13.7 Cultural Imperialism: Understanding Media and Culture (2023)

Spreading the American Flavor Through McDonaldization

A major danger of cultural imperialism is the possibility of American tastes crowding out local cultures around the world. HeMcDonaldizationof the world applies not just to its namesake McDonald's, with branches in seemingly every country, but to all industries that make extensive use of McDonald's technology. Coined by George Ritzer in his bookThe McDonaldization of Society(1993) roots the concept in the rationalization process. McDonald's takes four aspects of the business to extremes: efficiency, predictability, predictability and control. These four things are four of the main aspects of free markets. By applying the concepts of an optimized financial market to cultural and human goods like food, McDonaldization imposes common standards and uniformity on a global industry.

Not surprisingly, McDonald's is the best example of this concept. While the fast food restaurant is slightly different in each country (for example, Indian restaurants offer a menu without pork or beef to accommodate regional religious practices), the same basic principles apply in culture-specific ways. The company brand is the same everywhere; The catchphrase "I love it" is inevitable, and Golden Arches are all the rage, according to Eric Schlosser.FAST FOOD NATION, "better known than the Christian Cross (Schlosser, 2001)". More importantly, McDonald's business model remains relatively the same from country to country. While there are culture-specific variations, every McDonald's in a given area has basically the same menu as every other. In other words, whenever a consumer is likely to travel within a reasonable range, menu options and the resulting product will remain consistent.

McDonaldizing the media

The media works eerily similar to fast food. Just as the automation of fast food, from freeze-dried French fries to pre-packaged salads, seeks to reduce the marginal cost of a product and therefore increase profits, media companies seek a degree of consistency that allows them to deliver, ship and sell the same product everywhere. the world with minimal changes. However, the notion that the media actually disseminate a culture is controversial. in your bookcultural imperialism, argues John Tomlinson, that exported American culture is not necessarily imperialist because it does not promote a cultural agenda; tries to monetize all kinds of cultural items around the world. According to Tomlinson, "Nobody really disputes the dominant presence of Western, and particularly American, multinational media in the world: what is disputed are the cultural implications of that presence (Tomlinson, 2001)."

Of course, there are byproducts of American cultural exports around the world. American cultural mores, like the Western standard of beauty, have increasingly become global media. Already in 1987, Nicholas Kristof enrolledThe New York Times diesabout a young Chinese woman who was planning an operation to make her eyes look rounder, more like Caucasian women's eyes. Western styles, "delicious novelties like nylon stockings, pierced ears and eye shadows," also began to replace the austere blue robes of Mao-era China. However, the spread of cultural influence is difficult to trace, as the young Chinese woman says that she did not want the surgery because of her Western appearance, but because "she thinks she is beautiful" (Kristof, 1987).

Freedom, Democracy and Rock'n'Roll

The diffusion of culture works in mysterious ways. Hollywood probably doesn't have a master plan for exporting the American way of life around the world and supplanting local culture, any more than American music need be a harbinger of democratic government and economic cooperation. Rather, local cultures respond in many different ways to the foreign culture of American media and democracy. First, the media are often much more flexible than you might think; the successful export of the movieTitanicIt was no coincidence that suddenly everyone in the world wanted to watch movies like an American. Instead, the film's producers judged that it would be as successful on the world stage as it was on the national stage. So, in a way, American media is more widespread and also more globally oriented. It could even be argued that American cultural exports promote cross-cultural understanding; After all, for a company to sell to a culture, it must first understand that culture.

On the other hand, some local cultures around the world have embraced Western business models so much that they have created their own hybrid cultures. A well-known example of this is the Indian Bollywood film industry. Combining traditional Indian music and dance with American cinema, Bollywood studios release around 700 major films a year, three times as many as major Hollywood studios. India's biggest film industry mixes melodrama with musical interludes, dubbed by actors but sung by pop stars. These pop songs circulate long before a movie is released to generate hype and penetrate various media markets. While similar marketing tactics have been employed in the US, Bollywood appears to have mastered the art of cross-media integration. The song and dance numbers are essentially cinematic forms of music videos, both to promote the soundtrack and to add variety to the film. The numbers also feature many different Indian vernaculars and a mix of Western dance music and classical Indian singing, something that is different from mainstream Western media (Corliss, 1996).

While cultural imperialism may inspire resentment in many parts of the world, the idea that local cultures are helpless at the mercy of the overwhelming power of American cultural imposition is clearly all too easy to sustain. Instead, local cultures seem to be embracing American-style media models and changing their methods to suit corporate structures rather than just American media aesthetics. These two economic and cultural aspects are clearly intertwined, but the idea that a foreign power unilaterally destroys a native culture does not seem entirely correct.