Page 356 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

334 Perry Hinton

success of the telenovelas outside their countries of origin can be seen as the host
nation taking them into their own culture. They become part of the communi-
cation within the culture, the subject of everyday discussion and a vehicle for en-
gaging in issues such as gender and relationships in a changing society.

4. Concluding comments

In conclusion, we should not view globalization as a mechanism that necess-
arily leads to a homogeneity of media interpretation, but rather as “a process of
complex connectivity” (Tomlinson 2004: 26). It is a dynamic process by which
media products interact with their home culture to structure the discourse
around such societal concerns as youth violence or gender roles. When media
messages, such as television programmes are exported to other cultures, we
should not expect this audience to interpret the programmes in the same way but
to actively make sense of them in terms of their own cultural expectations.
Traditionally, the academic analysis of the media has focused on individuals
and the effect that the media message can have upon them, leading to a tendency
to ignore cultural differences or to see them as a ‘backdrop’ to experience. How-
ever, the development of a more cultural focus in analysis, such as in cultural
psychology within the field of psychology (e.g., Stigler, Shweder and Herdt
1990), has placed culture at the heart of understanding audience interpretation.
Rather than examining cultural difference, as cross-cultural psychology does,
cultural psychology examines the interrelationship between the mind and cul-
ture (Shweder 1991) and the set of cultural practices that develop within a cul-
ture. Thus, the focus of study is the involvement of culture in interpretation and
understanding. We can examine this through an examination of cultural prod-
ucts such as beliefs, traditions and the interpretation of the media.
One way of viewing this process is through Moscovici’s theory of social
representations (Moscovici 1981, 1998). He argues that people within a culture
share common representations, such as the English view of the French. This
idea of representation bears similarity with the idea of schema in cognitive psy-
chology (Augostinos and Innes 1990); however, Moscovici (1998) emphasizes
that representations are not static features in the individual mind but are dy-
namic and that representations are being constantly developed through com-
munication within a culture. So newspapers, television and everyday conver-
sations within a culture provide the forum for the negotiation of the cultural
representations. Moscovici (1998) uses the analogy with money to explain this.
I have ‘my’ money in ‘my’ pocket but I can give it to you. I will happily ex-
change two £5 notes for one £10 note. So the specific notes are not the important
feature. Just like the exchange of money, ideas flow within a culture, developing
these cultural models. Thus, both home-produced and foreign media products