Lecture Twelve - Globalisation, Sustainability and the Media.

Definitions of globalisation

• Socialist - The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.
• Capitalist - The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result
• markets become more powerful in influencing decisions
• multi-national become the most powerful
• all the people of the world were meant to share everything together
• now there are restrictions on goods and borders, a relegated system
• western market has spread across almost all of the developed world
• 'the pursuit of classical liberal policies in the world economy'
• americanisation of the world
• telecommunication systems have expanded us, making us more globalised

McDonaldisation

• ‘American sociologist George Ritzer coined the term “McDonaldization” to describe the wide- ranging sociocultural processes by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world’
• Principles of rigid hierarchy, parts of a machine
• these ideas being passed to other countries

Marshall McLuhan

• one of the first people to focus on the effects of the mass media
• radio, television and phone lines
• ‘Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’
• rapidity of communication echoes the senses
• experience instantly the effects of our actions on a global scale

Global Village Thesis 

• should make us more aware of our responsibilities
• ‘As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree’
• right and wrong
• new technology has expanded our senses
• hasn't brought us together but a greater accountability for people in power

Centripetal and Centrifugal forces

• centripetal - bringing the world together in uniform global society
• centrifugal - tearing the world apart in tribal wars
• big corporations have swallowed up the rest

Problems with globalisation

• sovereignty - challenges to the idea of the nation state
• accountability - transnational forces and organisations. Who controls them?
• identity - nation, group. Who are we?

Cultural imperialism

• if the global village id run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one
• key thinkers - Schiller and Chomsky

Rigging the 'free market'

• illusion people have is that mass culture is just a giant free market, some are popular and some are not
• music, film, tv, newspapers etc are controlled by 4 or 5 giant multinational corporations
• the control of all of those goes back to one
• media conglomerates operate ad oligopolies
• anything you are interested in will be controlled by one of these organisations

News corporations

• news corporations divide the world into territories of descending market importance
• hierarchy of market importance
• concentrate efforts on areas of the globe that will give them the most money
• focussing and hyping up american culture because that there is where the most money is
• hierarchy
• North America
• Western Europe, Japan and Australasia
• Developing economies and regional producers
• The rest of the world
• The news people get fed in the third world is the ideas of the west
• because of this bombardment it changes these people into thinking similarly
• US media power can be thought of as a new form of imperialism
• local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shaped, mirroring old school colonialism.
• create a product in the west, slightly repackage it and sell it everywhere else

Manufacturing Consent

• propaganda model
• 5 basic filters
• ownership
• funding
• sourcing
• only as objective as it's aloud to be
• what you're aloud to report is controlled by the rich and powerful
• flak
• companies set up to feed the stories in their interests
• characterised by concerting snd intentional efforts to manage public information
• anti ideology
• painting something different as you to be bad
• was communism
• now anti-islam
• news systems operate as a giant system of propaganda
• news is thought to be true but it is more fabricated stories
• not an objective reporting of fact but a tissue of lies in the benefit of the rich

Sustainability

• ‘sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’
• needs (particularly of the worlds poor)
• limitations of technology