BP4 Commodification of culture and media internationalisation (Eunice Pang)
I will be briefly touching on the introduction and chapter 2 of The Cultural Industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). Hesmondhalgh refers to the cultural industries in plural form to highlight complex and differing logics at work in different types of cultural production. He also mentions that audiences are active in resisting the commodification of culture, unlike the passive audience as envisioned by Adorno & Horkheimer (2012). In this blogpost, I will examine how American cultural goods achieved media internationalisation and the reaction of their audiences – small, 3rd world, developing countries.
America, after the Second World War, achieved cultural domination through increased transnational flow of texts, genres, technologies, and capital. The spread of American rock music, pop music, television and film to other countries were due to the neoliberal view of “free trade” in cultural goods. Understandably so, America had the most advanced cultural industries and were able to pump out the best cultural products attuned to a wide range of consumer tastes. These products were exported to flood the less advanced cultural markets of developing countries, making their local offerings pale in comparison. This is problematic as it destroys the local culture by not allowing them to possess the sovereignty of making independent choices as a media consumer. Locals are then unable to tell the local culture apart from Western or imported culture. The non-equitable access to information and American media imperialism got the developing countries more than slightly concerned. They went to the United Nations to speak about how American media were flooding their markets, setting up the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). It addressed the imbalances in global communication and international American dominance in cultural industries. As expected, the U.S. were hostile to the NWICO. They saw it as governmental censorship, barriers to the free flow of communication, and against the interests of their profit-making media oligarchies. In retaliation, the U.S. pulled their funding and backed out of the United Nations. Instead, the U.S. supported the World Trade Organisation’s agreements for global trade in mass media and information. Following these events, the leadership of UNESCO promptly distanced themselves from the ideas of the NWICO. The U.S., again, had the upper hand. They were able to shut down the concerns of the developing countries and continue their capitalist conquests. In this case, the audience did not have sufficient power to change the course of the conversation, even though they were active in resisting the commodified American cultural products.
