Introduction

ajdm

Asian Journal of Development Matters

0973-96290976-4674

Rural Organisation for Appropriate Development-ROAD TRUST (R)

ajdm-12-1spl-018

RESEARCH NOTE

Globalization impact on mass media

Umesha

M.D

Dr¹

¹Faculty, Centre of Gandhian Studies, University of Mysore, Mukhta Gangotri, Mysore

102018

121spl185189

2018

IndianJournals.com

Introduction

Globalization is defined as the interdependence of countries on a worldwide level through the increasing volume of cross-border transactions in goods and services and through the widespread diffusion of technology. As international trade in goods and services grows, global financial transactions increase and a global marketplace emerge. Central to the formation of a global marketplace are mass media. Mass media have been criticized for homogenizing global culture by disrupting national traditions. Mass media create global mass audiences that are targets for globalized consumer products, such as Pepsi, McDonald's, and the Gap. Around the world, people wear Gap jeans and eat McDonald's hamburgers as they sip Pepsi. Instead of homogenizing culture, the Web has been criticized for fragmenting it. The Web creates a chaotic marketplace of cultures that allows a greater degree of individualization across cultures. Rather than uniting the world into one large, homogeneous global village, the Internet exposes people to cultural diversity. This papers focusing on how Mass media is important in the scenario of Globalization and how globalization simultaneously brings people together into a large consumer culture and potentially exposes individuals to different cultures.

Globalization of the mass media should also be viewed in the context of its demographicconstituencies-an aspect often left to the sidelines in our discourse. Within the next few decades, the populations of China and India combined will constitute almost half of humanity. This demo graphic shift no doubt will be an important factor in determining the geographical and economicbasis of the market, as well as the major conglomerates involved in the mass media. The rapid expansion of the table mass media is based on the assumption that information is inherently neutral.This idea has been greatly magnified by organizations and companies which have a stake in theglobalization process, and it ignores the important role that cultural and social values play in shapinformation. The choices made every day by government officials, network executives andmedia producers and distributors determine what topics are covered, what information is selectedand the way it is portrayed. The simple choice of one story over another is as much a politicalchoice as it is economic and professional. It determines what becomes part of our national consciousness and what values and ideas take precedence in the general public. The choices madeby the media and their producers are always a function of their own individual beliefs, but, more important, they reflect cultural, societal and national values and identity.

The worldwide export of media content and attempt to establish Digital Satellite TV systems in regional and national markets around the world.As the Internet becomes a broadband medium, it is increasingly taking on the characteristics of a mass medium rather than an interpersonal one. In the future, mass media trends could be extended to the Internet. For instance, a recent study of Dutch children's Internet usage revealed that they primarily used the Internet as a leisure medium to play games, watch video clips, and visit entertainment sites. Research on Americans shows people primarily use the Internet to maintain social relationships through e-mail. The Dutch study was conducted by Valkenburg and Soeters (2001), who examined children's home Internet usage. They found three primary motives for children's Internet use: affinity with computers, information seeking, and entertainment. Children must first of all enjoy sitting in front of a computer, the researchers found. Second, children use the Internet to find information about hobbies and homework assignments. Finally, they visit entertainment Web sites. The use of the Internet as an entertainment and leisure medium is similar to television usage.

Although transnational media corporations are attempting to establish operations in nations around the world, some countries want to protect their domestic media and culture industries. Some nations, including Norway, Denmark, India, Spain, Mexico, and South Korea, have established government subsidies to maintain their own domestic film industries. The British government proposed a voluntary levy on the revenues from domestic film theaters, which show predominantly Hollywood movies. These theater revenues could then be used to subsidize the British commercial film industry. However, the proposal was not passed by Parliament. Culture ministers from a variety of nations have been discussing how they can protect their own cultural identities in an increasingly American-influenced global media environment. Some nations, such as Singapore, edit and censor for broadcast media content created in the United States. Language usage, for instance, in the Singapore version of the Sopranos is vastly different from the American version because curse words have been edited out of the sound track. In such ways, individual nations can establish barriers that make it more difficult for global companies to broadcast their American-produced content.

Globalization and National Cultures

Although the Internet connects people on a global level, people can also use it to form small groups with diverse political agendas. For this reason, the Internet's lack of centralized control makes some governments reluctant to let their citizens have Internet access. Nations such as Singapore, China, and Saudi Arabia attempt to censor sites for political and religious reasons, Governmental concern about how people will use the Internet is well founded. Ralph Nader sported that, in the United States, “rather than be the passive subjects of surveillance, citizens ire using the Internet and other networks to place the government and corporations under greater scrutiny and to organize on a wide range of issues”. A key factor in Internet activism is the ability of citizens to easily communicate with each other; the decentralized structure of the Internet facilitates this process.

English as a World Language of Mass Media

English is the predominant language on the Internet and has gained some type of global business status. However, English is not the native language that most people in the world speak. There are three times as many native speakers of Chinese as native speakers of English. According to Wallraff(2000), “about 1,113 million people speak Chinese as their mother tongue, whereas about 372 million speak English.” Many people using English on the Internet are second-language or foreign- language speakers, and although many people claim to speak English, there is a question about how well they actually know and understand the language. Often, people who speak English speak another language at least as well, if not better.

The Internet has been cited as an instrument for circulating English around the world; it is estimated that 80 percent of the information available on the Internet is written in English. However, as more non-English speakers gain access to the network, the use of other languages is growing. Spanish, Chinese, German, Portuguese, and many other languages are now thriving on the Web. As a result, search engines, such as Yahoo’., Excite, and Google are now offering their services in multiple languages. For example, Google (2000) says it offers the largest collection of Asian-language Web pages on the Internet. It has approximately 40 million Japanese Web pages, 24 million Chinese pages, and 10 million Korean pages. Google also supports Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Another factor influencing a shift away from using English as the dominant language for Internet communication is the development of translation programs. Translation programs, such as Alta Vista's Babel Fish, are available on the Internet. Information written in English can be cut and pasted into Babel Fish to be translated into a different language, or text written in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, or Russian can be translated into English. The introduction of a variety of languages to the Internet has led to predictions that the Web may soon resemble international television, where audiences expect to view sites in their own language. As the Web becomes more of a mass medium, its audience is changing. Originally, Internet users were highly educated and from English-speaking or multilingual upper-middle-class families. As a diversity of people are becoming connected to the network, more sites are using languages other than English because people prefer sites in their own language. For instance, language has been a deterrent to internet growth in China because many Chinese are not adept at writing English. Consequently, the Chinese want to develop their own, indigenous Internet culture with Chinese-language sites.

Conclusion

The dynamic between these two forces in future will depend on the balance between regulations governing economic expansion, communications integration and cultural sovereignty, as well as the ever-changing relationship between governments, international organizations, corporations and individuals. Although globalization appears to play a central role in our collective future, it is uncertain how it will be affected by grassroots movements and alternatives present in the South and within the industrialized countries. However, innovations in consumer technologies and the marked decrease in production technologies, such as lowcost video, Internet, and computers, have the potential to enhance individual freedom, widen opportunities for countries in the South, and increase democratic participation in communications and the media. The debate on communications and media issues in the last several decades should stimulate governments and private sectors in the South to adopt comprehensive national information and communication policies to respond to problems brought out by advances in telecommunications technologies and the process of globalization.

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