Monday 12 March 2012

Lecture 12 - Globalisation, Sustainability & The Media

Here are my notes from the twelth lecture Globalisation, Sustainability & The Media on 01/03/2011.

Definitiions of Globalisation

  • socialist - The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.
  • capitalist - The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result

The dominance of one culture over other cultures all over the world.

McDonaldization
‘American sociologist George Ritzer coined the term “McDonaldization” to describe the wide- ranging sociocultural processes by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world’

Marshall McLuhan
'Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have exended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned'
  • tv allows us to see further, radio allows us to hear further
  • we can now hear and see events on a global scale

Global Village Thesis
‘As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibilty to an intense degree’

  • people being in communication together would bring us all together, have more responsible on our actions
  • but this hasn't happened!

We can now see images of soldier cluster bombing villages. Media has desensitised us. 

The Internet
New technological age is extended to involve the whole of man kind. - definitely not happened.

We're moving further away from a unified culture.

It's causing a split rather than a unification. 

Three problems of Globalisation
  • sovereignty - challenges to the idea of the nation-state
  • accountability - transitional forces and organsations: who controls them?
  • identify - who are we? nation, group, community

Cultural Imperialism
If the global village is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.
Key thinkers -
  • Schiller
  • Chomsky

Rigging the 'free market'
  • media conglomerates operates as oligopolies

Oligopolies divide the world into sections depending on how much money they can make.

The whole free market is rigged around the interest of capitol. 

US media power can be thought of as a new form of imperialism
  • Local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shaped, mirroring old school colonialism.
  • Schiller- dominance of US driven commercial media forces US model of broadcasting onto the rest of world but also inculcates US style consumerism in societies that can ill afford it!

Propaganda Model - 5 Basic filters
  • ownership
  • funding
  • sourcing
  • flak
  • anti communist ideology

Ownership
Rupert Murdoch, selected media interests
  • News of the World / The Sun on Sunday
  • The Sun
  • The Sunday Times
  • The Times
  • NY Post
  • BSkyB
  • Fox TV

Sourcing
The news is only as good as the events that you're allowed to record. If a reporter goes to a press conference with Obama and starts to pester him, then that person would just be banned from ever interviewing him again.

Number 10 - ever actually see inside the building, only see the face of what they want us to see.

Most media organisations are funded by advertising.


Flak
US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC)
  • comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to rubbish the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.
  • flak is characterisedby concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information

Anti- Ideologies

Sustainability

  • ‘sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’


Sustainable development, sustainable growth, and sustainable use have been used interchangeably, as if their meanings were the same. They are not. Sustainable growth is a contradiction in terms: nothing physical can grow indefinitely. Sustainable use, is only applicable to renewable resources. Sustainable development is used in this context to mean: improving the quality of human life whilst living within the carrying capacity of the ecosystems.


Greenwashing

Sustainability, a sustainable system is impossible under a capitalist model.

'Most things are not designed for the needs of the people but for the needs of 'the manufacturers to sell to people'

No comments:

Post a Comment