Transcript Document

AL AKHAWAYN UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
COMMUNICATIONS STUDIES
5 Communication and Cultural Globalisation
Lecture by Dr. Mohammed Ibahrine
based on Thussu’s International Communication
The statement of the day
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I hear, I forget
I see, I remember
• I do, I Understand
Confucius
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Structure of the Lecture
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
2. The flow of International Television Programmes
2.1 Hollywood Hegemony
2.2
3. Concerns for Cultural Diversity
4. Global English
5. Regionalization and Localization in the Media Market
5.1 Regionalization in Print journalism
5.2 Regionalized Advertising
5.3 Regionalization of Pop Music
5.4 Global Media local Audience
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Structure of the Lecture
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3. Media exports from the South to the North
 3.1 Case 1:
TV Globo
 3.2 Case 2:
The other Hollywood: the Indian
film industry
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
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The effects of the explosion in international
communication has been mainly preoccupied with
the economic dimensions of globalization at the
expense of cultural aspects of interactions between
and among the world’s peoples
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
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Is globalization another term for Americanization?
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The general pattern of media ownership indicates that West,
led by the USA, dominates the international flow of
information and entertainment in all major media sectors
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What is the impact of such one-way flows of global
information and entertainment on national and regional media
cultures
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
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It has been argued that international communication and
media are leading to the homogenization of culture, but the
patterns of global/national/local interactions may be more
complex
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The issue of hybridity: How global genres are adapted to siut
national cultural codes
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
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Some argue that such globally transmitted programming will
promote a shared media culture, based on English and
American lifestyles and values
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The globalization of the privatized, advertisement-driven
model of American commercial television has brought
consumer culture to living rooms across the world
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Graphic
As a visual medium, television has much wider reach than the
print media
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
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The international dissemination of images transcends
linguistic barriers
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Television is thus central to what Stuart Hall has called a
“global mass culture”, one dominated by the image, imagery,
and styles of mass advertising
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This mass culture may be influencing the way people think
about their regional or national identities
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1. Globalization of Western Culture
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The globalization of consumerism has been variously described as
“Coca-Cola-ization” or “McDonaldization”, creating a credit-card
global society modeled on US commercial culture epitomized by
Nike and Addidas and their promotion by celebrities like Michael
Jordan (Graphic )
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It has been argued that one reason for the global appeal to US
popular culture is its openness and mingling of multiplicity of cultures
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The intercultural density may constitute part of the subliminal
attraction of American popular media, music, film and television
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2. The Flow of International Television Programmes
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The global flow of consumerist messages through
international television has been by some as evidence of a
new form of cultural imperialism, especially in non-Western
world
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The US use its “soft power” to promote its national interest
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The flow of international television programmes from the West
to other parts of the world has become more pronounced in
the era of multi-channel television
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2. The Flow of International Television Programmes
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There is generally one-way traffic from the major-Westernexporting nations to the rest of the world
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In Latin America, virtually all imports are from the USA, even
in countries where a strong domestic television industry exists
such as Brazil and Mexico
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Even in a country like Britain, with substantial earnings from
exporting its own television programmes, the US television
presence is still significant
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2. The Flow of International Television Programmes
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The US presence on European television has increased
substantially, especially in film-based programming, which is
often dubbed into local languages
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With a forecast growth in digital satellite subscribers across
the continent, the US programmes intake is likely to grow
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2.1 Hollywood Hegemony
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The US presence on European television has increased
substantially, especially in film-based programming, which is
often dubbed into local languages
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With a forecast growth in digital satellite subscribers across
the continent, the US programmes intake is likely to grow
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Hegemony
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Hegemony is a key term in the critical studies of
international communication
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The term hegemony is associated with the Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci and
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his famous book, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks published first in English in 1971
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Hegemony
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The term is rooted in the notion that the dominant
social group in a society has the capacity to
exercise
» intellectual
» moral
direction over society at large
to build a new system of social alliances to support
its aims
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Hegemony
Gramsci argued that
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Military force was not necessarily the best
instrument to retain power for the ruling classes
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The more effective way to use power was to build a
consent by ideological control of cultural
 production
 and distribution
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Hegemony
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The dominant social class exerts
 moral
 Intellectual
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leadership through its control of such institutions as
 Schools
 Religious bodies
 Mass media
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Hegemony
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In international communication, the notion of
hegemony is widely used to
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conceptualize political functions of the media in
 propagating
 maintaining
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the dominant ideology
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Hegemony
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In international communication, the notion of
hegemony is widely used to
 In explaining the process of media
communication production
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The dominant ideology shapes the production of
news and entertainment
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Hegemony
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Though the media are notionally free from direct
government control,
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yet they act as agents of legitimization of the
dominant ideology
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2.1 Hollywood Hegemony
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One of the most contest issues in global film exports has been the
trade in films between the USA and Europe
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The audio-visual market in the EU remains overwhelmingly
dominated by American productions
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American productions account for between 60 to 90 per cent of
members states’ audio-visual markets
 Receipt from cinema ticket sales
 Video cassette sales and rental
 Sales of TV fiction programmes
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2.1 Hollywood Hegemony
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The process of trade deregulation and expansion in the US film and
television industry in the 1990s has also undermined the heavily
subsidized European film industry
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Mexico’s film industry experienced a dramatic fall in production
between 1988 and 1998
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In Japan film production has halved in the past three decades
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The leading Russian studio, Mosfilm, which used to produce up to 50
films a year in the 1970s and 1980s, released only three films in
1997
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2.1 Hollywood Hegemony
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European countries have developed joint ventures to deal with thiis
challenge
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3 Concern for Cultural Diversity
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The standardization of programmes on the world’s cinema
and television screens risks the disappearance of cultural
and linguistic identities
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Many countries have regulations on maintaining a certain
level of programming on television dealing with local content
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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation = 60 percent
France = 60 percent
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4 Global English
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English ahs emerged in the pats two hundred years as the lingua
franca of global commerce and communication
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The US assumption of this pre-eminent position ensured the
continuation of English as the key language of global
communication, with significant implication for the future of the
world’s other language
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English has acquired the status of being the language of power and
prestige
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4 Global English
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This is particularly noticeable in the field of book publishing, where
English-language publishers set the literary agenda globally, which is
often detrimental to the interest of many Southern writers
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English, preferably American English, the Californian English dialect,
the chief of the computer and the Internet and the accepted of global
communication
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The growth in multi-channel television, filled with American
programming or its local clones, is likely to extend an American
version of English language to all parts of the world
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Regionalization and Localization in the Media Market
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Although there is enough evidence of the globalization of Western
media products to raise profound concern fore cultures outside the
USA and UK
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There is also a trend towards the regionalization and localization of
media content to suit cultural priorities of audiences and fears of a
homogenized world culture may be premature
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It has become a commercial imperative for international media
organizations to adapt their product and services to local cultural
conditions
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Regionalization and Localization in the Media Market
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Even in Europe, regionalization has become a commercial imperative for
international broadcasters
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Adaptation of US programming is easier in the countries where English is
widely used, as in Scandinavia
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Some see this regionalization of products as a sign of global-local cultural
syncretism
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In the Arab world, key Western television channels are increasingly localizing
their contents to go beyond the expatriate constituency
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Even the BBC channels have regionalized their content
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Global Media and Local Audience?
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The providers of global media messages are
primarily Western, though they employ an array of
regional and local strategies to maximize their
audiences and advertising revenues
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Western media texts bring with them images of
lifestyles, expected social relations and ways of
representing
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Global Media and Local Audience?
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While the presence of imported television products on
screens in the South and in Europe is undeniable, the
consumption of them is by no means a passive, receptive
process
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The interactions with mediated Western culture can produce
complex results
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People first filter and reorganize what comes from hegemonic
culture and then integrate and fuse this with what comes from
their own historically memory
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Global Media and Local Audience?
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This plurality of interpretations of media messages is borne
out by the studies of television, the most powerful global
medium
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Although the number of people watching CNN or reading
Time magazine in developing countries may be tiny, they are
often those with power and influence
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It could be argued that international communication is
promoting a globalized, “westernized” elite which believes in
the supremacy of the market and liberal democracy
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Global Media and Local Audience?
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A pan-Asian cross-media survey in 1999 found that CNN and
MTV were the most popular channels among the elite affluent
sections of society in Asia
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Rather than creating a homogenized culture, globalization of
Western culture my be producing “heterogeneous
disjunctions”
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The global-local cultural interaction is leading to a hyprid
culture, which blurs the boundaries between the modern and
the traditional, the high and low culture and the national and
the global culture
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Global Media and Local Audience?
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Roland Robertson called this mingling
“glocalisation” characterized by cultural fusion as a
result of adaptation of Western media genres to suit
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Local languages
Styles
Cultural conventions
using new communication technologies
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