Page 200 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

VISUAL CULTURE

On the assumption that the process envisioned above can also be brought
about by deliberate design, several researchers have used visual media – mostly
movies and video, rather than single images – in attempts to bring about a
greater sense of fellowship among members of different social groups. It is
possible to give a short summary of the results of such efforts without doing
too much violence to the individual studies. In brief, what happens is this:
when these experiments are performed with children and adolescents, they
almost always ‘work’, in the sense of having the desired outcome; however,
when the subjects of the experiments are adults, the results are much more
variable and ambiguous (Messaris 1997: 118–25). These findings are not sur-
prising, of course. They confirm one’s intuitive sense that adult attitudes are
much more resistant to change than those of younger people. So, while there
does seem to be empirical support for assuming that the international flow
of images could create the cultural preconditions for a ‘global village’, the
likelihood that such changes in consciousness might ever occur on a large scale
should be weighed against the fact that attitude changes arising in childhood
may not always endure beyond that stage in life.
Moreover, any discussion of global visual culture must take into account the
fact that, at present, much of that culture originates in one society, the United
States. Although the film industries of Asia have recently been making some
notable inroads into that position of dominance, global visual culture may still
be described, without too much exaggeration, as being saturated with the
products and influence of Hollywood, Madison Avenue (as a metaphor, not a
geographical fact), and CNN. The standard, and obvious, concern about this
state of affairs is that it leads to an erosion of local values and beliefs and
an adoption of cultural perspectives that may be maladaptive to one’s local
circumstances. A study that could be interpreted from this perspective was
performed some years ago by Dumas (1988). At a time when people living in
China had more limited access to US media than they do today, Dumas studied
recently arrived Chinese graduate students’ responses to the images in US print
advertising. One of the major patterns in her findings was that the Chinese
viewers would express approval of various US cultural practices that differed
sharply from traditional Chinese values: for example, lack of formal displays of
respect by children to parents; lack of restraint in the public display of sexual
attachments; lack of restraint in the expression of other strong emotions, etc.
Leaving aside the possibility that the Chinese students were merely express-
ing polite approval of the culture of their host country, it is easy to see Dumas’s
findings as a demonstration of the steamroller effect of the individualistic cul-
ture of US media, and that is probably how a traditional cultural critic would
see things. In other words, the emphasis in such criticism has tended to be on
the seductions of US media values and their putatively baneful consequences.
What is often overlooked in such criticism is the other side of the coin, that is,
the reasons that a particular person may have for rejecting the values of her/his
ancestral culture. In the case of Dumas’s study, many of her interviewees made

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