Americanization, Globalization and Secularization

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Americanization, Globalization and Secularization: Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe 

 

A powerful trend is clearly underway in the direction of greater similarity in the way the public sphere is structured  across the world.  In their products, in their professional practices and cultures, in their systems of relationships with other political and social institutions, media systems across the world are becoming increasingly alike.  Political systems, meanwile, are becoming increasingly similar in the patterns of communication they incorporate.

        We will explore this trend toward global homogenization of media systems and the public sphere, focusing particularly on the relations between media and political systems, and on the industrialized, capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America.  We will organize our discussion of how to account for this trend around two pairs of contrasting perspectives.  Much of the literature on homogenization sees it in terms of Americanization or globalization:  that is, in terms of forces external to the national social and political systems in which media systems were previously rooted.  Other explanations focus on changes internal to these national systems.  An important distinction can also be made between mediacentric perspectives, for which changes in media systems are autonomous developments which then influence political and social systems, and those which see social and political changes as causally prior to media system change.  

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Americanization and Globalization

The phenomenon of homogenization in world media systems was first emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of the 1960s and 1970s.  Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory of external influence (e.g. Schiller, 1969, 1976;  Boyd-Barret, 1977).   It saw homogenization as a result of cultural domination.  The global expansion of mass media industries based in advanced capitalist countries and particularly in the United States resulted in the destruction of local cultures and their replacement by a single, standardized set of cultural forms tied to consumer capitalism and American political hegemony.   Europe ...

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