Media and Globalization

Today television programs, social media groups, books, movies magazines, and the likes
have made it easier for advocates to reach larger audience. Globalization relies on media as its
main conduit for the spread of global culture and ideas.

Jack Lule was then right to ask, “Could global trade have evolved without flow of information
on markets, prices, commodities and more? Could empires have stretched across the world
without communication throughout their borders? Could religion, music, poetry, film, fiction,
cuisine, and fashion develop as they have without the intermingling of media and cultures?”

Media and Its Functions

Media – a means of conveying something, such as channel of communication (Jack Lule, n.d.).

 Technologies of mass communication

 Print media include books, magazine, and newspapers
 Broadcast media involve radio, film, and television
 Digital media cover the internet and mobile mass communication.

While it is relatively easy to define the term “media”, it is more difficult to determine what the
media do and how they affect the societies. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once declared that
“medium is the message”. Thus, television is not a simple bearer of messages, it also shapes it
also shapes the social behavior of users and reorient family behavior. McLuhan added that
different media simultaneously extend and amputate human senses. New media may expand the
reach of communication, but they also dull the users’ communicative capacities.

The Global Village and Cultural Imperialism

McLuhan used his analysis of technology to examine the impact of electronic media. McLuhan
declared that television was turning the world into a “global village”. By this, he meant that, as
more and more people sat down in front of their television sets and listen to the same stories,
their perception of the world would contract.

Commentators believed that media globalization couple with American hegemony would create
a form of cultural imperialism whereby American values and culture would overwhelm all
others. In 1976, media critic Herbert Schiller argued that not only was the world being
Americanized, but that this process also led to the spread of American capitalist values like
consumerism. Similarly, for John Tomlinson, globalization is simply a euphemism for “Western
cultural imperialism” since it promotes homogenized, westernized, consumer culture.
Critiques of Cultural Imperialism

Ien Ang

 Indonesian cultural critic

 Rather than simply receiving American culture in a passive and resigned way, she noted
that viewers put a lot of emotional energy into the process and they experienced pleasure
based on how the program resonated with them.

Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes

 They argued that text are received differently by varied interpretive community because
they derived different meanings and pleasures from this text. Thus, people from diverse
cultural backgrounds has their own ways of understanding the show.

Social Media and the Creation of Cyber Ghettoes

As with all new media, social media have both beneficial and negative effects. On the one
hand, these form of access have democratized access. These media have enable users to be
consumers and producers of information simultaneously. However, social media have their dark
side. In the early 2000’s, commentators began referring to the emergence of a “splinternet” and
the phenomenon of “cyberbalkanization” to refer to the various bubbles people place themselves
in when they are online. This segmentation has been exacerbated by the nature of social media
feeds, which leads users to read articles, memes, and videos shared by like-minded friends.

Another downside of social media is that fake news can spread easily since they have few
content filters. Unlike newspaper, Facebook does not have a team of editors who are trained to
sift through and filter information. If a news article, even a fake one, gets a lot of shares, it will
reach many people with Facebook accounts. This dark side of the social media shows that even a
seemingly open and democratic media may be co-opted towards undemocratic means. Internet
media have made the world so interconnected that a Russian dictator can, for example, influence
American elections on the cheap.

Conclusion

At one point, it seemed that global television was creating a global monoculture. Now, it
seems more likely that social media will splinter cultures and ideas into bubbles of people who
do not interact.