Introduction
Culture is an all inclusive system of communications which incorporates the biological and technical behavior of human beings with their verbal and nonverbal systems of expressive behavior (Loke, V., Supramaniam, G. and Wilson, T. 2005). Culture is the sum total of a way of life, including such things as expected behavior, beliefs, values, language, and living practices shared by members of a society; it is the pattern of values, traits, or behaviors shared by the people within a region. Some catalyst must exist that is capable of transforming private meanings into public meanings so they become understood by other members of the society; culture is that catalyst. Culture consists of both explicit and implicit rules through which experience is interpreted. Basically, Murphie, A. and Potts, J. (2003) believes that the function of culture is to establish modes of conduct, standards of performance, and ways of dealing with interpersonal and environmental relations that will reduce uncertainty, increase predictability, and thereby promote survival and growth among the members of any society. Culture influences behavior and explains how a group filters information; cultural meanings render some forms of activity normal and natural and others strange or wrong.
Cultural beliefs, values, and customs continue to be followed so long as they yield satisfaction. However, when a specific standard no longer fully satisfies the members of a society, it is modified or replaced, so that the resulting standard is more in line with the current needs and desires of the society. Thus, culture gradually but continually evolves to meet the needs of society.
As part of cultural development, the ways of communication, mass media and media technologies continues to get developed. New media technologies, the current era was driven by technology that allowed the massive duplication of material at a low cost. Physical copying technologies such as printing, record pressing and film duplication allowed the duplication of books, newspapers and movies at low prices to huge audiences. Television and radio allowed the electronic duplication of content for the first time.
Moreover, mass media had the economics of linear replication: a single work could make money proportional to the number of copies sold, and as volumes went up, units costs went down, increasing profit margins further. Vast fortunes were to be made in mass media. In line to these developments of media technologies, several issues occur in relation to cultural effect such as intellectual property, notions of authorship, patterns of consumptions, and privacy, and effectiveness of internet and/or other digital technologies.
Everyone lives in a world of social interaction and discourse from which our most fundamental self-perceptions are derived. We gain knowledge of ourselves and those with whom we interact based on many characteristics that become salient based on our cultural framework. For example, to an American the car that one drives has symbolic significance, whereas to an Indian, schooling is an important sign of position and status. It is through various types of social interactions that all people define themselves within their social community, and this self-definition lies at the very heart of human endeavor. This is a particularly important issue as we approach our move into the global village. People struggle with a desire for self-understanding and self-awareness in the face of the variety and ambiguity we encounter in a multicultural world. It is this struggle for self-definition in one's social system that is at the center of face.
Actually, these are not the main issues in global development. It is about how the different cultures respond to others culture. It is about how other cultures affect the local culture through televisions shows. What I’m trying to say is, “Most television’s shows worldwide are now having an access to other’s culture”. Television companies can easily buy notions of authorship from shows of other country in order to gain more profit to local viewers. And the problem is, local cultures and customs tend to get invaded by other cultures. In the case of Singapore as noted by Kuo (1999, p. 232), “The mass media in Singapore work in close conformity with government regulations and expectations. The guiding government communication policy prescribes that the media must not abused to mislead the population against public interest as defined by authority.” Moreover, the paper of Freedman, D. (2003) illustrated some various initiatives of the UK government to support an export-led strategy, and evaluates the consequences of such a strategy on domestic programming. Freedman, D. (2003), Highlighted the current trend towards the sale of programme formats, he considers whether the increased circulation of television programmes around the world points to a model of interconnectedness and heterogeneity or whether it reinforces unequal patterns of media flows.
Discussions
Media representation is an active, creative process through which images signify different meanings rather than merely presenting themselves as objective reflections of reality. Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures (Chandler, no date). The term refers to the processes involved as well as to its products. For instance, in relation to the key markers of identity representation involves not only how identities are represented (or rather constructed) within the text but also how they are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to demographic factors (Rotstein & Henkel, 1999).
These things has greatly affected how cultures now were shaped, and especially how nations and different people with different backgrounds are able to associate with each other because of the perceived information that they received from these devices used for communication. The environment in which we as interactive beings move together in order to create a semblance of order in our minds. At present, the modern media “produce and circulate meaning in the society” (Jensen, 2002) within the context of nationality and cultural heritage, religion, regional identities, societal classes, ethnic and minority rituals, family values and self-actualization. Such reality brings about endless debate of what is right or wrong, just or unfair, even real or unreal. Having wide variety of meanings in the society is a fact that maintains these debates, but to include the modernization of media simply aggravates the inherent confusion.
McQuial (1995) notes that the audience seeks the media either for surveillance (to find out what’s going on around us), personal identity (reaffirming who we are and how we appear to others), personal relationships (judging ourselves by the way others live), or diversion (generally what we term as entertainment). We can think of it as the media being a buffet table that offers different interests, and the audience goes around picking the ones they want. In which case it is up to the media to have available the things which its audience might need, lest the audience walks away unfulfilled. Take for example instrumental and ritualistic TV watching; the former is when the audience uses the TV purposely to look for something they need, and the latter is when they seek to be fulfilled either by being humored or roused to some other such emotion.
Since Television is considered as the advertising media as people from all over spend a large piece of their time watching everyday than reading the newspaper and any other media. Television most often than not, attracts people from its interactive and multimedia nature as it combines sight, sound and motion in one fall. Because of its unique capacity to instantly garner the attention of the audience, the Television may be considered as the most persuasive medium (Bruzzone & Tallyn, 1997; Peterson & Malhorta, 1998). After arresting the audience into watching the television advertisement in question, the audience listens and watches attentively and as the attention span is maintained, the audience finds themselves agreeing to the message and pleased at the visuals and sounds that enrapture them. An effective television campaign will positively influence viewers for as long as the advertisement is properly and persuasively designed. The radio as a broadcast communication medium can likewise help in the efficient promotion and education of the consumers through announcements and advertisements (Brassel, 2006).
Furthermore, consumers may choose particular products/brands not only because these products provide the functional or performance benefits expected, but also because products can be used to express consumers’ personality, social status or affiliation (symbolic purposes) or to fulfill their internal psychological needs, such as the need for change or newness (emotional purposes) (Kim et al, 2002). Culture influences behavior through its manifestations: values, heroes, rituals, and symbols (Luna & Gupta, 2001). The combination of both etic and emic perspective on the manifestations, can basically reveal culture’s strong relation with customer behavior. The etic philosophy is based on the definition of culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another’’ (Hofstede, 1997). On the other hand, the emic philosophy stresses upon understanding issues from the perspective of the subjects being studied (Luna & Gupta, 2001). As cited from McCracken (1988), this philosophy determines the coordinates of social action and productive activity, specifying the behaviors and objects that issue from both.
Apparently, once the culture of a developing country is influenced by a dominant culture, significant changes could happen. In fact, “the international flows of technology transfer and media ‘hardware’ couple with the ‘software’ flows of cultural products actually strengthened the one-way dependency between developed and developing countries (Rantanen 2005, p. 74).”
Moreover, foreign movies, shows, and media goods that are constantly dumped into other countries are easily accepted and embraced by the inhabitants of such nations, effectively damaging their own cultures. As a result, these nations would not experience national development at all; they would constantly be overshadowed by the more dominant culture that continuously influences them. Once more, media and communications such as televisions are perceived as strong tools that could endanger the cultural independence of nations particularly the developing nations.
Another adverse effect of cultural invasion with respect to television shows across cultures was encapsulated by Malysia’s former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, in his speech entitled Western Cultural Imperialism: “Today they broadcast slanted news. Tomorrow they will broadcast raw pornography to corrupt our children and destroy our culture (‘House of Glass: Culture, Modernity, and the State in Southeast Asia’ 2001).”
In a nutshell, the adverse effect of cultural invasion through television is the distortion or complete destruction of less prevailing cultures, due to the dominant influence of media globalization.
Conclusion
Cultural development through the seemingly harmless process of media globalization or television show strategies is a relevant issue that poses various concerns in the society today. The dominant culture gradually but undoubtedly affects the local culture of other countries through different forms of media and as a result, the customs, values, and norms of these nations are altered and even adversely affected.
References:
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