LESSON 8:
THE WORLD OF IDEAS
BY : SIR DANIEL
THE GLOBAL MEDIA CULTURES
• Situations created through globalization and media make people conceive they belong to one world called
global village, a term coined by Marshall MacLuhan in early 1960’s, a Canadian media theorist, to express
the idea that people throughout the world are interconnected through the use of new media technologies.
• According to scholars, the world is globalized in the 1900s upon the advancement of media and
transportation technology. Changes in migration patterns where people move easily and advancement in
media which brought changes to human life heightens globalization.
• Global media cultures create a continuous cultural exchange, in which crucial aspects such as identity,
nationality, religion, behavioral norms & way of life are continuously questioned & challenged.
Globalization and Media
• Globalization which refers to economic and political integration on a world scale, has a crucial cultural
dimension in which the media has the central role.
• In that sense, media globalization is about how most national media systems have become more
internationalized, becoming more open to outside influences, both in their content and in their ownership
and control.
Five Time Periods in the Study of Globalization and Media
1. Oral Communication
• Globalization as a social process is characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, linguistic and
environmental interconnections and flows that make the many of the currently existing borders and boundaries
irrelevant.
• Languages as a means to develop the ability to communicate across culture are the lifeline of globalization. Without
language there would be no globalization; and vice versa, without globalization there would be no world languages.
2. Script
• Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and
disseminating information. Writing may have been invented independently three times in different parts of the world:
in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. Writing is a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific
language. Cuneiform script created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, is the only writing system which can be traced
to its earliest prehistoric origin.
• Humans communicate and shared knowledge and ideas through script- the very first writing. The origin of writing was
in the form of carvings such as wood, stone, bones and others. The medium that drove humans to globalization was
the script of Ancient Egyptian written in papyrus (plant). Written and orderly arrangement of documents pertaining to
religious, cultural, economic and religious practices are done through script for dissemination to other places. These
can also be handed down from generation to generation.
HIEROGLYPHS
3. The Printing Press
• The printing press is a device that allows for the mass production of uniform printed matter, mainly text in
the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers. It revolutionized society in China where it was created.
Johannes Gutenberg further developed this in the 15th century with his invention of the Gutenberg press.
The following are the consequences of the printing press:
1. The printing press changed the very nature of knowledge. It preserved knowledge which had been more
malleable in oral cultures. It also standardized knowledge.
2. Print encouraged the challenge of political and religious authority because of its ability to circulate
competing views. Printing press encouraged the literacy of the public and the growth of schools.
4. Electronic Media
• It refers to the broadcast or storage media that take advantage of electronic technology. They may include
television, radio, internet, fax, CD-ROMs, DVD, and any other medium that requires electricity or digital
encoding of information.
• On going globalization processes such as economic, political, and cultural are revolutionized by a host of
new media in the beginning of the 19th century. These electronic media in the likes of telegraph, telephone,
radio, film, and television continuously open up new perspectives of globalization. In the 20th century, the
only available mass media in remote villages was the radio while film was soon developed as an artistic
medium for great cultural expression.
5.Digital Media
• Phones and television are now considered digital while computer is considered the most important media
influencing globalization. Computers give access to global and market place and transformed cultural life.
• Our daily life is revolutionized by digital media. People are able to adopt and adapt new practices like
fashion, sports, music, food and many others through access of information provided by computers. They
also exchange ideas, establish relations and linkages through the use of skype, google, chat, and zoom.
Popular Music and Globalization
• World music is defined as the umbrella category which various types of traditional and non Western music
are produced for Western consumption.
• It is a label of industrial origin that refers to an amalgamated global marketplace of sounds as ethnic
commodities.
The Globalization of Religion
• Religions played important roles in bringing about and characterizing globalization. Among the
consequences of this implication for religion is that globalization encourages religious pluralism. Religions
identify themselves in relation to one another, and they become less rooted in particular places because of
diasporas and transnational ties. Globalization further provides fertile ground for a variety of
noninstitutionalized religious manifestations and for the development of religion as a political and cultural
resource.
Perspectives on the Role of Religion in the Globalization Process
1. The Modernist Perspective.
• Its view is that all secularizations would eventually look alike and the different religions would all end up as
the same secular and “rational” philosophy. It sees religion revivals as sometimes being a reaction to the
Enlightenment and modernization.
2. Post-Modernist Perspective.
• The core value of post-modernism is expressive individualism. The post-modernist perspective can include
“spiritual experiences,” but only those without religious constraints. Post-modernism is largely hyper-
secularism, and it joins modernism in predicting, and eagerly anticipating, the disappearance of traditional
religions.
3. The Pre-Modernist Perspective.
• It is best represented and articulated by the Roman Catholic Church, especially by Pope John Paul II. The
Pope’s understanding is drawn from his experiences with Poland, but it encompasses events in other
countries as well. Each religion has secularized in its own distinctive way, which has resulted in its own
distinctive secular outcome.
• Secularization is understood as a shift in the overall frameworks of human condition; it makes it possible for
people to have a choice between belief and non belief in a manner hitherto unknown.
Transnational Religion and Multiple Glocalization
• Throughout the 20th century migration of faiths across the globe has been a major feature. One of these features is
the deterritorialization of religion – that is , the appearance and the efflorescence of religious traditions in places
where these previously had been largely unknown or were at least in a minority position.
• Transnational religion is a means of describing solutions to new-found situations that people face as a result of
migration and it comes as two quite distinct blends of religious universalism and local particularism.
1. It is possible for religious universalism to gain the upper hand, whereby universalism becomes the central reference
for immigrant communities. In such instances, religious transnationalism is often depicted as a religion going global.
2. It is possible for local ethnic or national particularism to gain or maintain the most important place for local immigrant
communities.
• Transnational religion is used to describe cases of institutional transnationalism whereby communities living outside
the national territory of particular states maintain religious attachments to their home churches or institutional.
• Indigenization, hybridization or glocalization are processes that register the ability of religion to mold into the fabric of
different communities in ways that connect it intimately with communal and local relations.
Forms of Glocalization
1. Indigenization
2. Vernacularization
3. Nationalization
4. Transnationalization
• Indigenization is connected with the specific faiths with ethnic groups whereby religion and culture
were often fused into a single unit. It is also connected to the survival of particular ethnic groups.
• Vernacularization involved the rise of vernacular language endowed with the symbolic ability of
offering privileged access to the sacred and often promoted by empires.
• Nationalization connected the consolidation of specific nations with particular confessions and has
been a popular strategy both in Western and eastern Europe.
• Transnationalization complemented religious nationalization by forcing groups to identify with
specific religious traditions of real or imagine national homelands or to adopt a more universalist
vision of religion.
