LESSON 7:

MEDIA AND GLOBALIZATION

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MEDIA AND ITS FUNCTIONS

Lule describes media as

“a means of conveying
something, such as
channel of
communication”.
Commentators refer to
“media” (the plural of
medium), they mean the
technologies of mass
PRINT MEDIA
•Includes books,
magazines, and
news papers.
BROADCAST MEDIA
•Involves radio,
film, and
television.
INTERNET MEDIA
•There are e-mail,
internet sites, f
social media and
internet-based
video and audio.
• Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once
declared that “the medium is the message”.
TELEVISION

SMARTPHONES
• McLuhan added that different media simultaneously extend and
amputate human senses.
• THINK ABOUT THE MEDIUM OF WRITING.
• 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.
• 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 AND
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
1960s, McLuhan used his analysis of technology to examine the
impact of electronic media. Since he was writing around.
He mainly analyzed the social changes brought about by television.
McLuhan declared that television was turning the world into a “
global village”.
McLuhan years after, media scholars further grappled with the
challenges of a global media culture.
A lot of these early thinkers assumed that global media had
tendency to homogenize culture.
• A lot of these early thinkers assumed that
global media had a tendency to homogenize
culture.
• America’s had power turned it into the world’s
cultural heavyweight.
• American hegemony would create a form of
cultural imperialism whereby American values
and culture would overwhelmed all others.
• In 1976, media critic Herbert Schiller argued that
not only was the world being Americanized, but that
process also led to the spread of “ American”
capitalist values like consumerism.
• John Tomlinson similarly , cultural globalization is
simply a euphemism for “Western cultural
imperialism” since it promotes “homogenized,
Westernized , consumer culture.
CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
o In 1980’s, media scholars begin to play attention to the ways in
which audiences understood and interpreted the media messages.
o A field of audiences studies studies emphasizes that media
consumer are the active participants in the meaning- making
process, who view media “text” through their own cultural lenses.
o Indonesian cultural studied the way in which different viewers in
the Netherland experience watching the American soap opera.
o From 42 viewers, she presented detailed analysis of audience
viewing experiences rather than simply receiving American culture
in a “ passive and resign way”
• In 1990, Elihu Kate & Tamar Liebes decided to push Ang’s
analysis further by examining how viewers from distinct
cultural communities interpreted Dallas.
• They argued that text are received differently by varied
interpretive communities.
• Russians were suspicious of the shows content, believing
not only that it was primarily about America.
• American viewers believed that the show was primarily
about the lives of the rich.
• The cultural imperialism thesis has been belied by the
renewed strength of regional trends in the globalization
process. Asian culture, for example, has proliferated world
wide 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 said for Korean (K-POP) and Korean
telenovelas, which are widely successful regionally and
globally.
• The most obvious case of globalized Asian cuisine is sushi.
• And while it its 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.
• 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
• While Western culture remains powerful and media production is
still controlled by a handful of powerful Western corporations, the
internet, particularly the media is challenging previous ideas about
media and globalization.
• On the hand, these forms of communication have democratized
access. Anyone with an internet connection or a smart phone can
use facebook
and twitter for free.
• The democratic potential of social media was most evident
in 2000s during the wave of uprising known as the Arab
spring. Without access to traditional broadcast media like
Tv, activist opposing authoritarian regimesin Tunisia,
Egypt and Libya used Twitter to organize and to
disseminate information.
• More recently, the “women 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
themselves in when they are online.
• This segmentation, notes an article in the journal science, has been
exacerbated by the nature of social media feeds, which leads user 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 ones existing beliefs and opinions.

• This segmentation has been used by people in power who are aware that
the social media bubbles can produce a herd herd mentality.
• 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 the fake news .
• Mostly 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 election
he seeks to influence.
• In the places across the world, Putin imitators replicate his stragety
of online strolling and disinformation to clamp down on dissent and
delegitimize critical media.
• Critics of the increasingly dictatorial regime of Turkish President Recep
Tayyip erdogan are threatened by online mobs of pro-government trolls who
hack accounts and 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 newspaper, Facebook does
not have a team of editors who are trained to sift through and filter
information
• 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.
CONCLUSION:
This lesson showed that different media have diverse effects on
globalization processes.
*Societies can never be completely prepared for the rapid changes in
the system of communication.
*Every technological change, after all, creates multiple unintended
consequences.
*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, every one must collectively discover ways of dealing with
them responsibility and ethically.