Comm 410 final exam essay

1) Regarding what you have learned about the history and theories of international communications, what lesson do you think we should take from this course about media and influence/power, especially regarding politics and international relations? 

2) What have you learned about international communications in relation to understanding cultural and economic power as well as the construction of knowledge? Use this section to address the last four weeks of class. 

Globalization & the Music Industry
Music may seem like a light topic (and in many ways it is). But what if you look beyond the
entertaining part of music? Let’s talk about music and its relationships with globalization and
politics.
First, get familiar with some concepts. They will be key to this week’s topic of music and also
relevant to next week’s discussion on television and films.
Global Media
How do people communicate cultures? Can music and other forms of entertainment serve
cultural imperialism? How do cultures spread throughout the world? How is music used to
facilitate soft power?
It is important to understand the various arguments that attempt to answer these questions
by exploring the relationship between media and culture.
Cultural Homogenization:
Behavior of media role models is “mirrored, digested, and internalized”. Thus, the “norms
and values, the morals of the culture industry they represent are taken over. If they drink
Coke, their followers do” (Stephan Dahl).
This argument suggests that the domination of a certain culture reduces other cultures to
superficial parodies.
It also minimizes significant differences that can and do exist between cultural groups.
Cultural homogenization can be seen as a form of cultural repression rather than an open
expression of cultural differences.
Why might such a condition be considered bad? Why would this trend/situation be
favorable to those who have power?
•
Cultural values are displaced/fragmented, creating tensions on a personal/cultural level
with regard to cultural values and hierarchies
•
•
Identity preservation and control of its representation become a concern (i.e. cultural
power issues)
Exploitation of less powerful cultures and countries occurs
This is what usually comes to mind when people think about cultural homogenization, and it
is accurate – McDonald’s entrees from around the world.
But the same can also apply to music.
Why is music becoming increasingly homogenized?
from Homogenization: Good for Milk, Not for Music By Melody Ewing
Change
Impact
Fewer radio
companies
The number of unique companies that own radio stations reached its
peak in 1995 and have steadily declined over the past ten years.
Larger radio
companies
Radio-station holdings of the top ten largest companies in the radio
industry increased by nearly fifteen times in between 1985 and
2005. During this same time frame, holdings of the fifty largest
companies increased nearly sevenfold.
Increasing
revenue
concentration
National concentration of advertising revenue went up from 12
percent market share for the top four companies in 1993 to fifty
percent market share.
There is a continued national concentration of listeners. The top
Increasing ratings
four firms have 48 percent of the listeners and the top ten firms have
concentration
nearly two-thirds of listeners.
Declining
listenership
Across 155 markets, radio listenership has seen an overall decline
during the last fourteen years—a 22 percent drop from its peak in
1989.
Watch this preview for a film called Before the Music Dies (3 min). If you are interested in
watching the whole film, look for it on Amazon Prime, Hulu or Netflix. This preview brings
up factors that are influencing the increasing homogenized music scene. At the center money, of course.
Cultural Hybridity:
It describes societies that emerge from cultural contacts with European ‘explorers’ and those
‘explored’; not mere imposition of a culture on another, it also emphasizes their mutual
influences; “a third language”
Cultural preservation/integration is always about power relations.
National media content remains important (and in many cases, the most successful and
profitable in local markets).
People prefer entertainment in their own language, especially when it caters to their own
cultural priorities. However viewers are more complex these days:
•
•
•
access to many media forms through new technologies allows individuals to access local,
regional, national and international channels and participate – in varying degrees – with
multiple levels of global media discourses and participate in multiple levels of
identification
it is hard to tie media consumers to one type of identity from which to “understand”
them
audiences can critically negotiate with imported media content in more complex ways
than many studies suggest
Music from around the world is easily accessible and has gone mainstream. For example,
NPR has a feature called Latitudes (Links to an external site.) where they showcase and
highlight global music each month. In December (Links to an external site.), they showcased
music from Cuba. Here’s one of the bands:
Global Mass Culture
Idea of global culture emerged in light of increasing global connectivity through
communication technologies and international traffic in cultural goods.
It is culture that is universally recognized (Disney, U2) and dominated by advertising. It
influences the way people think about their regional or national identity, as they are
increasingly exposed to foreign (often Western) media.
To some, it poses an explicit threat to the continued existence of local culture and traditions.
The dominant culture sees the process as receiving cultures becoming “modern”. The
receiving culture considers it a distortion of their values.
Corporations have used regionalization and localization to manifest the idea of “global
culture,” but the spread of technology and expanding forms of media and communication
have also made the global cultural landscape much more complex.
Glocalization
Local and regional players import and/or re-appropriate foreign media content while
transnational media corps pursue local partners to deliver localized content to the audience.
Here is an example of glocalization. It is a coke commerical in the Phillipines. (1:00)
Political Economy & Cultural Studies
Political Economy Approach
The political economy of mass communications has its roots in a Marxist critique of
capitalism.
Political economy examines questions of power, which is ultimately seen as an instrument
of control by the ruling class. In particular, political economists examine patterns of
ownership and production in the communications industry. They analyze these within the
overall context of social and economic power relations, based on national and transnational
class interests.
For example, researchers were concerned about the commodification of communications
hardware and software and its impact on inequalities of access.
From a PE perspective, commodification is defined as the inappropriate treatment of
something as if it can be acquired or marketed like other commodities.
Cultural Studies Approach
Began in Britain with the study of popular and mass culture and its role in reproducing social
hegemony (more details about this theory next week) and inequality among different classes
of people and cultures.
Cultural Studies is now more concerned about how media texts work to create meaning and
how individuals from different cultures gather meaning from texts.
A “text” can be any type of media: songs, movies, TV shows, video games, newspaper and
magazine articles, Internet content – each is a “text” that can be “read” or analyzed for
meaning. This type of analysis is called textual analysis.
Cultural Studies researchers often use textual analysis and observations of media consumers’
attitudes and behaviors to understand media influence.
Cultural studies and the critical theory combine sociology, literary theories, film/video
studies, and anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. Cultural
studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of
ideology, race, social class, and/or gender.
Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. Cultural
practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or
dining out) in a given culture. Particular meanings are attach to the ways people do things.
Cultural studies vs. political economy
One important difference is that cultural studies scholars acknowledge the potential
for agency – i.e. the potential for readers to generate their own meaning from media
messages.
Political economists, on the other hand, do not view audiences as having genuine power to
choose media and derive meaning from media, because the audiences’ choices are confined
within predetermined media systems that are inherently flawed.
Propaganda and Mass
Communications
During the twentieth century, propaganda became another tool, aside from military
intervention, to help the U.S. government grow its Empire. Of course, many different
countries/nation-states were interested in using propaganda to gain and maintain power,
especially during the Cold War.
Propaganda comes from the notion of “propagating” religious belief.
Do you consider propaganda to be a positive, negative, or neutral concept?
It is nearly impossible to talk about the history of international communications without
talking about propaganda. For the U.S., we see in the wartime propaganda, particularly in the
WWII propaganda, the nascent field of international communications. It is the crossroads
between (1) worldwide crisis and (2) the deep need to persuade people, not only within a
country’s borders, but also beyond those national borders. This idea of persuasion became the
axis (no pun intended) to which early international communications was attached.
The term propaganda finds its roots in the religious turmoil of the Counter Reformation.
It dates back to the 1600s when Pope Gregory XV established the Congregation for the
Propagation of the Faith. This was a committee of Cardinals responsible for spreading the
church doctrine to missionary territories.
Propaganda became an institutionalized component of interstate relations due to:
•
•
The growing importance of public opinion to modern government and
New communications technologies such as
o Motion pictures
o Telegraph
o Leaflets dropped from balloons
o Radio
Joseph Goebbels, who was the minister of propaganda in Hitler’s Third Reich, was a strong
supporter of the use of communications technology, particularly radio, to disseminate
messages to the masses.
At this point in the 20th century, we see the use of radio and films, and the advent of
television, and these new technologies made large groups of people beyond national borders
more accessible, and made communications faster, more persuasive, and more entertaining
than ever before.
Propaganda as Entertainment
Interestingly, Joseph Goebbels’ favorite films were not his own films (at least that was what
he said in public). His favorite films were entertainment films.
If you saw the film Inglourious Basterds, the scene in which Churchill discusses Goebbels’
desire to see himself as a U.S. filmmaker (somewhere between David O. Selznick, who
directed Gone with the Wind, and Louis B. Mayer, a studio boss at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
alludes to this competitive interest of Goebbels.
Why is this important?
Because Goebbels figured out that the more persuasive propaganda films/broadcasts were not
the didactic, heavy-handed, overtly military or wartime messages; on the contrary, they
were the entertaining films whose important, persuasive, social and political messages were
buried deep in the heart of the storylines that seemed to be purely entertaining.
1948
The movie “The Iron Curtain” has to do with Soviet cypher clerk Igor Gouzenka, Dana
Andrews, who being stationed in Ottawa becomes very disenchanted with his country of
birth, the Soviet Union, and decides to defect. We see Igor go through a number of
stages during his stay in Canada as he soon realizes what he would miss if not living in a
free country and just how hellish his home the USSR really is.
1948
In post-war Turkey, former O.S.S. operative Steve Roark is still involved in espionage
activities and occasionally functions as a double agent for the Russians. He is assisted in
his activities by suave Turk, Ali Imagu.
1952
At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the maximum-security “atomic city” of U.S. nuclearweapons research, top atomic scientist Frank Addison has a normal, middle-American life
with his wife and son…until the boy is kidnapped by enemy agents to extort H-bomb
secrets.
1962
A former Korean War POW is brainwashed by Communists into becoming a political
assassin. But another former prisoner may know how to save him.
1964
An insane general starts a process to nuclear holocaust that a room of politicians and
generals frantically try to stop.
1991
David Merrill (Robert De Niro), a fictitious 1950s Hollywood director, returns from filming
abroad in France to find that his loyalty has been called into question by the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and he is unable to work until cleared.
As an example, Der Ewige Judge (The Eternal Jew) was very unpopular with German
audiences for its strong, often grotesque portrayals of Jewish communities as inhuman,
comparable to rats or disease. On the other hand, Jud Suss which was a much more
entertainment-focused, story-based film (which included stereotypes of Jewish people and
anti-Semitic messages embedded in the plot) received much wider acclaim and popularity.
Of course, the Hollywood film industry also created and distributed entertainment as
propaganda.
Can we think of any American films that represent grotesque portrayals/stereotypes about
other cultures?
As communications researchers made discoveries regarding the actual persuasive impact that
such messages had, an inevitable marriage was created between national governments and
communications researchers, particularly in the U.S., which was uniquely positioned after
WWII as a new world superpower.
The outgrowth of such a union was the strong emphasis on international communications
messages to be used to “persuade, modernize or save” other nations from the Soviet Union
communism, which has been perceived as the axis of evil (an ideology that has rendered
communism in general as “evil” even in today’s political landscape).
7/23/2018
What exactly is neoliberalism?
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
What exactly is neoliberalism?
November 3, 2017 12.28am SAST
Paper chains hang on the White House fence in Washington in October 2010 during a demonstration against the IMF and World Bank neoliberal
economic policies during their annual meeting. Has the term neoliberalism run its course? (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
What exactly is neoliberalism?
November 3, 2017 12.28am SAST
I struggle with neoliberalism – as a problematic economic system we might want to
Author
change – and as an analytical term people increasingly use to describe that system.
I’ve been reading and writing about the concept for more than a decade. But the more I
read, the more I think that neoliberalism is losing its analytical edge.
Kean Birch
As a result of its growing popularity in academia, media and popular discussions, it’s
Associate Professor, York University,
Canada
crucial to understand neoliberalism as a concept. We need to know its origins and its
definition in order to understand our current political and economic mess, including the
rise of nativism that played a part in Brexit and Donald Trump’s election a year ago.
Neoliberalism is regularly used in popular debate around the world to define the last 40 years. It’s
used to refer to an economic system in which the “free” market is extended to every part of our public
and personal worlds. The transformation of the state from a provider of public welfare to a promoter
of markets and competition helps to enable this shift.
Neoliberalism is generally associated with policies like cutting trade tariffs and barriers. Its influence
has liberalized the international movement of capital, and limited the power of trade unions. It’s
broken up state-owned enterprises, sold off public assets and generally opened up our lives to
dominance by market thinking.
As a term, neoliberalism is increasingly used across popular media, including The New York Times,
The Times (of London) and The Daily Mail. It’s also used within international institutions like the
World Economic Forum, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the
International Monetary Fund.
Neoliberalism a Trump antidote?
Neoliberalism is criticized for giving markets too much power over our lives. Yet in light of the rise of
Donald Trump and other nativist, anti-trade populists, there is a growing chorus of people extolling
http://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755
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What exactly is neoliberalism?
the virtues of neoliberalism.
What’s most evident from this growing popular debate about neoliberalism – whether from leftleaning critics or right-leaning advocates – is that there are many different views of neoliberalism; not
just what it means politically, but just as critically, what it means analytically.
This raises an important question: How do we use a term like “neoliberalism” when so many people
have such different understandings of what it means?
I wrestled with this question when writing my book, A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism, in which I
examine the intellectual history of neoliberalism. I do so in order to examine the different conceptions
of the term and to expose the contradictions underlying our daily use of it.
The term “neoliberalism” has a fascinating intellectual history. It appears as long ago as 1884 in an
article by R.A. Armstrong for The Modern Review in which he defined liberals who promoted state
intervention in the economy as “neo-liberal” — almost the exact opposite meaning from its popular
and academic use today.
Another early appearance is in an 1898 article for The Economic Journal by Charles Gide in which he
used the term to refer to an Italian economist, Maffeo Pantaleoni, who argued that we need to
promote a “hedonistic world … in which free competition will reign absolutely” — somewhat closer to
our current conception.
Adopted by liberal thinkers
As the 20th century dawned and the world moved through one World War and onto the next, the
term was appropriated by a range of liberal thinkers who felt sidelined by the ascendance of state
planning and socialism.
The conventional narrative is that “neo-liberalism” was first proposed as a term to describe a rebooted
liberalism in the 1930s after the so-called Walter Lippman Colloquium held in Paris in 1938.
However, its history is not as clear cut as this narrative might imply. According to Arnaud Brennetot,
for example, the term was subsequently mainly used to refer to French and other liberals associated
with a publishing house called La Libraire de Medicis at least until the early 1950s. By then, the term
was increasingly used to refer to German Ordoliberalism, which was a “neoliberal” school based on
the idea that markets need a strong state in order to protect competition — ideas that are a major
forerunner of the European Union’s framework conditions.
Famously, Milton Friedman even referred to himself as a “neoliberal” in a 1951 article for the
Norwegian magazine Farmand, although he subsequently dropped the term.
By the 1970s, Brennetot and others argued that neoliberalism was a term primarily associated with a
shifting emphasis in Latin America away from import-substitution policies towards open economies,
influenced by Chicago School thinkers like Friedman.
It was around this time that neoliberalism increasingly took on negative overtones, especially after the
violent overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile in 1973. As the 1980s dawned, along with
http://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755
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What exactly is neoliberalism?
the generally accepted birth of the modern neoliberal era, the term
“neoliberalism” became indelibly linked to the Chicago School of
Economics (as well as Law and Business).
Neoliberalism has several ‘schools’
When we use the term today, it’s generally with this Chicago inflection,
rather than its other previous and alternative histories and associations.
But it’s important to remember that there were and are at least seven
schools of neoliberalism. Some of the older schools, like the First
Chicago School (of Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Jacob Viner),
disappeared or were subsumed in later schools – in this case, the Second
Chicago School (of Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, George Stigler).
Other old schools, like the Italian or Bocconi School (of Maffeo
Pantaleoni, Luigi Einaudi) faded into academia before being resurrected
as the legitimization for current austerity policies. Other more marginal
schools, like the Virginia School (of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock) –
American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann on the cover
itself influenced by the Italian school – have existed under the radar
of Time Magazine in 1931. Lippmann’s writings were
until recent critiques by historians like Nancy MacLean.
influential on the neo-liberal movement in the first half of the
20th century.
As these various schools of neoliberal thought have evolved and mutated
over time, so too have our understandings of them and their influence on us. It’s therefore tricky to
identify neoliberalism with any one particular school of thought without missing out on a whole lot of
the story.
Three contradictions
That’s a major reason why I identify three core contradictions in our current understandings of
neoliberalism in my new book.
First, too little has been done analytically to address the contradiction between the supposed
extension of “free” markets under neoliberalism and the growth in market power and dominance of
corporate entities and monopolies like Google and Microsoft.
Second, there has been too much emphasis on the idea that our lives, identities and subjectivities
under neoliberalism are framed by “entrepreneurial” beliefs, attitudes and thinking.
In contrast, my view is that our lives, societies, and economies are dominated by diverse forms of
rentiership — for example home ownership, intellectual property monopolies and market control.
According to British academic Guy Standing, rentiership can be defined as the extraction of income
from the “ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce.”
Finally, there has been little interest in trying to understand the important role of contract and
contract law – as opposed to “markets” – in the organization of neoliberal capitalism.
http://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755
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What exactly is neoliberalism?
All these areas need addressing in order to better understand our future, but neoliberalism has
perhaps run its course in providing us with the necessary analytical tools to do this work. It’s time to
find new ways to think about our world.

IMF
Economics
World Bank
Neoliberalism
http://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755
globalism
Free market
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