the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—spurred by
advanced communication technology. Soft power means these countries can
influence the global public opinion and cultural values by using the media, not by
military might (Shorenstein Center 2015 ). Sets of cultural products shared among
many localities are called popular culture. It includes
...the human activities, languages, and artefacts that grow and nourish people in com-
munities and that generate observable, describable interest about its events and artefacts,
within a community and between communities. (Holmberg 1998 : 15).
New media technologies in this contemporary globalization period, such as
Websites, Webpages, online chats, online videos, online TV, games online, and
social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Line,
manifest the age of mediated society. The mass media and new media have helped
create a virtual community and virtual experiences, at the same time they have been
a woven thread of the globalization process, therefore, created a global con-
sciousness, by which people compare their own living conditions with that of others
(McQuail 2005 :51–52). Digital social communication, by using new information
and communication technologies, has already blurred the boundary between the
traditional“interpersonal communication”and“mass communication.”We are now
part of a digital network. We are mass media when we receive a message and send
out to many people in a network. We also function as interpersonal communicators
both offline and online, in actual or real time and perceived time. Through the mass
and new media, people could see the otherness in the virtual reality and appropriate
it to their local situation, according to Thompson ( 1995 : 174). Moreover, a
long-term process of the media influence on social change and institutional inter-
actions has become noticeable. New media use in many countries has raised con-
cerns about threats to national values, privacy, security, laws, and influences from
major soft power producers in the world. The process whereby culture and society
are increasingly dependent on the media and their logic, in such a way that the
degree of the social interactions within a given culture and society modulated by
media capital, is called mediatization (Hjarvard 2013 :17). Mediatization is seen as a
longer term process than mediation as the media’sinfluence on the change of the
social and institutional interactions is to be expected, whereas the mediation
describes only the concrete act of communication by using a type of media in a
given social context (Hjarvard 2013 :18–19).
5.2.3 Mediatization and Culture
Mediatization can have impacts on culture by increasing general information about
the citizens of the world and cultures; accelerating contact with people who possess
“the otherness”; enhancing contact with people within the same culture for support;
redefining one’s own identity and think of identity management; and widening the
gap of access to communication technology, or the so-called digital divide (Martin
5.2 Literature Review and Theoretical Perspectives 75