Introduction
It is progressively comprehensible that media and culture nowadays are of central significance to the maintenance and recollection of current societies. Societies, like species, need to reproduce to stay alive, and culture foster the growth of attitudes and behavior that influence people to consent to recognized ways of thought and conduct, as a result incorporating human beings into a particular socio-economic system.
However, forms of media culture like television, film, popular music, magazines, and advertising present role and gender models, fashion hints, lifestyle images, and icons of personality (Kellner & Durham 2006, ix).
The descriptions of media and culture offer customary ways of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, moral messages, and abstract conditioning, sugar-coating social and political ideas with pleasant and seductive forms of well-liked entertainment. Similarly, media and consumer culture, cyberculture, sports, and other accepted activities connect the public in practices that incorporate them into the established society, while offering enjoyments, importance, and identities.
Different human beings and viewers act in response to media and culture disparately, negotiating their significances in complex and often contradictory ways (Kellner & Durham 2006, ix).
With media and culture performing such an important role in modern life, it is clear that we must come to understand our cultural environment if we want control over our lives. Yet there are several approaches to the study of media, culture, and society in separate disciplines and academic fields.
Media and cultural change
Various forms of media fill human’s everyday lives and the cultural change of the current technological revolution is so disorderly that it is becoming progressively more complicated to record the transformations and to sustain with the cultural communications and theories that attempt to make sense of it all. Culture in the present day is both ordinary and complex surrounding multiple areas of daily life.
In the 1960s feminist, African American, Latino, gay and lesbian, and diverse oppositional movements attacked the stereotypes and partial images of a cultural depiction of their groups. These critiques of sexism, racism, homophobia, and other biases made it understandable that cultural depictions are never innocent or pure, that they contain the positive, negative, or confusing representation of different social groups that they can provide destructive interests of cultural oppressions by positioning definite groups as substandard, thus pointing to the advantage of main social groups.
Media Industry Revolution
For quite a long time, Media and communications have played a fundamental part in the development of social, cultural, and economic components. The media is experiencing immense transformation, as a result of the digitalization of content, and the combination of a particular computer and particular operating system and devices. The digital transformation is considerably enhancing the changeability of media content and producing a large quantity of distributable content. It is also presenting a two-way approach to a problem that begins with details and works up to the highest conceptual level and creative content production, supply, and services. The approach to a problem that begins at the highest conceptual level and works down to the details nature of traditional mass media is being challenged by the changing nature of options from “on special offer” to ” Available when requested, needed or required,” from mass to personalized, and from corporate-created to user-created.
User-created content, facilitated by extensive access to broadband Internet and social networking devices, is emerging as the most important force in determining media, communication, and culture. The Internet has transformed the economics of content production and information sharing. With lesser access obstacles, improved demand for content, lesser access difficulties in upstream supply, and advances in cooperatively developed platforms and news collectors, media and cultural content are highly developed and increasingly fashioned by broad client involvement. The Internet is increasingly subjective to intelligent Web services with technologies enabling users to be increasing contributors to springing up, collaborating, and disseminating Internet content and developing and customizing Internet applications. A participative Web is rising and is providing a testing ground for inexpensive production of content and inexpensive testing of services, with social revolutionized repercussions.
Apart from technological factors, user-created content is driven by economic factors such as lower entry barriers to content creators, increased interest in user-created content by mobile operators and search engines, and growing accessibility of recent business models to monetize content, such as advertising-based models. Social drivers for user-created content include the young “digital natives,” the growing desire to communicate oneself and be more interactive than possible on traditional media platforms, and the development of community-driven projects. This is extending to improved user independence, a multiplicity of users and content, and a change from passive use of broadcasting to the “participative web.”(Hanna 2009, 44)
The increase of efficient, large-scale cooperative efforts-peer production of information, knowledge, media, and culture, matches those of business applications. The impacts of user-created content are broader than enabling network-centric novelty and rivalry in the business sector. They can influence the traditional media; create alternative information and communication channels, change government politics and civic life, and facilitate mass collaboration and community-driven development programs.
User-created content and the increasing wealth of networks elevate many legal, institutional, and governance challenges (Benkler 2006). In the middle of the key pressing issues are copyright violation, privacy concerns, content quality, and cyber-attacks resulting in user data vulnerability. They also led increased importance to issues of media literacy, e-literacy, strengthening capacities for local content production, and widening access to broadband infrastructure and digital tools-issues of particular importance to developing nations.
But they also raise societal matters and options that are fundamental to lasting social, political, and economic development. However, for more than 150 years, communication technologies have been inclined to focus and commercialize the production and exchange of information. The recent ICT developments introduce the prospect or potential of a radical turnaround of this long trend-a turnaround toward mass involvement and essential sharing of information and intelligence. Depending on societal choices, we may also observe the surfacing of a considerable component of nonmarket production and exchange of information and based tools, services, goods, and capabilities. This may lead to a substantial redistribution of power and wealth from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, media, and culture.
World Summits on Information Society have revisited many of the issues of inequalities but in very diverse technological, economic, and political contexts.
In the present day, equally contested are the need to increase the opportunities for open access to media content and the Internet, to limit intellectual property rights protection on digital information resources, and to finance literacy and other capabilities obligatory for people to partake in information societies (Hanna 2009, 46). The results are likely to be fashioned as much by geopolitics and globalization as by technological advances. They are also likely to be significantly influenced by mobilizing local NGOs, building social capacity to appropriate the new media tools, promoting user and community-created content, and pursuing national media and telecommunications reforms within an inclusive development strategy.
Furthermore, word processing was one of the first products of digitization to enter the newsroom, and spreadsheets and databases for storing and analyzing data followed. Later, the Internet revolutionized news sources and information search strategies (Herbert 2000, 3).
New Media Gender, Race and Identity
Media and communications are a fundamental component of current living, although gender and sexuality linger at the central part of how we sense our distinct personalities.
Even the idea of media audience has become more complex in recent years, since the launch of MySpace (in 2003), YouTube (in 2005), and numerous other social networking sites where people can be creative media producers, sharing their work with thousands and sometimes millions, or just communicating with friends.
This was capable of happening or existing due to the new media (World Wide Web). The World Wide Web has turned out to be an acceptable place for the public to share news and creative products (Gauntlett, 2000; Gauntlett and Horsley, 2004). The promise of the Web, to connect people and enable them to create, share and collaborate, was there from the start, but has only really taken off since around 2003, with the growth of ‘Web 2.0’ tools which make this especially easy for people. Today, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook are the most popular websites globally. Apart from search services, these are the most popular websites in the world (Gauntlett 2008, 1).
Globalization and its Implication on culture
Media and culture at present serve as an important constituent to the defense and duplication of modern societies. Culture promotes attitudes and behavior that persuade persons to act under-recognized ways of thinking and organization, consequently incorporating individuals into a particular socio-economic structure. Constitute of media culture such as television, film, music, newspapers, and publicity presents role and gender models, fashion hints, lifestyles images, and icons of personality.
Media and consumer culture, cyberculture, sports, and other accepted activities connect people in practices that incorporate them into an established society, at the same time as offering pleasures, meanings, and identities.
It is imperative to understand the human cultural environment if we want control over our lives as media and culture are playing such important roles in modern-day life. There are many ideas or actions intended to deal with the study of media and culture in independent disciplines that is why globalization is considered as an aspect of media and its significance on culture. Therefore, globalization relates to the process of the step-up of economic, political, social, and cultural relations across global boundaries. It is primarily aimed at the preternatural homogenization of political and socio-economic theory across the earth. It is equally aimed at “making global being current worldwide at the world stage or global arena”. It handles the “increasing breakdown of trade barriers and the rising incorporation of the world market.
In other words, it can be seen as a development that is systematically reforming interactive stages among countries by making barriers in the areas of culture, commerce, communication, and several other fields of endeavor ineffective.
The term globalization in the present day is the regular theory used to express the new global economy and culture. The most important feature of globalization is the increase of difference and new actors are part of the extensive mental viewpoint and the question of representation becomes extremely politicized and contested. The idea that all cultural depictions are universal is one of the most important themes of media and cultural theory of the precedent several decades.
The concept of globalization expresses or indirectly states the basic rupture in culture and history. There are significant changes in the economy, society, culture, the arts, and our everyday life which require new theories, ways of comprehending the world, and forms of disclosure and practice.
Globalization is a contested term, with some distinguishing it with new forms of a policy extending a nation’s authority by territorial gain, and seeing it as mainly negative, while others associate it with modernization and the increase of inventive products, cultural firms, and identities. According to Douglas Kellner and Richard Kahn, they classify the uses of the internet in creating different public spheres that foster political activism and progressive, liberating sodalities formed through the use of blogs and other virtual networking tools.
Globalization is best seen as a very complex and vague phenomenon that contains both stimulating and progressive forms of the internet, novel terrains of cyberculture, emergent economic and political actors and groups in the world economy. This combined with the growing strength of international institutions, intensified competition on a comprehensive level, sharp exploitation, corporate downsizing, and greater levels of unemployment, economic inequality, insecurity, terrorism, and war.
Globalization is connected with the scientific-technological-economic revolution which entails the introduction of emergent forms of labor, politics, culture, and everyday life. Globalization is always proliferating new forms of media and culture, hence is one of the governing forces of our present age.
Horizontal integration of media organizations harms the diversity of content in certain sectors of the media system. Media globalization also has had an important force on the production and reproduction culture. Two main discourses are present concerning the impact of media globalization on culture, these are homogenization and hybridization. Cultural studies theorists assert that the Homogenization discourse considers media globalization in two constricted terms. Another argument espoused by cultural studies discourses the surrounding of hybridization of culture through media globalization concerns the idea of active viewers. They disputed that all viewers to which culture is exported will not deduce media content in the same way nor will they accept it.
The Role of film as of today’s media mirror of society’s marginalization
Films are the essential influence and parental instructions less so. The Films provide the form and the ideal which is necessary for drug users to be on familiar terms with the freedom that is part of substitute socialization and separation. As they become internalized in the world self-reflection/ media packages, the films have led to a visual form of separation- the separation thereby becoming real. The films are a similar reference world, which can be used to form an identity in a dialectical process between practical and untrue reality, where the practical experience intensify the understanding of the film, and where the film is an interpretative structure that defines the practice as real (Lalander 2003, 128).
The films have motivated the creation of a subculture and made events and objects interesting and legalized them. Film and reality engage a dialectical association where reality is changed to conform to films, and films are made to equate reality.
As media institutions became more powerful economically and politically, with increased competition for advertising income and hence for the attention of the public, the question of how to magnetize and shape public attitudes became more pressing for media institutions themselves. Television ratings (audience measurement) are a major example of how systematic viewer’s research, based on large-scale quantitative surveys, is extremely central to the operation and economic survival of broadcasting. Within educational establishments, and also within many media and cultural institutions, other kinds of questions about how efficient particular creative techniques could be in helping the world inhabitants learn and understand also stimulated research (Mosdell & Davies 2006, 15). An example is the determining and evaluative research for the preschool program Sesame Street (Fisch, 2004), which continues to this day, and guides production decisions.
Reference List
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