Communication and Culture

Communication and Culture

- Culture defines what it means to be a human being. It is all our behavior summed up, our whole life experience.
- On the one hand there is a concern with artistic expression and creative, aesthetic, representational activity, on the other with ways of living, the organization and nature of social activity.
- More frequently, we refer to national culture, as if all of the people living within a particular nation-state share the same culture.
- Mass media are key components in any nation’s culture.

Culture Industries

- It was used to refer to “products which are tailored for consumption by massed, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan.
- Mass culture was developed as a tool of capitalism for the social control of society, according to Adorno and Horkheimer.

Other cultural groupings

- We may think of culture as the way of life of all human beings, or of nations, or of ethnic groups within or across national boundaries.
- Any organization to which we belong develops a culture if it manages to survive. An organization’s culture is the glue that keeps people attached to it and allows members to identify with it.

Transmission of culture

- We must learn the culture of those groupings before we can become an integral part of them.
- Culture is an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Clifford Geertz).
- The primary symbolic system used to transmit culture is that of language.
- The newspaper allowed people to read about others who lived in their nation who were culturally like themselves.
- Linguistic bond in contemporary society is achieved through television.
- Families used to be nearly the only transmitters of culture to young children by teaching the symbolic system, or language, to their children.
- Television certainly sends messages that can conflict with the family culture.
- Some people fear that the existence of so mush English-language broadcasting brings us ever closer to English being the only world language.

How the west dominates in production of culture

- The easy answer to why so many U.S. films and television programs are aired internationally is that the United States produces more of them than any other country in the world.
- Schiller claimed in that book that the military-industrial complex in the United States was using its television programs and films to obtain world dominance in cultural products.
- The flow of television programs was overwhelmingly one way, and was dominated by entertainment content.
- No major changes in the international flow of television programs and news had occurred since 1973.
- The media are about politics, and commerce and ideas. (Jeremy Tunstall)
- Ariel Dorfman focused attention on the cultural messages contained in U.S. cartoons strips.
- In Tomlinson’s view, we could assess blame to specific institutions when accounting for the economic aspects of cultural imperialism.
- We know something about the effect on people’s health when McDonald’s and KFC become the preferred meals in cultures where the local diet is relatively free of animal and other fats.
- It would be nice to so easily measure the effects of hip-hop music on the teenagers of a particular country.

What cultures do to defend cultural autonomy

- The international diffusion of television programs, films, and other media to countries is not a new phenomenon.
- Countries with large domestic markets for their cultural products always had an advantage as they could pay for the production costs at home and look to the export markets as mostly profit.
- Small countries became vulnerable to the imported products, finding them cheaper than producing their own films and television programs.
- Strategies to protect cultural products:

Quotas

- The most significant policy for supporting domestic television production is that of the European Union.
- France was the strongest proponent of the adoption of this directive.
- France also required that no more than 40% of films screened in the country come from outside Europe.
- French film critics have been blamed for being overly critical of domestic films while they praise American products.
- The United States has taken the position that cultural products should be treated like any other goods traded in the market.
- The United States has opposed the setting of quotas on film and television imports, viewing such quotas as trade barriers.

Subsidies

- The United States also opposes the use of government subsidies provided for development of films and television programs. But many countries take the position that without subsidies, their audiovisual sector will totally succumb to foreign imports.
- The European Union has been supplying grants for new production projects under a program called MEDIA. The program’s aim is to provide training and to stimulate the distribution and
development of European audiovisual works and to boost production companies.

Regional alliances including co productions

- Coproduced films, usually ones that combine the talents and resources of two film production companies in two countries, have several advantages.
- Some bilateral agreements also favor coproductions. One such deal was struck between India and Canada.

Adaptations

- For countries with smaller markets or fewer resources, film and television program production is too expensive to release many new products.
- People like local programs.
- It amounts to buying the rights to an imported television series of film and adapting it to the
local culture and language.

Not all pop cultures are American

- From the evidence presented, it would seem that the media are really American. But audiences around the world still prefer their local cultures and their local cultural products.
- Domestic production accounts for between 70 to 96 percent of market share in India, Russia, Japan and Brazil.
- Much of the magazine and book publishing in the United States is also owned by foreign companies.