Communication and Culture

Christine L. Ogan

1. What is Culture?
--> It's all our behavior summed up, our whole life experience.
--> national culture.
--> Mass media are key components in any nation's culture.
--> Media must be examined because they are so pervasive and touch so many people.

2. Culture Industries
--> Coined by Theodor Atorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (critical theorists. =Marxist Philosophy).
--> "products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to a plan."
--> Mass culture was developed as a tool of capitalism for the social control of society.
--> Today, it is described as important cultural economic resources that allow expressions of creativity to be "copied and boosted by industrial processes and worldwide distribution."

3. Other Cultural Groupings
-->Business have cultures.
--> An organization's culture is the glue that keeps people attached to it and allows members to identify with it.

4. Transmission of Culture
--> Clifford Geertz (1973) defined culture as "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 towards life".
--> Michael Schudson (1994) notes that "the importance of language as an aspect of culture can scarcely be overestimated. Language is the fundamental human mass medium. It is the mass medium through which all other media speaks".
--> Benedict Anderson (1983) described the way "print capitalism" in the form of newspapers created "imagined communities" where people came to believe that they shared a culture with people whom they may never have met face-to-face.
--> Newspapers in the past and Television now helps perpetuate national cultrues "by spreading a vernacular and reinforcing linguistics bonds among populations" (Silvio Waisbord (2004).
--> Transnational television stations now surrounding the globe expand the influence of the dominant language (nldr. English) over small linguistic communities.

5. How the West Dominates in Production of Culture
--> U.S is imperialistic when it comes to cultural products, specifically when it comes to films and television programs.
--> Production+ popularity.
--> In his 1969's book Mass Communication and the American Empire, Herbert Schiller claimed that the military-industrial complex in the U.S was using its televison programs and films to obtain world dominance in cultural products.
--> Nordenstreng and Varis: the one-way flow of cultural diffusion is based on historical conditions related to the introduction of tv and economic resources and demographic characteristics of the exporters and importers of programs.
--> Tapio Varis (1985): still one-way flow.
--> Jeremy Tunstall 1977's Media are American.
--> Ariel Dorfman focused attention on the cultural messages contained in US cartoon strips when he wrote How to Read Donald Duck.
--> Most of the evidence brought to bear on the topic was economic evidence, not cultural proof (John Tomlinson).
--> According to Tomlinson's view, we could assess blame for specific institutions --the mass media, the U.S., or multinational capitalists -- when accounting for the economic aspects of cultural imperialism.
--> It is the globalized audiovisual and Internet environment that now generates the most concern. .
--> SAtelittes and cable tv have extended the reach of national channels and privately owned transnational channels. Due to three factors: the (1) effect of deregulation; the (2) advance of digital technology, and the (3)overcapacity of satelitte systems.

6. What do cultures do to defend cultural autonomy
--> Several strategies have been taken by countries with low production of films or television programs to protect their own cultural products. Those strategies include:

a-Quotas

b- Subsidies and grants

c- Regional alliances, including co-production

d-Adaptations of programs produced in other cultures

f- Resistance measures

7- Not all pop cultures is American

8- Role of journalists in production of culture

9- Managing cultural conflict

10- Hybrid Cultures and the Media