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.

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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

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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’.

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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-

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http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Robert%20McChesney

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Noam%20Chomsky

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/imperialism


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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/SubmittedDocuments/archivedpapers/Fall2002/Griffin.htm

http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/SubmittedDocuments/archivedpapers/Fall2002/Griffin.htm