Cultural Imperialism Essay

1989 Words8 Pages
------------------------------------------------- Cultural Imperialism The concept of media and cultural imperialism was made prominent by a number of Latin American thinkers including Antonio Pasquali, Luis Ramiro Beltran, Fernando Reyes Matta, and Mario Kaplun. In addition, Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, and Armand Mattelart have been instrumental to the development of this theory. According to Tomlinson, the argument that links cultural globalization to cultural imperialism is as follows: “globalization is either just the latest term for, or the latest stage in, a process with a long history, a history more or less co-extensive with the history of Western imperialism. It is simply the global working through of a process of domination in which the West draws all cultures into its ambit. Adherents of the media imperialism tradition held that a small group of Western countries not only controlled the international media trade but used it to transmit their particular cultural and economic values, particularly individualism and consumerism, to large numbers of developing nations around the world. Boyd-Barrett (1997:119) writes that the country which is affected by media influence either adopts this influence as a deliberate commercial or political strategy, or simply absorbs this influence unreflectively as the result of the contract. According to Herbert Schiller (1976), ‘The concept of cultural imperialism today best describes the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how is dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the value and structures of the dominating center of the system.’ Two Models of Cultural Imperialism Boyd-Barrett provides a useful distinction, between the “Schiller Model” of
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