Impact of New digital media on Globalization

Prepared for:

Dr. Abu Yousuf Md. Abdullah

Course Instructor: International Business Environment

Prepared by:

Syed Ashhab Zaman | 97

Section- B | BBA 19th

Institute of Business Administration

University of Dhaka

September 23, 2013

 

Introduction New media refers to on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation. Another aspect of new media is the real-time generation of new, unregulated content. Globalization is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of worldviews, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Put in simple terms, globalization refers to processes that increase worldwide exchanges of national and cultural resources. Advances in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the telegraph and its posterity the Internet, are major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities. The term globalization has been in increasing use since the mid-1980s and especially since the mid-1990s. In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people and the dissemination of knowledge. Further, environmental challenges such as climate change, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and over-fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and is affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive. Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, video games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media does not include television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications – unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is an example, combining Internet accessible digital text, images and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of users and formation of a participant community of editors and donors for the benefit of non-community readers. Facebook is an example of the social media model, in which most users are also participants.

History In the 1960s, connections between computing and radical art began to grow stronger. It was not until the 1980s that Alan Kay and his co-workers at Xerox PARC began to give the power of a personal computer to the individual, rather than have a big organization be in charge of this. "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, a different kind of parallel relationship between social changes and computer design was witnessed. Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes sense that the Cold War and the design of the Web took place at exactly the same time. Until the 1980s media relied primarily upon print and analog broadcast models, such as those of television and radio. The last twenty-five years have seen the rapid transformation into media, which are predicated upon the use of digital technologies, such as the Internet and video games. However, these examples are only a small representation of new media. The use of digital computers has transformed the remaining 'old' media, as suggested by the advent of digital television and online publications. Even traditional media forms such as the printing press have been transformed through the application of technologies such as image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop and desktop publishing tools.

Types of Globalization Globalization is primarily of three types, namely, economic, cultural and political:

Ø Economic Globalization To varying degrees, national economies control one another. One country, which is capital-rich, invests in another country, which is underprivileged. One who has better technologies sells these to others who lack such technologies. The products of an advanced country enter the markets of those countries that have demands for these products. Similarly, the natural resources of developing countries are sold to developed countries that need them. Thus, globalization is predominantly an economic process involving the transfer of economic resources from one country to another.

Ø Cultural Globalization Culture has progressively more become a commodity. Popular books and films have international markets. Harry Potter has readers almost all over the world. English movies are seen almost in all countries. Western pop music has become popular in developing countries. The reverse flow of culture is insignificant. The flow of culture

is mainly from the North to the South. In the last few years the media owners of the West have shown interest in entering developing countries. For example, Murdoch has opened TV channels (STAR News, STAR Movies and STAR Plus) in India. The information revolution, the spread of satellite communication, telecommunication networks, information technology and the Internet etc have facilitated cultural globalization. This global flow of ideas, knowledge and values is likely to roll out cultural differences between nations, regions and individuals. As this flow of culture is mainly from the center to the periphery, from the North to the South, and from the towns and cities to villages, it is the cultures of villages of poor countries, which will be the first to suffer erosion.

Ø Political Globalization Since long, efforts have been on to bring the whole world under one government. The League of Nations and the UN have been the efforts in that direction. It is believed that the world under one government will be safer and freer from conflicts: The UN has belied expectations, but a number of regional organizations like European Union, ASEAN, APEC and SAARC, and multicultural economic organizations such as WTO have come up. The member-states remain sovereign, but through their obligations and commitments, they have, to some extent, integrated themselves to the concerned international organizations and groupings.

Impact on Globalization The impact of New Digital Media on Globalization cannot be stopped. It is a result of new communications technology. It is also the prerequisite and facilitator for all other forms of globalization. Multi-national media is critical to global industries. Now is the time to enjoy the benefits of media globalization, such as global communication, rather than fearing and attempting to avoid the consequences—which ironically include hindrance of free speech.

Communicating internationally has never been easier. Thanks to new media platforms, we can have a video conversation with a loved one who is 10,000 miles away or keep up-to-date on the stock market with our cell phones. The internet can also improve our health or save our lives. The doctor may send an X-ray or MRI to another doctor in India or China for a second opinion and have it within hours. “…A German company is making big advances in compression technology to allow for easier, better transfers of CAT scans via the Internet so one can quickly get a second opinion from a doctor half a world away” (Friedman, 2005).

Thomas L. Friedman, quoting Craig J. Mundie, a chief technical officer for Microsoft: “‘The Windows-powered PC enabled millions of individuals, for the first time ever, to become authors of their own content in digital form, which meant that content could be shared far and wide’”. Friedman’s book underlines his belief that media has the power to cross cultural gaps, bring people closer together and generally make our lives more convenient as it never has before (Friedman, 2005). Through the worldwide web, endless amounts of information are readily available to us. Yet it is important to consider what the chief technical officer of Microsoft did not say: readily available information does not necessarily mean we are better informed. And while new global media can cross cultural boundaries, this does not always bring people closer together. In truth it can deteriorate foreign relations as cultural barriers are broken down by American media (Siochru, 2004). Despite the benefits, there are also very real consequences. A majority of all media is owned by a very small percentage of wealthy corporations. Local media is being swallowed alive by conglomerations. Freedom of speech is threatened by these multinational corporations; they drown out the voice of local media with profit-maximizing formulas. Media moguls have the most to gain from globalization of media. Their power is concentrated; they have merged, often with companies that are unrelated to the field, as when GE bought NBC (Pappas, 2004). Naturally, the political ideas and bias of GE can be seen in NBC: GE expels criminal amounts of pollution. Therefore, pollution is not a topic covered by NBC. Imagine, for example, what our local news would sound like if it had been bought by Phillip-Morris (Pappas, 2004). Multi-national media corporations produce products which maximize their profits while decreasing the cost of production. Globalization has made it “easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world….and…easy to play off one immobile national labor force against another” (Chomsky, 1994). Jobs which might usually have been performed locally are being shipped internationally and performed at less than half the cost. Corporations are increasing profit by cutting costs and selling to an international audience. Meanwhile, the American middle class is disappearing along with the jobs. Robert McChesney, in a documentary titled Orwell Rolls in His Grave, stated that the income for the wealthiest 1% of Americans has risen 141% over the past twenty years. The income for the American middle class, however, has only risen a pathetic 9%. These statistics ought to appall and frighten, yet they go largely unnoticed by the American people because they are not handed over to us by our media (Pappas, 2004). Charles Klotzer of St Louis Journalism Review: “The top 5% is capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is clearly losing ground, and the highly touted American middle class is disappearing”. Klotzer claims that the media intentionally ignore these facts (Klotzer, 2004).

The benefits of media globalization may make it difficult to see these consequences, which are often subversive. After all, why should the media inform us about the negative effects of their global dominance? To do so does not support their main interest: profit. According to Noam Chomsky, “Their first interest is profits, but broader than that. It’s to construct an audience of a particular type…One that is addicted to a certain life-style with artificial wants” (Chomsky, 1996). The wealthiest countries have the resources to produce the most media; therefore, the media delivered to the global audience will promote the culture of the wealthiest countries. And it is the wealthiest minority within these countries who defines the content of the media, thereby influencing culture around the world. The multi-national media corporations are not held accountable for their actions. Only the government has the power to regulate media; in the past twenty years there has been a rising trend in decreasing regulation for the media. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. witnessed an “unprecedented historical explosion of mergers” (Bennett, 2000). These corporations were allowed to merge at least in part due to free market principles on behalf of the government. However, one of the consequences of the mergers is they have led to “…lowered public service obligations of media organizations…as free market ideology has ironically created near monopoly business practices” (Bennett, 2000). Not only does the oligopoly have the government’s blessing; the American media oligopoly is also subsidized by the government (Pappas, 2004). Anyone who believes in a true democratic society ought to feel outraged that tax dollars are being given to lobbyists to fund a lucrative oligopoly. More media is readily available to us than there ever has been before. As the number of media vehicles increases, so does competition in the open market. This increase in competition has not led to an increase in content diversity. Instead, media content, or media products, have become standardized to fill a profit formula as the largest media corporations compete with each other for audience share. Even news stations have taken up the profit formulas. It can be inferred that what occurs is a lower quality of journalistic content and an unspoken agreement across the board as to what news is (Bennett, 2000). “There’s just a common consensus among extremely narrow sectors of power as to the way the world should be perceived and as to what kind of people there should be” (Chomsky, 1996). The effect of a self-censored media is thought-control, controlled by personalized media content. If advertising in media increases, we can expect our media to be overwhelmingly dominated by advertiser interests and bias. In summary, we can expect the quality of journalism to wither. Media is a unique “product” in that it shapes how people think and behave. It is a product of culture which also shapes culture. Sean Siochru made note of this in an address at the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, held in

Geneva: “Media products are different, not least because they are more than mere consumer goods: in important respects they also ‘produce’ us” (Siochru, 2004). Because of the societal influence demonstrated by media, it is imperative to regulate it differently than other commodities (Siochru, 2004). Currently, America enforces very little regulation over media for the sake of an open and free market (Pappas, 2004). While the free market principle works for most other goods and services, the theory as applied to media has been detrimental to society (Bennett, 2000). The media falls victim to strong consumerist desires, which they encourage American citizens to exhibit. “For capitalism’s cheerleaders, like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, all this suggests that the human race is entering a Golden Age. All people need to do is sit back, shut up and shop and let markets and technologies work their magical wonders” (McChesney, 2001). The truly frightening aspect of the consumerist philosophy is that America is not the only country affected; globalization has allowed us to share our culture of greed with the world. When multi-national corporations are granted free speech rights, the voice of the people is stifled. The authors of the Constitution intended to guarantee these rights for individuals only; individuals do not have the same voice as a global media corporation (Pappas, 2004). Furthermore, when one considers that media shapes culture and that American oligopolies are largely in control of media globalization, one could come to the conclusion that media globalization is an imperialistic effort on the part of media conglomerates (Chomsky, 2004).

Conclusion New digital media has greatly impacted all the three primary forms of globalization both in positive and negative ways. Few effects are beneficial in the short run, but attention-worthy in the long run and few are just the opposite. The negative impacts, of new digital media on globalization, are seldom overlooked since, mostly, the positive effects significantly exceeds them.

Reference Bennett, Lance. (2000 November). Globalization, Media Market Deregulation, and the Future of Public Information. UNESCO-EU Conference. Chomsky, Noam. (1994 June). Profits of Doom. New Statesman and Society. 7.305. Chomsky, Noam. (1996 July). Media and Globalization: An Interview with Noam Chomsky. CorpWatch. Retrieved February 14, 2007, from http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1809&printsafe=1 Chomsky, Noam and Edward Herman. (2001 April). Filtering the News. New Internationalist. P. 13 Klotzer, Charles L. (2004 October). The 10 Best-Censored Stories: Key Issues that the Mass Media Largely Ignore. St. Louis Journalism Review. 34.270, P. 30 McChesney, Robert. (2001 March). Global Media, Neoliberalism and Imperialism. Monthly Review. 52.10, P. 1 Pappas, Robert Kane. (2004 November). Orwell Rolls in His Grave. Peterson, David. (1997 June). The Global Media: An Interview with Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney. ZMagazine. Siochru, S. O. (2004). Social consequences of the globalization of the media and communication sector: Some strategic considerations. Geneva: International Labour Office.