An Analysis of Cultural Communication

During the first day of The International Communications course, Professor Harsin proposed the question: “How would you define International Communication?” Heads swayed and hesitant hands began to rise in attempts to tackle the question. After delving into the nooks and crannies of this question throughout the course, another question arises today: What evidence can we condense to create a blueprint for how communication has been infiltrating continents globally? It can be reiterated that given the diversification of political, socio-economic context, cultural issues have apparently been treated as the questionable point of global debate. It seems quite evident that other aspects of globalization or of localization are determined by the manifestation of culture. All in all, culture is bound to influence and have diverse effects on global communication in days to come. It is nothing but global market and political economy that are intercepting to make people more connected than ever before through indirect and direct communications among different realms of culture and society. But the question still stands; will the world become disintegrated or homogenized via cultural communication?

The issue of cultural imperialism has been at the center of debates for quite a while. Two views co-exist; the rejectionist‘s approach that holds the view that one group maintains cultural imperialism in a one-way flow of cultural dominance from west to east or from center to periphery or even from local to global. Conversely, when juxtaposed with the alternative of this position, the stance becomes the contrary of attractive. This alternative view delves further into more of a comprehensive understanding, not only because of it being able to addr...

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...mocratic virtues of technology." Serving as smoke screens for fused power, such rhetorical implementations commonly hype "globalization"; corporate globalization, as a somewhat evident common-sense way of encouraging democracy and stimulating economical prosperity. "The idea has taken root in free trade rhetoric that the spread of products of the entertainment industry automatically leads to civil and political freedom, as if the status of the consumer were equivalent to that of the citizen." As Mattelart states: "the rapidity with which Asian and Latin American countries have adapted to digital technology and the advantage they have taken of it." However, there lays an uninviting flip side, which rises the notion that these new sources of modernity and technology exist alongside the process of exclusion and deprivation of a large portion of certain populations.