Cultural Imperialism
by In the 1980’s and early 1990’s there were many calls to reject US television shows due to the nature that they were monopolising television around the world. Many countries believed that the influx of American culture through television was a form of cultural imperialism and that their culture was being deteriorated by TV.
“Applying the active-audience frame of analysis, the study included four groups of Israeli viewers: Israeli Arabs, Moroccan Jewish immigrants, kibbutz members, and new Russian immigrants. Liebes found that the message imparted by “Dallas” depended on the viewer’s values and varied according to the experiences of the particular group to which the viewer belonged. The viewer, therefore, actively produces meaning while consuming the media product or program. Another academic, Ien Ang, has also supported this finding through studying the impact of “Dallas” to confront what she termed “a stubborn fixation on the threat of American cultural imperialism”(White, L. 2001)
This discusses an experiment undertaken to disprove the cultural imperialism theory, using the American show ‘Dallas’ as a medium for how non English speakers responded. However, this experiment cannot be proven, as it is impossible to prove that an idea, value, perspective or reaction is related to a certain thing. There could be other images in ones mind, from forgotten peripheral encounters. (White, L. 2001)
However English, in various forms, is spoken by an estimated 400 million people as a mother tongue and an additional 2 billion as a second and/or foreign language (Graddol, 2006). This astonishing number can be used as an example of how the English language is of a cultural imperialistic nature. Taking into consideration the arguments that what people consider cultural imperialism could actually be globalisation, or media imperialism. Also the fact that some say that over time the term cultural imperialism has had its meaning changed, and it is really simplifying the two terms of culture and imperialism.
“the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how is dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the value and structures of the dominating center of the system.” (Golding, P. Harris, P. 1997 {Schiller, 1976})
When considering this early definition of cultural imperialism, the idea that English as the global language of communication is a form of cultural imperialism, could be accepted. The way cultural imperialism is described here, fits with how the English language has been forced around the world through avenues such as colonialism, imperialism, the media and through big businesses. When taking into consideration the critics of the theory and the experiments undertaken to disprove the theory it is still undisputed that the global language of communication is English. In some way this dominance is a form of cultural imperialism.
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