Lecture- Globalisation, Sustainability & 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. 

George Ritzer

American sociologist George Ritzer combined 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 the rest of the world.' 

Marshall McLuhan Understanding the media

pg5 1964 
'as electricity contracted, the globe is no more than a village.'

Rapidity of communication

We can experience instantly the effects of out actions on a global scale 

'we live in mythically and internally.. in the electric age, when out central nervous system is technologically extended to involve in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us' this is not true 

Three problems of Globalisation

-Sovereignty 
challenges to the idea of the nation-state
-Accountability
transnational forces and organisations, who controls them?
-Identity
who are we? Nation, group, community 

Cultural imperialism

if the 'global village' is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.

key thinkers
-schiller 
-chomsky

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. 

Newspaper Ownership

News of the world and The Sun 
-Rupert Murcoch, selected media interests 
- a man of influence and incredible arrogance
-mass appeal 
-power to determine results  
-ownership determines content