Media imperialism Free Essay Example

There is no globalization without media and communication but this relationship is often overlooked. Media always acts as a bridge interconnecting the world with many different cultures. Globalization is based on the concept of Marshall McLuhan’s “Global village” describes cross-border relations between countries, highlights the electronic media and technology that rapidly integrating the planet, thus events in one part of the world could be experienced in real-time from the others, as a result, the world become more integrated.

The hybridization or fusing of different cultures all over the world, mixing and representing these into certain dominant forms of media representation result in media globalization and multiculturalism.

However, owning to the diversified cultural and historical origins of different countries, the problem of cultural imperialism generally arise leading to the domination and homogenization of Western and American cultures owning to western colonialism influence.

Cultural imperialism can be defined as one specific culture controls or forces its own ideologies onto other cultures through the use of the media.

It is also refer to Westernization or Americanization because western values are now dominating the recent cultural industries, being forced and imposed on non-Western societies to which they are spread most especially by the mass media leading to homogenization of world’s diversified cultures into western ones thus destroying indigenous tradition of other parts of the world.

The global flows of information are mostly believed to be a one-way traffic from “the west-to-the-rest” on one hand due to the historical colonist background that helps imposing their own culture on the others, and on the other hand owning to the technological mediated commodities that rely on the most modern and sophisticated machineries in transmitting media messages, and the growth of cable, satellite TV and internet lead to a globalized world that rely heavily on technological communication systems.

Unfortunately, these technological devices are held by the west thus result in western domination.

The third reason is that the expansion of media conglomerates such as Rupert Murdoch News Corporation manipulates the media industries and spreading western ideologies, although it gives rise to multinational communication media and cultural industry, the root is from the west and responsible for mediating Western popular culture to the others and results in Western dominance. Some people may argue that although the main media products are from western countries, the idea of western cultural dominance no longer important due to the rise of eastern powers for example Hong Kong and Japan.

The global culture is forms of differentiation and hybridity rather than western homogenization as there are positive cultural exports between the west and non-west. The changes of traditions are only a form of cultural change within the region to meet the people’s need and not related to cultural imperialism. In this aspect, indigenous traditions are represented as cultural business emphasizing it own uniqueness and the cultural text could be combined to form another forms of transnational culture and powerful media geolinguistic regions could be act as a protective barrier in order to preserve their indigenous cultures.

Globalization also leads to media convergence as a result of rapid flow of materials across national borders. It suggested that media flows are multidirectional ongoing process with variety of meanings ascribed to image at various sites of consumption. World’s culture is marked by organized diversity rather than replicated uniformity. The term pop cosmopolitanism refers to similar transcultural flows of popular culture inspire new forms of global conscious and cultural competency and neither is neither “global village” nor “media imperialism”.

The global entertainment market is still dominated by America but other forms of cultures can also evolve so that it can still be popular within certain groups. Notions of cultural domination still presence but in a complex manner in forms of corporate and grassroots convergence. Corporate convergence is a form of Capitalist convergence that shows the interest of corporate giants in multinational conglomerates.

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