“Media and Globalization”
• Firstly, what is globalization?
• Secondly, how have the questions of media, culture or visual
representation been understood within the discussion of
globalization?
• Thirdly, what are some of the important movements represented
by global or regional media that suggest other “optics” or other
visions, other circuits, or even something we might call a “new
media order”? And what are some the future possibilities for
global media and visual culture?
Globalization
Globalization describes the late twentieth-century condition of
encounter and interdependence across cultures, societies,
nations, and regions precipitated by an unprecedented
expansion of capitalism on a global scale; changes in world
political structure after World War II (post-1945) that included:
•
the rise of the United States and decolonization of the formerly
colonized world
• a shift from the concept of the nation-state as bounded and
independent toward a range of economic, social and political
connections across nations; and
• an acceleration in the scale, mode, and volume of exchange
and relationship in nearly all spheres of human activity.
Media within globalization has been understood in
several ways:
• The cultural imperialism argument emphasizes the information
technology divide within which dominant cultures impose
information, products, values on those of less dominant ones.
• The hybridization thesis stresses that globalization of economy,
trade, and migration has created cultures that are hybridized,
mixed, syncretic and composite. Globalization creates
combinations of sameness and difference: center to periphery,
periphery to center, creolization, and regional media
productions.
• A new media order, beyond sameness and difference suggests
that cultural exchanges are more complicated than similarity and
difference: polycentrism, indigenization, overlapping ‘scapes’ –
create alternative approaches to media and visual cultures.
Cultural imperialism
• MacBride and Roach observe that media communications
networks are unevenly distributed across the globe in ways that
conform to the uneven wealth and development of countries.
Rapid development of communications media in the postwar
years was dominated by multinational elites based in the most
powerful nations, subjecting the newly independent postcolonial
nations, developing countries to cultural imperialism.
• The 1980 UNESCO Commission headed by Sean MacBride
reported that the major news agencies of the U.S. (AP, UPI), the
U.K. (Reuters), and France (Agence France-Presse) had a
monopoly over flow of news to and from developing countries.
They asserted need for African reporting on Africa, Indian
perspectives on South Asia, as well as a “South-South” dialogue,
circumventing transmission through the dominant countries.
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Third Cinema: A Militant Response to Cultural
Imperialism
•
“The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the
concept has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact
or a historical event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary
filmmaking. Every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or
deepens the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or
purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the System finds
indigestible.”
•
“This cinema of the masses, which is prevented from reaching beyond
the sectors representing the masses, provokes with each showing, as in
a revolutionary military incursion, a liberated space, a decolonised
territory. The showing can be turned into a kind of political event, which,
according to Fanon, could be 'a liturgical act, a privileged occasion for
human beings to hear and be heard.'”
– Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards A Third Cinema”
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Gillo Pontecorvo, “Battle of Algiers” (1966)
Battle of Algiers (1966) Gillo Pontecorvo
• Reconstructed events during the 1954-62 Algerian war of
independence against French colonial rule (rule lasting 18301962)
• The film shows the brutal apartheid that separated the French
quarter from the Algerian district of the Casbah
• The film includes precise illustrations of the tactics of both the
F.L.N. insurgency and the French military counter-insurgency
• And it reflexively comments on Third Cinema’s struggles over
media representation
Black Girl (La noire de…), Ousmane
Sembene,1966 (Senegal)
 Critique of post-colonial relations
 Story of a servant who goes to work with
her employers when they return to France.
 Inverts centrality of European
characters/African.
 Shows the contradictions of former colonial
subjects who seek the promises of the
colonial motherland.
 Clip: opening, ending
LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS (The Hour of the Furnaces),
Fernando Solanas, 1968
One of the most influential films of Third Cinema.
Designed to be stopped and discussed as it was projected.
Clips: Intro , Dependence , Che
Touki Bouki, Djibril Diop Mambety,
1973 (Senegal)
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Synthesis of European cinema and
elements from West African images
narrative structures. Mambety’s films
juxtapose pastoral scenes with urban
capitalism, poverty and decadence,
tradition and modernity. Some would argue
Mambety has been influenced as much by
oral tradition as by avant-garde cinematic
conventions. The cinematic form is itself a
meta-commentary upon the role of
postcolonial media within globalization.
CNN coverage of the
Tienanmen Square Massacre, 1989:
Exemplifies the historical division of international news media that
MacBride and Roach term “cultural imperialism.”
Monopolistic controls of media continues to determine the kinds of
news that is broadcast and distributed.
Regional Media Production
While the “cultural imperialism” approach may explain the international
division of media access, it is limited as a description of local, regional,
and independent media; in order to make the important argument about
imperialism and inequality, it grossly underestimates the vital, ongoing
existing media and visual culture that exists worldwide. It tends to
exemplify a static functionalism that reduces culture to a mere passive
reflection of political economy, a mere reflection of western domination.
One key example: India is the largest film-producing country in the world,
and films made in India, particularly “Bollywood” as the Bombay or
Mumbai industry is known, are films extremely popular not only India,
but also in the rest of South Asia, in countries such as Pakistan, the
Middle East, the Caribbean, parts of Africa, parts of Southeast Asia,
and among the South Asian diaspora worldwide.
Other examples include the rise of Brazil’s TV Globo, the 4th largest
Television network in the world, and it’s successful export of
Telenovelas beginning in the mid-1960s.
Whether or Not There is a Tomorrow, dir. Nikhil Advani, 2003
Hybridization thesis
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Through global encounters and exchanges, cultures have hybridized, mixed,
become syncretic and composite.
In one version, hybridization suggests that globalization brings the ‘center to
the periphery,’ spreading western-style modernity, introducing Hollywood
genres and liberal values, ideas, and tastes to the non-west.
Another version emphasizes that media representations emanate from
regional centers in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and that goods, styles, ideas
and tastes from the ‘periphery’ are also imported to the ‘center,’ e.g.,
Bollywood, the Korean Wave, and the Chinese Fifth Generation are examples
of important regional media that produce another “optic,” which appeal to and
circulate among other spectators and audiences.
Globalization creates a tension between cultural difference and cultural
sameness; globalization differentiates, as well as equalizes, levels, or
unifies. The apparent spread of western cultural media actually produces
conditions that give rise to local particularisms to distinguish themselves and
comment on hybridization as a global process.
Amrit and Rabindra Singh, London born twin sisters Amrit and
Rabindra are artists who have exhibited widely in the UK and abroad.
Whilst drawing essentially on the Indian miniature tradition, their
paintings combine elements from Western and Eastern aesthetics to
create a unique genre in British Art practice which asserts the value of
traditional and non European art forms, describing their work as “pastmodern” (as opposed to post-modern).
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A. and R. Singh, “Mr. Singh’s India” (2000)
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A. and R. Singh, “Absent Lover” (2003)
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A. and R. Singh, “From Zero to Hero” (2002)
A New Media Order: Beyond Sameness and Difference
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Obama’s image taken up as an icon internationally:
Barack O’Bollywood clip
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjunction and Difference”
creating a new set of “imagined worlds”
ethnoscapes: the landscape of persons who are part of the shifting world in
which we live, cultural groupings that do not conform to nations. In an
ethnoscape, states are not major actors; rather multinational, diasporic
communities, tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and
other groups and individuals constitute the world.
technoscapes: the global configuration of technology, both high and low,
both mechanical and informational, that now moves at high speeds across
various boundaries: e.g., shifting consolidations of engineers, tech, and
infrastructure.
financescapes: the rapid disposition of global capital, as currency markets,
national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move through
national venues at great speed. Includes the global mobility of capital and
the people who staff finance operations, financial management, marketing,
and mixed production, e.g., Nike’s commodity chain.
mediascapes: the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and
disseminate information, images, newspapers, magazines, television, video
and film– now available to an increasing number of private and public
interests throughout the world; documentary or entertainment, electronic or
pre-electronic, their audiences may be local, national, or transnational.
ideoscapes: images and discourses, often directly political, whether those of
the state or counter to the state.
Arjun Appadurai
These configurations overlap and articulate together:
 Both an ethnoscape and a mediascape, the Korean Wave is
the name for the recent explosion of popular culture,
television, movies coming out of Seoul in the last five years
(replaces media from Japan.) Extremely popular not only in
South Korea, but in Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and
even in Latin America and the Middle East.
 This is also illustrated by the crossover successes of
particular genres or schools imported around the world, e.g.,
Hong Kong martial arts films, cinematic schools like the
“Fifth Generation” of Chinese directors( Zhang Yimou).
“Korean Wave,” Hallyu
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“Jewel In the Palace,” Dae Jang geum 대장금 (2003)
The Host (괴물, Gwoemul), Bong Joon Ho, 2006
“Winter Sonata” 겨울연가 (2002)
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Zhang Yimou, “Raise the Red Lantern” 大红灯笼高高挂 (1991)
Zhang Yimou, “Hero” 英雄 (2002)
A convergence of new
mediascapes and financescapes
The recent film Babel (2006) is a
collaboration by Paramount
Studios, Zeta Films, Mexican
director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu
and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga,
and high profile Hollywood actors
like Brad Pitt.
•
To study media within globalization is to understand information and visual
culture as neither merely commodified, nor as simply the inert effect or
function of transnational capitalism.
•
Rather, contemporary global media and visual culture expresses,
comments upon, and mediates the “structure of feeling” of globalization.
•
Not exclusively an expression of the “center” influencing the “periphery,”
global media includes:
– The “Third Cinema” critique of cultural imperialism (“Battle of Algiers”)
– Hybridization of western and non-western cultural forms (“Touki
Bouki”)
– Indigenization of western themes (Singh Twins)
– Ethnoscapes and mediascapes sustained by regional industries
(Bollywood,Telenovelas, Korean Wave)
– Crossover imports or collaborations from former “periphery” to the
“center” (“Hero,” “Babel”)