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 Interactive Module for the Contemporary World
WEEK 10

Media and Globalization

 Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. Analyze how various media drive different forms of global integration;
2. Compare the social impacts of different media on the processes of globalization:
3. Explain the dynamic between local and global cultural production; and
4. Define responsible media consumption.

Globalization entails the spread of various cultures. When a film is made in Hollywood, it is
shown not only in the United States, but also in other cities across the globe. South Korean rapper Psy's
song “Gangnam Style” may have been about a wealthy suburb in Seoul, but its listeners included millions
who have never been or may never go to Gangnam. Some of them may not even know what Gangnam is.
Globalization also involves the spread of ideas. For example, the notion of the rights of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities is spreading across the world and becoming more widely
accepted. Similarly, the conservative Christian Church that opposes these rights moves from places like
South America to Korea and to Burundi in Africa.

People who travel the globe teaching and preaching their beliefs in universities, churches, public
forums, classrooms, or even as guests of a family play a major role in the spread of culture and ideas. But
today, television programs, social media groups, books, movies, magazines, and the like have made it
easier for advocates to reach larger audiences. 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 a 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?"

There is an intimate relationship between globalization and media which must be unraveled to
further understand the contemporary world.

Media and Its Functions

Lule describes media as "a means of conveying something, such as a channel of communication.”
Technically speaking, a person's voice is a medium. However, when commentators Tefer to "media" (the
plural of medium), they mean the technologies of mass communication. Print media include books,
magazines, and newspapers. Broadcast media involve radio, film, and television. Finally, digital media
cover the internet and mobile mass communication. Within the category of internet media, there are the e-
mail, internet sites, social media, and internet-based video and audio.

While it is relatively easy to define the term “media”, it is more difficult to determine what media
do and how they affect societies it is Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once declared that "the medium is
the message.” He did not mean that ideas (“messages are useless and do not affect people. Rather, his
statement was an attempt to draw attention to how media, as a form of technology, reshape societies.
Thus, television is not a simple bearer of messages, it also shapes the social behavior of users and reorient
family behavior. Since it was introduced in the 1960s, television has steered people from the dining table
where they eat and tell stories to each other, to the living room where they silently munch on their food
while watching primetime shows. Television has also drawn people away from other meaningful
activities such as playing games or reading books. Today, the smart phone allows users to keep in touch
instantly with multiple people at the same time. Consider the effect of the internet on relationships. Prior
to the cellphone, there was no way for couples to keep constantly in touch, or to be updated on what the
other does all the time. The technology (medium), and not the message, makes for this social change
possible.

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.
Think about the medium of writing. Before people wrote things down on parchment, exchanging stories
was mainly done orally. To be able to pass stories verbally from one person to another, storytellers had to
have retentive memories. However, papyrus started becoming more common in Egypt after the fourth
century BCE, which increasingly meant that more people could write down their stories. As a result,
storytellers no longer had to rely completely on their memories. This development, according to some
philosophers at the time, dulled the people's capacity to remember.

Something similar can be said about cellphones. On the one hand, they expand people's senses
because they provide the capability to talk to more people instantaneously and simultaneously. On the
other hand, they also limit the senses because they make users easily distractible and more prone to
multitasking. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it is merely change with a trade-off. The question of
what new media enhance and what they amputate was not a moral or ethical one, according to McLuhan.
New media are neither inherently good nor bad. The famous writer was merely drawing attention to the
historically and technologically specific attributes of various media.

The Global Village and Cultural Imperialism

McLuhan used his analysis of technology to examine the impact of electronic media. Since he
was writing around the 1960s, he mainly analyzed the social changes brought about by television.
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 listened to the same stories, their
perception of the world would contract. If tribal villages once sat in front of fires to listen to collective
stories, the members of the new global village would sit in front of bright boxes in their living rooms.

In the years after McLuhan, media scholars further grappled with the challenges of a global media
culture. A lot of these early thinkers assumed that global media had a tendency to homogenize culture.
They argued that as global media spread, people from all.

Localizing the Material

 If cultural globalization merely entails the spread of a Westem monoculture, what explains the
prevalence of regional cultural trends? For example, the regionalization of culture was a boon to
Filipino telenovelas. From 2000 to 2002, ABS-CBN aired Pangako sa Yo starring Jericho Rosales and
Kristine Hermosa. The show soon became a hit in Singapore and Malaysia, and its two stars became
household names. In 2013, Cambodian TV even purchased the rights to produce its own version of the
show. Until now, Filipino telenovelas like Be Careful with My Heart find audiences across Southeast
Asia

over the world would begin to watch, listen to, and read the same things. This thinking arose at a time
when America's power had turned it into the world's cultural heavyweight. Commentators, therefore,
believed that media globalization coupled 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, cultural
globalization is simply a euphemism for “Western cultural imperialism” since it promotes "homogenized,
Westernized, consumer culture."

These scholars who decry cultural imperialism, however, have a top-down view of the media,
since they are more concerned with the broad structures that determine media content. Moreover, their
focus on America has led them to neglect other global flows of information that the media can enable.
This media/cultural imperialism theory has, therefore, been subject to significant critique.

Critiques of Cultural Imperialism

Proponents of the idea of cultural imperialism ignored the fact that media messages are not just
made by producers, they are also consumed by audiences. In the 1980s, media scholars began to pay
attention to the ways in which audiences understood and interpreted media messages. The field of
audience studies emphasizes that media consumers are active participants in the meaning-making process,
who view media "texts" (in media studies, a "text" simply refers to the content of any medium) through
their own cultural lenses. In 1985, Indonesian cultural critic len Ang studied the ways in which different
viewers in the Netherlands experienced watching the American soap opera Dallas. Through letters from
42 viewers, she presented a detailed analysis of audience-viewing experiences. 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.

In 1990, Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes decided to push Ang's analysis further by examining how viewers
from distinct cultural communities interpreted Dallas. They argued that texts are received differently by
varied interpretive communities because they derived different meanings and pleasures from these texts."
Thus, people from diverse cultural backgrounds had their own ways of understanding the show. Russians
were suspicious of the show's content, believing not only that it was primarily about America, but that it
contained American propaganda. American viewers believed that the show, though set in America, was
primarily about the lives of the rich.

Apart from the challenge of audience studies, the cultural imperialism thesis has been belied by
the renewed strength of regional trends in the globalization process. Asian culture, for example, has
proliferated worldwide through the globalization of media. Japanese brands-from Hello Kitty to the Mario
Brothers to Pokémon--are now an indelible part of global popular culture. The same can be said for
Korean pop (K-pop) and Korean telenovelas, which are widely successful regionally and globally. The
observation even applies to culinary tastes. The most obvious that McDonald's has continued to spread
across Asia, it is also the case that Asian brands have provided stiff competition. The Philippines’ Jollibee
claims to be the number one choice for fast culture and ideas can move in different directions. While
Western culture remains powerful and media production is still controlled by a handful of powerful
Western corporations, the internet, particularly the social media, is challenging previous ideas about food
in Brunei.

Given these patterns, it is no longer tenable to insist that globalization is a unidirectional process
of foreign cultures overwhelming local ones. Globalization, as noted in Lesson 1, will remain an uneven
process, and it will produce inequalities. Nevertheless, it leaves room for dynamism and cultural change.
This is not a contradiction; it is merely a testament to the phenomenon's complexity.

Social Media and the Creation of Cyber Ghettoes

By now, very few media scholars argue that the world is becoming culturally homogenous. Apart
from the nature of diverse audiences and regional trends in cultural production, the internet and social
media are proving that the globalization of culture and ideas can move in different directions. While
Western culture remains powerful and media production is still controlled by a handful of powerful
Western corporations, the internet, particularly the social media, is challenging previous ideas about
media and globalization.

As with all new media, social media have both beneficial and negative effects. On the one hand,
these forms of communication have democratized access. Anyone with an internet connection or a smart
phone can use Facebook and Twitter for free. These media have enabled users to be consumers and
producers of information simultaneously. The democratic potential of social media was most evident in
2011 during the wave of uprisings known as the Arab Spring. Without access to traditional broadcast
media like TV, activists opposing authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya used Twitter to
organize and to disseminate information. Their efforts toppled their respective governments. More
recently, the "women's march" against newly installed US President Donald Trump began with a tweet
from a Hawaii lawyer and became a national, even global, movement.

However, social media also have their dark side. In the early 2000s, 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. In the United States, voters of the
Democratic Party largely read liberal websites, and voters of the Republican Party largely read
conservative websites. This segmentation, notes an article in the journal Science, has been exacerbated by
the nature of social media feeds, which leads users to read articles, memes, and videos shared by like-
minded friends." As such, being on Facebook can resemble living in an echo chamber, which reinforces
one's existing beliefs and opinions. This echo chamber precludes users from listening to or reading
opinions and information that challenge their viewpoints, thus, making them more partisan and close
aware that the social media bubbles can produce a herd mentality It can be exploited by politicians with
less than democratic minded.

This segmentation has been used by people in power who are aware that social media bubbles can
produce a herd mentality. It can be exploited by politicians with less than democratic intentions and
demagogues wanting to whip up popular anger. The same inexpensiveness that allows social media to be
a democratic force likewise makes it a cheap tool of government propaganda Russian dictator Vladimir
Putin has hired armies of social media "trolls" (paid users who harass political opponents) to manipulate
public opinion through intimidation and the spreading of fake news. Most recently, American intelligence
agencies established that Putin used trolls and online misinformation to help Donald Trump win the
presidency--a tactic the Russian autocrat is likely to repeat in European elections he seeks to influence.”

In places across the world, Putin imitators replicate his strategy of online trolling and
disinformation to clamp down on dissent and delegitimize critical media. Critics of the increasingly
dictatorial regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are threatened by online mobs of pro-
government trolls, who hack accounts and threaten violence. Some of their responses have included
threats of sexual violence against women." As the preceding cases show, fake information can spread
easily on social media since they have few content filters. Unlike newspapers, 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 social media
shows that even a seemingly open and democratic media may be co-opted towards undemocratic means,
Global online propaganda will be the biggest threat to face as the globalization of media deepens. Internet
media have made the world so interconnected that a Russian dictator can, for example, influence
American elections on the cheap.

As consumers of media, users must remain vigilant and learn how to distinguish fact from
falsehood in a global media landscape that allows politicians to peddle what President Trump's senior
advisers now call “alternative facts." Though people must remain critical of mainstream media and
traditional journalism that may also operate based on vested interest, we must also insist that some
sources are more credible than others. A newspaper story that is written by a professional journalist and
vetted by professional editors is still likely to be more credible than a viral video produced by someone in
his/her bedroom, even if both will have their biases. People must be able to tell the difference.
Conclusion

This lesson showed that different media have diverse effects on globalization processes. 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. Societies can
never be completely prepared for the rapid changes in the systems of communication. Every technological
change, after all, creates multiple unintended consequences. Consumers and users of media will have a
hard time turning back the clock. Though people may individually try to keep out of Facebook or Twitter,
for example, these media will continue to engender social changes. Instead of fearing these changes or
entering a state of moral panic, everyone must collectively discover ways of dealing with them
responsibly and ethically.

Activity Questions
Direction: Read the questions carefully and write your answer on a separate sheet of paper.

1. Compare and contrast the social impacts of television and social media.
2. Do you think globalization leads to cultural imperialism?
3. What strategies can you use to distinguish between fake and factual information on the internet?
Evaluation:

Asian Music and Globalization

Form groups of three to five members. Pick an Asian musical artist or group that became
internationally famous (Psy, Utada Hikaru, F4, etc.). In your group report, answer the following
questions:

1. Where did the musical artist originate?

2. In which countries did the artist become famous?
3. How did the artist become famous?
4. Why do you think the artist became famous?