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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Balancing provocative criticism with clear explanations of complex ideas, this student-friendly introduction investigates the crucial role global entertainment media has played in the emergence of transitional capitalism.
- Examines the influence of global entertainment media on the emergence of transnational capitalism, providing a framework for explaining and understanding world culture as part of changing class relations and media practices
- Uses action adventure movies to demonstrate the complex relationship between international media political economy, entertainment content, global culture, and cultural hegemony
- Draws on examples of public and community media in Venezuela and Latin America to illustrate the relations between government policies, media structures, public access to media, and media content
- Engagingly written with crisp and controversial commentary to both inform and entertain readers
- Includes student-friendly features such as fully-integrated call out boxes with definitions of terms and concepts, and lists and summaries of transnational entertainment media
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Seitenzahl: 481
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction
Entertainment
Transnational Media and Democracy
Media and Audience
Diversity without Democracy
Hegemony and Consent
Localizing the Global
Diversity with Democracy
References
Further Reading
1 Twenty-First Century Capitalism and Transnational Relations
Capitalism and Social Class
Production and Class Formations
The Contradictions of Capitalist Social Relations
Transnational Capitalism
The Transnational Corporate World
Pockets of Micro Transnationalism
Quantifying Transnational Production
Consolidation and Competition
The Transnational Capitalist Class
Interlocking Directors for the TNCC
References
Further Reading
2 Leading the Charge
Trilateral Commission
World Economic Forum
All Together Now
Show Me the Money! Deregulation and Privatization
Individualism
The Contradictions of Accumulation by Dispossession
Hegemony
A Transnational State
Nationalizing the Global
Transnational Relations as International Leadership
References
Further Reading
3 Transnational Media
Media for Profit
Media Entertainment and Transnational Capitalism
Transforming the Political Economy of Global Media
Diversity in Transnational Media Operation
Media Apparatus
Media Content as Social Lubricant
Media: Industries for Profit
Audience as Commodity
Transnational Media Production
Finding the Choke Point for Profit: TNMC Planning and Policy Groups
References
Further Reading
4 From Regional to Global
Transnational Media Integration
Transnational Media in East Asia
Complementary Media Flow as Transnational Consent
Capitalist Interlocks
Transnationalism for All: Diversity without Democracy
References
Further Reading
5 Cultural Hegemony
Legitimizing Transnational Relations
Cultural Hegemony and Mass Consent
Relations of Production and Transnational Capitalist Cultural Hegemony
The New International Division of Cultural Labor
Training for Consent
A New International Culture of Consumption
Advertising in the Transnational Era
The Hegemony of Advertising and Entertainment
References
Further Reading
6 Power Decentered
Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Dominance
The Inertia of Contraflow: Dominance Undenied
Cultural Proximity: Bringing Domination Home
Hybridity: Domination through Diversity
Homogenizing Hybridity
Content by and for Transnational Capitalist Cultural Hegemony
Diversity in the Familiar
Content for Consent
References
Further Reading
7 Superheroes to the Rescue
Organizing Action for Cultural Hegemony
Transnational Production
Action for Cultural Hegemony
From Spectacle to Consent
References
Further Reading
8 Media, Democracy, and Political Power
Venezuela and Twenty-First Century Socialism: A Model for Democratic Media
The Right to Speak and Be Heard
Transnational Media at Home
A Media Coup, a Democratic Response
Community, Public, and Participatory: Media Reform for Democracy
Government Support for Public Broadcasting
Community Media: Independent and Democratic
Democratic Media in Production and Distribution
A New Political Economy for a New Cultural Leadership
References
Further Reading
Conclusion
New Media, New Society
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want Your Revolution
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 04
Table 4.1 Top transnational entertainment media, 2014 (by revenue)
Table 4.2 Media companies in the Forbes Global 2000 in 2014 (ranked by revenues, profits, assets, market value)
Chapter 07
Table 7.1 Selected action movies
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Global Entertainment Media
A Critical Introduction
Lee Artz
This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc
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IntroductionEntertainment, Television, and Cultural Hegemony
Tell me a story. Make me laugh. Entertain me. From childhood on, humans share stories to inform, educate, and entertain. In every joke and pastime, lessons about social norms, values, and morals are shared. We have laws, but stories express why we have laws and what happens to those who disobey. Entertaining stories from Aesop’s fables, fairytales, and the latest Disney animation express and evaluate good and evil.
In the twenty-first century the primary storytellers are global media, and “like stories told around the campfire, they promote and criticize some identities and kinds of social organization and celebrate others. In doing so they reflect the interests of the storyteller” (Machin & Van Leeuwen, 2007, p. 39). The stories circulated most widely are those created by consolidated international media: children’s stories in cartoons, telenovelas, game shows, action-adventures, situation comedies, mysteries, anime, factual entertainment, sports, music, movies, and news. All of them are entertainment.
Global entertainment crosses national and cultural boundaries, promoting consumerism in theme and format, adjusting to local cultural norms and affecting the social order in many identifiable ways, some of which will be discussed in this book.
From the earliest media studies to contemporary concerns, media have been understood as central to society but not all have agreed on media’s political or cultural effect, nor has there been agreement on the relationships between media and the rest of the social order. This book finds media to be part of our larger social order that has recognizable social class divisions. Such an approach challenges the accepted knowledge broadcast by contemporary media and protected by their academic admirers. I follow the Chilean novelist and social critic Ariel Dorfman (1983) in that I do not pretend to infallibility, but “feel it is my duty to profane the secular cathedral and wonder out loud, in the middle of the service that gathers the priests of knowledge, and the faithful to be enlightened” (p. 136) how do the architecture and icons of popular media become so worshipped and to what values and beliefs are we converted?
This is not an American phenomenon. Technological progress and growing competition push media corporations to expand their businesses nationally and internationally. Around the world, in Britain, Germany, India, Japan, Brazil, and everywhere commercial media predominate, media express cultural values, social norms, and even commonsense universal beliefs.
New global structures of production and distribution are altering daily life and cultures. Just as new social relations of production appear in leading capitalist enterprises, the economic operations and cultural contributions of global media have been transformed as well. For the average man and woman, consumption and consumer goods become means for expressing identity and lifestyle, particularly when occupational and economic roles lose their significance as sources of values in the face of popular culture and ubiquitous media presence and power.
Entertainment
With the advent of media deregulation, privatization, and commercialization, nations around the world have opened their media operations to transnational mergers, joint ventures and foreign direct investment (FDI). As part of the neoliberal drive to privatize everything, commercial enterprise dominates media in most countries. Privatized, commercialized media turn to advertising and subscription for profits, looking to reduce production costs at the same time. Not surprisingly, entertainment media is now the most prevalent media form in every country. Following deregulation, entertainment media in Europe took a quantum leap – from 93 to some 1,500 entertainment channels (according to Screen Digest, as cited in Thussu, 2009, p. 38). In Africa, francophone transnational media broadcast mostly movies, sports, music, and children’s programs (Mytton, Teer-Tomaselli, & Tudesq, 2005). In India, News Corp’s Star TV is indicative of television formats: of its 10 trans-Indian channels, nine are dedicated to entertainment, music, and sport (Thussu, 2005, p. 165). East Asian television, especially Japanese and Taiwanese, is wedded to entertainment, advertising, and “idols” who appear on talk, music, and even fictional series to titillate and stimulate fans and consumers (Karlin, 2012; Galbraith, 2012). Drama, sport, music, games shows, and variety shows comprise the bulk of television broadcasting in Latin America. With the appearance of commercial broadcasting in Russia since the 1990s, entertainment dominates television schedules (Endaltseva, 2011; Vartanova, 2008). “Commercial TV and print media in Turkey promote this culture of entertainment” (Algan, 2003, p. 185). Even accepting the news value of various television magazine shows, the US television schedule is primarily entertainment: dramas, soaps, situation comedies, children’s shows, game shows, reality contests, sports, and lifestyle/hobby stations predominate. Global entertainment media reached $2.2 trillion in revenue in 2012, with entertainment media “rapidly embracing new and emerging technologies” and television remaining the primary source of programming for all media platforms (MarketingCharts, 2008). Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner notes that “the entertainment industry is not so much Americanizing the world as planetizing entertainment” (Miller et al., 2008, p. 176).
Entertainment rules television, radio, and mass market periodicals, from sport, fashion, and recreation, to lifestyle, home improvement, and good housekeeping. This is now a global condition. Even factual entertainment as produced by National Geographic, Discovery, and on occasion BBC, retreats from political and historical documentaries encompassing social contexts to make slick presentations concerned with human interest, celebrity, and non-controversial subjects (Mjos, 2009).
One might even classify much of the news as entertainment. It is often difficult to separate “hard” news of political, social, and scientific consequence from entertaining “soft” news about celebrity or human spectacle. In their drive for audiences, network programmers curb investigations about the state of the world and offer up “happy” news and all kinds of entertaining, titillating news about crime, disaster, and danger. Networks and publishers offer circus-like spectacles to attract viewers. The US war on Iraq gets airtime, but appears as entertainment: in brilliant images of explosions, dramatic shots of “terrorist” leaders in dark garb, or melodramatic stories about heroes and their families. STAR News in India has an “obsessive interest in glamour, crime, and celebrity culture. At the heart of this agenda is the popularization of news by making it accessible and entertaining, thus expanding the audience base for advertisers” (Thussu, 2007, p. 599). In Britain, as programmers chase ratings for advertising revenue, the news agenda gives way to an “emphasis on celebrity, crime, and consumer journalism” (Thussu, 2009, p. 34). In other words, news has become infotainment as the logical progression of commercial media’s emphasis on consumer entertainment.
On first glance, entertainment may seem to be less political, less pedagogic, than news, but a closer look reveals that all entertainment carries kernels of cultural values, social norms, and political ideology. There is no such thing as “just” entertainment. All stories and images express worldviews, conceptions of humor, beliefs about gender, beauty, success, and right and wrong. Entertainment provides a perfect vehicle for transporting advertising and consumerist ideology. “Entertainment offers the image of something better to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide” (Dyer, 1992, p. 18).
Entertainment media are part of a larger culture industry, organized and operated according to the same profit motives that inform other industries. Global media entertainment as it is now structured represents the temporary triumph of transnational capitalism, produced and distributed through joint ventures with local and national firms.
Media do not stand apart from society and its capitalist social relations; commercial media reflect and reproduce the social relations and cultural practices necessary for the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system. This book intends to spotlight some of the characteristics and trends of transnational capitalism and the transnational media environment, hoping to overcome the reluctance by many to recognize social class relations as central to understanding global media.
Transnational Media and Democracy
What is sorely missing from much contemporary media studies is an analysis of media as capitalist institutions, institutions with corporate structures, corporate practices, and corporate goals. It’s as if Western media scholars have yet to have their rude awakening to the “true nature of the capitalist system” (Jakubowicz, 2007, p. 370).
In the twenty-first century, there is no “our” media. Transnational media corporations (TNMCs) do not belong to or represent the interests of the average citizen of any nation. Media are part of a transnational system of production for profit. Media aid and abet – indeed, they are crucial to – promotion of transnational capitalism and consumerism on a world scale. Advertisers stimulate. They want happy images, quick fixes, non-reflective viewers and readers; advertisers don’t want citizens thinking about the world. They want consumers focused on the next best thing for sale. And media want advertisers.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2009) imagines that the non-Western world has “turned the tables” on the formerly dominant nations (p. 57). Pieterse’s metaphor is useful but misapplied, as are similar contentions about the rise of the Asian tigers or BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries and the economic or cultural displacement of the United States or Britain and Europe. No tables have been turned. In fact, the integration of capitalist production across national boundaries may be understood as the production of more tables laden with a capitalist bounty of commodities. However, unlike a community potluck of sharing, these tables are for the display of plenty that can only be bought and sold by a global elite.
Chapters 1 and 2 narrate the development of transnational capitalism and how it has altered the production of commodities for national markets, how social relations among corporate owners cross-national borders, and how the production and distribution of goods and services involve workers, managers, and contractors from around the world in a unified, integrated, but transnationally dispersed process of accumulating wealth for corporate shareholders. Pieterse blames media for “dozing at the wheel” and lacking “civic vigilance” (2009, p. 59). Here Pieterse’s evocative metaphor once again is poorly employed: media owned, organized, and directed by transnational capitalists and their managers are at the wheel of information and communication, but they are not dozing. As Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, media are driving the news, entertainment, and culture down the road of market values, immediate gratification, and consumerism.
Transnational media, owned cooperatively by media firms from multiple nations, actively work for deregulation, privatization, commercialization, and advertising-driven mass entertainment. Transnational media do not want public service broadcasting, political diversity, and least of all democratic civic vigilance. As this book will demonstrate, Pieterse and others perceiving the displacement of dominant nations or dominant media by China, Brazil, India, or localized community media need to look over the table, over the wheel, down the road, and over the horizon. The economic and political drivers of globalization have won allies and partners from every nation and every culture, forming a new, energetic, and politically powerful transnational capitalist class. Even members of the Chinese state bureaucracy have become millionaire capitalists aligned with GM, Ford, Disney, Sony, News Corp, and Bertelsmann.
American and European dominance has not been defeated, it has crystallized outside of any national identity or interest. Even as they continue to jockey for individual advantage, diverse national capitalists have united in transnational mergers, joint ventures, partnerships, and other collaborations. The economic, political, and cultural leadership (including the media) has been reorganized. The promotion of consumerism, the market, and transnational capital is expressed in the diversity of images, stories, and ideas disseminated and repeated through transnational media: images, stories, and ideas that leave little for democratic imagination or application.
Media and Audience
Of all media, television and film have the widest global distribution. Television is ubiquitous; in some developed countries close to 100% of the population has receivers. TV is a center pillar in the Japanese movie industry, financially and organizationally (Davis & Yeh, 2008, p. 70). China has 400 million television sets, the United States 220 million, and Japan 86 million (Media Statistics, 2013). Worldwide more than 1.2 billion households have at least one television (IDATE, 2010).
The television industry organized transnationally is well-positioned to dominate the Internet and mobile content services (ITVE, 2010) with an abundance of entertainment available for mobile distribution expanding the reach and repetition of television programming. Orchestrated fandoms and interactive participation via text “voting” further enhance the integration of television and film content into daily life. Thus, film and television industries remain primary producers of entertainment worldwide, which gives the owners of movie studios and television networks tremendous power as purveyors of media representations of our world and our lives.
Television and movies circulate images and stories from which we learn of society’s preferred values, norms, and behaviors. Television and film narratives flood everyday life, saturating culture with spectacles of fantasy. We become more spectator than participant. Our lives are filled with gratifying texts, videos, and images. Such pervasive communication provides the symbolic material for how we actively construct our own lives and the world in which we live. Television and blockbuster movies pleasantly distract us from more serious, more consequential issues like the environment, mass unemployment, unhealthy products and lifestyles. Much media entertainment further dehumanizes with insult comedy, violent drama, and cage fighting sports, despoiling even the modest pleasures available.
In the last few decades, corporate media in every country have developed more global strategies, turning to transnational arrangements. Transnational capitalist media lead through FDI, joint ventures, and mergers as they search for cultural diversity for their content. Importantly, transnational entertainment media also advance advertising and consumerism, practices crucial to transnational capitalism. As media become transnationalized, a “vast entertainment-driven economy has formed for the purpose of expanding audiences and maximizing profits” (Galbraith & Karlin, 2012, p. 12). Given the prominence of media entertainment within and across nations, entertainment media function as the primary means for extending “the reach of the prevailing political terrain, bringing into one orbit zones of society that seldom encountered the same ideas simultaneously” (Rajagopal, 2001, p. 151).
The chronic and urgent economic question facing commercial media is how to capture audiences for their programs and how to deliver audiences to advertisers. Past practices relied on direct export of the product (e.g., Hollywood and network offerings dubbed into the language of the “foreign” audiences with the little regard for cultural variations). The global dissemination of content – mistakenly called “cultural imperialism” – nurtures a homogenous middle class culture of pop music, fast food, action movies, animated features, and other McDonaldized, Disneyfied, Hollywood fare that appear to be part of local cultures.
Diversity without Democracy
Claims about the “democratization of content” by privatized media reduce democracy to consumer choice and practices that conveniently lead to “populations being better integrated into the global market” (Srebreny, 2009, p. 51). Diversity in genres does nothing to further democratic decision-making and the equitable sharing of scientific and technological advances. Afghanistan now has 15 television channels – each warlord has his own – while the “diversity” of channels advances democracy not one bit.
Content diversity tailored with local icons, scenes, language, and actors is part of the global strategy of transnational media, a strategy interfering with an authentic plurality of voices having open, non-commercial, democratic access to the media. Diversity in entertainment content helps transnational entertainment media reach larger and more diverse audiences, provides audiences to advertisers, and expands the reach of consumerism with homogenized themes and formats filled with cultural variety.
For years, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was a top show from Latin America to Japan, from Europe to India, because the hosts, the questions, the languages were all repurposed for diverse national and cultural audiences. The show, of course, unabashedly promotes individual competition, the desirability of personal wealth, and consumerism – not cooperation, democratic access to resources, or production for human needs.
The dominant economic forces in the world have temporarily succeeded in becoming the dominant cultural and social forces in society, reorganizing work and daily life, while advancing market relations through entertainment and consumerism. Transnational capital leads. Unfortunately, these clear class interests have been neglected in most contemporary analyses. This book aims to apply the profound findings of international political economy to the developing transnational media institutions and their practices. This book reviews the changing social relations that organize the world, summarizes the processes of global capitalist leadership, including the role of entertainment media in promoting consumerism and market values, and identifies the links between transnational capitalism and its transnational media.
To aid in this journey, the concept of cultural hegemony resting on political economy will be advanced in Chapter 5 as an aid for understanding the appeal of transnational media content. Cultural hegemony expresses the consent that citizens give to the cultural and political leadership of transnational capitalism because we perceive some benefit and no alternative.
Hegemony and Consent
For now, commercial media practices and values prosper because TNMC leadership and investment are welcomed, even invited. Indeed, TNMC global predominance is not based on control or coerced domination, but hegemony – their social and cultural leadership has widespread international consent.
Hegemony occurs when participants in a social relationship consent to the policies and leadership of a dominant group. Consent is assured only to the extent that the leadership sufficiently meets the needs of allied and subordinate groups (Gramsci, 1971; Artz & Murphy, 2000). For the cultural hegemony of transnational media corporations, leadership and power stems from its collaborative effectiveness – local and national capitalist media owners, protected and bolstered by their own governments, solicit and join transnational media partnerships. The corporate consent demonstrated in cooperative media productions parallels the audience consent given to the practices of consumerism. Local TNMC partners willingly contribute culturally familiar local representations for TNMC entertainment content. Whatever the specific local variant or hybrid, the dominance of the hegemonic commercial model and values are apparent: atomized, individualized, and consumerist entertainment become the new global norm.
While cultural dominance cannot be denied (too many examples of forced takeovers and media monopoly belie as much), predominance is more accurate as leading global media have found hegemonic attraction and persuasion more cost-efficient and politically effective. Throughout the world, deregulated, privatized media have accompanied the parallel political reform of governments, reflecting the intimate connections between civil society and the state. Of course, liberalization of media does not guarantee an open, democratic society; Guatemala, El Salvador, and Qatar have private media but few civil liberties. In fact, many governments continue to mete out punishment and repression, but they do so with more legitimacy when they have the cover of non-unionized, temporary labor, two-candidate demonstration elections, and privatized media. In most cases, transnational and local media defend the newly reformed states. In all cases, privatized media legalized by the newly reformed states promote complementary cultural forms (entertainment) and practices (individualism, consumerism) that advance and reinforce global market relations at the expense of public interest.
Occasionally, resistance by sections of the working class and other politically disenfranchised groups spill over into public discourse and media coverage, opening the door to some limited working class and indigenous participation, as in Mexico following Chiapas, or in Ecuador, Greece, Spain, and Egypt over the last few years. Yet, no matter how deep the social crisis, private media seldom balk from staunch support of their national capitalist class (Fox, 1988). Corporate media may vary in size, stature, temperament, and format, but never in allegiance to their class.
Consent to capitalism is established through social relations organizing work and through images and narratives that explain those relations in an entertaining fashion. And, entertainment dominates media content everywhere. Public access to news, policy, and discussions about local, national, and world issues “cede their place to the pleasure taken in electronic media spectacles where narration or the simple accumulation of anecdotes prevails over reasoned solutions to problems” (García Canclini, 1993, p. 24). News Corp, Disney, Bertelsmann, Sony, Ghibli, Reliance, and other transnational media firms contribute to a global entertainment universe, leading most other smaller media along the same path of spectacle, infotainment, and a diversity of mass entertainment, driving out democratic public media access and even public service media.
Cultural hegemony
Given the prevalence of entertainment media, the expression of how things are and how things ought to be is dominated by stories written by corporate media producers from Disney and Bertlesmann to Canal + and Viacom with images and messages that “create and reinforce their audiences’ attachments to the way things are” (Schiller, 1976, p. 30). These stories and themes are not a one-time deal: they appear in show after show, station after station, and mass market magazine after newspaper lifestyle section.
Capitalist cultural hegemony indicates broad consent and participation in the transnational free market project pressuring labor for more work and lower pay while providing reinforcing narratives and ideologies in media content. The most effective content includes challenges and creative adaptations that appeal to diverse cultures while demonstrating a preference for existing capitalist social relations. Allegiance to this hegemonic class perspective is apparent in transnational media’s commitment to a commercialized global culture, a culture that has several remarkable characteristics (revised from Artz, 2003):
Consolidated control tightens. Ownership of the production and distribution of the global culture has geographically “de-centered” with more local and national sites of production, while consolidation continues, supported by regional co-aspirants and domestic media subcontractors. Transnationally, about 10 companies dominate, but hundreds provide essential complementary support.
Entertainment formats predominate. From Ghana to Brazil to Singapore and the West, broadcasting genres, music, and movies are entertainment. Public media access, investigative journalism, and political documentaries have declined.
Consumerism rules. Marked by individualism, immediate gratification, and unfettered acquisitiveness, consumerism is expressed in hierarchical fictional and nonfictional narratives in privatized mass communication.
Cultural hybrids flourish. Variations draw from rich and diverse traditions, as in Brazilian telenovelas and rap, Nigerian juju videos, and Islamic and green pop in Turkey. Yet, when controlled and represented by corporate media, most advance and none challenge the basic individualist, consumerist tenets of the capitalist market.
Media variety promotes cultural homogeneity. Hybrid forms provide diversity in local content for uniform global themes apropos of global capitalism. The global culture of transnational capitalist media features two complementary yet distinct representations: hybrid content packaged in standardized forms and hegemonic themes.
Localizing the Global
Chapter 6 considers cultural hybridity and other perspectives, addressing how local and national media often appear to construct alternatives to global capitalism and consumerism. Hybridity in particular is a characteristic of all communication, including media entertainment from any source. Hybridity reflects the creative contributions and resistances to intercultural exchanges by domestic media producers, cultural artists, and active audiences, either as accommodating or resisting responses. Yet, most hybrid content reflects an intercultural homogeneity wrapped within a capitalist consumerist model. The international success of Ugly Betty, MTV, network game shows, pop music, and other homogeneous cultural products indicates that subordinate, yet aspiring, classes around the world find pleasure, comfort, and assurance in the cultural similarity of consumption in all countries. TNMC television produce localized entertainment formats like quiz shows, telenovelas, and competitive reality TV as cost-efficient commercial strategies for maximizing audiences (Keane, Fung, & Moran, 2007). In signing on to the cultural hegemony of transnational capital, local media collaborate with TNMCs to creatively hybridize commodified cultural products and models to fit local cultural or political sensibilities. “Globalized” cultural practices represent local interests and meanings, occasionally allowing subversion of global media messages with more politically conscious interpretations and uses (Kraidy, 1999, 2002; Robertson, 1992) but just as frequently, power remains intact except for the local particulars. If the local market is still a commercial enterprise, not a community hall, it provides no real alternative to the supermarket chain. At any rate, transnational media have adjusted quickly, realizing that hybrid alterations are largely non-threatening, potentially very profitable, and politically preferable as evidence of dominant media’s cultural diversity and sensitivity. In addition to the locally generated hybrid culture, TNMCs now produce their own commodified hybrids gleaned from cultures around the world. Homogeneous or hybrid, the structure of power remains.
Chapter 6 reminds us that the consumption of media commodities is a social practice, open to interpretations and use beyond the intent of the producer. The cultural meaning and consequence of any text have as much to do with the social and political context of reception as they do with the sender–receiver dynamic. In Managua, Nicaragua, Brazilian soap operas are viewed by entire neighborhoods at the homes of those few with televisions, permitting much more democratic communication and meaning construction than that done by the single viewer passively atomized in a North living room. Still, interpretations by readers and viewers are neither autonomous nor necessarily superior to the meanings proposed by writers and producers. Without access to mass communication resources, audiences everywhere are handicapped if their constructions of meanings remain creative personal reactions to the mass productions of others, primarily the corporate few.
What is progressive about cordoning off human subjects as active receivers who are relegated to reconstructing meanings produced by others? Why not have a society and media that allow citizens to produce their own texts for mass distribution? The “reader-as-producer” perspective expresses little concern regarding globalization or power, despite the fact that most intercultural communication and dialogue are filters – simultaneously pasteurizing cultural activity and bolstering capitalist media hegemony. Constraining audiences as receivers retards the communication process. There is no democracy if the majority cannot speak in their own terms with full access to media production and dissemination.
Entertainment media present images and narratives that represent diverse voices as a substitute for actual communication by the diverse majority speaking in its own voice. In other words, TNMC cultural hegemony thrives because (in very practical terms) it not only presents the most popular versions of commercial culture – the representative epitome of success – it also appears to be the best promoter of indigenous culture and cultural diversity.
Chapter 7 looks at action movies that share a thematic and ideological consistency across cultures – movies that employ challenges to authority and social norms only to reinvigorate the status quo before the final credits roll on screen.
In addition to action movies, other entertainment content drawn from independent, indigenous, or hybrid mixes are widely distributed by corporate media. However, in hegemonic terms, any music, movie, art, political discourse, or social commentary that passes through corporate media filters must meet the prerequisites of mass entertainment and profit, thereby weakening and undermining any political edge, class independence, or democratic potential. For now, transnational capitalist media and their cultural leadership mute and lead the working class and other diverse subordinate groups because mass culture provides favorable and rewarding representations and images. From Big Bang Theory and American Idol in the United States, to Rebelde in Mexico and the popular radio show Our New Home on Afghan radio, life is good!
Thanks to TNMCs, we can laugh, work, play, and shop in our own little worlds without regard, concern, or even awareness of any unpleasantness. Individually consumed mass pleasure makes for a solid consumerist hegemony. Indeed, a central tenet of capitalist media hegemony worldwide is to promote an interclass culture of pleasure based on continuous consumption. In image and narrative, this interclass culture is strictly affluent middle class in outlook: professional, managerial, or entrepreneurial and aspiring to move closer to the corporate center. Yet, to the extent that the global media set agendas and popularize models of entertainment, mass culture closes down public discourse.
Only when cultural practices reject commercialization will public discourse open up possibilities for a truly new world order. Chapter 8 highlights developments in democratic media access in Venezuela as part of its Bolivarian revolution.
Diversity with Democracy
As noted, cultural diversity per se is not the issue. TNMCs will happily emphasize the cross-cultural character of the elite or moderate intercultural contributions that might jilt the blander middle class palette into hybrid cross-overs (e.g., African music via Paul Simon, de-Latinizing Ricky Martin, Korean K-pop hybrids). More importantly, advertising and commercialized entertainment “undermines people’s will to understand” their own social conditions and individual potential, while hegemonic middle class lifestyles are emulated and even internalized (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1992, p. 153). Furthermore, a media focus on celebrity, spectacle, and dancing cats undercuts attention to history and the future, while a focus on individual consumption and desire denies collective, democratic, and more creative possibilities for humanity.
The problem with the TNMC culture industry is not only in the stories they tell of hyper individualism, but also in how they occupy the collective consciousness with celebrity, trivia, and self-aggrandizement. Pleasure is marketed as the goal, but it is always just beyond our reach, requiring another consumer purchase, then another. Of course, pleasure is not the same as happiness, satisfaction, or human fulfillment.
This book offers a “conjunctural” analysis of the historical moment that is marked by the maturation of transnational capitalism and its social relations. Claims, illustrations, evidence, and arguments presented here speak to conditions we collectively face around the world. This offering is not intended to be a final statement on the way forward, but does make an appeal for a clearer materialist analysis and resolute action based on what we know.
What we do know and what the pages of this book confirm is that the spread of transnational media based on market imperatives debases labor, feeds individual desire, legitimizes mass consumption, mass production, and privatization – obstructing humanity’s fulfillment in the process.
Hybrid variations that do not challenge atomized pleasure, mass hedonism, or the commercial model may surely represent subordinate classes and cultures, but they do so as unwitting servants for capitalist cultural hegemony. For instance, by independently producing his own hybrid blend of Ghanian “highlife” music with American pop and reggae, Kojo Antwi may have revived his country’s classic sound, but he cannot stem the multinational “flooding of Sub-Saharan Africa with flimsy pop,” especially after impresario Quincy Jones takes over Antwi’s productions, softening them for the world music market (Zachary, 2001). In other words, the economic goals of transnational media ultimately conflict with the social and cultural needs of communities, nations, and working classes worldwide. As local media solicit TNMCs and become commercialized, they are subjected to the laws of market more than the needs of the community. Privatized media subvert the local even if they remain local because they emulate the commercial global media and the model they value.
Consumerism (local or global) is created, planned, and organized according to a value system obeisant to corporate goals. Likewise, media and cultural practices adhering to privatization and commercialization are created, planned, and organized for similar corporate ends. Global capitalism, in other words, creates a transnational consumer market and cultivates a consumerist ideology.
TNMCs measure value in terms of sales of audiences to advertisers and sales of media merchandise to audiences. Yet, an increase in the quantity of goods does not systematically improve the well-being of humanity. Not surprisingly, consumerism and advertising appear as the legitimate forbearers of capitalist-defined democratic freedom: the free flow of information and free consumer choice impersonate the ultimate “free” society. Global capitalism will not willingly advance either democratic practices or democratic cultural exchanges. To paraphrase the abolitionist Frederick Douglas, capitalist globalization concedes nothing without demand. This book argues that we would be better off to break with the atomized consumer model of global entertainment media and turn to more democratic media with citizen creativity and participation whose goal is improving the quality and joy of human life.
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1Twenty-First Century Capitalism and Transnational Relations
In a world of entertainment media filled with consumer advertising, who does not know about iPhones, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, or the World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero? At the front end of the twenty-first century, media broadcasting and wireless messages relentlessly promote these and other must-have consumer goods. Yet, how many happy consumers know that Apple uses poisonous chemicals in its Chinese manufacturing plants (Walters, 2012)? Know that Coke depletes ground water aquifers in Rajasthan, India, threatening agriculture and the lives of thousands of farmers (Indian farmers, 2008)? Which coffee drinker is aware that a German equity firm bought Caribou Coffee to close down 80 stores in the Midwest? Do beer drinkers taste the added water in their Budweiser, put there as part of a profit strategy by the Brazilian CEO of the company’s Dutch owners? Do gamers linked on-line in the World of Warcraft or Call of Duty find irony in a French firm producing and marketing those military games even as French citizens protest real military action in the Mideast? Most likely, few consumers are aware of the investment, production, and marketing campaigns of the corporations responsible for the personal goods and services of daily life.
Even fewer know that making possible the slick advertisements and the immediate gratification of these and similar consumer products are thousands of workers around the world, some making as little as 21 cents an hour. Women and children work 12 hour days in firetraps for Disney, Sears, WalMart, and Sean Combs in Bangladesh (Hart, 2012). Likewise, workers for Apple’s iPhone and iPad Chinese supplier are forced to work in unsafe factories under inhumane conditions (Qiang, 2013). While major media tout competitive free market globalization as the way to improve the quality of life for all, major transnational corporations (TNCs) pursue an eternal fight for greater profits as global poverty and inequality worsen (Chossudovsky, 1997). Worldwide viewers have seen Yo soy Betty, la fea (Ugly Betty), the telenovela by Fernando Gaitan, that has been translated into 13 languages and broadcast in 74 countries (Kraul, 2006). Few know that Colombian media success is partly driven by the low-cost, non-union labor of creators, producers, and technicians working under repressive anti-labor laws. We watch. We enjoy. We buy.
Knowledge of and attraction to consumer goods result from global entertainment media that extol the “myth of consumer agency to convince consumers that they are empowered by what they consume” (Galbraith & Karlin, 2012, p. 25). These are the same transnational media corporations (TNMCs) that do not inform us about the conditions of production or the social and environmental consequences of our consumerist lifestyles. Entertainment for profit, the norm for all capitalist media, does not encourage news and information for the common good. Advertising-driven entertainment wed to codes and conventions of mundane formats does not even meet elementary levels of artistic creativity. This is not a question of high or low culture, but a recognition of the structural constraints on access to cultural production and creativity by all. In the interests of democracy and an informed global citizenry that deserves access to the creative use of media, this book investigates how entertainment media contribute to the globalization of capitalism and the creation of a global consumer culture.
The world is undergoing dramatic changes in the organization of production, trade, communication, and culture. Because these changes seem to be occurring everywhere, globalization has become the catchword to describe various dimensions of a dynamic, complex process. In popular and academic literature, globalization has been used to explain “a process, a condition, a system, a force, and an age” (Steger, 2005, p. 7). In fact, enough has been written about globalization to fill a small library (see Ritzer, 2009). This book will not attempt to review or unearth the lineages or contours of the ongoing conversations on globalization. However, the many competing and sometimes contradictory versions of what globalization involves should not obscure its existence or its consequence.
Capitalism and Social Class
Scholars in International Political Economy and world systems theory have identified and documented the development of transnational corporations (TNCs) led by an emerging transnational capitalist class (TNCC) (van der Pijl, 1998; Sklair, 2001; Robinson, 2004; Carroll et al., 2010). To make sense of these discoveries and put them into meaningful context for understanding global entertainment media, which also is an industry mass producing standardized cultural goods (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2007), this chapter reflects on capitalism, social class, and class formation. Entertainment media are integral to almost all social, cultural, and political activities of society (Golding & Murdock, 1991, pp. 17–22; Artz, 2006, pp. 14–23).
Capitalism is a social system in which resources and the means of production are privately owned. Capitalism, as a social system based on the creation of private profit from production by wage labor, requires the constant expansion of production and consumption. Capitalism’s ceaseless drive for profits leads to a never-ending search for resources and markets. In the late nineteenth century, many advanced industries, having reached the limits of expansion within their own national boundaries, turned to other regions for resources and markets. Competition and conflict led to two world wars among emerging imperialist powers. The industrial expansion of capitalism following WWII was complemented by a renewed search for more resources and markets in the developing world. Still, capitalism has not escaped the recurring contradiction of overproduction – more goods and services are produced than the working and middle classes can purchase, even with extended credit. Consequently, capitalists continue their quest for more consumer markets, even as they continue the onslaught on wages and social welfare. Since the 1970s, leading sections of the capitalist class found the international integration of national production to be appealing and ultimately more profitable: outsourcing, off-shore production, subcontracting, and decentralization of production for local markets brought increased profits by decreasing labor and transportation costs. In the United States, employment declined, job security and wages went down, while work hours increased and production became more regimented. This new global system of production and distribution has led to new social relations and a global capitalist class.
Production and Class Formations
All societies have used natural resources like wood, metal, water, and agricultural products from nature and developed by humans, but as long as the raw materials remain in the ground or standing in the forest, as long as the fruits and vegetables remain on the trees or vines or in the ground, they are useless. It takes human labor to transform natural resources into usable goods (a fact obscured by advertising and the consumer culture, from Nike and Budweiser to Honda, Disney, and McDonald’s). A variety of techniques and practices to sustain human life have been used over the thousands of years of our existence. In expropriating nature and the production of goods and services, men and women have entered into social relations reflecting the organization of productive activities. All productive practices include and reproduce particular social relations – practices and relations, even when contradictory, are organically interconnected. Societies have arisen through this combination of production and social relations in a multitude of ways, from primitive communism, feudalism, chattel slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and socialism to name the more well-known. In the twenty-first century, transnational corporations have instituted new productive activities from joint venture investment relations to integrated decentralized production chains and standardized distribution methods. Transnational corporations comprise new social class formations (integrating capital classes across national borders) and new global social relations (the de-industrialization of developed countries and the rapid industrialization and consumerization of developing nations), including the remarkable transformation of social classes – peasant and farmers have become repositioned as agricultural and industrial workers at the rate of 50 million per year (Kalb, 2011, p. 2), although many will become casual or unemployed workers. In 2012, as corporate media rhapsodized about the economic recovery, more than 200 million were out of work.
Capitalism is a social system in which resources and the means of production are privately owned and operated for individual profit, not necessarily for social use or the common good. Capitalism requires labor power to obtain the natural resources and put the machinery in motion for production. Wageworkers are paid for their labor time and skill, but not the total value of their work. The commodities produced are sold on the market, but workers are paid less than the value of what they produce. Capitalist profits come from this sleight of hand. Capitalists keep the difference between the value of the commodity and the price of labor, including the labor necessary for manufacturing machines and transporting materials. The value of labor appears in Wall Street business reports as labor productivity – expressed as the value produced by one hour of work. After factoring in the costs of material, machinery, and transportation – all costs dependent on labor, as well – the difference between the hourly wage and labor productivity is the hourly profit appropriated by the corporate owners. Workers are paid for their labor time and skill, but not their productivity. This understanding makes abundantly clear why corporations would strategically become transnational: by moving production to low-wage countries, the value of the commodities remains about the same in the international market, but the cost of labor is significantly lower, providing increased profits on all goods sold (International Labor Organization, 2013; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012).
Transnational corporate relations are necessary if firms hope to maximize local economic, political, and cultural benefits. Thus, international and multinational corporations “merge” with national or other multinational firms, increasing access to local labor and markets, and usually defeating national competitors in the process. Machinery, technology, and skill embodied in machines and technology, through science, invention, and innovation improve the efficient use of labor power. National firms often willingly integrate into transnational firms to have access to capital and the latest technology and technique – or face failure given superior capitalist operations. Modern capitalism organizes the immense productive capacity of international wage labor with the latest technology and machinery available. In striving for increased labor productivity, businesses now even use technology to monitor employee behavior, enforcing a work regime of stricter productivity (Semuels, 2013). Not technology for democracy. Technology to improve profit. Technology to extract more from labor.
The social relations of production of capitalism are not as advanced, progressive, or socially egalitarian as the productive capacity and the means of production would allow. Production is highly socialized: the labor process is collectively organized with an extensive division of labor, increasingly on a global scale. For the most part, individuals do not sew their own clothing, grow their own food, or build their own furniture. Instead, to meet the needs and desires of society, clothes, cereal, sofas, music, and most other socially useful goods are mass produced by tens of thousands of working people – albeit contained in privately owned enterprises. Individuals with many different skills perform many different tasks: discovery, design, extraction, transport, manual labor, skilled machining, assembly, packaging, quality control inspection, and machinery maintenance. This is a social process. Producers are “not simply individual workers, side-by-side, in a given enterprise,” but workers who “have been made into a real ‘collective’ worker by the division and organization of labor” (Jalée, 1977, p. 12) and by the production of commodities to be sold for profit. Commodities are produced for exchange, for profit; their use or social need is incidental although complex social interactions are needed to produce even the most incidental commodity.
In the globalized capitalist system component operations occur in multiple sites of production, such that even the smallest item destined for mass consumption requires a highly socialized, coordinated collective effort. A typical cell phone, for example, is manufactured from diverse natural resources and synthetic materials, including oil, metal, plastic, silicone, quartz, copper, gold, coltan, and other materials – each having complex extractive, refining, manufacturing, and development processes, as well as a number of levels of design, development, and transportation. The little 2” × 4” media device represents the combined creative and productive efforts of millions.
