LESSON

7
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MEDIA AND GLOBALIZATION

I. INTRODUCTION
Different media have diverse effects on globalization processes. Now, it seems more
likely that social media will splinter cultures and ideas into bubbles of people who do not
interact. 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
will continue to engender social changes. Can society be completely prepared for the rapid
changes in the systems of communication? The relationship between globalization and
media will be unravelled to further understand the contemporary world.

II. OBJECTIVES
 Analyze how various media drive different forms of global integration.
 Define responsible media consumption.
 Describe the emergence of cultural imperialism.

III. LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Design your own social media application icon.

Answer the following questions.

1. What sets it apart from the current existing social media application?

2. How does it contributes to globalization? Cite example.

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" (the plural of medium), they mean the technologies of mass
communication. Print media include books, magazines, and newspapers. Broadcast media
involve radio, film, and television. Finally, digital media cover the internet and mobile mass
communication. Within the category of internet media, there are the e-mail, internet sites,
social media, and internet-based video and audio.

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 Marshall McLuhan once
declared that "the medium is the message." He did not mean that ideas ("messages") 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. Thus, television is not a simple
bearer of messages, it also shapes the social behavior of users and reorient family behavior.
Since it was introduced in the 1960s, television has steered people from the dining table
where they eat and tell stories to each other, to the living room where they silently munch
on their food while watching primetime shows. Television has 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. This development, according to some
philosophers at the time, dulled the people's capacity to remember.

Something similar can be said about cellphones. On the one 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. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it is
merely change with a trade-off.

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
famous writer was merely drawing attention to the historically and technologically specific
attributes of various media.
 The Global Village and Cultural Imperialism

McLuhan used his analysis of technology to examine the impact of electronic media. Since
he was writing around the 1960s, he 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. If tribal villages
once sat in front of fires to listen to collective stories, the members of the new global village
would sit in front of bright boxes in their living rooms.

In the years after McLuhan, media scholars further grappled with the challenges of a
global media culture. A lot of these early thinkers assumed 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, therefore, 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. They argued
that texts are received differently by varied interpretive communities because they derived
different meanings and pleasures from these texts. Thus, people from diverse cultural
backgrounds had their own ways of understanding the show. 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

Social Media and the Creation of Cyber Ghettoes

By now, 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.

As with all new media, 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 Libya 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.

However, social media also have their dark side. In the early 2000s, commentators
began reterring to the emergence of a "splinternet” and the phenomenon of
"cyberbalkanization" 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. Critics of the
increasingly dictatorial regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are threatened
by online mobs of pro-government trolls, who hack accounts and threaten violence. Some
of their responses have included 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 newspapers, Facebook does not have a team of editors
who are trained to sift through and filter information. If a news article, even a fake one,
gets a lot of shares, it will reach many people with Facebook accounts.

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, for example, influence American
elections on the cheap.

As consumers of media, users must remain vigilant and learn how to distinguish fact
from falsehood in a global media landscape that allows politicians to peddle what President
Trump's senior advisers now call "alternative facts.” Though people must remain critical of
mainstream media and traditional journalism that may also operate based on vested
interest, we must also insist that some sources are more credible than others. A newspaper
story that is written by a professional journalist and vetted by professional editors is still
likely to be more credible than a viral video produced by someone in his/her bedroom, even
if both will have their biases. People must be able to tell the difference.
 Answer the following questions.

1. What is the role of media in globalization process? Cite example.

2. Do you think globalization leads to cultural imperialism?

3. What strategies can you use to distinguish between fake and factual information on the
internet?