Free will society
International communication
May 2014
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM VS GLOBALIZATION Is there somebody controlling everything? In this new post, I wanted to talk the everyday life question that we all had one day : is everything controlled? It is the famous topic of the international complot. In the history, this topic always interested human: the enemy was always plotting. During the XVII in Italia, hundreds of religious or nobles’ people died poisoned because of the struggle for throne. In the XIX, the complot was made by the Jews to control the economy. In the XX century it was the communists. What about now? Now, the question is: Are the northern countries, and in particular the US, controlling our minds to makes us consume every day more, adopting the capitalism ideologies? We are going to focus this topic on the media and ideological scale (Appadurai) First, we have to define what is the notion of cultural Imperialsim defined by Boyd-Barret. For this author, several clues, in time and space, justify the existence of an American culture imperialism in the world. In an empiric analysis, he found that imperialism can vary between different Medias and between different levels, scales or sphere of activity in all the sector of the media industry. But what is it exactly. Several authors analyzed this phenomenon like Mario Kaplun, Dallas Smythe, or Herbert Schiller. They explained that not only a few western countries controlled the meaning of production and distribution for the biggest medias, but also that that control allows them to transmit their particular way of life, think, values and in particular individualism and consumerism. The definition of Herbert Schiller (1976) is very relevant of their theory: ‘The concept of cultural imperialism today best describes the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how is dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the value and structures of the dominating center of the system.’ But of course, there are a lot of critics to that theory. Here we have a very good and structured critic of what is called the homogenized view of globalization: for Golding and Harris (1997), Media Imperialism “overstates external determinants and undervalues the internal dynamics, not least those of resistance, within dependent societies. Secondly, it conflates economic power and cultural effects. Thirdly, there is an assumption that audiences are passive, and that local and oppositional creativity is of little significance. Finally, there is an often patronizing assumption that what is at risk is the ‘authentic’ and organic culture of the developing world under the onslaught of something synthetic and inauthentic coming from the West.” What if all this wasn’t a proper imperialism, but just the market logics that create the superior number of western media content? And is that superiority putting in danger the free will of the audience all around the world? It is important here to distinguish the economic power and the social influences. Those two notions are link, but it is important to see in which way. Because some time economic power can be rejected by a society. For instance in France, even if the Medias are full of American content, there is a big repulsion of American society and way of life. Some authors like Appadurai (1990) integrated the vocabulary to be more contrasted like Indigenization or
Free will society
International communication
May 2014
hybridization. For the readers, we advise you to go further in the analysis of globalization as a homogenized or heterogenized process.