Does the globalisation of television bring a threat to national and local cultural identities? Discuss in relation to any one television genre.

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

Number 2: Globalisation of television

Global Media, Global Culture MZ3001

STUDENT NUMBER: J0285629

PROFESSOR: Stuart Hanson

NAME: Marina Schiaffino Domènech

Number 2: Does the globalisation of television bring a threat to national and local cultural identities? Discuss in relation to any one television genre.

According to the Catalan language dictionary Albertí, culture is a ‘joint space of knowledge from a person; or else the joint space of the human creations in general, or the specific of a country or a society’.

So everything that creates culture is related to the knowledge that different individuals have. And how can people achieve knowledge?

As said by Timo Jarvilehto, psychology professor in the Oulu University:

“…the senses are not transmitters of environmental information; rather, they create a direct connection between the organism and the environment that makes possible a dynamic organism-environment system… With the help of efferent effects on receptors, each organism creates its own particular world”

Therefore, we get knowledge thanks to everything that surrounds us.

Basing on the results of an interview (see annex), Catalan people do not know their own culture. The Catalan typical folkloric dances are danced in a cultural association called Esbart. Theoretically, everybody must know at least, which is the name of this association, but when we look to the results we see that this is not true. To the question: Do you know what an Esbart is? No more than a 20% of the interviewed men knew what is it. In women, results are a bit higher, but anyway the tax is very low; only a 40% of them knew the answer.

However, the results for another question were very different. After the Catalan culture, I asked for the American one. The question was: Do you know what the Country Dance is? Surprisingly ALL the interviewed women know how the American dances are, even some of them had practice it. Moreover, in the males case only one of the interviewed didn’t know what the American dances were, and it was the case of a 72 years old man who almost didn’t know what the television was.

So we can extract from this example that the actual society knows better foreign cultures that their own traditions.

Going back to the first definition of culture, we know that what is around us affect us.

Since last 30 or 40 years, media are one of the main stimuli around us. So are the influences that help us most to create culture.

And during the last 20 years, media have been completely dominated by the USA. Convergence is the order of the day. A convergence accelerated by the growth of transnational media companies. Media industries are becoming more and more concentrated, and the dominant players in each media industry are subordinates of huge global media conglomerates. But in few industries has the level of concentration been so big as in media. The global media market has come to be dominated by seven multinational enterprises: Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann.

So if we make a simple relationship between the last two points, we obtain very interesting results: if what creates culture is the media, and the media are guided by the American; the Americans are creating our culture.

All the information that is broadcasted in any media brings a charge of intentions. By this, I mean that even in the most serious news program, the journalist always gives a bit of his opinion about a new. Even if trying to be impartial, maybe through corporal language or rarely directly expressing their own ideas, the intention can be seen.

...