Page 153 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

reflection and evaluation, and symbolically represent real human concerns as
part of the cultural imagination. The pivotal role of media in such processes
will now be explored in greater detail.

International cultural imagery
‘We live in a time of fractures and heterogeneity, of segmentations
inside each nation and of fluid communications with transnational
orders of information, style, and knowledge. In the middle of this
heterogeneity we find codes that unify us, or at least permit us to
understand ourselves . . . these codes are less and less of ethnicity, class,
or the nation into which we were born’.
(García Canclini 1995: 49)

Especially for the global middle class, supercultural construction increasingly
reflects exposure to the abundant symbolic resources and discourses that
occupy international media and information technology. Global knowledge of
universal human rights, aesthetic standards and preferences, basic psychological
needs, and emotions, as we have just briefly discussed, reverberate widely. Their
visibility has been facilitated by advances in communication technology and
use of that technology by persons all over the world. These are not the only
global cultural phenomena. Some media genres and narrative forms – action,
romance, science fiction, sports, and music, for example – appeal widely,
though differentially, according to gender. As the Mexican cultural anthro-
pologist Néstor García Canclini points out, certain ‘spectacular narratives’ such
as the movies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are based on myths that
‘are intelligible to everyone, independent of their culture, educational level,
national history, economic development, or political system’ (García Canclini
1995: 111). We could say the same thing about the global appeal of the Disney
creations, for example, and to a greater or lesser degree of much popular culture
emanating from the United States, Britain, and to a certain extent Japan and
China as well. Japanese karaoke and anime have struck a universal cord, for
instance, as have kung-fu and other Asian martial arts.
The global economic and cultural marketplace motivates transnational
communications activity like never before, generating unprecedented quan-
tities of material and symbolic cultural resources. The Internet mushroomed to
unbelievable popular proportions towards the end of the last century in part
because the cost of processing information by computer decreased so radically
(from US $75 million per operation in 1960 to less than one hundredth
of a cent in 1990; Castells 1996: 45). But at a time when discussions about
globalization and culture understandably tend to revolve around information
technology and the Internet, it is very important to keep in mind that the
phenomenon which manifests even greater significance in the global context
with respect to the circulation of symbolic forms is the unprecedented

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