Media Globalization and its Effect upon International Communities: Seeking a Communication Theory Perspective

Signorielli, N., & Morgan, M. (Eds.). (1990). Cultivation analysis: New directions in media effects research. Newbury Park: Sage.

Straubhaar, J., & LaRose, R. (2004). Media now: Understanding media, culture, and technology. (4th ed.) Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth.

Tomlinson, J. (2002). The discourse of cultural imperialism. In D. McQuail (Ed.), Mcquail's reader in mass communication theory (pp. 223-237). London: Sage Publications.

Whetmore, E. J. (1993). Mediamerica, mediaworld: Form, content and consequence of mass communication. (5th ed.) Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

[1] In this paper, the term first tier corporation shall refer to significant multinational media organizations. The term second tier refers to regional corporations, while third tier are the smallest players, with only local influence.

[2] McLuhan and Powers collaborated on the project. The book was published nine years after McLuhan died. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This Just In: The Boob-Tube, Not YouTube, Is Transforming the World

 

Consumers and businesses, voters and politicians, and readers and writers today are caught up in the social media wave. There is no escaping the magnetic pull the Web, and sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have over our everyday existence. We continue to hear about the diminishing importance and relevance of traditional media channels--namely TV, radio and print. There is sort of an air of inevitability about it all. Old media will give way to new and the World will be better, more peaceful and prosperous for it.

But a provocative new research paper boldly challenges this worldview. Perhaps even more striking than its finding on media usage around the world is how the research reveals a dynamic that John Edwards--he of "Two Americas"--might appreciate. We live (and consume media) in Two Worlds: The Internet-ascendant minority world (US & Europe), and the TV-ascendant majority World (The Developing World).

Charles Kenny, a development economist with the World Bank, argues that television, far from being a mature or fading phenomenon in areas like India, Africa and Brazil, has picked up quite a bit of steam over the last decade or so in population penetration and impact. TV growth has been especially driven by the expansion of satellite and digital cable TV, and with that the number of channels and choices.

But the quantitative influence of TV is not really the story; it is about the qualitative effect of the medium and its content: TV has become a revolutionary force for good in the majority world (not just a couch potato-maker). Using a robust sample of data over many years and countries, Kenny shows a high correlation between areas that receive and consume TV and positive trends in literacy, school enrollment, health outcomes, birth control, lower levels of drug use and corruption, and even increased prosperity.

Take soap operas, a genre famously attacked by cultural critics and seemingly on the decline in the "North." In Brazil, India and other developing areas, soaps portray successful and independent women--and watching them has been linked with increased social status, rights and economic well being for women in those countries.

What Kenny's article does not focus on is the planet's digital divide. Internet use within the developing world is estimated at less than 15% of the population, and under 3% in sub-Saharan Africa. Since the Web is still a relatively new phenomenon, it is not yet possible to study population impact meaningfully. But Kenny thinks that the mainstream media and development groups have oversold the promise of the Internet while TV and development research (including important work by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster) has been under-reported. (It is interesting that Foreign Policy, NPR and TV Guide UK are the most prominent media to report on the Kenny research.)

While TV can be constructive in low income societies, it should not be viewed as a panacea, says Georgia Tech Professor and Internet global development guru Michael Best. He takes issue with some of Kenny's generalizations and interpretation: "To refer to Baywatch as 'an everyday tale of lifesaving folk' is really too much; one need not employ a feminist perspective to still understand the departure from the 'everyday' evinced in Baywatch."

Ethan Zuckerman, a global social entrepreneur with Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues for a more balanced view on how media can be used to solve problems and improve societies in the developing world. "We tend to overvalue the impact of the Internet in the developing world and undervalue the impacts of other technologies," he says. "Television has had important development impacts. So have radio, especially community radio, and mobile phones. Because we're going through an Internet revolution in the U.S., we tend to look for a parallel revolution in the developing world."

Zuckerman lauds Kenny's work, but does challenge Kenny's portrayal of TV as a 'be-all' device. Kenny's research doesn't address the one-way nature of television, says Zuckerman. "Lots of people consume it, and very few people produce it. One of the reasons we're so excited by the Internet is that it's a two-way medium. It requires a lot of work for video to become two-way."

In the short term, radio combined with mobile phones will provide two-way interaction in the developing world. Zuckerman offers a couple examples: A radio show in eastern Congo that allows women in the community to send in questions anonymously via SMS, talk shows in Ghana that allow individuals to confront government ministers on the air. Zuckerman says, "I sometimes quip that radio plus mobiles=60% of the Internet."

Kenny acknowledges the efficacy of radio and mobile phones: "Radio is tied to less people stepping on mines, more people learning in school ... and mobiles have been associated with folks earning more from fishing and agriculture and smoking less amongst other things. I'd say all three technologies--TV, radio, mobiles--have had a bigger impact on developing countries than the Internet to date."

That's why technology development experts like Charles Kenny, Ethan Zuckerman and Michael Best--as well as philanthropists like Tim Berners-Lee who chairs the World Wide Web Foundation--are advocating a more pluralistic media approach that combines channels and technologies in working to solve social and economic problems in developing countries. "I just wouldn't put much Foundation effort behind streaming Baywatch," says Best. "Surely we can do better than that."  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Community, Culture and Globalization

By Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard

In May of 2001, the authors represented in this anthology met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como in northern Italy. The villa and its grounds are beautiful, especially when adorned by spring’s profusion of leaf and blossom. Succumbing to spring fever, from time to time we abandoned the conference room for a wide lawn overlooking the lake.

One afternoon, Maribel Legarda, artistic director of the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), volunteered to lead theater exercises as a demonstration of PETA’s work, kicking off a discussion that was to touch on privatization and commercialization of cultural development. Following Maribel’s instructions, everyone assembled by world region into five groups: we joined one that included several people from the United States, one Canadian, one Peruvian and one Mexican. Other groups were just as polyglot: the Asian cluster included someone from Hong Kong, two members from India and three Australians (one born in Vietnam). Our eventual assignment turned out to be silly, ironic and hilarious: devising and performing a mock television commercial for community cultural development. But for a warm-up, Maribel had each group choose a Beatles’ song to perform with enthusiasm. If memory serves, our group chose "All You Need Is Love." Another group belted out "Yellow Submarine." Without conferring or even knowing the choices the other groups had made, each picked an entirely different Beatles tune.

Here, in microcosm, we have the dialectic of globalization: two dozen community arts practitioners and theorists come from 15 countries on six continents to a meeting in Italy. The meeting’s purpose is to share experiences and ideas gleaned from their own work in communities, exploring commonalities as well as differences. Before the meeting, they conduct an introductory dialogue in English via e-mail to introduce themselves and their work, together beginning to formulate an agenda of issues for their face-to-face meeting. At the meeting, their presentations are earnest, diverse, often amazing and about as multifarious as can be imagined: a community dance project in which construction workers performed a pas de deux for tractors; a half-mile-long mural commemorating the suppressed history of southern California; a Vietnamese youth theater; a youth-created video game on unemployment; and many, many more. Their common aims are to help people wrest a meaningful and grounded sense of cultural identity from the jaws of a rapacious market culture and, by engaging with ideas, feelings and expression, to catalyze social action. But when they search for a lingua franca, they turn to the products of that market, from the Beatles — one of the most successful franchises of the commercial cultural industries — to the formulas of television advertising, familiar to each and all.  

This anthology was created to raise the profile of community cultural development practice around the world by offering a rich mixture of experiences, ideas and stories that demonstrate the validity of this work as a stimulus to pluralism, participation and equity in cultural life, and as a response to globalization’s pull toward the standardization of commercial culture. Our hope has been to create a tool that can be used by anyone to understand the community cultural development field, a book that can serve as a resource for both training and practice.

"Community cultural development" describes the work of artist-organizers ("community artists") who collaborate with others to express identity, concerns and aspirations through the arts and communications media, while building cultural capacity and contributing to social change. In community cultural development work, community artists, singly or in teams, use their artistic and organizing skills to serve the emancipation and development of a community, whether defined by geography (e.g., a neighborhood), common interests (e.g., members of a union) or identity (e.g., members of an indigenous group). The work is intrinsically community-focused: while there is great potential for individual learning and development within its scope, it is aimed at groups rather than individuals. Individual issues are considered in the context of collective awareness and common interests.

Culture — the sum total of signs, beliefs, artifacts, social arrangements and customs created by human beings — is both the container and the content of this work. To be human is to make meaning. Powerful meanings attach to even the smallest matters: the fate of species of bird or a plot of land; the way a regulation is interpreted or the outcome of a particular court case. Social life offers infinite opportunity for organizing, as is seen wherever people protest against laws and policies they oppose or rally support for their chosen causes. But culture subsumes them all. When we speak of culture, we describe a people’s "operating system," to borrow an analogy from one of humanity’s most suggestive creations, the computer. Culture underpins all choices, all outcomes. It contains the means of expressing all thoughts and emotions. It enables all associations. And within this encompassing realm, the purest and densest meanings are conveyed through art, through individual and collective creations driven by the desire to express and communicate, unencumbered by extraneous objectives.

Thus, culture rather than a particular art form is the true medium of this work. Within the community cultural development field, projects are remarkably diverse. All artistic media and styles are adaptable. Projects have employed visual arts, architectural and landscape design, performing arts, storytelling, writing, video, film, audio and computer-based multimedia. Activities include structured learning, community dialogues, community mapping and documentation, oral-history collection, the physical development of community spaces and issue-driven activism, as well as the creation of performances, public art, exhibitions, moving-image media, computer multimedia and publications. In all this work, the powerful experience of bringing to consciousness and expressing one’s own cultural values is deemed worthwhile in and of itself, apart from the outcome.

Despite superficial differences, the field’s internal diversity reflects strong common principles and values. The following unifying principles originally appeared in "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development," a companion volume to this international anthology, focusing on community cultural development’s definition, history, theoretical underpinnings and current conditions in the United States. (Copies are available free of charge from the Rockefeller Foundation.) Community cultural development projects aim to realize these common principles:

• Active participation in cultural life is an essential goal of community cultural development.
• All cultures are essentially equal, and society should not promote any one as superior to the others.
• Diversity is a social asset, part of the cultural commonwealth, requiring protection and nourishment.
• Culture is an effective crucible for social transformation, one that can be less polarizing and create deeper connections than other social-change arenas.
• Cultural expression is a means of emancipation, not the primary end in itself; the process is as important as the product.
• Culture is a dynamic, protean whole, and there is no value in creating artificial boundaries within it.
• Artists have roles as agents of transformation that are more socially valuable than mainstream art-world roles — and certainly equal in legitimacy. ^[1]

 

Many of the authors whose work is included here are based in the developing world or in marginalized communities within the industrial world. Considered as a group, they represent a departure from the stereotype of the deracinated intellectual described by commentators from Fanon to Naipul, alienated by education and training from heritage culture, yet unable to enter fully into or find deep satisfaction within the transnational imposed culture. Rather than surrender to permanent alienation, these artists and activists have grasped the power inherent in their simultaneous roles of participant and observer. Understanding the new reality of multiple identities and multiple belonging, they serve as catalysts and conduits, dedicating their skills to the development of their communities, to the articulation of suppressed voices.

Although their particular locations differ greatly, these authors respond in their work to realities that now transcend all national boundaries. Every current society is multicultural due to the penetration of virtually all cultural barriers by colonization, immigration and the nearly universal proliferation of electronic media. Every chapter of this volume touches on some of the many and varied challenges this presents. Although most projects described here take place within the bounds of a particular location, every one reflects the reality that community cultural development work is intrinsically transnational and multicultural in scope and outlook — from the work with migrants described here by Judy Baca and Mok Chiu Yu to the second-generation immigrant cultures depicted by Tony Le Nguyen and Gary Stewart to the many depictions of populations straining to shoulder the cultural impact of industrialization.

More fully than any other artistic endeavor or development approach, community cultural development embodies the deep appreciation of cultural diversity described in the first three articles of the "UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity" adopted in November 2001:

Article 1 — Cultural diversity: the common heritage of humanity

Culture takes diverse forms across time and space. This diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities of the groups and societies making up humankind. As a source of exchange, innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. In this sense, it is the common heritage of humanity and should be recognized and affirmed for the benefit of present and future generations.

Article 2 — From cultural diversity to cultural pluralism

In our increasingly diverse societies, it is essential to ensure harmonious interaction among people and groups with plural, varied and dynamic cultural identities as well as their willingness to live together. Policies for the inclusion and participation of all citizens are guarantees of social cohesion, the vitality of civil society and peace. Thus defined, cultural pluralism gives policy expression to the reality of cultural diversity. Indissociable from a democratic framework, cultural pluralism is conducive to cultural exchange and to the flourishing of creative capacities that sustain public life.

Article 3 — Cultural diversity as a factor in development

Cultural diversity widens the range of options open to everyone; it is one of the roots of development, understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence.[2] 

Collectively, the essays in this volume assert community cultural development’s value as a response to the homogenizing effects of the complex phenomenon known as "globalization." The increasing economic irrelevance of national boundaries and growing interdependence of worldwide trade, capital and population have been a boon to markets, hugely escalating the global penetration of new technologies and cultural products. That practitioners from 15 different countries were able to conduct a pre-conference dialogue via e-mail and to enter so easily and enthusiastically into a global Beatles’ medley at Bellagio attests to this new reality. These same phenomena have also raised serious concern that commercial considerations will override efforts to protect our cultural commonwealth — from local seed stocks to indigenous architecture to home-grown music — resulting in a world society more reminiscent of a hypermart than a garden of human possibility.

Globalization is a newish term (the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use in 1962); but to see the phenomenon as entirely novel would be to mistake the label for the contents. In fact, the community cultural development field came into being in response to earlier social forces we now group under the label globalization.

Consider the international phenomenon known as Theater for Development, discussed in David Kerr’s essay, Masitha Hoeane’s interview and elsewhere. By the early 1970s, community workers and artists in the developing world had conducted extensive experiments in the use of theater to educate and involve community members in campaigns to improve their quality of life in the face economic and social concerns. As Ross Kidd and Martin Byram wrote in their 1978 how-to manual for such work:

Popular theatre can be used for extension work and adult education. As entertainment it can catch and hold the interest of large numbers of people. As a dramatic way of presenting local problems, it makes people in the audience see these problems in a fresh way. Through discussion (which follows every performance) people can talk about these problems with others and see what can be done about them. Often this leads to action.[3]

Their work was shaped by new geopolitical conditions — the restructuring of local economies, the decline of traditional cultures, the rise of insurgent indigenous movements and governments’ repressive responses, all in the setting of post-colonial Africa. Among the typical local problems the Kidd and Byram manual lists are those now associated with globalization:

Young people drift to towns. Women and old people left in villages 
People forgetting traditional practices 
Unemployment 
Inflation

This early community cultural development work — called by many names, including popular theater, Theater for Development, people’s theater — was shaped both by the unique conditions facing each locality and by inspiring examples circulated throughout the growing international network of practitioners.