Critical Perspectives: Cultural Imperialism and Appropriation.

Exploring the impact of:
-Globalisation- the media is a global marketplace/www.
-Cultural Imperialism- 'exploration' of values through global media
-Cultural appropriation

Global dominance explored:
-Globalisation considers the extent to which certain political economies 'dominate' the world through the process by which global media organisations as 'cultural transmitters'.
-Thus major media organisations on the world stage 'drowned out' smaller regional outlets as they tend to follow this lead and effectively replicate their stance and mode of production.
-In terms of news, accusations that 'US style journalism' is 'homogenising' world news coverage, becoming 'missionaries of corporate capitalism.
-Equally it has the potential to establish a dominant GLOBAL CULTURE.

Globalisation:
-It can be regarded as a positive or a negative phenomena.
-Why has it happened?
-Global media brands and output transmitting and selling formats on a worldwide scale are at least part of the reason.
-An increasingly 'marketed' media landscape on a global scale, chase big revenues and operate as nay other product being sold- dependent on supply and demand. But what affect does that have?

The consequence of 'Cultural Imperialism':
-In general, what we are talking about is the potential for the media to allow one culture to dominate over another.
-What does this mean for storytelling and the coverage of world issues.

Consequence:
-CNN have been accused of stirring up 'compassion fatigue' through their reporting of global suffering.
-Rather than motivation and mobilising change amongst world powers and individuals, its suggests that it has desensitised the audience to major world crises.
-Furthermore, focusing on particular events of 'crises coverage', global tv news coverage ignores many more significant events and there for they are excluded from policy debate.

Globalisation: World News- Whose News?
-When related to news, globalisation is distinct from globalisation in general- which tends to focus upon socioeconomic lines such as the impact of international trading.

Changing News Formats:
-Change the style and presentation of news programming.

-EG British television inherited it’s news formatting model from the US in the mid 1950s, with both ITN and then the BBC taking on generic features such as :
-‘dramatic’ tone, but distinct in form from drama.
- Half an hour in duration of ‘comprehensive’ coverage.
- Generically formatted but still unique to their individual brands.

Truly Global?
-How likely is it that TV news can truly provide 24/7 global ‘breaking news’ -
-More often it can revert to the usual short cuts in storytelling and story seeking as it does on domestic stories? Ie elite voices and establishments dominate.
-Global TV news players emerged throughout the 1990s and beyond
-with the likes of BBC World and Murdoch’s News Corps news brands such as Fox, Sky and Star competing with one another on a world stage for audiences in new markets such as China and India -
-what ideological impact is this likely to have?

TV News & The Global Public Sphere

-Not everyone agrees that global ideological dominance is a consequence of modern TV news operations –
-[global TV news] has the capacity to contribute to democracy ..... Through it’s range of respresentations, genres and information. ...... [but it’s plurality is] compromised by .... Images of consumerism’ (Barker, C : 1997 “ 230)
-I.e. the media can enhance and convey cultural differences, as well as the sort of ‘bad’ news which might reinforce cultural prejudices e.g. conflict or famine in the Third World etc.
-Furthermore meanings are negotiated and filtered through culturally varied ways of understanding therefore less culturally “imperialist” than the ‘Global Dominance’ model suggests.
-‘Although US programmes might lead the world in their transportability across cultural boundaries .... They are rarely the most popular .... Where viewers have a reasonable menu of locally produced programmes to choose from’ (Sinclair et al, 1999 : 176)
-Is this the case?
-What is the affect of social media on re-dressing the balance?

It's a Small World After all
-Can global and social media make the world more ‘interconnected, inder-dependent” (Cottle, 2009, p351)?
-Thus is global television is not something which necessarily causes cultural imperialism, but rather allows us to see the ourselves and each other as facing the same challenges and issues.
-What impact does this have on the potential for both news and fiction adaptation storytelling?

Drama & Cultural Appropriation:
-Equally drama and dramatic adaptations move across cultural ‘boundaries’.
-Consider : implications of taking a Manga-inspired story such as “Ghost in the Shell” and translating that to a US blockbuster? Is it as some have claimed an example of “Hollywood Whitewashing Controversies”:
-The issues of Cultural Appropriation is at the fore in these cases.
-What implications or examples are worth considering in your choice of screen adaptation? They may be less overt but still important to consider.

Global market place Vs Global representation?
-So why is it that, given there is an inherently global marketplace for media (particularly online) and that therefore audiences are inherently diverse, that major film producers should consider it so difficult to be more representative of the original ethnicity of the text itself??
-What is it that motivates ”cultural appropriation” ?

Does any of this matter? Reception Theory:

-The implications for cultural appropriation are not necessarily that we in the audience are “Passive” to the meanings “encoded” in the material they watch.
-Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory (1980) argued that audiences “De-code” what is presented to them and impose their own ideologies onto what they see and hear.
-Dominant Reading (views as intended)
-Negotiated Reading (views with some interpretation) • Oppositional Reading (opposition of intended view)
-Thus it is not necessarily the case that views are always imposed as intended nor even that the intention is always overt in the producer of the piece. is it not true that the media can affect our views and behaviour towards one another?
-Consider the role of the media in making sense of the world and what “matters”...