Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, 8th edition

Culture: globalization of

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measures to protect intellectual property from

piracy. Th e Berne Convention laid initial guide-

lines on protection that eventually materialized

in the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects

of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the

World Trade Organization. This included the

extension of protection to databases, computer

programs being classifi ed as literary works and

therefore subject to copyright.

Texts are not only protected, their universal

access – working within a global free market – is

also protected; thus, for example, the attempts

by one country to protect its own cultural prod-

ucts from cultural ‘invasion’ becomes an area of

contention. Th e result, fears Bettig, threatens to

be an economic domination of the information-

rich nations over the information-poor.

Economic dominance brings with it ideologi-

cal infl uence. Copyright becomes a device for the

privatization of knowledge where ‘the views and

accounts of the world held by the capitalist class

and aligned class factions and groups are broadly

disseminated and persistently publicized’. In

practice, however, global agreements have a

mother of all battles in the war against piracy.

See downloading; information commons.

Culture: globalization of Considered by many

commentators as a paramount trend in the late

twentieth century, in which cultures and cultural

practices of chiefl y Western nations – the US in

particular – spread through the world, dominat-

ing native, home-grown cultures. The media

are seen to be the channels through which the

globalizing torrent has poured; and those chan-

nels have been largely under the direction and

control of transnational corporations. Under

the umbrella of globalization we encounter a

couple of key, linked and interactive phenomena:

consumerization and media imperialism.

With cultural dominance, fear some commen-

tators, comes ideological dominance, and that

ideology centres around the processes of

production and consumption and the targeting

of audiences in their role of consumers. Todd

Gitlin in his chapter ‘Prime time ideology: the

hegemonic process in television entertainment’

in Television: Th e Critical View (Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1994), edited by Horace Newcomb,

was of the opinion that ‘the dominant ideology

has shifted toward sanctifying consumer satis-

faction as the premium defi nition of “the pursuit

of happiness”’.

Corporate domination of the economy extends

to corporate dominance worldwide of culture,

at least those cultures through which profi ts may

be obtained. It is not happiness alone that global

nature of communications. In the world of blogs
(see blogosphere), the rise and rise of the
mobile phone and its multitude of applications
(see mobilization), in a cyberspace populated
by facebook and youtube, the traditional
dominance of the mass media – their power to
defi ne, legimitimize and lead culture – is in rapid
transition.
▶Nick Stevenson, Understanding Media Cultures
(Sage, 1995); Colleen Roach, ed., Communication
and Culture in War and Peace (Sage, 1995); Andrew
Tudor, Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in
Cultural Studies (Sage, 1999); David Hesmondhalgh,
The Cultural Industries: An Introduction (Sage,
2002); John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of
Popular Culture: Th eories and Methods (Edinburgh
University Press, 2003); James Curran and David
Morley, Media and Cultural Theory (Routledge,
2005); Jeff Lewis, Cultural Studies ( Sage, 2nd edition,
2008); James Curran, ed., Media and Society (5th
edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); Graeme
Turner, Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic
Turn (Routledge, 2010).
Culture: consumer culture Arguably
consumer culture is the prevailing culture of
late modernity in Western societies. Don Slater
in Consumer Culture & Modernity (Polity Press,
1997) argues that ‘it is more generally bound up
with central values, practices and institutions
which defi ne Western modernity, such as choice,
individualism and market relations’.
For Slater its ‘defining feature’ is that it
‘denotes a social arrangement in which the rela-
tion between lived culture and social resources,
between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic
and material resources on which they depend,
is mediated through markets’. Th e media and
cultural industries obviously play a pivotal role
in the operation of consumer culture, and the
nature of this relationship is the focus of much
research. See consumerization.
Culture: copyrighting culture In the global
context of communication, and in view of the
open-access properties of the internet, a ques-
tion of growing importance is – to whom does a
text or work belong? (See text: integrity of
the text.) R.V. Bettig, in Copyrighting Culture:
Th e Political Economy of Intellectual Property
(Westview Press, 1996), addresses this concern,
arguing that with information/knowledge
becoming one of the chief commercial industries
in the current age, the control of culture has
fallen to a number of transnational corporations
(TNCs) through their ownership of copyright.
TNCs fear copyright piracy on a world
scale and their ambition is to extend, globally,