Page 186 - Culture Society and the Media

176 CULTURAL DEPENDENCY AND THE MASS MEDIA
cultural or media influence are the most ‘significant’: media technology, comics,
and advertising, for example, may be just as significant as, respectively, media
content, ‘élite’ news, and drama. Totalization’ also alerts researchers to the
assumptions about the channels of control which actually carry most influence:
in the assessment of communication impact, for instance, an owner cannot be
assumed to have more overall influence than an advertiser or supplier.
But ‘totalization’ also brings certain dangers. It not only de-neutralizes the
phenomena under investigation, but effectively de-neutralizes itself at the same
time. Its emergent priorities are curiously in line with the political strategies and
bargaining poses of the nationalist-Marxist alliance of southern nations in their
international negotiations with nations of the north. In certain formulations it is
ahistorically and naively determinist: thus Nordenstreng and Schiller speak of the
‘decisive determination’ of national development by the global economy. This
formulation is as rigid as the structural functionalism which neo-Marxism helped
to surmount, indeed more so, in its incapacity to account for change. The
totalistic approach adopts too uncritically a relatively simplistic version of
dependency theory, in a manner which appears unduly concerned to eliminate as
insignificant the machinery of the national state. For example, it is by no means
generally accepted that capitalist expansion everywhere or even typically
destroyed viable patterns of desirable or indigenous forms of development; nor is
it beyond dispute that dominant nations ‘de-capitalize’ peripheral nations or ‘de-
nationalize’ their successful local business in the manner in which dependency
theory asserts (Smith, 1979). (‘Decapitalize’ is to direct or deflect indigenous
capital or sources of capital away from locally-controlled enterprise and
investment. ‘Denationalize’ is to remove the locus of real control of indigenous
enterprise from local to non-local interests.) It is still too early to determine what
significance should be attributed to the fact that India, for example, has doubled
its food production in twenty years; is, in 1980, the eighth largest industrial
country in the world, with the third largest pool of technically trained manpower;
and has exerted considerable government control over industrial development.
Simplistic referencing to dependency theory is not enough. What is required is a
two-way process in which grounded theoretical research informs and modifies
dependency theory as much as it draws sustenance from it.

FORMS OF INTER-CULTURAL MEDIA PENETRATION
The remainder of this paper is concerned primarily with the inter-cultural
dimensions of traditional mass media processes and with particular reference to
the poorer economies of the world. The discussion will be contextualized, where
appropriate, in relation to the range of factors discussed in preceding paragraphs.
Perhaps the most overt form of intercultural media penetration is the ownership
of national media by multinational interests. Linked to, but by no means
coincidental with this, is the question of the locus of formal managerial control.
But regardless of ownership or formal control, inter-cultural penetration may also