chapter5, detailed outline

Communication and culture



I- What is culture?

- Culture defines what it means to be a human being.

- It is all out behavior summed up, out whole life experience.

- The study of culture as a way of life draws more on social history, anthropology, ad sociology and focuses on the structures of everyday life and its forms of interactions.

- Mass media are key components in any nation's culture.

II- Culture Industries

- The term cultural industries was coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

- They developed an approach to scholarship called critical theory that was based on Marxist philosophy.

- They first coined the term Cultural Industries in their work Dialectic Enlightenment in 1947.

- It was used to refer to products which were tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption by masses, are manufactured more or less according to a plan.

- They believed that the real purpose of mass media was to provide ideological justification for the capitalistic societies where these industries developed.

- Mass culture was developed as a tool of capitalism for the social control of society, according to Adorno and Horkheimer.

- The term culture industries carries a more positive meaning today.

-UNESCO describes culture industries as important national economic resources that allow expressions of creativity to be copied and boosted by industrial processes and worldwide distribution.

- UNESCO includes publishing, music audiovisual technology, electronics, video games, and the Internet in the category of cultural industries.

a- Other Cultural Groupings

- Businesses have cultures, and each business has its own set of cultural characteristics.

- Any organization to which we belong develops a culture if it manages to survive.
- An Organization's culture is the glue that keeps people attached to it and allows members to identify with it.
- It is the set of meanings the members of the group share.

- We all belong to multiple groups, each with its own characteristic culture. These include schools, religious organizations, and civic groups.

- Each family has a culture that distinguishes it from other families; a set of traditions, a way of living and interacting.

- Many animal groupings also have cultures.

III- Transmission of Culture

We must learn the culture of those groupings before we can become an integral part of them.

- The primary symbolic system used to transmit culture is that of language.

- While the written language increased the power to transmit one culture. Thereby bringing people together, it differentiated people and nations form other cultures, thereby separating them.

- This linguistic bond in contemporary society is achieved through television. Television helps perpetuate national cultures.

- The pervasiveness of English is believed to threaten many other cultures.


IV- How the west dominates in production of culture?

- The U.S is imperialistic when it comes to cultural products, especially when it comes to films and television programs.

- There are several factors besides the economy of a nation which influences the extent of inflow of TV material. The population size is naturally crucial importance, since it largely determines such marketing conditions as the size of the TV audience, the general dominance of a national culture, and usually also a common or unifying language.

- When a country allows news importation it is in effect importing a piece of another country's politics.

- And because the media also deal in ideas, their influence can be unpredictable in form and strength.

- Economic interdependence becomes a key to survival in the global system, while the strategies for preserving important elements of the cultures of the societies around the world have received much less attention.

- We don’t exactly know what the cultural impact of consuming American products might be.

- The European Audiovisual Observatory attributes this phenomenon to three factors in the European member countries: The effect of deregulation; the advance of digital technology; and the overcapacity of European satellite systems.

V- What cultures do to defend cultural autonomy?

A- Quotas: - The U.S has taken the position that cultural products should be treated like any other goods traded in the market.

- The U.S has opposed the setting of quotas on film and television imports viewing such quotas as trade barriers.

- However, other countries have been successful in obtaining a cultural exception for audiovisual products in the GATT, claiming that these are expressions of national identity and should be preserved.

b- Subsidies: - The U.S also opposes the use of government subsidies provided for development of films and television programs.

- Many countries take the position that without subsidies, their audiovisual sector will totally succumb to foreign imports.

- Feigenbaum believes that subsidies offer the most promise for boosting production of cultural products, and he argues that government aid to film and television production should not have to be justified on an economic basis, for him culture is its own reward.

c- Regional Alliances including co productions: Co produced films , usually ones that combine the talents and resources of two film production companies in two countries, have several advantages.

- They have a larger domestic market, that of two or more countries.

- They have appeal across cultures, not just within a particular culture.

- They usually have wider name recognition of principle actors, director, and so on.

e- Adaptations

- For countries with smaller markets or fewer resources, film and television program production is too expensive to release many new products.

- Audiences prefer local programs.

- The compromise that has been struck to address this dilemma is increasingly popular. It amounts to buying the rights to an imported television series or film and adapting it to the local culture and language.

F- Resistance

- Some cultural groups try to resist being deluged by products from abroad by producing more products about themselves.

VI- Not all pop culture is American

- Audiences around the world still prefer their local cultures and their local culture products to those imported.

-Current trends seem to show that local production is regaining dominance in television content.

-Much of the magazines and book publishing in the United States is also owned by foreign companies.

VII- Role of journalists in production of culture

-Culture is at the core of what journalists do.

- The concept of objectivity that has been under attack for most of this century does not exist.

- News culture is also revealed in news format.

VIII- Managing Cultural Conflict

- Cultures of the world do not always get along.

- Out concern is what role the media play in preventing conflicts internationally.

- We might think that it would be able to help smooth out the differences between various cultural groupings.

- The global media might encourage cultural conflict by sending the message that we are all alike, we are all consumers, and nothing makes us unique.

- The way cultures struggle to preserve a distinctive identity, they may create more conflict with other cultural groups, rather than creating a climate for mutual cultural understanding.


IX- Hybrid Cultures and the Media

- In a melting pot, none of the different groups ever became totally assimilated.

- However, while immigrants may hold onto their cultural roots when they settle in another society, they also modify their tradition and behaviors in what has been called variously a process of hybridity or glocalization.

- As national identities decline and local identities are strengthened through resistance to globalization, new identities or hybridity also take place of the old national identities.

- The dominant culture also takes on some characteristics and traditions from the migrants to that culture.

- Roberston writes that this process of glocalisation occurs in the world's media too, he challenges the notion of media imperialism arguing that cultural messages from the U.S to other cultures are interpreted according to the local culture context, and that that U.S produced movies and programs modify their products to a global market because they need the global market to be profitable. Furthermore, that national cultural products end up being interpreted and consumed in a local way and also ideas and cultural products flow from the periphery to the center far more often than we have thought.


X- What we can conclude


- Even though the U.S is very powerful in dominating the world's culture through its movies and programs , people in their own countries have been also powerful in preserving their own cultures .