Page 147 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 138
‘development’ and ‘modernization’ of the 1950s and 1960s where mass communication
processes were thought to play a vital role. Here, the making of the ‘global village’ can
be rewritten as the transformation, or domestication, of non-Western others in the name
of capitalist modernity, the civilization which was presumed to be the universal destiny of
humankind: global spatial integration is equated with global social and cultural
integration.
It should be clear that in theoretical terms transmission models of communication
inherently privilege the position of the Sender as legitimate source and originator of
meaning and action, the centre from which both spatial and social/cultural integration is
effectuated. Communication is deemed successful if and when the intentions of the
Sender, packaged in the Message, arrive unscathed at the Receiver, sorting the intended
effects. But the hegemony of such linear and transparent conceptions of communication
has been severely eroded in the last few decades. This erosion was simultaneously an
epistemological and a political one. A telling case is Everett Rogers’ declaration, in 1976,
of the ‘passing’ of the ‘dominant paradigm’ of the diffusion model of development. As
author of The Diffusion of Innovations (1962), Rogers had to submit almost fifteen years
later that the model’s weakness lie precisely in its emphasis on linearity of effect, in its
reliance on hierarchy of status and expertise, and on rational (and presumably
benevolent) manipulation from above (see Rogers 1976).
Not coincidentally, the same period saw the ascendancy of alternative, critical
accounts of development, often framed within theories of cultural imperialism and
dependency. The rise of such accounts can be understood in the light of the growing force
of anti-systemic, new social movements in the West which have challenged the
unquestioned hegemony of capitalist modernity’s ‘central value system’, as well as the
increasing desire for self-determination in postcolonial, developing nations. As John
Tomlinson has argued, ‘the various critiques of cultural imperialism could be thought of
as (in some cases inchoate) protests against the spread of (capitalist) modernity’
(1991:173). However, Tomlinson continues, ‘these protests are often formulated in an
inappropriate language of domination, a language of cultural imposition which draws its
imagery from the age of high imperialism and colonialism’ (ibid.). I would add here that
this inappropriate language is symptomatic of the fact that most theories of cultural
imperialism remain firmly couched within transmission models of communication.
Indeed, the marked emphasis within the notion of cultural imperialism on the dimension
of power operating in the relation between Sender and Receiver importantly exposes the
illusion of neutrality of the transmission paradigm. But because it conceptualizes those
relations in terms of more or less straightforward and deliberate imposition of dominant
culture and ideology, they reproduce the mechanical linearity of the transmission model.
Such a vision is not only theoretically, but also historically inadequate: in a world-system
where capitalism is no longer sustained through coercive submission of colonized
peoples (as in nineteenth-century high imperialism) but through the liberal institutions of
democracy and the sovereign nation-state, equation of power with imposition simply will
not do. The problem, rather, is to explain how capitalist modernity ‘imposes’ itself in a
context of formal ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’. In other words, how are power relations
organized in a global village where everybody is free and yet bounded? It is in order to
grasp the ramifications of this question that we need to develop new theoretical tools.