By: SAMAN AROOJ and TOOBA FARHEEN
The media industry has grown over the decades to be a force behind cultivating world cultures. It includes the social networks, the video-sharing websites and streaming services, as well as the world news portals, all of which offer a vast scale of content which is not limited by the state borders. To the marginalized groups of people, who rarely get a chance to get through to the mainstream media or if they do they don’t get a fair shot, both advantages and disadvantages exist in these global platforms.
At the same time as they offer people shows that minorities’ stories, cultural values, and experiences can be shared, and win recognition globally. On the flip side, such sites have the capacity of placing cultures into operation to reduce differentiation. locally hence the destruction of cultures.
The modernization process, which seems to be accompanied by a civilizations’ conflict, resulted in the process called globalization, and culture and life experience seem to be governed by standards which are global or, at least, Western. In this transformation process, power subordinate local identities are erased or overlaid by standardized globalization culture. Furthermore, social networking platforms also stand in as a platform of resistance that lets the oppressed society’s culture and heritage be represented. At the same time, getting media can bring the feeling of belonging to the global culture for poorer and more remote subcultures.
Nevertheless, doubts arise in the best way that these sites contribute to the presentation of cultures and if, in turn, they help perpetuate the leading Euro-American culture. This article aims to identify and discuss the positive and negative effects of global media influence on local cultures, especially subjugated communities. Thus, examining the relations of this kind will help capture the vectors of cultural conflict and dialogue in the postmillennial media culture.
Scholars have actively discussed how the global media interact with the cultural marginalization of subgroups. In his 1996 book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai looks at the cultural dimensions of globalization where the effects of global culture to locals are highlighted. In line with his theory of cultural globalization, media generates a cultural flow that transcends national borders but brings in new culture in form of ideas, norms as well as practices hence resulting in cultural creolization.
Global boulevards interact with local essences in this process. Equally, in his 1998 Globalization and Culture, media scholar John Tomlinson asserts that there is another effect of media globalization which is the culture’s deterritorialization– the act of displacing cultures from their original territorial-based context. This is a double-edged process in the context of subaltern subjects: on one hand, it makes it possible to articulate counter-hegemonic cultural identity; on the other, it subverts this agency through the creole of the postcolonial global neoliberal culture.
Critics such as Mahmood Mamdani, in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:America, The Cold War and The Roots Of Terror and Gregory’s idea that global media put forward Western cultural values which has negative effects on isolated cultures and forces the elimination of indigenous cultures in the wake of globalization. However, in his 1996 book The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells has pointed out that even though global media tend to give prominence to the gloom and doom stories, they do empower local communities to tell the world their untold stories and give a cultural documentation to detached culture as the mainstream media is not capable of. Therefore, it is apparent that through using media from other cultures one can organize cultural resistance; at the same time, media from other cultures can help maintain cultural imperialism, which in turn requires the occasional scrutiny of the influence of global media on local cultures.
Media has played a great role in globalization, resulting in a great change in cultural identification. It has the impact of bringing to the spotlight various groups in society that have been discriminated against. The mass media in the past has at times not portrayed minorities or have depicted them in a stereotypical manner.
Today’s video sharing websites like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter enable minorities to post and monetize their narratives. These representations can effectively reverse negative cliches erupting in media that previously prevented the cultural representation of such minorities. For example, indigenous communities have adopted social media to bring back lost languages, revive cultural practices and find lost persons within the tribe. For Example, Africans in the western countries have been able to dance to aero and promote African music, fashion and everything related to Africa through TikTok. This kind of cross-culturalism is advantageous to society since it raises the levels of self esteem and pride within the oppressed groups offering them ways of countering the process of globalization.
However, there is no denying that like most things in this world, global media too comes with its set of drawbacks. On one hand, these platforms allow the voices of the disadvantaged groups to be heard, but, on the other hand, it opens these groups to the negative influences from outside that may affect the local culture. There is also a problem of cultural imperialism evident on these platforms because there is so much influence from media and culture originating from the western countries.
Global media is remodeling the orientation of various minorities, cultural minorities in particular. They open doors for a nondescript representation but they are equally harmful to local cultures, that they seek to force onto the international standards. Such platforms offer effective means for sharing stories and commemorating traditions, yet they can obscure localized narratives with the general ones. To coordinate all these aspects and remain in harmony with globalization, and give countries as much freedom as possible while preserving cultural differences, it is crucial to find a balance.
Such exposure may lead the indigenous youth into emulating the western fashion, music and other cultural practices and over time they can easily forget their original culture. Besides, the algorithms that regulate different social media platforms may be inclined towards promoting content that can be considered as typical of some culture today. This means that people from the minority could upload content that will not reach anyone unless it falls under news or science categories and it influences the content to adapt to the global platform, changing the real culture.
The second concerns the inequality gap commonly referred to as the ‘digital divide’. Another point to note is that global media is not equally accessible to all the marginalized communities, since such access depends on the level of technology and economic development of the country. While some countries can tap into global media, there is a feeling that the receiving end is often areas away from cities especially in the developing world, those in the rural areas or those in the low-income bracket. Such asymmetrical cross-cultural encounters not only perpetuate the process of exclusion of such minorities but also distances them even more from the global discourse.
Further, global social networks also misuse culture by simply making it a fad of which they do not understand the implications. This commercialization forces the communities to perform and represent their culture in a new way and encourages them to sell out their cultural practices as products that are available for consumption in the global consumer market culture. This is even more pernicious for marginalized communities because the surfacing of oneself as a part of a group with a particular cultural background is tantamount to selling out the group’s culture with no tangible rewards.
As with all the global media, the primary chances are provided for the affirmation and
definition of positions of the marginalized communities here as well. Although they are advantageous, they act as a double-edged sword since all three are well known to be very harmful to humans. On one hand, they can incorporate different cultures and traditions, but on the other hand they are a threat of covering up local identity and changing the specific vision and character of a place. The task thus becomes to harness these inland communicative platforms while at the same time not allowing themselves to become too dominated by the global entities while at the same time not silencing the essences of the localized cultures.
Global media is remodeling the orientation of various minorities, cultural minorities in particular. They open doors for a nondescript representation but they are equally harmful to local cultures, that they seek to force onto the international standards. Such platforms offer effective means for sharing stories and commemorating traditions, yet they can obscure localized narratives with the general ones. To coordinate all these aspects and remain in harmony with globalization, and give countries as much freedom as possible while preserving cultural differences, it is crucial to find a balance.
The writer is a freelance columnist
