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Cultural Imperialism

Cultural imperialism is a mighty civilization exerts culture influence over another. Less economically prominent cultures often import culture from Western countries, which have the economic means to produce a majority of the world’s cultural media, mostly via the global transmission of media. The weak civilization adopts the mighty civilization’s customs, philosophies, worldviews and general ways of life. The theoretical foundations of the academic study of cultural imperialism mostly come from Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, governmentality and Edward Saïd’s concept of Post-colonialism, which theories see cultural imperialism as the cultural legacy of colonialism or forms of Western hegemony. Media effect study which integrated with political-economy traditional is the core argument of cultural imperialism. There are two opposite effects of media study. The negative one is that Western media imposes socio-political conflicts to the developing country and the latter one’s resist to the media effects to preserve their traditional culture identities. The positive effects are the issues of the process of civilization such as women’s right or racial equality with exposing to Western media. Now the term of cultural imperialism is usually refers to America’s global culture expansion to the rest of world, which include brand name products, video media, fast food and so on.

Global Media Studies

Global media studies is a field of media study in a global scope. Media study deals with the content, history and effects of medias. Media study often draws on theories and methods from the disciplines of culture studies, rhetoric, philosophy, communication studies, feminist theory, political economy and sociology. Among these study approaches, political economic analysis is non-ignorable in understanding the current media and communication developments. But the political economic research has become more resilient because of stronger empirical studies, and the potential connections to policy making and alternative praxis.

Each country has its own media feature because of various conditions of a country. The media of mainland China is state-run, so the political subjects are under the strict regulations set by the government while other areas such as sports, finance, and increasingly lucrative entertainment industry face less regulation from government. Canada has a well-developed media sector, but the mass media in Canada is threatened by the direct outcome of American economic and cultural imperialism which hinder the form of Canada’s media identity. Many of the media in America are controlled by large for-profit corporations who reap revenues from advertisings, subscriptions and the sale of copyrighted materials. Currently, six corporations (Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom and CBS Corporation) have controlled roughly 90% of the America media. Such successes come from the policies of the federal government or the tendency to natural monopolies in the industry.

World System Theory

World-system theory is a macro-sociological perspective that seeks to explain the dynamics of the “capitalist world economy” as a “total social system”. A world-system is what Wallerstein terms a “world-economy”, integrated through the market rather than a political centre, in which two or more regions are interdependent with respect to necessities like food, fuel, and two or more policies compete for domination without the emergence of one single centre forever. World-system theory was first articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein. There are three major sources of the world-system theory which conceived by Wallerstein: the Annales school’s general methodology, Marx’s focus on accumulation process and competitive class struggles and so on, and dependency theory’s neo-Marxist explanation of development processes.

Referring to the transnational division of labor, world-system divides the world into core countries, peripheral countries, semi-peripheral countries and external areas. The core countries usually developed a strong central governments, extensive bureaucracies and large mercenary armies, which permit the local bourgeoisie to obtain control over international commerce and extract capital surpluses from the trade for benefits. The peripheral countries often lack strong central governments or been controlled by core countries, they export raw materials and rely on coercive labor practices. Semi-peripheries which served as buffers between the core and the peripheries. They retain limited but declining access to international banking and the production of high-cost high-quality manufactured goods.[3] External areas such as Russia maintain their own economic systems, they want to remain outside the modern world economy.