SORSOGON STATE UNIVERSITY

Sorsogon City Campus

College of Engineering and Architecture
Baribag, Bibincahan, Sorsogon City

Group Name: DUWENDE Section: EE-1A

Activity: Usapang Globalisasyon (Written Report) Date: 11/13/2023
Course Title: GE-04 The Contemporary World Instructor: Ms, Justeen Frances D. Manuel
GLOBAL MEDIA CULTURE
(MEDIA AND GLOBALIZATION)

INTRODUCTION
Globalization entails the spread of various cultures such as the South Korean rapper Psy’s song
“Gangnam Style” millions of its listeners never been or never may have been in Gangnam. Globalization also
involves the spread of ideas. For example, the notion of rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) communities is spreading across the world and becoming more widely accepted.
People who travel the globe teaching and preaching their beliefs in universities, churches, public
forums, class rooms, or even as guest of a family play a major role in the spread of culture and ideas.
However, today, television programs, social media groups, books, movies, magazines, and the like 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 a flow of information on
markets, prices, commodities, and more? Could empires have stretched across the world without
communication throughout the borders? Could religion, music, poetry, film, fiction, cuisine and fashion
develop as they have without the intermingling of media and culture?
There is an intimate relationship between globalization and media which must be unraveled to further
understand the contemporary world.

MEDIA AND IT’S FUNCTION

Jack 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 refer to “media” (plural of
medium), they mean the technologies of mass communication.
 Print media - includes books, magazine, and newspaper.
 Broadcast media - involve radio, film, and television.
 Digital media or new media - information’s through internet and mobile mass communication.
While it is relatively easy to define the term “media,” it is more difficult to determine what media do and
how they affect societies.
Media theorist Marshal McLuhan once declared that “the medium is the message”. He did not mean that
ideas (“message”) 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.
Television shapes the social behavior of users and reorient family behavior. Since it was introduced in the
1960s, it has steered people attentions. Television 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 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. Something similar can be said about cellphones. On the 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.
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 GLOBAL VILLAGE & CULTURAL IMPERIALSM

Around 1960's, McLuhan 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. Media Scholars continue the work of McLuhan in the global media culture. They think that
global media had a tendency to homogenize culture. They argued that as global media spread, people from
all 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, 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 Ien 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. 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 case of globalized Asian cuisine is sushi. And while it is true 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 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 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

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. 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 Liliya 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. Social media
also have their dark side. In the early 2000s, commentators began referring to the emergence of a splinternet"
and the phenomenon of "cyberbaikanization" 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 closed- minded. This segmentation has been used by people in power who are aware that
the 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. 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.
CONCLUSION
This lesson showed that different media have diverse effects 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 wall 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.