Page 138 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Global media/local meaning 129
of systemic desegregration in which local cultures lose their autonomous and separate
existence and become thoroughly interdependent and interconnected. Nowadays, as I will
indicate later, local cultures everywhere tend to reproduce themselves precisely, to a large
extent, through the appropriation of global flows of mass-mediated forms and
technologies.
In this sense, the integrative effects of globalization should be conceived in a
conditional rather than a substantive sense. What becomes increasingly ‘globalized’ is not
so much concrete cultural contents (although global distribution does bring, say, the same
movies to many dispersed locals), but, more importantly and more structurally, the
parameters and infrastructure which determine the conditions of existence for local
cultures. It can be understood, for example, as the dissemination of a limited set of
economic, political, ideological and pragmatic conventions and principles which govern
and mould the accepted ways in which media production, circulation and consumption
are organized throughout the modern world. This is one sense in which the claim that ‘the
media are American’ (Tunstall 1977) has a quintessential validity. After all, it is in the
United States that many of these principles and conventions, now often taken for granted
and fully routinized, were first explored and perfected. As the commercial principle of
production of culture for profit becomes ever more dominant, for example, it brings with
it a spread of concomitant practices such as marketing, advertising and audience research,
all heavily institutionalized, specialized practices which were first developed in the
United States in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, the commodification of media
culture is an increasingly global phenomenon which brings with it the adoption of
peculiarly modernist cultural arrangements such as the fashion system with its principle
of planned obsolescence, framed within risk-reducing strategies of innovation through
repetition. In television, for example, this takes the form of a continuous rehashing of
relatively constant formats and genres (e.g. the cop show, the sitcom, the soap opera) and
a standardization of scheduling routines. Again, it is in American commercial television
that such profit-maximizing strategies have been most perfected, from where they have
been increasingly globalized, that is, taken as the commonsense way of doing things.
However, it is in the particular appropriation and adaptation of such standardized rules
and conventions within local contexts and according to local traditions, resources and
preferences that the non-linear, fractured nature of cultural globalization displays itself.
The evolution of the film and television industries in Hong Kong is a point in case. In the
1950s, Cantonese movies dominated the Hong Kong market, drawing on traditional
Cantonese cultural forms such as opera, musicals and contemporary melodrama. Their
popularity declined in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Hollywood films consistently
outgrossed locally produced Chinese films. By the 1980s, however, the most popular film
genres in Hong Kong were once again locally produced, in the Cantonese language, but
evincing definite elements of ‘indigenization’ of the Western action adventure movie
format. The contemporary genre of Cantonese Kung Fu movies, for example,
appropriated and refracted James Bond-style film narratives by using fists and martial
arts as weapons, as well as drawing on traditional Cantonese values such as vengeance
for friends and kin, loyalty to close acquaintances and punishment to traitors (Lee 1991).
Culturally speaking, it is hard to distinguish here between the ‘foreign’ and the
‘indigenous’, the ‘imperialist’ and the ‘authentic’: what has emerged is a highly
distinctive and economically viable hybrid cultural form in which the global and the local