Communication and Culture

Chapter 13 Outline
Katherine Wilson

What is Culture?
- what is means to be a human being
-national culture- all people living within a particular nation-state who share the same culture
-stories and images are a primary way societies transmit their values and beliefs from generation to generation
1. Cultural Industries
-Theodor Adorno and Max Hornheimer (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1923)
-"products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan"
-UNESCO: describes cultural industries to be "copied and boosted by industrial processes and worldwide distribution"
II.Transmission of Culture
-primary symbolic system to transmit culture is LANGUAGE
-Benedict Anderson (1983)
"print capitalism" leads to "imagined communities"
III. How the West Dominates in Production of Culture
-Herbert Schiller (1969) Mass Communication and the American Empire
-military industrial complex in US was using TV and film to obtain world dominance in cultural products
-(1971) Finnish scholars, Nordenstreng and Varis
-(1977) Jereremy Tuunstall The Media Are American
-(1991) John Tomlinson Cultural Imperialism
- Tomlinson argued that blame to be put upon specific institutions- not individual practices
IV.What Cultures Do to Defend Cultural Autonomy
a. Subsidies
-MEDIA (Measures to Encourage Development of the Audiovisual Industry)
b. Adaptations
- Soap Operas
-Reality TV
- American Idol, Pop Idol, Super Star
c. Resistance
-Briza
-TV Globo
d. Regional Alliances and Co productions
-UNESCO
-Bilateral agreements- India and Canada
e. Quotas
- Television Without Frontiers
-GATT
V. Not All Pop Culture is American
- In India, Russia, Japan, and Brazil, domestic production accounts for between 70 and 96% of market share.
- English musicals
VI. Role of Journalists in Production of Culture
- expected to produce news without bias
-John Fiske (1987) TV news producer deceives herself that truth exists, and the production of news story is just a matter of organizing it for easy consumption
VII. Managing Cultural Conflict
-Benjamin Barber (1995) Jihad vs. McWorld
- globalization versus fragmentation
-Kurdish example
VIII. Hybrid Cultures and the Media
- melting pot...without losing identity
-hybridity, creolization, glocalization
- not fixed: fluid and dynamic