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Republic of the Philippines

Department of Education
LYCEUM OF WESTERN LUZON-ZAMBALES, INC.
COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE EDUCATION
BATONLAPOC, BOTOLAN, ZAMBALES

Contemporary World
(GE7 MODULE 7)

Prepared by:

JOSEPH G. BESA
INSTRUCTOR

APPROVED BY:

JOSSETTE Y-PEREZ DAES, RN

PRESIDENT
Globalization and Media
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Cultural Imperialism and the Global Media Debate

In international communication theory and research, cultural imperialism theory argued
that audiences across the globe are heavily affected by media messages emanating
from the Western industrialized countries. Although there are minor differences between
"media imperialism" and "cultural imperialism," most of the literature in international
communication treats the former as a category of the latter. Grounded in an
understanding of media as cultural industries, cultural imperialism is firmly rooted in a
political-economy perspective on international communication. As a school of thought,
political economy focuses on material issues such as capital, infrastructure, and political
control as key determinants of international communication processes and effects. In
the early stage of cultural imperialism, researchers focused their efforts mostly on
nation-states as primary actors in international relations. They imputed rich,
industrialized, and Western nation-states with intentions and actions by which they
export their cultural products and impose their sociocultural values on poorer and
weaker nations in the developing world. This argument was supported by a number of
studies demonstrating that the flow of news and entertainment was biased in favor of
industrialized countries. This bias was clear both in terms of quantity, because most
media flows were exported by Western countries and imported by developing nations,
and in terms of quality, because developing nations received scant and prejudicial
coverage in Western media.
These concerns led to the rise of the New World Information Order (NWIO) debate, later
known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debate.
Although the debate at first was concerned with news flows between the north and the
south, it soon evolved to include all international media flows. This was due to the fact
that inequality existed in news and entertainment programs alike, and to the advent of
then-new media technologies such as communication satellites, which made the
international media landscape more complex and therefore widened the scope of the
debate about international flows.
The global media debate was launched during the 1973 General Conference of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Nairobi,
Kenya. As a specialized agency of the United Nations, the mission of UNESCO includes
issues of communication and culture. During the conference, strong differences arose
between Western industrialized nations and developing countries. Led by the United
States, the first group insisted on the "free flow of information" doctrine, advocating
"free trade" in information and media programs without any restrictions. The second
group, concerned by the lack of balance in international media flows, accused Western
countries of invoking the free flow of information ideology to justify their economic and
cultural domination. They argued instead ·for a "free and balanced flow" of information.
The chasm between the two groups was too wide to be reconciled. This eventually was
one of the major reasons given for withdrawal from UNESCO by the United States and
the United Kingdom-which resulted in the de facto fall of the global media debate. A
second stage of research identified with cultural imperialism has been associated with
calls to revive the New World Information and Communication Order debate. What
differentiates this line of research from earlier cultural imperialism formulations is its
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emphasis on the commercialization of the sphere of culture. Research into this area had
been a hallmark of cultural imperialism research, but now there is a deliberate focus on
transnational corporations as actors, as opposed to nation-states, and on transnational
capital flows, as opposed to image flows. Obviously, it is hard to separate the power of
transnational corporations from that of nation-states, and it is difficult to distinguish
clearly between capital flows and media flows. Therefore, the evolution of the debate is
mainly a redirection of emphasis rather than a paradigm shift.

It has become fashionable in some international communication circles to dismiss

cultural imperialism as a monolithic theory that is lacking subtlety and increasingly
questioned by empirical research. Cultural imperialism does have some weaknesses, but
it also continues to be useful. Perhaps the most important contribution of cultural
imperialism is the argument that international communication flows, processes, and
effects are permeated by power. Nevertheless, it seems that the concept of globalization
has in some ways replaced cultural imperialism as the main conceptual umbrella under
which much research and theorizing in international communication have been
conducted.
Media, Globalization, and Hybridization
Several reasons explain the analytical shift from cultural imperialism to globalization.
First, the end of the Cold War as a global framework for ideological, geopolitical, and
economic competition calls for a rethinking of the analytical categories and paradigms of
thought. By giving rise to the United States as sole superpower and at the same time
making the world more fragmented, the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of
complexity between global forces of cohesion and local reactions of dispersal. In this
complex era, the nation-state is no longer the sale or dominant player, since
transnational transactions occur on sub national, national, and supranational levels.
Conceptually, globalization appears to capture this complexity better than cultural
imperialism. Second, according to John Tomlinson (1991), globalization replaced cultural
imperialism because it conveys a process with less coherence and direction, which will
weaken the cultural unity of all nation-states, not only those in the developing world.
Finally, globalization has emerged as a key perspective across the humanities and social
sciences, a current undoubtedly affecting the discipline of communication.
In fact, the globalization of culture has become a conceptual magnet attracting research
and theorizing efforts from a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary formations such
as anthropology, comparative literature, cultural studies, communication and media
studies, geography, and sociology.
International communication has been an active interlocutor in this debate because
media and information technologies play an important role in the process of
globalization. Although the media are undeniably one of the engines of cultural
globalization, the size and intensity of the effect of the media on the globalization of
culture is a contested issue revolving around the following question: Did the mass media
trigger and create the globalization of culture? Or is the globalization of culture an old
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phenomenon that has only been intensified and made more obvious with the advent of
transnational media technologies? Like the age-old question about whether the egg
came before the chicken or vice versa, the question about the relationship between
media and the globalization of culture is difficult to answer.
One perspective on the globalization of culture, somewhat reminiscent of cultural
imperialism in terms of the nature of the effect of media on culture, but somewhat
different in its conceptualization of the issue, is the view that the media contribute to the
homogenization of cultural differences across the planet. This view dominates
conventional wisdom perspectives on cultural globalization conjuring up images of Planet
Hollywood and the MTV generation. One of the most visible proponents of this
perspective is political scientist Benjamin Barber, who formulated his theory about the
globalization of culture in the book Jihad vs. McWorld (1996). The subtitle, "How
Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World," betrays Barber's reliance on a binary
opposition between the forces of modernity and liberal democracy with tradition and
autocracy.
Although Barber rightly points to transnational capitalism as the driving engine that
brings Jihad and McWorld in contact and motivates their action, his model has two
limitations. First, it is based on a binary opposition between Jihad, what he refers to as
ethnic and religious tribalism, and McWorld, the capital-driven West. Barber (1996, p.
157) seemingly attempts to go beyond this binary opposition in a chapter titled “Jihad
Via McWorld," in which he argues that Jihad stands in "less of a stark opposition than a
subtle counterpoint." However, the evidence offered in most of the book supports an
oppositional rather than a contrapuntal perspective on the globalization of culture. The
second limitation of Barber's book is that he privileges the global over the local, because,
according to him, globalization rules via transnational capitalism. "[T]o think that
globalization and indigenization are entirely coequal forces that put Jihad and McWorld
on an equal footing is to vastly underestimate the force of the new planetary markets ....
It's no contest" (p. 12). Although it would be naive to argue that the local defeats the
global, Barber's argument does not take into account the dynamic and resilient nature of
cultures and their ability to negotiate foreign imports.
Another perspective on globalization is cultural hybridity or hybridization. This view
privileges an understanding of the interface of globalization and localization as a
dynamic process and hybrid product of mixed traditions and cultural forms. As such, this
perspective does not give prominence to globalization as a homogenizing force, nor does
it believe in localization as a resistive process opposed to globalization. Rather,
hybridization advocates an emphasis on processes of mediation that it views as central
to cultural globalization. The concept of hybridization is the product of interdisciplinary
work mostly based in
intellectual projects such as post colonialism, cultural studies, and performance studies.
Hybridization has been used in communication and media studies and appears to be a
productive theoretical orientation as researchers in international media studies attempt
to grasp the complex subtleties of the globalization of culture.
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One of the most influential voices in the debate about cultural hybridity is Argentinean
Mexican cultural critic Nestor Garcia-Candini. In his book Hybrid Cultures (1995), Garcia-
Candini advocates a theoretical understanding of Latin American nations as hybrid
cultures. His analysis is both broad and incisive, covering a variety of cultural processes
and institutions such as museums, television, film, universities, political cartoons, graffiti,
and visual arts. According to Garcia-Candini, there are three main features of cultural
hybridity. The first feature consists of mixing previously separate cultural systems, such
as mixing the elite art of opera with popular music. The second feature of hybridity is the
deterritorialization of cultural processes from their original physical environment to new
and foreign contexts. Third, cultural hybridity entails impure cultural genres that are
formed out of the mixture of several cultural domains. An example of these impure
genres is when artisans in rural Mexico weave tapestries of masterpieces of European
painters such as Joan Mira and Henri Matisse, mixing high art and folk artisanship into an
impure genre.
In media and communication research, the main question is "Have transnational media
made cultures across the globe hybrid by bringing into their midst foreign cultural
elements, or have cultures always been to some extent hybrid, meaning that
transnational mass media only strengthened an alreadyexisting condition?" There is no
obvious or final answer to that question, because there is not enough empirical research
about media and hybridity and because of the theoretical complexity of the issue. What
does exist in terms of theoretical understanding and research results points to a middle
ground? This position acknowledges that cultures have been in contact for a long time
through warfare, trade, migration, and slavery. Therefore, a degree of hybridization in all
cultures can be assumed. At the same time, this middle ground also recognizes that
global media and information technologies have substantially increased contacts
between cultures, both in terms of intensity and of the speed with which these contacts
occur.
Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that transnational mass media intensify the
hybridity that is already in existence in cultures across the globe. Consequently, the
globalization of culture through the media is not a process of complete homogenization,
but rather one where cohesion and fragmentation coexist.

Source: Kraidy, M. (2002). Globalization of culture through the media. In J. R. Schement

(Ed.),Encyclopedia of communication and information (Vol. 2, pp. 359-363).
New York, NY: Macmillan Reference USA. Retrieved from
http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/325.