Asian and Western Media Cultural Connections in Globalization

Introduction: Media's Role in Culture and Globalization

Akif, Osman, and Subhani state that media portrays the current age, recognizing and communicating the negative and positive occurrences transpiring around us. Besides functioning as a means for exposing and addressing a number of problems from diverse angles, media also produces positive representations and impressions, and considers communities' ingrained history. Its contribution to production and economic sectors is considerable. Diversity and transparency at the primary level promotes and cultivates overall media, offering the economic and political domains sound authority and control. This represents both a bottom-up and top-down strategy, as media channels' scope covers both the destitute and the wealthy, the strong and the weak. Media protects specific populations' interests, fosters receptiveness, and ensures administrative and governmental accountability when it comes to saving and protecting the environment.

The worldwide cost of advertising reflects media's capability of influencing and modifying behavior. Considerable funds are expended towards persuading people, companies, and groups across the globe and producing change within them. The media enjoys variable efficacy when it comes to altering views and inspiring change (Sinclair).

In Rohn's opinion, just as in all other cases, place and time have perpetual significance in media as well. Media content variations have arisen on account of cultural obstacles. From the perspective of organizations, culturally-dependent audience requirements pose obstacles to entry into overseas markets. The growing international movement of individuals and goods implies entry into "imagined domains" in which social networks are forged without any national interest, boundary, or flag. Global audiences are often not cognizant of symbols and signs from other cultures. A further disparity between nations is linguistic obstacles. While media channels translate content into local languages, success is frequently impacted by these linguistic barriers.

Literature Review

Facts about our world are communicated to developing nations from industrialized ones. Of late, media channels in Asia have attempted to challenge and surpass their rivals in the West, who dominate the international media market. While industrialized and Asian nations constitute around 14% of the global population, they control approximately 66% of overall information flow. The Asian media has also attempted to achieve greater fairness, objectivity, and thoroughness of coverage compared to its Western counterpart. Media companies in Asia, especially those based in developing countries, now engage actively in global events and cooperate more closely with one another in the reporting of regional news. One will no longer witness a monopoly in the reporting of major regional events and news, as media channels now share, edit, and exchange reports and facts to offer improved content to audiences. The Asian media sector is also studying new technologies for transmitting information via mobile phones and the World Wide Web. Beginning in the 1960s, it has been growing and improving, contesting the monopoly of industrialized countries and acquiring global influence (Chan & Suen).

Information flow and media content differences between unindustrialized and industrialized countries have not changed much over several decades, owing to Western media channels' misconceptions and prejudiced views of Asian and developing societies. Asians have learned the skill of self-investment and relocating their resources to acquire control and support improved communication. An example of current developments is the groups and communication meetings in which nations such as Japan, China, Sri Lanka, and Korea have formally agreed to make themselves heard on the international stage (People's Daily Online).

Rudolph indicates that Asian media challenges have an association with cultural politics. Competition in the area of cultural production, and disagreements regarding its meaning, constitute the foremost challenge; the contemporary world pursues individual value and identity that can be expressed through media. It promotes the circulation of status, money, and authority. Another challenge is that the main interest of media involves the simultaneous generation of public culture and encouragement of socio-economic advancement. The media's capability of both concealing and exposing social realities is both an opportunity and a challenge. Media can symbolically and non-symbolically deal with and convey societal realism, romanticism, idealism, symbolism, and classism. It expands culture via globalization and the global interchange of ideas and information. However, the reporting of conflicting opinions with regard to diverse sovereignties may at times exacerbate hostilities between countries.

Iwabuchi explains that during the past twenty years, the world has seen extraordinary advancements in media culture production and its international dissemination. Among the major areas where such cultural expression alternatives have thrived is East Asia, which has witnessed growing cultural blending and organizational collaborations, alongside a trend of intraregional consumption. These cultural dynamics illustrate novel forms of cultural relationships and innovation and advance them across national boundaries. Cultural and media globalization has achieved a whole new level of diffusion and growth. Listening to pop songs produced by Chinese musicians, watching Korean soap operas and internationally co-produced Asian movies, and reading Japanese comics have become commonplace practices in urban East Asia. Although media culture links between Asian countries have been in place for much longer, very dramatic growth and transformation have been seen beginning in the early 1990s. This post-Cold War era has been characterized by major globalization process development. International movement of goods, individuals, and capital has been further increased by the spread of neoliberal marketization and the strengthening of global migrant, tourist, and labor flows. Equally significant is the advancement of cultural and media globalization. Digital communication technology growth has personalized and decentered media usage, while also lending itself to global media market integration and permeation by Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, and other dominant international media culture companies (Iwabuchi).

Globalization of culture does not simply imply the dissemination of Western—largely US-origin—products worldwide via media companies. The growth of extra-American media culture production capability has also become prominent, and a highly dynamic example of this is East Asia. Advanced media culture production capability in the form of East Asian movies, pop music, and television has triggered regional co-production, and intraregional media culture dissemination and use. The region has been recognizing media cultures belonging to other East Asian areas at a remarkable rate, resulting in the development of novel relationships between media culture businesses and individuals (Iwabuchi).

Asian Media's Rise and Cultural Exchange

Media represents the strongest and most important means of expression within the current era of globalization. The Asian continent has understood media's capacity to maneuver and influence current agendas. While it enjoys a certain degree of Western influence, the continent's media environment differs from that of other regions across the globe. This disparity becomes apparent when examining its operation and performance. America has contributed significantly to the creation, sharing, and understanding of cultural norms, which forms the foundation of the major part of global media flow. Some scholars explain the overlap between Asian and American consumer culture as assisted by American media. From fashion and furnishings to fast food, consumer culture trends—linguistic, lifestyle, and aesthetic—are directed from America via mediascapes to the rest of the world.

Media enables individuals to communicate through diverse sources. Asian nations resemble global standards in media practice as well as law. Governmental media control, linked to a smaller degree of press freedom, is greater in nations with authoritarian political institutions. By contrast, media in Asia that operates democratically is guided by government and public interest for the purposes of societal advancement (Osman, Subhani & Hasan).

Since long, media cultures of East Asia have amalgamated local components while absorbing US cultural influences. Cultural fusion has also been produced within the media culture of the region itself. Frequent remakes of popular movies and television dramas from other East Asian areas have been seen, particularly among Hong Kong, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean media texts. Japanese comics have frequently been adapted for movies and television dramas in East Asian countries beyond Japan. The resultant texts ingeniously unify various local components, far from simply imitating the original works. Among the leading examples is Liuxing Huayuan (translated as Meteor Garden), a Taiwanese television drama based on Hana yori dango—a Japanese comic about high school students—that displays Japanese media culture's creative localization in Taiwan together with the resulting transnational journey. At the time, the Japanese had not yet produced a drama based on the comic. However, Taiwanese producers proficiently adapted it in drama form in 2001. The show garnered phenomenal popularity across East Asia, including Japan. A Japanese television station created its own adaptation from 2005 to 2007, which also gained popularity outside Japan. Subsequently, the Koreans created their own adaptation of the series (Ching).

Conclusion

Western and Asian media share a number of media practices that enable certain Asian-Western generalizations. Indeed, demands for novel Asian media models that "exoticize" the Asian experience propose an unwarrantable claim of Asia as unique and detached from transnational capitalism's growth. Western culture exerts powerful influences over Asian nations. Japanese anime, Korean pop, and Hong Kong movies blend Western and Asian values in a number of ways. On the whole, due to Western and capitalist influences, Hong Kong and other Asian media possess characteristics that noticeably resemble those of the West, though the dynamics of these characteristics differ from place to place, and indigenous structural and cultural practices remain evident as well (Cheung).