Television During the Past Few

Television

During the past few decades, the world has become both globalized and glocalized. Today, countries around the world are part of the global economy, as outsourcing is now standard business practice and developing nations participate in export-import. The Internet allows access to information at a phenomenal rate, and cable television brings news and culture from around the globe.

According to Jnanabrata Bhattacharyya, "a community or neighborhood can exist with close linkage to the larger society and still retain its identity and viability" (Bhattacharyya pp). J.A. Christenson and J.W. Robinson define a community as "a collectivity of people, who can be identified geographically, who have something in common which unites them in action...such a definition includes micro communities (special interest groups, neighborhoods, subdivisions, villages, towns, etc.) as well as macro communities (cities, megalopolises, areas, regions, states, nations, international alliances, and global humanity)" (Bhattacharyya pp). The erosion of solidarity has been an integral feature of the process of industrialization with its attendant ideology of the free markets, and the dominant fact about industrial capitalism is the commodification of life and its consequences (Bhattacharyya pp). Thus, many feel that through industrialization and in particular globalization, communities have lost their relevance as economic and political powers were centralized and national social and ethical norms have come to dominate community norms (Bhattacharyya pp).

Benedict Anderson describes the invention of imagined communities as a "response to the new style of global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism" (Mahendran pp). According to Anderson, a key concept was the advancement of technologies such as radio, television, and telecommunications, all of which surpass the abilities of print media to construct imagined communities (Mahendran pp).

The globalization of economic activity brings cultural transformations by a process referred to as "cultural globalization" (Ramachandra pp). The pop phrase "McDonaldization," is used by many to describe how the entire planet is "being wired into music, movies, news, television, and other cultural products," most of which originate in the U.S., while local cultures are uprooted and replaced with universal cultural symbols (Ramachandra pp). There is an ever-greater uniformity of personal tastes and lifestyles, as people in Manila, the villages of Tuscany, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, watch television reruns of Baywatch and the Cosby Show (Ramachandra pp). From Mickey Mouse to Madonna, cultural icons have become part of a global stock of images, and this combination of global and local has come to be referred to as glocalization, when global becomes local (Ramachandra pp).

Trends toward greater democratization, greater access to the media, and globalization have all increased opportunities for young people to become active and involved members of their communities (Globalization pp). Television, radio, and newspapers are becoming more accessible to young people, however their availability varies greatly by region (Globalization pp). For example, among 15-19-year-olds, 22% in southern and eastern Africa watch television at least once a week, compared with 91% in former Soviet Asia (Globalization pp). The media, along with schools, play increasingly important roles in citizenship formation (Globalization pp).

Dr. Lee Komito, of the University College Dublin, states that new communications technologies, such as cable and satellite television, as well as Internet-based communication, remove the geographical limitation on both mass media and one-to-one interaction (Komito pp). Previously, interaction and experience was limited by proximity, community was the interactions and common experience among individuals in a particular location (Komito pp). Moreover, culture was founded on common experience, resulting, as individuals grew older, to a common culture (Komito pp). However, today, geographical limitations are less relevant, as technology facilitates non-geographically bounded interactions (Komito pp). According to Komito, "new technologies of communication and consumption enable more choice about what people experience, and how that becomes the basis for a created and chosen identity, rather than inherited identity fashioned out of involuntary experience" (Komito pp).

New technologies allow people to find others to share common experience and social interaction, rather than actually moving to a new place, or trying to recreate common experience among proximate neighbors (Komito pp). Moreover, electronic communities provide a sense of common experience and involvement that seems lacking in much of modern society (Komito pp). Most of society today has no problem with the idea of "imagined community," where national solidarity is a projection, on the part of individuals, rather than a practice founded on face-to-face interaction and communication (Komito pp).

Komito points out that it is rare, within any group, that social relations are without conflict, hierarchy and inequality, and no matter how strong the commitment to shared values based on family, kinship or ethnicity, there is negotiation based on conflicting individual interests and concerns (Komito pp). Although collective solidarity is often a goal, it is rarely achieved, because communities are composed not only of people who like each other, but also hate each other, and thus, both co-operate and compete with one another (Komito pp). Komito warns that "one must avoid both technological utopianism that characterizes proponents of electronic moral communities, as well as the technological determinism that is used to deny the possibility of such communities" (Komito pp).

Benedict Anderson writes:

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined (Anderson pp).