SOC/AN 332

Globalization and Culture

GLOBALIZATION AND THE MEDIA INDUSTRY ROBERT CHRISMAN

• Globalization may be defined as a form of imperialism in which consumption and consumer values are extended, imposed upon the oppressed to fully assure identification with metropolitan values and to create the world in its own economic and cultural image.

• Globalization has transformed the traditional role of media as a reflective force. Now media has become a generative force, an engine of the economic and political ruling class.

• The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) voted last December (2007) to allow companies that own television stations in the country’s twenty largest markets also to own newspapers. This overturned a thirty-two-year-ban on such multimedia ownership.

Lacking cognition, and exercise of moral faculties, U.S. citizens have embraced a culture of lumpenism and brutality: gangster rap, police, and prison shows.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger

• Jesse Ventura

The globalization of U.S. culture has meant the globalization of black culture, one of its chief exports.

• The chief consequence of these new media conglomerates and their brand of news and "infotainment " has been a hyper-reification effecting the general degeneration of the cognitive and moral spheres of the individual.

How is this empire of globalization to be countered, defeated, undone? What forms of resistance can be developed? What is the role of media?

• First and foremost we must assert that access and governance of the airwaves is a fundamental right of the people, essential as air or water. We must struggle for proper governmental regulation and a vigorous public sector. This means preserving public television and radio and also battling the current campaigns to further privatize the airwaves by changing broadcast signals and frequencies to create more broadcast channels and force citizens to buy new televisions for converter boxes. It is important to continue to develop and sustain independent media.

Second, creative development of radio should continue. This means not only the improvement of the news-documentary-talk show style of radio, which has often become the dull default of broadcast. Television's hegemony in creating fictive and imaginative programs should also be challenged by the development of radio dramas and musicals.

Radio is a cheaper medium to maintain, with a less costly infrastructure. And radio does not make its audience hostage to the sedentary slouch before a set

We should revisit past forms of successful struggle against global systems. popular struggles and existing organizations such as the United Nations, and NGOs, should be supported and strengthened, as well as traditional black organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, which should be supported in their quest for independence, dignity, and self-determination.

THE KOREAN WAVE:AN ASIAN REACTION TO WESTERN-DOMINATED GLOBALIZATION HYUN-KEY KIM HOGARTH

The” Korean Wave (hallyu)," the term coined by Chinese media towards the end of the last millennium to describe the meteoric rise in the popularity of Korean pop culture in Asian countries.

Scenes containing unadulterated sex and violence, which offend the sensitivities of the Asian general public, are almost an integral part of many a commercially successful film. Opportunities for big roles are almost non-existent to ethnic Asian actors. Romantic heroes and heroines are very rarely played by Asian actors, who usually appear as weird villains or, very rarely, wizards with supernatural powers.

• The "Asian-ness" is no longer something weird or marginal, but takes center stage. Therefore there is a sense in which the Korean Wave is a reaction of the Asian people to the West-dominated globalization in popular culture. But what distinguishes the Korean Wave from other similar phenomena, such as Bollywood and Nollywood, is the juxtaposition of globalized and traditional Korean cultures.

• But most agree that the Korean Wave began in China in the mid-1990s with the introduction of Korean TV drama serials and pop music.

• At the height of the Korean Wave in the mid-noughties, there were backlashes, criticism, and scepticism about its long-term future. Some strong anti-Korean Wave movements occurred in Japan^ and China, and even many Koreans were beginning to doubt its continued success.

What are reasons for the popularity of Korean TV drama in China? (pages 137-139)

K-POP (KOREAN POP MUSIC)

• It has more Western influence than Korean TV dramas. It is not based on traditional Korean song and dance, but rather contemporary Western pop, which has undergone extensive globalization, borrowing a lot from Afro-Caribbean culture.

• K-pop dance does not focus on arm and shoulder movements, which is a characteristic of traditional Korean dance, but rather on hip and leg actions.

• Most singers are known by their first names, and some groups' names, such as JYJ, are the initials of their first names. In Asian countries, using first names is deemed to be Western

• Another interesting feature of K-pop is that groups predominate rather than solo artists. Whereas few Western pop groups have more than five members, K-pop groups have much larger numbers, ranging from the popular five members to as many as 13. For example. Girls' Generation has nine members and Super Junior had 13 at its peak.

• "Individual performers look shabby and lonely, and groups are more fiin. You see, the more the merrier!" I would suggest that it demonstrates Asian groupism as opposed to Western individualism.

IS CULTURE TO ECONOMY AS LOCAL IS TO GLOBAL? DEBORAH WINSLOW

• Are we seeking cross-culturally valid generalizations or good descriptions of the varieties of human experience? Can this gap, like the gap between studies of local cases and global economic forces, ever be bridged?

• Does globalization render local studies pointless except to make the victims visible?

In his study of the life of a Western African trader, the attention Stoller gives to personal networks allows him to transform his few, well-known informants into a human portal through which we can glimpse the wider informal economy of New York City and beyond.

By deploying local ethnography to look at global flows, Stoller uses his skillful ethnographic touch to do a little bridge building over the local=global divide that troubles contemporary anthropology.

• In another study, Kemper begins with a description of advertising as a transnational business and a closing presentation of case studies of the consumer practices of two middle-class Colombo, Sri Lanka families.

• Resisting connotations of an all-consuming, worldwide tsunami of influence, Kemper argues that tide pools of difference persist, protected by local considerations and forcing us to rethink the ‘‘notion that the West is everywhere’’ (p. 68). This occurs because the foreign always must connect with and work through what it encounters in the local spaces.

• What one consumes becomes a matter of national identity, or modernity, or decency. How commodities are advertised poses a political dilemma, forcing the state to protect local values and interests while also encouraging development and other connections to transnational forces’’

• In another study, Throsby says economics and culture—exist as separate spheres of human interest.

• Culture is primarily ‘‘goods,’’ and ‘‘cultural goods’’ differ from ‘‘ordinary’’ economic goods in that the former have value outside the market while the latter do not (p. 160). Furthermore, Throsby alleges, while culture is socially based and locally particular, the economy is not; rather, it is grounded in universal human self-interest.

• ‘‘The economic impulse is individualistic, the cultural impulse is collective’’

NEGOTIATING GLOBALIZATION: MEN AND WOMEN OF INDIA’S CALL CENTERS A. ANEESH

How can cultures talk?

This study begins with a simple premise: in order for global processes to integrate culturally and geographically remote locations, there must be a certain neutralization of differences.

Focuses on the social psychology of interaction.

• It becomes important to train the agents in the pace, emphasis, and intonation of their second language, i.e., English, while also seeking to neutralize the thickness of regional accents.

• Is there a neutral English?

• Agents employed for American processes were given common, putatively neutral, names from the United States. So, Sumit served as Tim while Geeta became Tina in a world where their identity was supposed to mimic generalized identities of cultures they were serving.

• Agents needed to take account of their cultural, often semiconscious, habits of conversation and learn a different style of interaction. They were encouraged to unlearn culturally specific ways of speaking, including gender and age-based socialization in humility and hierarchy. Their behavioral training emphasized “polite assertiveness” while adopting a neutral stance toward gender or age of their American customers.

• Agents can’t be too polite.

• Call center agents must also learn appropriate “emotions” for the communication to succeed.

• The agents had to memorize many ready-made phrases to express appropriate emotions during a call.

• When a debtor reasoned during a debt collection call that his wife had met with an accident, the agent was supposed to express empathy.

• Motivational slogans about selfhood (“believe in yourself”) or time (“Make use of time, let no advantage slip”) were attempts to inspire new, globally compatible, habits of the mind that were slow to take hold among the agents who “believed in groups”

• What do you do when someone you call begins to tell you his or her life-story and

personal philosophies?

• Brief II:

• Is culture to economy as local is to global?

• What changes would you need to make in order to work at an international call-center?

• Why hasn’t the Korean Wave hit the United States?