Cotexts, global media, global cultures. How do culture and globalization influence each other

CONTEXTS, GLOBAL MEDIA, GLOBAL CULTURES. HOW DO CULTURE AND GLOBALIZATION INFLUENCE EACH OTHER

Plan:
Global Media Cultures
Global Media, Globalised Cultures
Globalization of Culture Through the Media
The objective of the research programme is to undertake an extensive and focused analysis of the ways in which media cultures take part in processes of globalization, including how they challenge existing cultures and create new and alternative symbolic and cultural communities.
The research programme will address these questions through a theoretical discussion and reexamination of existing international research and through a series of individual empirical studies.
The programme is crossdisciplinary in nature, and involves a series of media.
Thus, theories and methodologies draw upon both humanistic and social science disciplines and a multiplicity of media cultures is examined:
television, Internet, advertising, news, sports etc.
The point of departure is the crucial role played by media in particular electronic and audiovisual media, in the cultural, political, economic and social processes that together constitute the process of globalization.
The media have an important impact on cultural globalization in two mutually interdependent ways:
Firstly, the media provide an extensive transnational transmission of cultural products and, secondly, they contribute to the formation of communicative networks and social structures.
The rapidly growing supply of media products from an international media culture presents a challenge to existing local and national cultures.
Discourses on globalisation still tend to treat the media, particularly television, as an independent cause of cultural change within societies.
However this synthesis of media, communications, cultural studies and sociology literature on globalisation suggests rather that there is multidirectional causality between media and culture in the process.
Thus globalisation of the media and culture does not necessarily spell imperialism of one by the other, but is often characterised by two-way interaction at both global and local levels.
Furthermore the politicoeconomic integration of nation-states and the place of multinational corporations in the capitalist world-system have significant impact on media and culture.
The consequence seems to be hybrid cultural identities in postmodern societies which have access to transnational media and are subject to global marketing.
In highlighting research in the late 20th century, this paper suggests that academic theorising and social policymaking in which global media and local culture are characterised as sole or at least dominant players are wholly inadequate, even defective.
The received view about the globalization of culture is one where the entire world has been molded in the image of Western, mainly American, culture.
In popular and professional discourses alike, the popularity of Big Macs, Baywatch, and MTV are touted as unmistakable signs of the fulfillment of Marshall McLuhan's prophecy of the Global Village.
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