Riassunto esame Lettorato di Lingua Inglese, prof. Solly, libro consigliato Global Media Discourse di Machin e Van Leeuwen

Chapter 1 – Histories of media globalisation

Many of us tend to think of news as a natural phenomenon, and it seems natural that we should find newspapers all around the planet. News itself, and its associated practices, the organisations of its institutions, its formats and genre, have their origins particularly in European and American culture. Early nineteenth century newspapers were an important vehicle of political communication. They didn’t separate “fact” and “comment”. News agencies started in the middle of the nineteenth century to supply these newspapers with the news items from across the world. The first agencies started in the late 1840s in Germany, France and UK. The big three agencies had monopoly access to the national agencies in their territories and these national agencies in turn could only buy news from the global agency that had the monopoly in their territory.

In global media communication, elements of politics, culture and economics come together. To sell to editors of different political persuasion, news had to become politically neutral, pure information, pure fact. This approach which today is common in newspapers the world over, was gradually developed and globally propagated by the major news agencies. In the course of the twentieth century, standardisation increased further. In the 1980s the chief editors of news agencies began to publish voluminous handbooks to prescribe company style in minute detail and they also started quality control units to reinforce their prescriptions day by day, as in this quote, where a journalist is reminded of the principles of the “lead paragraph”.

The rise of the news agencies took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nation states all started their own news agencies, and the national interests these agencies sought to protect sometimes clashed with the interests of the international agencies on which they depended. A case in point is Spain. Western journalists constantly criticise agencies and exchanges for being under the control of governments. Under communism, the news agencies of eastern European countries were also government-controlled. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the major western agencies moved in, further diminishing the remaining influence of local agencies. On the surface, most countries' news and information media are still national. They support their countries' national ethos and protect national interests.

The cartel of European news agencies collapsed in 1934 when the United Press Association refused to join the cartel and began its own global operations. From this moment, the major news agencies began to compete with each other and the USA rather than Europe, became the major player. The new global agencies that started in the late twentieth century were all American: Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Knight Ridder.

From the 1920s onwards, America began to take the lead, not only in the provision of news, but also in other media, so much so that, in the 1970s, a study of the political economy of the mass media could be called “the media are American”. Hollywood was the first breakthrough. By the middle of 1990s America controlled about 85% of the world’s film market and even in France, which has been the only European country to retain a strong home production industry, French language films now account for only 30% of their home box office revenue.

When television came along, the USA was already well ahead of the game. All of the main television formats were invented in America. The arrival of satellite broadcasting hastened the process. Satellite government-controlled television channels had to shift towards more entertainment-based programming, as for instance in India and Egypt. In the 1980s satellite broadcasters like other global corporations began to see profit in localisation.

Themes of American media hegemony

• The missionary zeal that informed it.
• The link between entertainment and politics on which it was founded.
• The emphasis on standardisation.
• The combination of profit motive and idealism is typical and would continue to characterise American media globalisation.

Reader’s Digest is a particularly telling example of this missionary spirit. Founded in 1922, it condensed every month 31 articles selected from magazines such as literary digest, vanity fair, etc. Its breakthrough came in the early 1930s when it added “art of living” articles with titles such as “how to regulate your weight” and started experimenting with forms of reader participation in which readers could send in anecdotes and jokes as well as personal experiences. By the 1958 the magazine was published in 13 languages, counting 30 different editions for 100 countries.

The global spread of Disney had started a little earlier. By 1937 Disney comic strips, comic books and story books appeared in 27 languages. Now some critique for the stereotyped ways in which Disney products depict the rest of the world and of their racism and sexism.

The link between entertainment and propaganda goes back at least as far as the 1930 when Goebbels wrote that argument is no longer effective and looked towards popular song, humour and movies as key media of propaganda: “with films we can make politics too”. The American popular media have consistently spread not just good, clean family values, but also political messages. Both examples of Reader’s Digest and Disney: the first foreign-language editions of Reader’s Digest were started in the service of war propaganda. Disney too participated in the Second World War propaganda effort and Disney cartoons contained many references to political events, for instance to war demonstrations.

Chapter II – Theories of media globalisation

This chapter looks more closely at two key themes of globalisation theory: the theme of homogeneity and diversity and the question of what globalisation is, and when it began.

The problem with the debate about homogeneity and diversity is, it is not a neutral issue. The case of cultural homogenisation is often associated with another more specific idea, the idea of “cultural imperialism”, the idea that “globalisation is really another name for the dominant role of the United States”. In the second half of the twentieth century American media did indeed conquer many parts of the world, not only by exporting their own media products but also by infiltrating themselves into local media everywhere. The American empire did not just happen. It was a deliberate and explicit project. Since the Second World War, American media have quite deliberately sought cultural world domination.

Two aspects of American global media practices have often been singled out, particularly in critiques which implicitly or explicitly defended European national media and high culture: standardisation (Adorno’s critique of American popular songs) and simplification. Adorno also attacked American popular music for its simplification. Simplification is not the same as standardisation, because it doesn’t necessarily derive from industrial processes of creative production. Simplification is also an important aspect of Dorfman and Mattelart’s critique of Disney and Reader’s Digest. The idea of homogeneity finally, is in the context of globalisation theory, closely associated with the idea that cultural differences are disappearing as a result of globalisation.

A critique of the critics of cultural imperialism emerged in the early 1980s, initially centring on the American television series “Dallas”, that became a new focus for the critique of American cultural imperialism. But not everybody agreed. A new generation of media theorists didn’t recognise themselves in the image of the passive and infantilised victim of mass media manipulation that some of the critics of American cultural imperialism had drawn. Katz and Liebes claim that Dallas and other American programmes appeal to audiences across the world because they have “primordial”, universal themes. In this they are perhaps closer to Reader’s Digest editor DeWitt Wallace’s view. They also argue that programmes like Dallas are deliberately ambiguous, deliberately open to different interpretations.

The study of Disney on which we have already touched brings out in unexpected ways. Like Dallas studies, it focuses on audiences, but these audiences are from yet another generation. They are young students from the late 1990s and they have grown up with Disney and understand his message very well, yet they are at times ambivalent about Disney or even critical. In some countries young audiences do accept that they have been “Americanised” and worry about it.

The globalisation process

The term globalisation is relatively new. Robertson describes globalisation as a long-term process that started in the fifteenth century and went through a number of phases.

1. Germinal stage of globalisation, in the early fifteenth century, nation states began to establish themselves in Europe, while at the same time the world was opened up through exploration and trade.
2. The incipient stage (mid-eighteenth century to 1870s) saw the consolidation of homogeneous, unitary nation states, yet also the beginning of international agreements and international legislation. In other words, the national and the international developed side by side and in relation to each other.
3. Take off stage, saw nation states intensified the processes of regulating their single national languages and repressing minority languages and of inventing national traditions and histories, to ensure that nationality would become a core aspect of people’s identities. It was also a period of increasing global communication.
4. Struggle for hegemony (mid 1920s to late 1960s). The independence of nations was still a key theme and newly independent, decolonised nations everywhere began to develop their own national institutions, yet the relations between all these independent nations became closer.
5. Uncertain phase, is the most recent stage. On the one hand the intensity of global trade and global communication increases and many new global institutions are created, on the other hand the oldest and richest nations become more preoccupied with maintaining their national homogeneity in a time of increasing immigration and in the face of alternative globalisations, such as radical Islam.

Robertson’s historical mapping of globalisation is restricted to modern times, making globalisation more or less synonymous with westernisation. Other commentators of globalisation bring the beginning even closer to the present time, like Giddens.

Two case histories of media globalisation

The first case is that of women’s magazines in the Netherlands and the second case is that of comic strips in the Middle East.

Dutch women’s magazines

In the late nineteenth century the Dutch developed a social and political system in which groups with different religious or political views created entirely separate life worlds with their own political parties, unions, schools, media, universities, and so on.

Germinal stage (1930s-60s)

• It is in this context that a range of Dutch women’s magazines were created in the early 1930s. One magazine, Elegance, aimed at the modern woman, included beauty, fashion, sports, in most magazines these were not included. The first modern advertising agencies had started in the USA in the 1920s and they had quickly come to the conclusion that women were the purchase managers of the household.

Internationalisation (1960s-70s)

• In the 1960s Dutch society changed rapidly. Post-war scarcity had continued to be felt throughout the 1950s but now people’s income rose and many households acquired a refrigerator, a washing machine, a television, a motor car for the first time. More young people stayed in education, including women, and began to rebel against traditional values, including traditional sexual morality. American feminism that influenced the second wave Dutch feminism.

Top-down globalisation (1980s)

• The 1980s saw the introduction of Dutch versions of foreign glossy magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Marie Claire. As in the case of Reader’s Digest, localised versions are closely supervised by the magazine’s head office. Local editors go to New York for an induction in the Cosmo values and style, and have to adopt an identical agenda and identical presentation formats and styles but can adapt the content according to local circumstances and preferences. These magazines are localised rather than local. Their agenda, format, and style are imposed by Hearst in New York.

Bottom-up globalisation (1990s-present)

• The 1990s saw what some have called a “third wave” of feminism. The media are no longer in Dutch and they are no longer mediated by Dutch cultural elites, feminist or otherwise but directly accessed on the internet, and given shape locally in dress styles, behavior, and so on. Initially Dutch women’s magazines particularised a universal model, adapting it to the local situation, and presenting it as fully Dutch. Objectively the global already impinged on magazine readers, but they were not yet aware of it. In a later stage, the situation was reversed. Global magazine were localised not by the Dutch cultural elite, but from centre of cultural power such as New York and Paris.

Arab comic strips

The story of comic strips in the Middle East is very different. This story starts with the introduction of top-down globalisation, and leads gradually to the development of indigenous media.

Top-down globalisation (1950s-60s)

• Disney introduced Arab-language comics in the early 1950s and European comics were introduced at the same time. Miki, the Egyptian version of Mickey Mouse, was distributed across the Arab world and contained both Egyptian and translated content. Some of the stories were locally produced, for instance “the adventures of Ramses in Paris”. The story in this case is telling in Egyptian.

Indigenisation (1970s-80s)

• As the Arab world became oil-rich, a flourishing art of indigenous comic strips emerged. The most common themes were pan-Arab heritage, and respect for Islam, as heritage and as a source of morality.

Islamisation (1990s-now)

• While Dutch women’s magazines became secularised and Americanised as a result of globalisation, Arab comics went in the opposite direction and became both more religious and less American in form and content. Some of these islamised comics are quite political. Clearly, in different historical, political and cultural contexts, globalisation happens in different ways.

Chapter III – Discourses of identity and community

Two models of identity

Recently, globalised commercial culture has created new identities that are no longer connected to a specific nation or place of origin. An interview of two women: how do these women describe their identity?

First of all in terms of gender, of female identity, positively contrasted to male identity. Being a woman is fundamental to their view of who they are. Second, they nominate identity traits that are psychological and individual, personality traits. And third, they mention their preferred leisure time activities. Note that there are many other potential aspects of identity that they do not mention (nationality, class background, job, etc.) The interview was part of a research on the magazine “Cosmopolitan” and this allowed us to notice that these women’s views of their identity are highly compatible with the model of the “fun”.