Media Globalization and Its Effect Upon International Communities

Media Globalization and its Effect upon International Communities: Seeking a Communication Theory Perspective

Jeffrey K. Lyons

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a growing body of research on the topic of globalization.

Traditional definitions of globalization focus on economics and the effects of multinational

corporations. In the book Alternatives to Economic Globalization, authors Cavanaugh and Mader

(2002) referred to a number of factors that are identified with the term globalization. These

factors are: hyper-growth and exploitation of the environment, privatization of public services,

global cultural homogenization, promotion of consumerism, integration of national economies,

corporate deregulation, and displacement of traditional nation-sates by global corporate

bureaucracies (p. 19).

This paper examines the topic of globalization from the perspective of the media. The primary

vehicle of the phenomenon of global media is the multinational corporation. Media globalization

has aided in both the production and distribution of information. Dominick (2002) has noted that

the production rate of information doubles every eight years. In addition, "information is being

produced at a rate that is four times faster than the consumption of information" (p. 513). The

phenomenon of media globalization along with the increasing abundance of media-text

production has produced various effects which are being researched by communication scholars.

Media globalization is a broad topic, which includes television, radio, film, music, the Internet,

and other forms of digital media. This paper will first focus upon the cultural effects of media

globalization, and then discuss various communication theories that address this issue. After

examining a number of media theories which address globalization, there will be a discussion on

the theory which seems to best address the media globalization phenomenon.

Christopher Dixon, a media analyst for Paine-Webber has stated that a creation of a "global

oligopoly" is taking place among a handful of multinational organizations which control

worldwide media properties. (McChesney, 2005, p. 81). Compaign (2005) identified a short list

of nine global media corporations, which represent a variety of nations, as the major players (p.

98). These corporations and their significance will be discussed in more detail in this paper.

Media globalization shall be defined as the phenomenon of expanding multinational corporate

media investment, resulting in the emergence of a global oligarchy of first tier corporations,

which own and operate a variety of mass media content and distribution technologies including:

television, radio, film, music, broadcasting, satellite, telecommunication, cable, newspapers,

magazines, publishing companies, Internet content providers, and other forms of converged

digital media. [1]

The Climate of Globalization

Globalization is being driven by increasingly strong international market factors fueled by

organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary

Fund (IMF). The World Trade Organization was established in 1995 and as of October 2004 had

148 member nations. The WTO is located in Geneva, Switzerland. According to the WTO, they

are "the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations"

("What is the wto?" 2004). The International Monetary Fund was founded in 1945 and is located

in Washington D.C... The IMF currently has 184 member nations. The goals of the IMF include:

monitoring and consultation, financial assistance, and technical assistance to its members

("About the imf," 2003). Other organizations which promote globalization are: the World Bank

(1946) which makes loans to developing nations, and the Trilateral Commission (1973) which

focuses on trade between Japan, Europe and North America, "to foster closer cooperation among

these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in

the wider international system" ("About the organization," 2004).

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is another

significant player regarding globalization policies and discourse. UNESCO was founded in 1945

and is headquartered in Paris, France. As an agency of the United Nations, UNESCO functions

as an international cultural think tank, which "serves as a clearinghouse – for the dissemination

and sharing of information" to its 190 member nations in the areas of "education, science, culture

and communication." One of the ambitious goals of UNESCO is to "to build peace in the minds

of men" ("About unesco," 2003).

MacBride and Roach (2000) pointed out, that the UNESCO constitution which was adopted in

1946 addressed the flow of international information by charging the agency to "collaborate in

the work of advancing the mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples, through all means of

mass communication and to that end recommend the free flow of ideas by word and image" (p.

287). In 1978, UNESCO published The Declaration on Fundamental Principles Concerning the

Contribution of the Mass Media. Article VII of The Declaration refers to, "the mass media

contribut[ing] effectively to the strengthening of peace and international understanding, to the

promotion of human rights, and to the establishment of a more just and equitable international

economic order" ("Declaration on the mass media," 1978).

Without question, the driving force behind globalization is motivated by economic interests.

Much of the current climate of international investment and global business is a direct result of

global reconstruction, which followed World War II. Both the World Bank and the International

Monetary Fund were founded within a few years after the end of World War II. Critics of

globalization say that capitalism is the driving force behind world economics. According to

Amnesty International (2000), "of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are now global

corporations; only 49 are countries" (p. 187). Critics of globalization, such as Amnesty

International (AI) are concerned that developing nations are losing their national sovereignty and

that human rights violations are taking place. According to AI, "They [developing nations] have

diminishing power to control mergers, take-overs and liquidations, may not know who plans to

buy or sell a major industry or utility; a telephone, TV or water company may change ownership

overnight" (p. 188).

Media Globalization and Corporate Expansion

Media globalization has been a natural extension of corporate expansion on an international

scale. Post World War II reconstruction through organizations such as the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund helped to spread globalization through financial investment. In

1974, UNESCO published a study by researchers Nordenstreng and Varis. MacBride and Roach

(2000) reviewed the 1974 UNESCO study and noted that, "The study demonstrated that a few

Western nations controlled the international flow of television programs, with the United States,

the United Kingdom, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany accounting for the largest

shares" (p. 289). According to MacBride and Roach (2000), media globalization gained further

momentum in the 1980's, when a prevailing policy of deregulation of media in many developing

nations along with openness to private investment occurred (p. 289). McChesney (2005) also

noted this trend of free-market deregulation occurring in the eighties and the nineties, in the

cable and digital satellite systems around the world.

Head, Spann and McGregor (2001) noted that in the mid-1980's privatization and deregulation

gained momentum in Europe, in the cable and telephone industries, through foreign investment

from companies such as: Ameritech International, Deutsche Telecom, U.S. West, and Bell

Atlantic (p. 414). Some nations have only recently allowed foreign investment in

communications industries. In the case of China, the admittance into the World Trade

Organization was a benefit that outweighed the past reluctance towards foreign investment in

their national telecommunications infrastructure.

China changed its official policy in 1999, as a required component of its acceptance into the

World Trade Organization. Under the new policy, China will allow foreign investors to hold up

to 49 percent of certain telecommunications companies, including Internet firms. (Head et al.,

2001, p. 414)

Critics of media globalization have long held that the United States is far too powerful and that it

exercises cultural imperialism over smaller nations by overwhelming them with movies and

television programs produced in the United States (McChesney, 2005). According to Dominick

(2002), there has been international reaction to charges of cultural imperialism by certain nations

"including Canada, Spain, and France [that] have placed quotas on the amount of foreign

material that can be carried on their broadcasting systems" (p. 475).

Economist Benjamin Compaine (2005) answered the criticism of American cultural imperialism

directly, by stating that in the twenty first century the major players are corporations from a

variety of nations:

While Viacom, Disney, and AOL Time Warner are U.S. owned, many non-U.S.-owned

companies dominate the roster of the largest media groups: News Corp. (Australia), Bertlesmann

(Germany), Reed-Elsevier (Britain/Netherlands), Vivendi, and Lagardere/Hachette (France), and

Sony Corp. (Japan). (p. 98)

Effects of Media Globalization

Researchers have noted a variety of effects resulting from media globalization. Some of these

observed effects are open to interpretation while others are acknowledged by most

communication scholars. Certain researchers tie their observations to their own theories which

attempt to explain certain observed effects. In contrast, other researchers may take on a more

descriptive approach preferring to describe detailed effects and apply the theories of other

scholars as models for explanation.

According to researcher George Gerbner, the most successful television programs are no longer

made for national consumption but rather for international distribution. Gerbner further noted

that content is affected by the desire to increase the marketability of international television

program distribution. Programs that contain violent material are considered to "travel well"

according to Gerbner (Jhally, 1994). In contrast, comedy programs which may be quite

successful in the United States do not necessarily do well in other countries. Comedy is

culturally defined, and what is deemed funny by one cultural group may in fact be offensive to

another. In comparison, violent material has a very simple story line of good versus evil. It is

universally understood and in many ways culturally transparent.

Robert McChesney is a media historian and political economist. In a recent article by

McChesney (2005), he criticized multinational corporations in a number of ways. First, that the

global media market is dominated by eight multinational corporations which also dominate U.S.

media. These companies are: "General Electric, AT&T/Liberty Media, Disney, Time Warner,

Sony, News Corporation, Viacom and Seagram, plus Bertelsmann, the Germany-based

conglomerate" (p. 93). Second, multinational corporations are becoming increasingly

horizontally integrated, meaning that these companies both create content and own publishing

companies or broadcasting networks, and are able to distribute their own product. Third,

international deregulation and free-market policies have created a climate that has been

conducive to foreign investment in media. Fourth, that the World Trade Organization is

threatening local culture by encouraging foreign investment in local media. McChesney has

observed a trend of cultural protectionism form developing nations:

In the summer of 1998 culture ministers from twenty nations, including Brazil, Mexico, Sweden,

Italy and Ivory Coast, met in Ottawa to discuss how they could 'build some ground rules' to

protect their cultural fare from 'the Hollywood juggernaut.' (p. 93)

Fifth, there is a well defined second tier of media conglomerates which are increasingly

competing on the international level through foreign investment, mergers, and acquisitions. Half

of these corporations are based in North America while the others are based in Western Europe

and Japan. (This observation by McChesney is interesting since the Trilateral Commission

encourages economic trade between precisely these three regions.) Second tier corporations

include, "Dow Jones, Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Hearst, and Advance Publications, and among

those from Europe are the Kirch Group, Havas, Media-set, Hachette, Pisa, Canal Plus, Pearson,

Reuters and Reed Elsevier" (p. 94). Sixth, merger mania seems to be the rule of day when it

comes to multinational corporations. McChesney noted that sixty or seventy first and second tier

multinational corporations control a major portion of the world's media in the areas of

publishing, music, broadcasting, television production, cable, satellite distribution, film

production, and motion picture theater exhibition. Seventh, McChesney concluded that the effect

of the spread of multinational media corporations has resulted in cultural imperialism, a loss of

local cultural identity. McChesney summarized the motivation of multinational media

corporations as such, "The global commercial-media system is radical in that it will respect no

tradition or custom, on balance, if it stands in the way of profits" (p. 95).

Benjamin Compaine (2005) has disagreed with many of McChesney's criticisms of the effects of

globalization of the media. Compaine tackled a number of major criticisms head on in his article

"Global Media." First, Compaine disagreed with the view that a few large companies are taking

over the world's media. Compaine has compared international media mergers to "rearranging the

furniture," as companies are repeatedly sold and re-sold:

In the past 15 years, MCA with its Universal Pictures was sold by it U.S. owners to Matsushita

(Japan), who sold to Seagram's (Canada), who sold to Vivendi (France). Vivendi has already

announced that it will divest some major media assets, including textbook publisher Houghton-

Mifflin. (p. 98)

Second, Compaine disagreed that corporate ownership is having a toll on effective journalism. A

study by the non-profit organization Freedom House in 2000 researched 186 countries; it

suggested "that press independence, including journalists' freedom from economic influence,

remained high in all but two members (Mexico and Turkey) of the Organisation [sic] for

Economic Co-operation and Development" (p. 99). Third, Compaine disagreed that global media

can hurt local content. MTV in Brazil plays music and videos that are selected by local

producers. Star TV, distributes satellite TV in India. Star was initially unsuccessful when it

showed American television programs. Star TV only succeeded after it hired an Indian television

executive who created Indian soap operas. Fourth, Compaine disagreed that the public would be

better served by stricter regulation of the media. Media concentration can be beneficial in the

case of two small struggling newspapers merging in order to survive, as opposed to one of them

going out of business. Licensing and antitrust regulation can act as a barrier to new players

entering the competitive landscape. Relaxing broadcast regulation expands competition. News

Corp. began its investment in American media when the FCC raised the limit of national

television station ownership from seven to twelve, and also struck down the rule that prohibited

TV networks from owning their own programming. As a result, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

was able to build an audience with a core group of television stations and purchase 20th Century

Fox. Compaine noted, "Fox was thus able to launch the first successful alternative to the Big

Three in 30 years. Its success also paved the way for three other large media players to initiate

networks" (p. 101).

Marjorie Ferguson has similar views to Compaine. Ferguson (2002) has stated that cultural

homogeneity is a myth which is predicated upon McLuhan's theory of a global village. The myth

is not evidenced by real-world observation since identical consumer products, movies, clothes

and architectural expressions are not seen in every nation. The new world order and economic

globalism is not marching forward in an unchecked manner. As Ferguson has stated,

"Paradoxically, we witness an antifederalist ethos competing with a resurgent regional economic

protectionism in the EC, the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and the proposed

South-East Asian trading bloc" (p. 245).

In a significant historical article, Pike and Winseck (2004) argued that media globalization is not

a recent phenomenon at all. Globalization began in the 1850's when "domestic telegraph systems

had greatly extended their reach and become linked to a worldwide network of cable

communications. . . . British companies dominated, maintaining almost complete control over

the manufacture and laying of cables and owning two-thirds of the world's cables by 1900" (pp.

645-646). Pike and Winseck make three major points in their article. First, globalization is not a

recent phenomenon. Some scholars have interpreted the early stages of globalization as being

synonymous with imperialism, since "competing western nations utilized communications to aid

in the expansion of their empires" (p. 643). Second, there is the technocratic view of

globalization. This view linked the technical aspects of globalization with the global spread of

modernity and civilization. Third, globalization is a natural extension of "laissez-faire

capitalism," which broke through national boundaries to extend the free market economy to a

global-world market (p. 644).

Communication Theories that Address Media Globalization

The trends and effects of media globalization will continue to be both observed and debated by

communication scholars, sociologists, economist, and politicians alike. With the fall of

communism in the USSR in August of 1991, private investment and the proliferation of

multinational corporations has continued to march across Europe and the other continents of the

world. The trend of continuing media globalization has showed no recent signs of retreat. Both

critics and advocates of media globalization agree that there is fierce competition taking place

between the first and second tier corporations. The smaller regional second tier corporations

don't want to loose market share to the larger multinational corporations. It seems that market

forces and shrewd political maneuverings on the part of multinational media corporations will

determine the competitive landscape of the future. While this fierce battle is taking place in the

corporate boardrooms of some of the worlds largest multinational corporations, communication

researchers search for a theoretical basis to interpret various phenomena related to global mass

media. What follows is a variety of theoretical perspectives from scholars that are addressing

these questions.

Cultural Imperialism and Marxism and Critical Theory

One of the oldest theories of mass media which is also critical of globalization is cultural

imperialism. John Tomlinson (2002) has addressed a number of issues related to cultural

imperialism discourse. First, Tomlinson recognized that traditional Marxism divided the world

into a political-economic dialectic struggle between an elite ruling class and a larger working

class. For the Marxist, capitalism is interpreted as a "homogenizing cultural force" (p. 228). The

idea is that capitalism propels a sort of "cultural convergence" which people are not able to resist

and that cultural imperialism implies a spreading culture of worldwide consumerism. Second,

cultural imperialism is used as a term which described a foreign culture invading an indigenous

community. Tomlinson has criticized this common view by pointing out that indigenous culture

can be an ambiguous term. Tomlinson asked, "How does a culture belong to an area?" (p. 226).

Since culture is constructed by human beings, how can it be geographically grounded in the

same way that plants and animals are? Tomlinson's second point is not a very sound one.

Anthropologists and linguists alike can describe how the very words and customs that are

incorporated into most indigenous cultures and languages are a reflection of the environment in

which the people live (Geertz, 1983). Third, Tomlinson saw cultural imperialism as a critique of

modernity. According to Tomlinson, "But on another theoretical level the critique of modernity

becomes an argument against the dominant trends of global development. Indeed, it involves an

argument about the meaning of 'development' itself" (p. 229).

Critical Theory as popularized by the Frankfurt School, was founded in 1923. It continues to be

an important methodology in the study of mass communication. According to Littlejohn (2002),

the Frankfurt School is well known for its Marxist traditions. The criticism of the mass media

from the Frankfurt School was tied to a "harsh critique of capitalism and liberal democracy" (p.

212). Critical theory and cultural imperialism theory share common roots in Marxist ideology,

which are both anti-capitalistic and generally anti-Western in their approach to the study of

media globalization. Everett Rogers (1994) detailed how the Frankfurt school was a combination

of Marxist and Freudian theories. According to Rogers, the term "critical school" refers to "not

only a dozen or so important intellectuals originally affiliated with the Frankfurt school but also

to hundreds of other contemporary scholars who consider themselves intellectual descendants of

the original Frankfurt scholars . . ." (p. 109).

Cultivation Theory

George Gerbner (1977) has developed cultivation analysis theory. Gerbner's theory asserts that

television has displaced traditional sources of socialization such as: the family, the church, and

school:

A culture cultivates the images of a society. The dominant communication agencies produce the

message systems that cultivate the dominant image patterns. They structure the public agenda of

existence, priorities, values, relationships. . . . The mass media – printing, film, radio, television

– ushered in the modern world as we know it. Mass communication changed the production and

distribution of knowledge. (p. 205)

According to Gerbner, Gross, Morgan and Signorielli (1986), "television has become the

primary common source of socialization and everyday information (mostly in the form of

entertainment) of an otherwise heterogeneous population," Gerbner believed that mass media

produced images from, "the mainstream of a common symbolic environment" (p. 18). Stephen

Littlejohn (2002) commented that Gerbner's theory "is not a theory of individual media 'effects'

but instead makes a statement about the culture as a whole" (p. 317). Gerbner predicted that

heavy television viewers are far more likely to be socialized through television than light

television viewers. Gerbner went on to describe what he called the "mean world syndrome"

which suggests that the violent nature of television content will affect heavy television viewers

to believe that the world is a violent place, where people cannot be trusted. According to

Gerbner, violent television programs "travel well" across political borders since violence is

easily understood cross-culturally. In contrast, comedy does not translate well in other cultures

since it is inherently culture-bound.

Nancy Signorielli (1990) has done research which seems to substantiate Gerbner's theory,

suggesting that heavy television viewers are more prone to be mistrustful of others and to see the

world as a meaner place, than do lighter television viewers. Signorielli and Morgan (1990) have

written a book titled, Cultivation analysis: New directions in media effects research, which

contains a wide variety of research regarding cultivation analysis theory, from critics and

adherents alike. The Museum of Television has summarized the research and controversy

surrounding cultivation analysis theory:

The literature contains numerous failures to replicate its findings as well as numerous

independent confirmations of its conclusions. The most common conclusion, supported by meta-

analysis, is that television makes a small but significant contribution to heavy viewers' beliefs

about the world. . . . In sum, cultivation research is concerned with the most general

consequences of long-term exposure to centrally-produced, commercially supported systems of

stories. Cultivation analysis concentrates on the enduring and common consequences of growing

up and living with television. ("Audience research," 2004)

Spiral of Silence Theory

Similar to Gerbner, Noelle-Neumann also argued for the dominating effect of mass media upon

the public. Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory proposed that people are more likely to

publicly express their opinions when they perceive that others share their views. The spiral of

silence effect refers to individuals choosing to be silent when faced with the potential of criticism

by others. According to Littlejohn (2002), "the spiral of silence seems to be caused by the fear of

isolation" (p. 19). Eliju Katz (2002) has made the following statement regarding the relationship

between spiral of silence theory and the media:

Central to Noelle-Neumann's thesis is the notion that the media have come to substitute for

reference groups. It is strongly implicit in the Noelle-Neumann papers that people decide

whether or not to be silent on the basis of the distribution of opinion reported (often incorrectly)

by the media. (p. 387)

Katz criticized Noelle-Neumann's lack of discussion regarding an individual's participation in

reference groups. There remains a delicate balance between reference groups and mass

communication. While a person may feel the effects of the spiral of silence in the face of mass

media messages that are different than one's personal beliefs, being a member of a reference

group with shared values may counter the silencing effect. Katz further pointed out that both

Gerbner and Noelle-Neumann agreed that the "media are active agents of false consciousness,

constraining people to misperceive their environment and their own place in it" (p. 386).

Dependency Theory

Dependency Theory is a means to address the role of news agencies in the international

distribution of news content. Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Terhi Rantanen (2002) discussed the roots

of dependency theory as stemming from the viewpoint that agencies such as Reuters, were seen

as significant in certain British territories during the 1930's, in promoting British trade interests.

Dependency theory itself arose from South American nations in the post-colonial stage. The

theory maintained that prior colonial nations which had been exposed to North American

capitalistic investment had become dependent upon western news agencies since the news-

system provided a critical link between the developing nations and the larger world economy and

corresponding value system. Dependency theory had an impact as part of the nonaligned nations

movement, which began in 1955 (MacBride & Roach, 2000). In 1976, Mustapha Masmoudi, the

Tunisian Secretary of State for information, spoke at the nonaligned news symposium in Tunis.

The outcome of the meeting was to challenge the nonaligned nations to form a new world

information and communication order (NWICO). The purpose of the NWICO was to advance

among the nonaligned nations a "reorganization of existing communication channels that are a

legacy of the colonial past" (287).

Megaphone Effect Theory

Bloch and Lemish (2003) have created a new term which they call the megaphone effect. They

theorize that cultural texts which become adopted into the popular culture in the United States

can be transformed into a global cultural phenomenon, through the international media. The

theory suggests a two-step process. First, cultural texts cross the Atlantic (or Pacific) and enter

into the culture of the United States. The second step occurs when these texts are then perceived

as having wider international appeal, and are then marketed and distributed to the global

community. The study analyzed: television programs, news networks, children's culture, and pop

music. It suggested that the adoption of local cultural texts into mainstream U.S. culture provided

a greater opportunity for their voices to be heard on a global scale. This theory is quite new to

the globalization literature and as yet there are few published articles on the subject.

Global Imaging Theory

In his book, The Roar of the Crowd (1993), Michael J. O'Neill built a strong case for a more

homogenized world culture, as the result of television and mass media. O'Neill is the former

editor of the New York Daily News, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. O'Neill

contends that, "communications technology always influences human organization. . . . As the

speed of communication rises, social distance shrinks and ever larger numbers of people, widely

separated by space, are drawn together into common experiences" (p. 24). O'Neil's book viewed

media globalization from the point of view of a news reporter. Winston Churchill was opposed

to using television but later conceded to its necessity. O'Neill attributed Margaret Thatcher's rise

to political power as stemming from her television appearances in the 1974 election (p. 121).

O'Neill's main thesis is that mass communication, on a global scale, drives public opinion:

Whatever the country-by-country variation, a central force in all that is happening is obviously

public opinion, mobilized and distributed by mass communications on an unprecedented scale.

The rise in people power is having a heavier impact on political institutions than at any other

time in history, not only in Western democracies but in many areas of the world where it has

never existed before. (p. 104)

O'Neill's view of communication technology as a major force behind human organizations and

political movements is similar to Marshall McLuhan's theory of technological determinism. In

this view, television like the printing press, and the telegraph before it, are signature

technological inventions which affect society as a whole. McLuhan understood that technologies

such as the telephone, television and undersea communications cables connected the world's

societies together. According to Straubhaar and LaRose (2004), McLuhan used the term "global

village" in the 1960's, before the advent of the Internet.

Tetrad Theory

Perhaps one of the most interesting theories regarding media globalization is one developed by

Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers (1989) in their book The Global Village. [2]McLuhan and

Powers present a model which they refer to as a tetrad. The tetrad is a made up of three elements.

The first element is visual space which refers to a Western civilization mind set, based on logical

systematic, linear, and Platonic reason. The second element is acoustic space, which is more

holistic and Asian in approach. The third element is the tetrad itself which is a collision of these

two opposing philosophies in a four part metaphor, consisting of enhancement, reversal, retrieval

and obsolescence. According to McLuhan and Powers, "The tetrad helps us to see 'and-both' the

positive and the negative results of the artifact" (p. 11).

The example is given of the invention of the automobile which greatly aided the need for

transportation, but also changed society by transforming workers into distance commuters,

dooming the inner city to skyscraper landscapes, while at the same time creating the need for

suburbs. The practicality of verifying tetrad theory with social science research seems limited

since it seems to be as much a philosophy as a theory of communication.

Gordon Gow (2001) has written an article about tetrad theory and relates it to special metaphor,

from an ontological perspective. This approach is used as a model for the study of culture and

technology. In this sense, tetrad theory is more of an epistemological perspective than a

methodological approach to global mass media research.

In any case, McLuhan and Power's work does offer a number of interesting and almost prophetic

observations, considering that the book was written in 1989. Before the Internet existed, the

authors describe the interactive nature of the World Wide Web:

For example, the new telecommunication multi-carrier corporation, dedicated solely to moving

all kinds of data at the speed of light, will continually generate tailor-made products and services

for individual consumers who have pre-signaled their preferences through an ongoing data base.

Users will simultaneously become producers and consumers. (p. 83)

Seeking an Interactive Model for Media Globalization

With the exception of tetrad theory, all of these theories have one thing in common. They all

view mass communication from the perspective of the traditional model proposed by Wilber

Schramm (1954). Schramm's theory proposed a one-to-many model in which a highly complex

mass media organization (newspaper, television network, radio network, or news agency)

created and then distributed messages to a mass public. In Schramm's model, the media

organization is depicted as the gatekeeper of information flow. It is from this model that volumes

of media effects research such as gate keeping and agenda setting studies have been based (Head

et al., 2001, p. 323; Whetmore, 1993, p. 5).

George Gerbner's cultivation theory describes the effects of a top-down, one-to-many mass

communication model. It does not offer an explanation for bottom-up content from a large

heterogeneous audience. Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory offers an explanation for

why people do not speak up, when faced with intimidating messages from an impersonal mass

media system, with which certain publics do not agree. Spiral of silence theory could also be

used in a converse manner. What happens when the media provide a gathering place for similar

points of view and expression of meaning? In the case of the Internet, the recent popularity of

web logs (a.k.a. blogging) suggests that the antithesis of spiral of silence produces new

communities of shared sense-making, which stimulate expression.

Dependency theory and the theory of cultural imperialism are traditionally grounded in Marxist

ideology. The criticism of Marxist ideology is that the entire world is reduced to an economic-

political struggle between the classes. Culture is seen as being dominated by economics. In

contrast, sociologists with a constructivist epistemology believe that humans (not economic

struggle) create meaning. Movements such as NWICO are an attempt for local cultural

expression to have a voice, in opposition to dominating foreign cultures. Some of these

movements are reactionary in nature, and make little attempt to integrate local media-texts into

the larger scope of global media. An alternative, Bloch and Lemish's megaphone effect theory

offers the opportunity which Marxist critical theories deny their publics. In short, megaphone

theory suggests that local media-text production can have international appeal, and that mass

media organizations are seeking new sources of media content for global distribution.

There is now a significant shift which is taking place regarding the globalization of media. As

media convergence continues, and a higher percentage of media-texts and content are reduced to

the digital domain, a new model of mass communication is unfolding. As Joseph Dominick

(2002) pointed out, this new model is not one-to-many but rather, many-to-many (p. 23). Users

of Internet content are suddenly empowered with the ability to post messages on web sites; they

can also create their own web sites. These messages and sites can then be viewed by millions of

Internet users around the world. When McLuhan and Powers' book was published in 1989, there

was no Internet, as we know it today. Their prediction that "Users will simultaneously become

producers and consumers" has been prophetic (p. 83). Today, anyone with access to the Internet

can easily create a web page or post a message on a bulletin board. The traditional one-to-many

model has been replaced by a new interactive paradigm.

Interactive Global Media Theory

A theory of media globalization based on an interactive platform is sustainable for many reasons.

First, the global spread of the Internet and the increasing trend of digital media convergence.

Pavlik and McIntosh (2005) pointed out that feedback in the converged world of digital

communication is instantaneous in comparison with traditional analog mass communication (p.

71). Second, television is becoming increasingly interactive. Millions of viewers call in to vote,

as in the case of the popular television program American Idol. High Definition Television in

2007 will have built in two-way interactive capabilities. Cable television currently has interactive

capabilities allowing viewers to order a pizza directly through the cable connection. Third, there

is an increasing competitive pressure between first tier multinational media corporations to offer

more locally produced content. Compaine (2005) noted that the key to success for Star TV in

India was the development of an Indian soap opera created by a local television executive.

Jocelyn Cullity (2002) pointed out that cultural nationalism has been the key to success for MTV

India. Indrajit Banergee (2002) argued that there is a significant trend in local and regional

programming in developing nations, and that much of this is in response to charges of cultural

imperialism. Forth, the entire discussion of communication convergence in the digital realm,

which affects the Internet, telecommunications, television, movies, radio, and satellite

distribution of content, is based on increasing interactivity. Consumers and media users

increasingly seek interactive environments in which they can use these types of services in a

seamless manner (Rushkoff, 2005). Consumers in Europe are already able to use cell phones to

make purchases from vending machines. The successful marketers of the future will be those

who discover new interactive solutions for a public which seeks ubiquitous solutions from a

variety of digital devices. Fifth, interactive capabilities create a new growth curve, which in turn

will expand the customer base of mature media technologies. Talk radio has exploded in

popularity in the United States. According to Head (2001), "Arbitron reports that national shares

for talk radio have risen steadily from 15.4 in 1993 to more than 17 today" (p. 305).

Conclusion

This paper has looked at the phenomenon of globalization from the perspective of the media.

The effects of media globalization have been discussed as presented by a variety of

communication scholars. Current theories of the mass media that address globalization have been

presented and criticized. Finally, this paper has noted the need for more theory which

specifically addresses media globalization from an interactive many-to-many model. It is time to

break from the traditional one-to-many model as proposed by Schramm (1954). In addition,

current communication theory needs to address the rise of the multinational first tier players, and

to develop models which take into account the unique aspects of interactivity, which digital

technologies provide. As Pavlik and McIntosh (2005) pointed out, the traditional analog mass

communication model saw the audience as a large, anonymous public, which was passive in its

use of the media. In contrast the new paradigm of digital mass media sees the audience in a

completely different manner. The audience is now fragmented, known and addressable. This new

audience is engaged, and active in participation. It actively creates media content and new

communities of content exchange. This paper is a call for new communication theory to be

created which will address these emerging phenomena.

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[1] In this paper, the term first tier corporation shall refer to significant multinational media

organizations. The term second tier refers to regional corporations, while third tier are the

smallest players, with only local influence.

[2] McLuhan and Powers collaborated on the project. The book was published nine years after

McLuhan died.

This Just In: The Boob-Tube, Not YouTube, Is Transforming the World

Consumers and businesses, voters and politicians, and readers and writers today are caught up in the social media wave. There is no escaping the magnetic pull the Web, and sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have over our everyday existence. We continue to hear about the diminishing importance and relevance of traditional media channels--namely TV, radio and print. There is sort of an air of inevitability about it all. Old media will give way to new and the World will be better, more peaceful and prosperous for it.

But a provocative new research paper boldly challenges this worldview. Perhaps even more striking than its finding on media usage around the world is how the research reveals a dynamic that John Edwards--he of "Two Americas"--might appreciate. We live (and consume media) in Two Worlds: The Internet-ascendant minority world (US & Europe), and the TV-ascendant majority World (The Developing World).

Charles Kenny, a development economist with the World Bank, argues that television, far from being a mature or fading phenomenon in areas like India, Africa and Brazil, has picked up quite a bit of steam over the last decade or so in population penetration and impact. TV growth has been especially driven by the expansion of satellite and digital cable TV, and with that the number of channels and choices.

But the quantitative influence of TV is not really the story; it is about the qualitative effect of the medium and its content: TV has become a revolutionary force for good in the majority world (not just a couch potato-maker). Using a robust sample of data over many years and countries, Kenny shows a high correlation between areas that receive and consume TV and positive trends in literacy, school enrollment, health outcomes, birth control, lower levels of drug use and corruption, and even increased prosperity.

Take soap operas, a genre famously attacked by cultural critics and seemingly on the decline in the "North." In Brazil, India and other developing areas, soaps portray successful and independent women--and watching them has been linked with increased social status, rights and economic well being for women in those countries.

What Kenny's article does not focus on is the planet's digital divide. Internet use within the developing world is estimated at less than 15% of the population, and under 3% in sub-Saharan Africa. Since the Web is still a relatively new phenomenon, it is not yet possible to study population impact meaningfully. But Kenny thinks that the mainstream media and development groups have oversold the promise of the Internet while TV and development research (including important work by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster) has been under-reported. (It is interesting that Foreign Policy, NPR and TV Guide UK are the most prominent media to report on the Kenny research.)

While TV can be constructive in low income societies, it should not be viewed as a panacea, says Georgia Tech Professor and Internet global development guru Michael Best . He takes issue with some of Kenny's generalizations and interpretation: "To refer to Baywatch as 'an everyday tale of lifesaving folk' is really too much; one need not employ a feminist perspective to still understand the departure from the 'everyday' evinced in Baywatch."

Ethan Zuckerman, a global social entrepreneur with Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues for a more balanced view on how media can be used to solve problems and improve societies in the developing world. "We tend to overvalue the impact of the Internet in the developing world and undervalue the impacts of other technologies," he says. "Television has had important development impacts. So have radio, especially community radio, and mobile phones. Because we're going through an Internet revolution in the U.S., we tend to look for a parallel revolution in the developing world."

Zuckerman lauds Kenny's work, but does challenge Kenny's portrayal of TV as a 'be-all' device. Kenny's research doesn't address the one-way nature of television, says Zuckerman. "Lots of people consume it, and very few people produce it. One of the reasons we're so excited by the Internet is that it's a two-way medium. It requires a lot of work for video to become two-way."

In the short term, radio combined with mobile phones will provide two-way interaction in the developing world. Zuckerman offers a couple examples: A radio show in eastern Congo that allows women in the community to send in questions anonymously via SMS, talk shows in Ghana that allow individuals to confront government ministers on the air. Zuckerman says, "I sometimes quip that radio plus mobiles=60% of the Internet."

Kenny acknowledges the efficacy of radio and mobile phones: "Radio is tied to less people stepping on mines, more people learning in school ... and mobiles have been associated with folks earning more from fishing and agriculture and smoking less amongst other things. I'd say all three technologies--TV, radio, mobiles--have had a bigger impact on developing countries than the Internet to date."

That's why technology development experts like Charles Kenny, Ethan Zuckerman and Michael Best--as well as philanthropists like Tim Berners-Lee who chairs the World Wide Web Foundation--are advocating a more pluralistic media approach that combines channels and technologies in working to solve social and economic problems in developing countries. "I just wouldn't put much Foundation effort behind streaming Baywatch," says Best. "Surely we can do better than that."

Community, Culture and GlobalizationBy Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard

In May of 2001, the authors represented in this anthology met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como in northern Italy. The villa and its grounds are beautiful, especially when adorned by spring’s profusion of leaf and blossom. Succumbing to spring fever, from time to time we abandoned the conference room for a wide lawn overlooking the lake.

One afternoon, Maribel Legarda, artistic director of the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), volunteered to lead theater exercises as a demonstration of PETA’s work, kicking off a discussion that was to touch on privatization and commercialization of cultural development. Following Maribel’s instructions, everyone assembled by world region into five groups: we joined one that included several people from the United States, one Canadian, one Peruvian and one Mexican. Other groups were just as polyglot: the Asian cluster included someone from Hong Kong, two members from India and three Australians (one born in Vietnam). Our eventual assignment turned out to be silly, ironic and hilarious: devising and performing a mock television commercial for community cultural development. But for a warm-up, Maribel had each group choose a Beatles’ song to perform with enthusiasm. If memory serves, our group chose "All You Need Is Love." Another group belted out "Yellow Submarine." Without conferring or even knowing the choices the other groups had made, each picked an entirely different Beatles tune.

Here, in microcosm, we have the dialectic of globalization: two dozen community arts practitioners and theorists come from 15 countries on six continents to a meeting in Italy. The meeting’s purpose is to share experiences and ideas gleaned from their own work in communities, exploring commonalities as well as differences. Before the meeting, they conduct an introductory dialogue in English via e-mail to introduce themselves and their work, together beginning to formulate an agenda of issues for their face-to-face meeting. At the meeting, their presentations are earnest, diverse, often amazing and about as multifarious as can be imagined: a community dance project in which construction workers performed a pas de deux for tractors; a half-mile-long mural commemorating the suppressed history of southern California; a Vietnamese youth theater; a youth-created video game on unemployment; and many, many more. Their common aims are to help people wrest a meaningful and grounded sense of cultural identity from the jaws of a rapacious market culture and, by engaging with ideas, feelings and expression, to catalyze social action. But when they search for a lingua franca, they turn to the products of that market, from the Beatles — one of the most successful franchises of the commercial cultural industries — to the formulas of television advertising, familiar to each and all.

This anthology was created to raise the profile of community cultural development practice around the world by offering a rich mixture of experiences, ideas and stories that demonstrate the validity of this work as a stimulus to pluralism, participation and equity in cultural life, and as a response to globalization’s pull toward the standardization of commercial culture. Our hope has been to create a tool that can be used by anyone to understand the community cultural development field, a book that can serve as a resource for both training and practice.

"Community cultural development" describes the work of artist-organizers ("community artists") who collaborate with others to express identity, concerns and aspirations through the arts and communications media, while building cultural capacity and contributing to social change. In

community cultural development work, community artists, singly or in teams, use their artistic and organizing skills to serve the emancipation and development of a community, whether defined by geography (e.g., a neighborhood), common interests (e.g., members of a union) or identity (e.g., members of an indigenous group). The work is intrinsically community-focused: while there is great potential for individual learning and development within its scope, it is aimed at groups rather than individuals. Individual issues are considered in the context of collective awareness and common interests.

Culture — the sum total of signs, beliefs, artifacts, social arrangements and customs created by human beings — is both the container and the content of this work. To be human is to make meaning. Powerful meanings attach to even the smallest matters: the fate of species of bird or a plot of land; the way a regulation is interpreted or the outcome of a particular court case. Social life offers infinite opportunity for organizing, as is seen wherever people protest against laws and policies they oppose or rally support for their chosen causes. But culture subsumes them all. When we speak of culture, we describe a people’s "operating system," to borrow an analogy from one of humanity’s most suggestive creations, the computer. Culture underpins all choices, all outcomes. It contains the means of expressing all thoughts and emotions. It enables all associations. And within this encompassing realm, the purest and densest meanings are conveyed through art, through individual and collective creations driven by the desire to express and communicate, unencumbered by extraneous objectives.

Thus, culture rather than a particular art form is the true medium of this work. Within the community cultural development field, projects are remarkably diverse. All artistic media and styles are adaptable. Projects have employed visual arts, architectural and landscape design, performing arts, storytelling, writing, video, film, audio and computer-based multimedia. Activities include structured learning, community dialogues, community mapping and documentation, oral-history collection, the physical development of community spaces and issue-driven activism, as well as the creation of performances, public art, exhibitions, moving-image media, computer multimedia and publications. In all this work, the powerful experience of bringing to consciousness and expressing one’s own cultural values is deemed worthwhile in and of itself, apart from the outcome.

Despite superficial differences, the field’s internal diversity reflects strong common principles and values. The following unifying principles originally appeared in "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development," a companion volume to this international anthology, focusing on community cultural development’s definition, history, theoretical underpinnings and current conditions in the United States. (Copies are available free of charge from the Rockefeller Foundation.) Community cultural development projects aim to realize these common principles:

Active participation in cultural life is an essential goal of community cultural development.

All cultures are essentially equal, and society should not promote any one as superior to the others.

Diversity is a social asset, part of the cultural commonwealth, requiring protection and nourishment.

Culture is an effective crucible for social transformation, one that can be less polarizing and create deeper connections than other social-change arenas.

Cultural expression is a means of emancipation, not the primary end in itself; the process is as important as the product.

Culture is a dynamic, protean whole, and there is no value in creating artificial boundaries within it.

Artists have roles as agents of transformation that are more socially valuable than mainstream art-world roles — and certainly equal in legitimacy. [1]

Many of the authors whose work is included here are based in the developing world or in marginalized communities within the industrial world. Considered as a group, they represent a departure from the stereotype of the deracinated intellectual described by commentators from Fanon to Naipul, alienated by education and training from heritage culture, yet unable to enter fully into or find deep satisfaction within the transnational imposed culture. Rather than surrender to permanent alienation, these artists and activists have grasped the power inherent in their simultaneous roles of participant and observer. Understanding the new reality of multiple identities and multiple belonging, they serve as catalysts and conduits, dedicating their skills to the development of their communities, to the articulation of suppressed voices.

Although their particular locations differ greatly, these authors respond in their work to realities that now transcend all national boundaries. Every current society is multicultural due to the penetration of virtually all cultural barriers by colonization, immigration and the nearly universal proliferation of electronic media. Every chapter of this volume touches on some of the many and varied challenges this presents. Although most projects described here take place within the bounds of a particular location, every one reflects the reality that community cultural development work is intrinsically transnational and multicultural in scope and outlook — from the work with migrants described here by Judy Baca and Mok Chiu Yu to the second-generation immigrant cultures depicted by Tony Le Nguyen and Gary Stewart to the many depictions of populations straining to shoulder the cultural impact of industrialization.

More fully than any other artistic endeavor or development approach, community cultural development embodies the deep appreciation of cultural diversity described in the first three articles of the "UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity" adopted in November 2001:

Article 1 — Cultural diversity: the common heritage of humanity

Culture takes diverse forms across time and space. This diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities of the groups and societies making up humankind. As a source of exchange, innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. In this sense, it is the common heritage of humanity and should be recognized and affirmed for the benefit of present and future generations.

Article 2 — From cultural diversity to cultural pluralism

In our increasingly diverse societies, it is essential to ensure harmonious interaction among people and groups with plural, varied and dynamic cultural identities as well as their willingness to live together. Policies for the inclusion and participation of all citizens are guarantees of social cohesion, the vitality of civil society and peace. Thus defined, cultural pluralism gives policy expression to the reality of cultural diversity. Indissociable from a democratic framework,

cultural pluralism is conducive to cultural exchange and to the flourishing of creative capacities that sustain public life.

Article 3 — Cultural diversity as a factor in development

Cultural diversity widens the range of options open to everyone; it is one of the roots of development, understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence.[2]

Collectively, the essays in this volume assert community cultural development’s value as a response to the homogenizing effects of the complex phenomenon known as "globalization." The increasing economic irrelevance of national boundaries and growing interdependence of worldwide trade, capital and population have been a boon to markets, hugely escalating the global penetration of new technologies and cultural products. That practitioners from 15 different countries were able to conduct a pre-conference dialogue via e-mail and to enter so easily and enthusiastically into a global Beatles’ medley at Bellagio attests to this new reality. These same phenomena have also raised serious concern that commercial considerations will override efforts to protect our cultural commonwealth — from local seed stocks to indigenous architecture to home-grown music — resulting in a world society more reminiscent of a hypermart than a garden of human possibility.

Globalization is a newish term (the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use in 1962); but to see the phenomenon as entirely novel would be to mistake the label for the contents. In fact, the community cultural development field came into being in response to earlier social forces we now group under the label globalization.

Consider the international phenomenon known as Theater for Development, discussed in David Kerr’s essay, Masitha Hoeane’s interview and elsewhere. By the early 1970s, community workers and artists in the developing world had conducted extensive experiments in the use of theater to educate and involve community members in campaigns to improve their quality of life in the face economic and social concerns. As Ross Kidd and Martin Byram wrote in their 1978 how-to manual for such work:

Popular theatre can be used for extension work and adult education. As entertainment it can catch and hold the interest of large numbers of people. As a dramatic way of presenting local problems, it makes people in the audience see these problems in a fresh way. Through discussion (which follows every performance) people can talk about these problems with others and see what can be done about them. Often this leads to action.[3]

Their work was shaped by new geopolitical conditions — the restructuring of local economies, the decline of traditional cultures, the rise of insurgent indigenous movements and governments’ repressive responses, all in the setting of post-colonial Africa. Among the typical local problems the Kidd and Byram manual lists are those now associated with globalization:

Young people drift to towns. Women and old people left in villagesPeople forgetting traditional practicesUnemploymentInflation

This early community cultural development work — called by many names, including popular theater, Theater for Development, people’s theater — was shaped both by the unique conditions facing each locality and by inspiring examples circulated throughout the growing international network of practitioners.

In preparing this essay, we retrieved from our archives a thick folder of documents from the Third World Popular Theatre Network, a now defunct international alliance that published its first newsletter — composed on an electric typewriter — in January 1982. Some readers may not recall the difficulty of international networking in the years before the advent of the Internet. Some of these archival materials are tissue carbon copies or handwritten letters; still others are mimeographed. All were received by post operating at the snail-like pace of the international mails of two decades ago. The obstacles were formidable: it took a year to compose and circulate the newsletter’s first two issues. But around the globe — most actively in Asia and Africa — practitioners of Theater for Development struggled to document and share what they had experienced.

Where conditions permitted work to develop, itinerant theater programs grew out of universities, community organizations and development agencies: Laedza Batanani in Botswana, programs directed at farmers emerging from Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, the impressively ambitious programs of PETA (still going strong and represented in the present volume by Maribel Legarda), Sistren in Jamaica. Even in its earliest days, Theater for Development’s powerful ambitions emerged side-by-side with its populist critique:

Chikwakwa Theatre and Theatre-for-Development attempted to take theatre to the marginalized groups of Zambian society but they have not been able to convert theatre into a tool which popular groups and organizations can use in challenging oppression and victimization in Zambian society. Theatre for Development remains a means for imposing technocratic solutions on the rural and urban poor rather than a tool for analyzing the class contradictions in Zambian and the real sources of urban and rural poverty.[4]

Holding their own work to this challenging standard, every accomplishment of the international network was matched by a painful setback. Partners from India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Zambia and the Philippines, aided by first-world partners, pulled off an "Asia-Africa Popular Theatre Dialogue" in Bangladesh in February 1983. The statement adopted by participants called for many of the same elements of support that community cultural development practitioners still feel are needed to advance their work, including "Popular theatre networks … at national, regional, and inter-regional levels." [5]

Next to this statement in our file is a bright green flyer urging recipients to send cables to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos to express concern at the disappearance of Karl Gaspar, a pioneering popular-theater worker. During the two years when Gaspar was held in military detention in the early ’80s, international attention was focused on his situation through the efforts of the network; in 1984, for example, he received the J. Roby Kidd Award of the Toronto-based International Council for Adult Education. Next in the file is a rumpled, fawn colored paper dated 1983 addressed to President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya and other government officials; it exhorts them to release political prisoners and end repression against groups such as the theater of the Kamiriithu Community Educational and Cultural Centre, home base of the imprisoned and exiled playwright N’gugi Wa Thiongo, now Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages at New York University.

Or consider an even older example from the United States: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal created employment and subsidy programs to put people back to work

during the Great Depression of the 1930s, including massive Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs with major divisions covering visual art, music, theater, writing and history. Artists and scholars employed by the WPA painted murals for public buildings, tramped through cotton fields to collect slave narratives and record folk music, wrote and performed plays on social issues, and much, much more. New Deal cultural programs were created in response to massive unemployment in those sectors hardest hit by the Depression. Artists suffered in those years in part because of the Depression’s general effects: people had less discretionary income to spend on things like theater tickets and art exhibits, so artists earned less income. But the main cause of unemployment in the performing arts was structural and coincidental to the general economic collapse: the new technology of motion pictures was displacing live performance, putting countless authors, actors, designers and technicians out of work. The richness of visual art, theatrical production, music and narrative that emerged from communities during the New Deal — and that inspired so much community cultural development work in succeeding generations — was at bottom a publicly funded response to the encroachment of capital-intensive industrial development in the arts sector.

In other words, before the term globalization came into common usage, community cultural development work was called into being around the world by the same complex of social forces and social dangers known outside the United States by another name: Americanization. While the United States remains the "golden land" that animates the dreams of countless immigrants, to scholars and social critics abroad, Americanization has for decades represented the decline of traditional, participatory cultural practices in favor of consuming their commercial counterparts.

Commentators on both left and right are still making this correlation. For example, here’s how Francis Fukuyama (professor of public policy at George Mason University, consultant to the RAND Corporation and author of "The End of History and the Last Man") responded to the question of whether globalization is really a euphemism for Americanization:

I think that it is, and that’s why some people do not like it. I think it has to be Americanization because, in some respects, America is the most advanced capitalist society in the world today, and so its institutions represent the logical development of market forces. Therefore, if market forces are what drives globalization, it is inevitable that Americanization will accompany globalization.

However, I think that the American model that people in other cultures are adopting is from the America of two or three generations ago. When they think of globalization and modernization, many people think of America in the 1950s and ’60s: "They put a man on the moon," John Wayne, and "Father Knows Best." They’re not thinking of the America of the Los Angeles riots and O.J. Simpson. The culture that we exported in the ’50s and ’60s was idealized. It really presented quite an attractive package. The culture we export now is cynical, and a much less attractive model for other nations to follow.[6]

As the essays and interviews in this volume affirm, certain aspects of the phenomenon called globalization have positive, liberating potential. Advocates of cultural freedom in Asia can use the Internet to contact counterparts and supporters in Africa, Europe and the Americas, making it much harder for the perpetrators of human rights abuses to keep their misdeeds secret and much more likely that they will be called to account — if not in an official forum, then in the court of global public opinion. Mok Chiu Yu’s essay about Asian popular theater lists a dazzling array of transnational collaborations, suggesting that the problems of migrant workers — enormously exacerbated by globalization — can be addressed by a joint international effort to use theater as an organizing tool, an effort that would undoubtedly be supported by the Internet and other transnational communications and support systems. Martha Ramirez Oropeza is interested in

using new communications media to protect and restore indigenous Nahuatl culture in a way that transcends the Mexico-United States border. Gary Stewart’s interview describes working with young people to use music sampling and recording technologies to portray their Asian-British-international youth culture in London, thereby addressing the racism of British society. Dee Davis’s essay describes efforts to document, preserve and valorize rural culture using the tools of mass communications.

Yet both the preservationists among community cultural development practitioners and those who celebrate the syncretic fluidity of contemporary cultural mixing are up against the same formidable opponent, a key assumption underlying the course that globalization is taking: that the cultural products, customs and values of the U.S. marketplace are precisely what the rest of the world should and will have. Here’s how Maude Barlow, national chair of the Council of Canadians watchdog organization, characterizes it:

The entertainment-industrial complex … sees culture as a business, a very big business, and one that should be fiercely advanced through international trade agreements, like the World Trade Organization. This industry combines giant telecommunications companies, movie studios, television networks, cable companies and the Internet working together in a complex web that includes publishing, films, broadcasting, video, television, cable and satellite systems, megatheatre productions, music recording and distribution, and theme parks.

Mass produced products of American popular culture are the U.S.’s biggest export according to the United Nation’s 1999 Human Development Report. A huge, well organized coalition has formed that links the U.S. entertainment, media and information-technology sectors together in a "common front" to oppose cultural protectionism. Companies like Time-Warner and Disney have powerful friends on Capital Hill and in the White House and they work closely with the U.S. Government which in turn has taken a very aggressive stand in protecting their interests.

She goes on to sum up the ambitions of globalization:

The corporate assault on cultural diversity is part of a larger political, social and economic global watershed transformation. Economic globalization is the creation of a single global economy with universal rules set by big business for big business in which a seamless global consumer market operates on free-market principles, unfettered by domestic or international laws or standards. [7]

According to the Computer Industry Almanac, there were more than 550 million Internet users around the world at the end of 2000, with users in the United States making up just under one third of the total. [8] Various sources have estimated that from 80 to 87 percent of the approximately five million Web sites active at this writing are in English. [9] Indeed, the online dialogue that laid the foundation for our Bellagio meeting was conducted in English, as was the conference itself. Clearly, a common language can be an advantageous instrument, facilitating international exchange and economies of scale that would be prohibitive if the costs of translation had to be borne.

But even the ubiquity of English can be seen as expressing a single nation’s program of internationalizing its perceived self-interest. The fact is that for an increasingly large proportion of this planet’s residents, the cultural products of the United States are an omnipresent, distorting mirror. Filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara describes the power of this "unified imaginary" to shape perceptions in Africa:

There is a globalized information network that characterizes Africa as a continent sitting on top of infectious diseases, strangled by corruption and tribal vengeance, and populated by people with mouths and hands open to receive international aid. The globalization of the media, which now constitutes a simultaneous and unified imaginary across continents, also creates a vehicle for rock stars, church groups, and other entrepreneurs in Europe and America to tie their names to images of Afro-pessimism for the purpose of wider and uninterrupted commodification of their name, music, or church. Clearly, the media have sufficiently wired Africa to the West, from the public sphere to the bedrooms, to the extent that Africans are isolated from nation to nation but united in looking toward Europe and America for the latest news, politics, and culture. [10]

The vast majority of community cultural development practitioners would welcome the globalization — the universal extension — of human rights, self-determination, the means to livelihood, health and safety. But it is the globalization of consumerism, as Fredric Jameson has written, that inspires dread:

… the destructive forces … are North American in origin and result from the unchallenged primacy of the United States today and thus the "American way of life" and American mass media culture. This is consumerism as such, the very linchpin of our economic system, and also the mode of daily life in which all our mass culture and entertainment industries train us ceaselessly day after day, in an image and media barrage quite unparalleled in history. Since the discrediting of socialism by the collapse of Russian communism, only religious fundamentalism has seemed to offer an alternative way of life … to American consumerism. But is it certain that all of human history has been, as Fukuyama and others believe, a tortuous progression toward the American consumer as a climax? And is it meanwhile so sure that the benefits of the market can be extended so far as to make this new way of life available for everyone on the globe? If not, we will have destroyed their cultures without offering any alternatives… [11]

Community cultural development practice is based on the understanding that culture is the crucible in which human resilience, creativity and autonomy are forged. As everyone knows, an unexamined life is indeed possible: any of us might move through our lives in a trance of passivity, acted upon but never acting as free beings. The root idea of community cultural development is the imperative to fully inhabit our human lives, bringing to consciousness the values and choices that animate our communities and thus equipping ourselves to act — to paraphrase Paulo Freire — as subjects in history, rather than merely its objects.

The practitioners and thinkers represented in this volume do not suggest that making theater or murals can substitute for the other social and political acts that create a humane and equitable society. But these community cultural development activities are demonstrably the best available tools to teach the skills and values of true citizenship: critical thinking, interrogating one’s own assumptions, exercising social imagination and creative problem solving, simultaneously holding in mind one’s immediate interests and the larger interests of the community as a whole.

The computer metaphor invoked earlier may help to make the point clear: many forms of social activism in essence tinker with the surface of society, as one edits a document — substituting this piece of legislation for that one, this social program for that one — meaningful activity, but also often self-contained. When a particular accomplishment of this type is in place — when the edited document is complete — the task begins anew. In contrast, community cultural development work aims to change individuals’ (and thereby society’s) "operating system," providing new and fundamental tools of comprehension, analysis and creative action that inform all constructive social endeavor. The prospects for improving any social system, no matter how

flawed it may be at first, are vastly increased when citizens enter into the tasks of social imagination and cultural development with consciousness of the work to be done and their own roles within it.

Community cultural development theory and practice have been influenced by activist movements for civil and human rights and by theoreticians of liberation including Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique who formulated his revolutionary ideas on the psychology of the colonized and colonizer while practicing in Algeria during its struggle for independence from France; Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator whose "pedagogy of the oppressed" was shaped by literacy campaigns with landless peasants in northeast Brazil in the years preceding his expulsion following the military coup of 1964; and Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal (who at one time served in Rio de Janeiro’s municipal legislature), creator of the social-dramatic forms known as Theater of the Oppressed, Forum Theater and Legislative Theater, among others.

Many liberatory ideas converge in community cultural development practice, which asserts each human being’s value to both the local and the world community. The heart of the work is to give expression to the concerns and aspirations of the marginalized, stimulating social creativity and social action and advancing social inclusion. Inherent in this approach is asserting the value of diversity, fostering an appreciation both of difference and of commonality within difference. In valuing community cultural assets both material and nonmaterial, community cultural development deepens participants’ comprehension of their own strengths and agency, enriching their lives and their sense of possibility. By linking the personal and communal, community cultural development brings people into the civic arena with powerful tools for expression and communication, promoting democratic involvement in public life. Essential in an era of globalization, it creates public, noncommercial space for full, embodied deliberation of policies affecting citizens. And as the essays in this volume amply demonstrate, the work is inherently transnational, with strong roots in immigrant communities and deep commitments to international cooperation and multidirectional sharing and learning.

At community cultural development’s core is Freire’s concept of "conscientization" (from the Portuguese conscientização). This describes the process by which one moves from "magic thinking" toward "critical consciousness," breaking down imposed mythologies in order to reach new levels of awareness through dialogue, thus becoming part of the process of changing the world.

Within the community cultural development field, a parallel has been drawn between community artists’ efforts to protect local cultures from unwanted market interventions and developing countries’ efforts to resist the economic and social interventions of agencies of globalization such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, more recently, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The most passionate critique of these interventions has emanated from impoverished countries where citizens have discovered that the price of securing World Bank largesse is too high to be borne. Typically, in exchange for certifying governments for much-needed international credit, the IMF has demanded such measures as reductions in public expenditure (often achieved through job cuts, wage freezes or cuts in health, education and social-welfare services); privatization of public services and industries; currency devaluation and export promotion, leading to a conversion from local food production to cash crops, which in turn leads to greater impoverishment as citizens are forced to buy imported food; and so on. For example, here is one account of the impact of such policies on Africa:

Globalization in Africa involves one fundamental project: that of opening up the economies of all countries freely and widely to the global market and its forces.

To this end, it is demanded that, whatever the nature of their economies, their level of development, and whatever their location in the global economy, all countries must pursue a common set of economic policies. In particular, they must permit the free and indiscriminate operation of transnational corporations in their economies: open their economies freely and indiscriminately to imports and concentrate on exporting what they are supposed to be good at; reduce the role of governments in the economy to that of supporting the market and private enterprise; and leave the determination of prices of goods, currencies, labour, as well as the allocation of resources to the operation of the market. Seen in this way, globalization is primarily not an impersonal process driven by laws and factors of development — such as technology — operating outside human control and agency. Rather it is a conscious programme of reconstructing international economic and political relations in line with a particular set of interests (the profit motivations of the businesses, especially the transnational corporations of the advanced industrial countries) and vision (the dogma of the primacy of the free market and of private enterprise in all processes of human development).

For Africa, all the central planks of the process of globalization have been implemented over the past decade-and-a-half as structural adjustment programmes. Countries have deregulated foreign investment, liberalised their imports, removed currency controls, emasculated the direct economic role of the state, and so on. The results have been to further undermine the internal, national productive capacity, social security and democratic integrity of these countries. So that is basically how globalization has impacted on Africa. [12]

Following much the same pattern, globalization of culture inculcates consumerism, substituting mass-produced imported products for indigenous cultural production, and encourages privatization of public cultural-funding apparatus. The result is that market forces determine what aspects of culture will be preserved and supported, and as in the advanced industrial economies, much of the cultural particularity that continues to exist is expressed through purchases of clothing, recordings, concert and film tickets — through a process of market segmentation — rather than active participation in community cultural life.

It is not that such choices are meaningless: to the contrary, a powerfully evocative recording or insightful film can have great meaning in the life of an individual, and affinities for such products can be part of the basis for even intimate connections. The point is that as an act, consummating purchases can never express the breadth or depth of meaning that inheres in heritage culture or that we invest in our own creations. But the particulars of what is purchased are incidental to the main impacts of the act — enriching the consumer cultural industries and placing our roles as consumers at the center of our lives and communities. By reducing culture to commerce, globalization robs us of so much: our connection to our own histories with their reservoirs of resilience and creativity; our ability to reconceive the past for the benefit of the future; the ease of exploring our boundless creativity.

We opened our meeting at Bellagio by asking each participant to envisage cultural democracy: What are we working for? What are the conditions we hope to bring about through community cultural development? People’s responses give a flavor of the group — its members’ pragmatic idealism, their uncanny ability to engender hope and possibility where others might see cause for despair.

Tony Le Nguyen: To give an alternative voice to the community. To allow and accept a different way of thinking and doing things and making decisions.

Munira Sen: Not just to respect and tolerate other cultures, but to celebrate other cultures.

David Diamond: It has to do with creating the space for authentic voices in the midst of a growing corporate voice. To be in true dialogue is a human right.

Judy Baca: What we’re struggling with is the creation of a kind of homogeneity that is going across the world, and what we’re trying to do is preserve the specificity of various cultures and to amplify those voices in such a way that they become valued.

Nina Obuljen: Giving space, on different levels, from individuals to small groups, nations, and eventually coming into something that is globally appreciated.

Dee Davis: Finding strategic ways to take cultural voices and frame public discourse.

David Kerr: I am interested in cultural exchange, and a big problem is unequal exchange, like when Paul Simon comes and gets Ladysmith Black Mombazo to work on his record, it’s not really an equal cooperation. My point is trying to create conditions in which cultures can exchange on an equal basis.

Liz Lerman: One aspect of our work is to insist that art making is a central, critical and crucial aspect of decision making within the culture, and it’s not marginal.

Prosper Kampoare: To facilitate the empowerment of the population to be actors in their own development.

Nitin Paranjape: To create spaces where multiple flows of information are possible, to empower people to believe in themselves, their own values, their own personal strength.

Mary Marshall Clark: To create ways of communicating across cultures and all other kinds of barriers, people communicating to create community.

Maribel Legarda: We’ve seen that the political and economic spheres have not really contributed to finding resolutions to our problems. The cultural sphere is the last bastion of trying to struggle against globalization. Coming from culture being an appendage — a thing we did to support political and social issues — the cultural sphere takes the lead role in the changes, insurrections and struggles that we need to be able to let mankind survive.

Tony Stanley: For me it’s all about connectedness — us as individuals helping other people connect with their own imaginative lives. But more important perhaps is the connectivity between people and through that, the building of cultures and the sustainability of cultures.

Gary Stewart: Young people around the world tend to be the most consistent targets of negative global practices. The way I envision cultural democracy is for those young people to have ways of articulating their concerns and ideas with each other that aren’t mediated necessarily through adults or other agencies.

Norm Horton: Given that there’s a lot of economic and cultural and social development that’s happening around us all the time, protocols should be established that are particular to place, so that development work is actually informed by the specific place where it’s acting and that drives it.

Sarah Moynihan: Being able to create a space for dialogue between or amongst the mainstream and all the marginal groups, so that can start to impact on more appropriate development.

Mok Chiu Yu: We should work toward everyone becoming active creators of art, not just passive consumers. Cultural democracy means people have control of their lives.

Brian Holmes: Discovery — people discover themselves in relation to a community or a group. Expression, confrontation.

Iman Aoun: To break the silence and develop the art of listening. By breaking through the walls of each self, we might create a bond.

Paul Heritage: I believe in inclusion, but cultural democracy is about exploring the margins. We should watch the margins change as our cultures develop, and find a safe place for the excluded.

Bárbara Santos: The challenge is to find the means to stimulate people to find themselves and find their own futures.

Azril Bacal: Globalization has bred a lot of hopelessness: how to breed hope? And how to reappropriate and democratize cultural definition and development?

Masitha Hoeane: Looking around the room I see the diversity of humanity. In that divergence, those differences, there is a convergence. It is important to redefine culture and how it is perceived.

Martha Ramirez Oropeza: To find ways of motivating through participation. The way to motivate the original part within us as well as indigenous people and communities is through self-esteem. Globalization is destroying self-esteem.

Arlene Goldbard: To awaken compassion, a passion for justice and freedom.

Don Adams: There is a fundamental way we understand our participation in culture. Most people do not think, "What I see around me is a direct result of what I do."

Most community cultural development work is conducted in microcosm, at the level of the individual in community. Paul Heritage’s and Bárbara Santos’ essays share experiences of prisoners and guards in Brazil’s penal system; Liz Lerman talks about employees of a shipyard in Portsmouth, Maine; Judy Baca recounts the experiences of gang members in East Los Angeles. The localism and particularity of this work is both its strength and its vulnerability.

On the one hand, there is no way to mass-produce transformation of consciousness: the individuals who make theater out of their own lives or unearth their own cultural heritage as preparation for creating a history mural or a computer game come to consciousness of the roles they may play in changing the world precisely because their own minds and bodies are directly engaged in the process of self- and community-discovery. The labor-intensive, time-consuming effort that Maribel Legarda describes in creating a youth theater in Smokey Mountain — a mountain of garbage near Manila where children endanger their health working as scavengers — or that Sarah Moynihan and Norm Horton recount in discussing their work in creating a database of local cultural information with the people of Dajarra — a small, remote, predominantly Aboriginal township northwest of Brisbane, Australia — has dynamic transformative impact that

can’t be reached by any shortcut. The work’s power and its enduring effects stem from its intensely personal nature.

But one of the impacts of globalization has been a cheapening of the local and the particular in favor of the general, and especially whatever gives "more bang for the buck." What is distended through mass replication or swollen with its own putative significance shows up on the "globalized information network" to which Manthia Diawara refers. Everything else — such as community cultural development projects on the ground in Australia, Mexico, India or Britain — is too small to signify. As one consequence, this democratic community cultural development movement, with its tremendous potential to respond successfully to the negative effects of globalization, has been marginalized by its invisibility in the mass media, and thus lacks the resources to realize that potential. This is a pity, because right now many of those who wish to oppose globalization’s most dangerous effects can be seen as acting them out, if only inadvertently.

Consider what has come to be known as the anti-globalization movement, the decentralized network of many thousands of activists who have demonstrated in Seattle, Montreal, Genoa and beyond against the World Trade Organization and other multinational attempts to regulate trade at the expense of local livelihood and culture. Part of the critique of globalization is the globalized media’s cynical manipulation of symbols to disguise its real impact: the very concept of "free trade" reduces the meaning of liberty to little more than corporations’ unfettered access to world markets. Yet the centerpiece of the anti-globalization movement’s campaigns has been symbolic action transmitted through sound bites and film clips on CNN: smashing the windows of a McDonald’s, spray painting slogans on the facade of a Gap outlet, temporarily shutting down a world capital’s business district in time for the evening news. Certainly these efforts have publicized the fact that there is a serious opposition to the globalization of corporate interests. Certainly they have forced international trade meetings to seek out more remote and secure meeting places. But it is hard to argue they have done much beyond that to slow the advance of globalization’s harmful effects or hasten the realization of its liberatory potential.

Many of the essays in this volume were completed during September 2001, as can be discerned from some authors’ mention of the appalling terrorist acts that cost so many lives in New York and Washington. In the aftermath of those tragedies, commentators at all points along the political spectrum have remarked that the World Trade Center was chosen as a target because it was a symbol of American capitalism — just as the Pentagon is a symbol of American military might. As we write, a few months later, pre-September 11 photos of the New York skyline evoke tears, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center have come to symbolize thousands of lost lives. In this context, spray painting anti-capitalist slogans on a McDonalds may read one way to a committed North American or European anti-globalization activist, but how does it read halfway around the world? Consider this account of Asian young people’s consumer preferences:

A NEW GenerAsians survey asked 5,700 children, between the ages of 7 and 18, in 18 cities in 12 Asia-Pacific countries, about their activities, aspirations, food, drink and entertainment. The survey was sponsored by Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network, and conducted by ACNielsen in March and April of 1998.

FOOD & DRINK:

"What’s your favorite fast food restaurant?" "What’s your favorite soft drink?"

AUSTRALIA: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola CHINA: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola HONG KONG: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola INDIA: Suvarna Bhuvan, Coca-Cola INDONESIA: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola JAPAN: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola MALAYSIA: KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], Coca-Cola PHILIPPINES: Jollibee, Coca-Cola SINGAPORE: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola S. KOREA: Lotteria, Coca-Cola TAIWAN: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola THAILAND: KFC, Pepsi [13]

The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, the corporations targeted on that day and the anti-globalization movement all have this in common: their activities have been staged for the global media network, which they have used to disseminate one-way messages that — whether or not one agrees with any of them — have no organic relationship to communities’ own aspirations for their development. Neither embracing nor rejecting consumerism constitutes a cultural identity nor a platform for social change. Nor can it be demonstrated that the global media themselves have the power to bring about real social change. To the contrary, it has been convincingly argued that their main impact is to solidify the existing social order by broadcasting a continuous stream of official pronouncements and reactions to them, so that there is absolutely no confusing the "center" from which authoritative messages originate with the "margins" where the less powerful reside.

As has so often been pointed out, mass media are fascinated with images of destruction because spectacle — fire, explosion, blood and agitated crowds — makes "good television." In the days following September 11, news footage of the World Trade Center towers was repeated on CNN with such disturbing frequency that the Red Cross ran public-service announcements during commercial breaks exhorting viewers to limit their TV news watching, thus avoiding the trauma that might result from a permanent mental imprint of the horror. During the demonstrations accompanying international trade meetings in Seattle, Montreal and Genoa, images of demonstrators smashing shop windows and blocking streets and of police smashing demonstrators’ heads were broadcast with proportionate repetitiveness. So far as we have seen, no one has even suggested that the result of these image-wars will be positive social change. Indeed, the main result traceable to both seems the same: an escalation of the barrage of symbols asserting the desired status quo; and new and expanded security measures that promise to constrain the lives of ordinary citizens, if not to deter terrorists.

In times of stress and upheaval, pundits are forever tempted to divide the world into easy dualities: two popular versions are Benjamin Barber’s "Jihad vs. McWorld," and Samuel P. Huntington’s "clash of civilizations." In the current fashion, Islamic fundamentalism is placed on one side of the dividing line, with a version of the West characterized by post-Enlightenment ideals of rationality on the other. Implicit in these divisions is the assumption that modernity can only be opposed by the oppressive nostalgia of fundamentalism. But fundamentalism, protectionism and nationalism are based on the fortress paradigm of the walled city discussed in Dee Davis’ essay, something impossible to achieve given the interpenetration of realities already accomplished through globalization. Nationalism and essentialism create disconnection, asserting that a separate destiny somehow awaits each people. But the fate that unchecked globalization threatens would be truly encompassing, rendering all cultures dispensable in the face of market imperatives. Rather than attempting to wall cultures off from each other, the

urgent question now is how it will be possible to construct dynamic relationships between communities and the larger world, relationships that allow for agency on all sides.

In community cultural development practice — and this is also supported by what we now know about human consciousness and learning processes — it is understood that no ideological platform can accomplish the shift needed to expand freedom and equality in the world. Declarations inevitably evoke counter-declarations. The only meaningful dividing line is between received ideologies that demand to be swallowed whole and regurgitated intact and the process of questioning that defines human intellectual and spiritual freedom. The passion for global justice does not attach to the human spirit as a good idea: it is acquired through first-person experiences that concretize concepts such as freedom and equality, allowing them to be integrated and lead to constructive social action. When Nitin Paranjape writes about tribal children in the Indian government’s Ashram Schools discovering their own agency by publishing a "wall paper" in their own words, he shows us this process.

There is infinite scope for books, films and broadcasts about globalization and its discontents. There is infinite room for interesting ideas and analyses, for quotable scholarship and theoretical exploration. It is altogether a good thing that the process of globalization be examined and interrogated, that room be made to assert its constructive powers and condemn its destructive forces. But the only real promise for ordinary people in their own communities to have a say in how their cultures will be affected by the process of globalization lies in efforts like those described in this volume, in which the process of conscientization — discovering one’s own voice and learning to speak one’s own words — emancipates those who experience it, equipping them to enter the public sphere and take action to realize their ideals.

The community cultural development field is still taking shape. As we wrote of the U.S. field in "Creative Community," there is as yet no consensus on definition or nomenclature. Many different names are in simultaneous use:

Community arts. This is the common term in Britain and most other Anglophone countries; but in U.S. English, it is also sometimes used to describe conventional arts activity based in a municipality, such as "the Anytown Arts Council, a community arts agency." While in this document we use "community artists" to describe individuals engaged in this work, to avoid such confusion, we have chosen not to employ the collective term "community arts" to describe the whole enterprise.

Community animation. From the French animation socio-culturelle, the common term in Francophone countries. There, community artists are known as animateurs. This term was used in much international discussion of such work in the 1970s.

Cultural work. This term, with its roots in the panprogressive Popular Front cultural organizing of the ’30s, emphasizes the socially conscious nature of the work, stressing the role of the artist as cultural worker, countering the tendency to see art making as a frivolous occupation, a pastime as opposed to important labor.

"Participatory arts projects," "community residencies," "artist/community collaborations" — the list of labels is very long. Even though it is a mouthful, we prefer "community cultural development" because it encapsulates the salient characteristics of the work:

• Community, to distinguish it from one-to-many arts activity and to acknowledge its participatory nature, which emphasizes collaborations between artists and other community members;

• Cultural, to indicate the generous concept of culture (rather than, more narrowly, art) and the broad range of tools and forms in use in the field, from aspects of traditional visual- and performing-arts practice, to oral-history approaches usually associated with historical research and social studies, to use of high-tech communications media, to elements of activism and community organizing more commonly seen as part of non-arts social-change campaigns; and

• Development, to suggest the dynamic nature of cultural action, with its ambitions of conscientization … and empowerment and to link it to other enlightened community-development practices, especially those incorporating principles of self-development rather than development imposed from above.

Within the community cultural development field, there is a tremendous range of approach, style, outcome — in every aspect of the work.[14]

Researching the current state of the global field in order to identify participants for the May 2001 Community, Culture and Globalization conference, we began with archival resources. At first, we searched through Web sites and publications for organizations that had been fairly prominent in years past. Some of these — for example, the Third World Popular Theatre Network mentioned above — had effectively disappeared from view. Later, during the online dialogue that preceded our conference, David Kerr e-mailed this story:

In 1983 popular theatre workers from all over the "Third World" meeting in Koitta, Bangladesh, tried to set up IPTA (International Popular Theatre Alliance), to help mobilise work at a global level, with an annually rotating leadership. The first chair was to be Karl Gaspar.… Unfortunately, shortly after Karl’s return to the Philippines, he was detained by the Marcos regime, and his files confiscated.… IPTA was in disarray. Several others in the original organisation had problems. The police in Malawi simply confiscated virtually all my mail for two years (my postal arrest I called it!). Dickson Mwansa in Zambia did try to pick up the mantle, and did draw attention to abuses against popular theatre workers (Karl’s case, arrested student actors in Malawi, etc.), but it was very difficult. The inertia of involvement in local struggles made it hard for us to unite at a global level.

Such are the conditions faced by many community cultural development workers, making continuity and coordination a perpetual challenge. But we were heartened that even though earlier networks had disintegrated, it proved possible to trace the progress of some of their constituent parts, and thus we were able to learn a little about who is active now and what they are doing.

Within the field as a whole, development has been uneven. Without question, the most vigorous and well-established branch of the community cultural development field today centers on Theater of the Oppressed and other dramatic practices originated by Augusto Boal: fully a third of the essays in this volume touch on such work, and that is representative of the community cultural development work evident around the globe. Related but independent popular-theater practices — such as PETA’s "Basic Integrated Arts Workshop," used by many Asian people’s theater workers — have had tremendous staying power, enabling community artists to work effectively with an enormous range of social and age groups. As Paul Heritage’s essay points out, the effectiveness of such work has been recognized even in sectors that don’t normally

interact with community cultural development practitioners, such as prisons, and this recognition has aided its expansion.

MASS MEDIA & SOCIETY

A Sociological Perspective on Media

The communication media are the different technological processes that facilitate communication between (and are in the "middle" of) the sender of a message and the receiver of that message. The mass media include newspapers, magazines, radio, and films, CDs, internet, etc. The media communicate information to a large, sometimes global, audience. Near-constant exposure to media is a fundamental part of contemporary life but it is  TV that draws our attention  the most as one of the primary socializing agent of today's society.

98.3 % of households (hh) have TV sets (2.3 sets per hh) 99% of hh have a radio (5.6 radios per hh on average) 65% have cable TV 82% have VCR (US Census Bureau, 1996). by 1999: 1/2 of US hh have a home computer, 1/3 of hh have internet access

@ home TV sets are turned on for an average of 7 hours each day average american spend 2.5 hours a day in front of TV ( = 38 solid days of TV

viewing in a year)

Media are very integral part of our lives and therefore they generate popular interest and debate about any social problem that we can think of.

Does TV have too much sex and violence? Are the news media biased? Have TV talkshows gone too far with their sensationalized topics? Should the content of the Internet be regulated? Are media shaping our values? IS TV harmful for our children? Do media drive foreign policy? Are newspapers insensitive to minorities? Is emphasis on body image harmful to our society? Should the names of rape victims be reported? Should tobacco advertising be restricted? Should the media cover criminal trials? Do media reports of crime heighten the fears of citizens? Is coverage of political campaigns fair? Is advertising ethical? Do paparazzi threaten First Amendment Rights? Does concentration of ownership jeopardize media content?

Does the globalization of media industries homogenize media content?

In order to address such questions we need an understanding of the mass media's role in contemporary social life. What is the nature of the relationship between media and society? From a sociological perspective we can consider the role of media in our daily lives (the micro level) within the context of larger social forces such as the economy, politics, religion and technological development (the macro level)

Mass Media and SocializationSocialization is the process of developing a sense of self connected to a larger social world through learning and internalizing the values, beliefs, and norms of  one's culture. Through socialization we learn to perform certain roles as citizens, friends, lovers, workers, and so forth. Through internalization our culture becomes taken-for-granted. We learn to behave in socially appropriate and acceptable ways. Some social institutions have explicit roles in socializing the young (such as the family and schools) and others have less intentional but still powerful roles in the process (such as adolescent peers).

Where do the media fit in this process? An average American high school graduate spent more time in front of the TV than in the classroom (Graber 1980). The mass media is a powerful socializing agent. For sociologists significance of the media is not limited to the content of media messages. Media affect how we learn about our world and interact with one another. Media literally mediate our relationship with social institutions. We base most of our knowledge on government news accounts, not experience. We are dependent on the media for what we know and how we relate to the world of politics because of the media-politics connection. We read or watch political debates followed by instant analysis and commentary by "experts." Politicians rely on media to communicate their message. Similar dynamics are present in other mediated events such as televised sports and televangelism. media is part of our routine relations with family and friends. They define our interaction with other people on a daily basis as a diversion, sources of conflict, or a unifying force. Media have an impact on society not only through the content of the message but also through the process.

Sociological Imagination (C. Wright Mills 1959)Sociological imagination helps us grasp the relationship between history and biography. Through a sociological imagination we can see how our personal lives are connected to social world (micro-macro connection). Our personal choices are shaped by larger social forces around us such as the historical or cultural context and social institutions. In this context, media's importance is apparent. Media often act as the bridge between our personal/private lives and the public world. We see ourselves and our place in society through mass media. It is because of this connection that we need to pay special attention to mass media if we want to understand how society functions.

Media play many different - and maybe incompatible- roles. For the audiences, it is a source of entertainment and information while for media workers, media is an industry that offer jobs- and therefore income, prestige

and professional identity-. For the owners, the media is a source of profit and a source of political power. For society at larger, the media can be a way to transmit information and values (socialization). Therefore depending on whose perspective and which role we focus on we might see a different media picture.

Structure vs AgencyBy structure sociologists suggest constraint on human action while agency indicates independent action. Each social relationship we will look at will exhibit this tension between the structure and agency. Social structure "describes any recurring pattern of social behavior" (Croteau and Hoynes 2000: 21). For example, family structure could be defined as a pattern of behaviors associated with the culturally defined idea of 'family.' Another example is educational system which is a structure comprised of students, teachers, administrators in their 'expected roles.' Having an education makes it possible for many Americans to achieve a better life standard but it also can be very constraining (required courses, assignments, deadlines, grading criteria that limit actions of students and teachers). When we talk about structure in this class it is very important to consider the constraining nature of structure. Therefore it is inevitable that we will also refer to agency in the same context. Agency is intentional and undetermined human action. For example, even though the educational system is rigid in many ways it is up to the student how much time and energy to be spent on schoolwork. Students do have agency however that agency is limited by the structural constraints.

It is very important that we recognize how human agency reproduces social structure. As we accept and act out our appropriate roles in this system we reproduce the system. Therefore, while structure constrains agency, "it is human agency that both maintains and alters social structures" (Croteau and Hoynes 2000: 22).

Class Perspective:Below are some questions we will try to answer in this class through a sociological perspective. Our class will take a critical look at media's role in society. Therefore we will question taken-for-granted assumptions about how things work.

Who owns the media- and why does it matter? How are media products created? What should be government's relation to regulating the media? Why are some images and ideas so prevalent in the mass media, while others

are marginalized? Whose voices are not heard? How has growth in mass media influenced the political process? What impact do mass media have on our society and on our world? How do people use and interpret the mass media? What is the effect of technological change? What is the significance of the increasing globalization of mass media?