Global Media Cultures

SOCSCI032 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

GLOBAL MEDIA CULTURE
• MEDIA
• The plural for medium – a means to convey something,
such as a channel of communication.
• This term came into popular usage because a word was
needed to talk about a new social issue.
• Though the word is relatively modern, humans have used
media of communication from their first days on earth,
and we will argue, those media have been essential to
globalization.
EVOLUTION OF MEDIA AND GLOBALIZATION
• Scholars have found it logical and helpful to organized
the history of study of media by time period or stages.
• Harold Innis (1950) divided media into three periods: oral,
print and electronic.
• James Lull (2000) added digital to those three.
• Terhi Rantanen (2005) places script before the printing
press and breaks down the electronic period into wired
and wireless, for six periods.
Oral Communication
• Speech is often the most overlooked medium in
histories of globalization. Yet, the oral medium – the
human speech – is the oldest and most enduring of all
media.
• How did the medium of language aid globalization?
Language allowed humans to cooperate. Sharing
information about tools and weapons led to the
spread of technology.
Oral Communication
• Language helped humans move, but it also
helped them settle down.
• Language stored and transmitted important agricultural
information across time as one generation passed on its
knowledge to the next, leading to the creation of villages
and towns
• Language also led to markets, trades of goods and
services, and eventually into cross-continental trade
routes.
Script
• Language was essential but imperfect. Distance
causes trouble for oral communication. Script –
the very first writing – allowed the humans to
communicate and share knowledge and ideas
over much larger spaces and across much longer
times.
• Writing has its own evolution and developed from cave paintings,
petroglyphs and hieroglyphs.
Script
• But script needed to be written on something.
Writing surfaces even have their own evolution.
• Writing was done at first as carvings into wood, clay,
bronze, bones, stone, and even tortoise shells.
• With scripts on sheets, humans had a medium that
catapulted globalization. Scripts allowed for the written
and permanent codification of economic, cultural,
religious, and political practice. These codes could then
be spread out over large distances and handed down
through time.
Printing Press
• It started the “information revolution” and
transformed markets, businesses, nations,
schools, churches, governments, armies and
more. All histories of media and globalization
acknowledge the consequential role of printing
press.
Printing Press
• Prior to the printing press, the production and
copying of written documents was slow,
cumbersome, and expensive.
• Reading and writing were practices of the ruling
and religious elite. The rich and powerful
controlled information.
Printing Press
• With the advent of the printing press, reading materials
suddenly was cheaply made and easily circulated. Millions
of books, pamphlets, and flyers were produced, reproduced,
and circulated.
• Literacy followed, and the literacy of common people was
revolutionized every aspect of life.
• Two overarching consequences:
1. Printing press change the very nature of knowledge
2. Print encourage the challenge of political and religious
authority because of its ability to circulate competing views.
Electronic Media
• Beginning of the 19th century, a host of new media
would revolutionize the ongoing processes of
globalization.
• Electronic media: because they require
electromagnetic energy (electricity) to use.
• Telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and television are
the usual media collected under electronic media.
Digital Media
• Digital media are most often electronic media that rely
on digital codes – the long arcane combinations of )s
and 1s that represent information.
• Many of our earlier media, such as phones and
televisions, can now be considered digital.
• The computer is the usual representation of digital
media. Computer comes as the latest, and most
significant medium to influence globalization.
NO GLOBALIZATION WITHOUT MEDIA
• The partnership of globalization and media is clear –
each eras saw marked influences of media on
globalization because humans have the impulse to
globalize and needs to communicate over distance to
proceed together through history, each driving and
influencing the other.
GLOBAL IMAGINARY AND GLOBAL VILLAGE
• Through media, the people of the world came to
know the world. That is, people needed to be able to
truly imagine the world – and imagine themselves
acting in the world – for globalization to proceed.
• The media are helping to bring about a fundamentally
new imaginary, what scholar Manfred Steger (2008)
has called a rising global imaginary – the globe itself
as a imagined community.
MEDIA AND ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION
• The media have been essential to growth of economic
globalization in our world.
• Indeed, the media have made economic globalization
possible by creating the conditions for global
capitalism and by promoting the conceptual
foundation of the world’s market economy.
MEDIA AND ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION
• The media foster the conditions for global capitalism.
• They fill our days with inivitations and exhortations for
consumption, from ceaseless commercials on radio and
television, to product placements in films, to digital
billboards, to pop-up ads, to broadsheets in bathroom
stalls.
MEDIA AND POLITCAL GLOBALIZATION
• Globalization has transformed world politics in
profound ways.
• It led to the formation and then the overthrow of
kingdoms and empires.
• It led to the creation of the nation-state. And now some
argued that nation-state is being weakened as people and
borders become ever more fluid in our globalizes world.
• Some argue that transnational political actors now rise in
prominence in our age of globalization.
MEDIA AND POLITCAL GLOBALIZATION
• Utmost importance, though media corporations
are themselves powerful political actors,
individual journalists are subject to brutal and
intense intimidation as more actors contend for
power. There has never been a more dangerous
time to work in media.
MEDIA AND POLITCAL GLOBALIZATION
• In the age of political globalization, the opposite
hypothesis appears to be true: governments
shape and manipulate the news.
• Officials around the world are extremely successful
at influencing and molding the news so that it
builds support for their domestic and foreign
policies.
MEDIA AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION
• The media, on one level, are the primary carriers
of culture.
• Through newspapers, magazines, movies,
advertisements, television, radio, the Internet
and other forms, the media produced and
display cultural products, from pop songs to top
films.
MEDIA AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION
• The media are people. These people are active
economic agents and aggressive political lobbyist on
matters of culture. They market brands aggressively.
They seek out new markets worldwide for their
cultural products. They actively bring about
interactions of culture for beauty, power and profit.
• Cultural Differentialism
• Cultural Convergence
DARK CONTOURS OF GLOBAL VILLAGE
• Globalization and media have done wondrous
deeds. They have succeeded in bringing the
world closer together.
• But do not get fooled: media technology used
not to better the world but to exploit the world
in pursuit of property, profit, and power.
DARK CONTOURS OF GLOBAL VILLAGE
• Globalization and media have built a village with
large tracts of economic injustice, political
repression, and cultural conflict. They have sewn
seeds of bitter and deadly discord between
nations, classes, political parties, ethnic groups,
religions, and neighbors. They pit humans
against nature. They have despoiled the very
globe they encircle.
End of Topic.
Thank You!