Page 124 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Cultural Appropr at on | 10

Channel—are all part of major media conglomerates, as are the broadcast net-
works. These are far from diverse and antagonistic sources of news and informa-
tion, so the debate on media conglomeration rages on.

see also Branding the Globe; Communication and Knowledge Labor; Com-
munication Rights in a Global Context; Hypercommercialism; Media and the
Crisis of Values; Media Reform; Minority Media Ownership; Net Neutrality; Pi-
racy and Intellectual Property; Pirate Radio; Regulating the Airwaves; Runaway
Productions and the Globalization of Hollywood.
Further reading: Bagdikian, Ben. The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004;
Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the
Public Interest, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006; Herman, Ed-
ward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988; Kellner, Douglas. Television and the Crisis in
Democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990; Kunz, William M. Culture Conglomer-
ates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television Industries. Boulder, CO: Row-
man and Littlefield Publishers, 2006; McChesney, Robert. The Problem of the Media:
U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2004; Turner, Ted. “Break Up This Band.” Washington Monthly (July/August 2004):
33–44; Wasko, Janet. Hollywood in the Information Age: Behind the Silver Screens. Aus-
tin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995.
William M. Kunz

Cultural aPProPriation

When the mass media and information technology became increasingly cen-
tral parts of everyday life during the last century, they produced an extraordi-
nary increase in the volume of cultural material available to us. The symbolic
forms that media and the Internet generate—TV programs, blogs, movies, radio
personalities, podcasts, and so on—have become some of the most recognizable
and influential elements of culture, and human involvement with the full range
of cultural forms that surround us has also become more diversified, flexible,
and intense. Some worry that citizens consume such forms passively, and that
culture as such is manufactured by the industries that create the media. But peo-
ple have greater opportunities than ever before to actively shape the meanings of
cultural institutions and experience. They do so as individuals and members of
groups by creatively engaging their cultural environments in ways that promote
their own interests.
Our cultural worlds have become increasingly complex. In particular, the
symbolic aspects of culture have become much more common and widespread.
In the face of what might seem to be considerable prospects for creative engage-
ment with the media and popular culture, however, some critics contend that we
are all being fed a homogenous, prefabricated culture. To such critics, corpora-
tions create, control, and regulate culture and thus our very means of expression.
But culture cannot be so easily contained. The remarkable growth of media,
information technology (IT), and the culture industries demonstrates one