'between imagining that "the globe', like material possessions, memories, and ideas, belongs to "us' (or, rather, "me") -- and that "we" belong to the "globe" and "globality". As a result, two paradoxical realities characterize the work of globalization today and distinguish it from its past incarnations: the unprecedented circulation and consumption of cultural commodities such as music; and the resurgence and reinforcement of national boundaries through militarized technologies of security and neo-nativist policies of citizenship and migration control. Mobility, indeed, has become a rare commodity. For many musicians, marketing themselves as 'world musicians' has become the only way they could achieve mobility, for in all other contexts, it is either denied or given under dire conditions through contemporary forms of exploitation such as human trafficking. For example, in his study of the Guinean djembe drum and its transformation into one of the most globalized instruments today, anthropologist Pascal Gaudette illustrates how djembe players have taken to giving lessons and founding djembe schools targeting Western apprentices as a way to create a network of contacts that might eventually open the way for migration to Europe and North America (Gaudette, 2013). Nevertheless, for every musician who acquires mobility and tours the world by capitalizing on music's from his or her country of origin, thousands of digital samples of world music, either taken from actual recordings or entirely composed, circulate through the networks of the music industry, the Internet and social media. Musicologist Timothy Taylor has examined the increasing engagement with and treatment of music in the public domain as a commodity through an extensive study of the use of music in advertising (Taylor, 2012a). World music is but the latest in a long line of musical genres to be sampled and put to use, not only to sell music and imagined access to the world of the other, but to sell products targeting specific audiences. In fact, he argues that it is through samples of world music used in advertising and not through records by Western or non-Western artists or world music festivals that world music, as imagined by the culture industry, has had the strongest impact on the soundtrack of the twenty-first century (Taylor, 2012b). Citing the growing presence and popularity of sample libraries which offer artists and composers a digital archive of excerpts of pre-recorded music of all kinds which they can, in turn, select, copy and paste onto their computer-generated compositions, Taylor explains how, through these samples 'world music has insinuated itself into more mainstream kinds of pop and rock music, including... music used as soundtracks for film, television, and advertising, where world music has been replacing classical music in commercials for expensive goods' (Taylor, 2012b).