Nonverbal communication and culture. Identity, stereotypes and prejudices, страница 76

Many other U.S. media are widely available outside of the United States, including television and newspapers. Cable News Network (CNN) was even available in Iraq during the Gulf War. MTV is also broadcast internationally. The International Herald Tribune, published jointly by the New York Times and the Washington Post, is also widely available in some parts of the world. The implications of the dominance by U.S. media and popular culture have yet to be determined, although you might imagine the consequences.

Not all popular culture comes from the United States. For example, the invention and rise of James Bond is a British phenomenon, but the famous character has been exported to the United States. The appropriation of the British character into U.S. ideological and economic terrain complicates arguments about popular culture and intercultural communication.

Cultural Imperialism

It is difficult to measure the impact of the U.S. and Western media and popular culture on the rest of the world. But we do know that we cannot ignore this dynamic. The U.S. government in the 1920s believed that having U.S. movies on foreign screens would boost the sales of U.S. products because the productions would be furnished with U.S. goods. The U.S. government worked closely with the Hays Office (officially, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) to break into foreign markets, most notably in the United Kingdom.

The discussions about media imperialism, electronic colonialism, and cultural imperialism, which began in the 1920s, continue today. The interrelationships between economics, nationalism, and culture make it difficult to determine with much certainty how significant cultural imperialism might be. The issue of cultural imperialism is complex because the definition is complex.

Five different ways of thinking about cultural imperialism are identified: (1) as cultural domination, (2) as media imperialism, (3) as nationalist discourse, (4) as a critique of global capitalism, and (5) as a critique of modernity.

Emphasized is the interrelatedness of issues of ethnicity, culture, and nationalism in the context of economics, technology, and capitalism— resources that are distributed unevenly throughout the world. To understand the concerns about cultural imperialism, therefore, it is necessary to consider the complexity of the impact of U.S. popular culture. There is no easy way to measure the impact of popular culture, but we should be sensitive to its influences on intercultural communication.

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Popular culture plays an enormous role in understanding relations around the globe. It is through popular culture that we try to understand the dynamics of other cultures and nations. Although these representations are problematic, we also rely on popular culture to understand many kinds of issues all over the world. For many of us the world exists through popular culture.

SUMMARY

-  For many people, popular culture is one of the primary modes of intercultural experience. The images produced by culture industries such as film and television enable us to "travel" to many places.

-  As a forum for the development of our ideas about other places, we rely heavily on popular culture.

-   It is significant that much of our popular culture is dominated by U.S.-based culture industries, considering how we use popular culture as a form of intercultural communication. Not all popular culture emerges from the United States, but the preponderance is from either the United States or Western Europe. And it contributes to a power dynamic—cultural imperialism—that affects intercultural communication everywhere.