The History of Mass Media in the United States and How it was Politically Determined (Essay Sample)

Mass Media in Europe
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InstitutionMass Media in Europe
Thinking about media industry in a global scale is not easy. This is because most research are focused on the media industries in the U.S. Globalization of thought is also not easy due to the research tend to circle back to the national policy. Cinemas around the world are studies through the national cinemas. Similarly, the television is studied as a discrete national system with debate revolving around the issues of national policy. Media industries were not discussed in light of globalization until the 1990s (Holt & Perren, 2009).
In the 1970s and the 1980s, the international flow of images was controlled by the United States and its European allies. This trend was referred to as media imperialism. They imposed media texts and industrial practices on nations that were unwilling and on audiences that were susceptible. This was done all around the world. In this view, the indigenous production capacity is diminished by the western media hegemony. The expressive potential of national culture is also undermined through imposing of values that are foreign and leading to a worldwide cultural homogenization. In that period, the powerful states imposed their wills on the weaker ones (Holt & Perren, 2009).
Many critics and scholars challenged the concept of media imperialism. Some argued that the foreign texts and values were deleterious to a country’s own values and cultures. However, some objected to this and asserted that many of the Hollywood narratives that were in circulation at those times actually had positive impacts. The debate went on for years until some scholars came up with the concept of media globalization. In this context, nations had the chance to exploit their capacity to express their own creativity and values. This is when the concept of media cities came up. In this case every country had the potential to develop media cities, which acted as the nation’s hubs of media information. According to Michael Curtin (2008), globalization of media was a great move that paved way to the development of many media capitals.
According to Michael Curtin (2008), there are three important principles of a media capital that are responsible for the development of media industries. The three elements include an industrial infrastructure that is driven by the logic of accumulation, a human capital that is subject to the trajectories of creative migration, and the successful controlling of the forces of socio-cultural variation (Curtin, 2008).
Any capital has to develop creative strategies for clustering in order to build its capacity in all areas including the lower-end animation. For example, Hong Kong and the entrepreneurial Shanghai have the capacity to readily display the forces of socio-cultural variation than the political capital. As a result Beijing’s development as a ...