Globalization

After lecture concluded on Wednesday, I have come up with the following working definition Globalization. Globalization is the process of increasing interconnectedness among nations, cultures, and people through developments in technology and media. Globalization increases the opportunity for people to communicate with each other no matter how far away they may be. As a result, an abundance of information is now available for massive amounts of people due to the seemingly unlimited access that technology gives to its users which creates a global audience, rather than just a local, regional or national audience.

However, one must look at the positive AND negative effects of Globalization and the "global" audience. It can be argued that increased globalization can lead to increased cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism is the idea that, due to globalization, nations are becoming more Westernized and Americanized which is decreasing the amount of local, indigenous and national culture. The idea of cultural imperialism doesn't take into consideration 3 major factors. First, cultural imperialism doesn't take into consideration the diversity of different national cultures and media outlets. Second, cultural imperialism does not address how a product is made, or how the product is used in different nations. Third, many view cultural imperialism as too totalizing across different media outlets, nations and audiences.

A great example of cultural imperialism and globalization is the fact that most news stations are owned by 3 corporations.  In class we learned that the most "global-est" news corporations were AP (US), AFP (France) and Reuters (UK & Canada). Although there are definitely perks to having few conglomerations running the majority of the news, such as increased amount of information and access to news on an international level, there are some serious negatives as well. The power of that these few corporations have can be very dangerous in terms of their ability to call attention to certain issues, rather than others. For example, if there is a scandal with one of the news agencies, they have the ability to keep the details of the scandal under wraps, do to their massive power over an abundant amount of stations. Since globalization is creating more mass audiences than ever before, the ability to keep a story from getting into the news means that a massive amount of people will not hear about the story. This type of power held by so few companies leads to what is now referred to as a media conglomerate. In other words, the rich and the powerful have final say about what is important for the entire world to learn about on the news. This example could definitely be viewed as a way in which one corporations can have a large amount of power on the world, rather than just one nation or region.

Below I have attached a link that further develops the ideas of cultural imperialism and globalization in the media today.
http://www.mediamonitors.net/osama4.html