continued: "Where the Global Meets the Local: Media Studies and the Myth of Cultural Homogenization" by Larry Strelitz
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My study thus argues that their insertion into this alien environment has brought into sharp focus their difference from other students--identity as difference. As a result of this, their identities as rural black South Africans have come to the fore. The television programs they now choose to watch speak to this identity in a way that foreign programs cannot. In this bipolar world of insiders and outsiders, foreign programs are now associated with the black and white middle class values they despise.

My study also points to the often politically regressive cultural politics expressed by many of the "homeland" students (evidenced, for example, in their strong patriarchal attitudes) and argues that ironically the rejection of foreign (primarily American) television on their part reflects an unwillingness to become modern subjects, open to new, more socially progressive ways of being in, and relating to, the world. This position obviously represents a counter to the rather gloomy prognosis of American cultural imperialism put forward by media imperialism theorists.

There are other reasons for rejecting many of the pessimistic claims of the media/cultural imperialism theorists. For example, arguments which see indigenous cultures in the non-West as terribly vulnerable don't acknowledge that for centuries--before the project of globalization swung into high gear--cultures have been encountering each other. A number of commentators point out that the current panic over American cultural imperialism tends to overlook the fact that the globalization of communication is only the most recent of a series of cultural encounters, in many cases stretching back centuries, through which the values, beliefs, and symbolic forms of different groups have been superimposed on one another. Thus, most forms of culture in the world today are, to varying extents, hybrid cultures.

The concept of "creolization" is one that is currently used to refer to this process of cultural inter-penetration. Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz says: "Globalization need not be a matter only of far-reaching or complete homogenization; the increasing interconnectedness of the world also results in some cultural gain." The people on the receiving end of globalization and its media do have a choice of what to accept--and very often they choose bits and pieces which they mix with their own forms and expressions.

Hannerz points out that there would not have been a Nigerian Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1986 if Wole Soyinka had not creatively drawn on both a cosmopolitan literary expertise and an imagination rooted in Nigerian mythology, and turned it into something unique. Another example is world music--influence and counter-influence make an eclectic new form of expression which is not Western and not indigenous.

In the field of South African jazz the work of Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) provides a richly hybridized oeuvre that illustrates Hannerz's (1989) claim. As Carr et al note, with regard to Ibrahim's musical influences, besides his own African heritage, American popular music was strongly evident: "He grew up with the hymns, gospel songs and spirituals of the American-influenced African Methodist Episcopal Church; also heard Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five popular hits blaring from the township ice-cream vans; and Duke Ellington's music was so familiar that he was 'not regarded as a foreign musician, but rather as something like a wise old man of our community in abstentia." Rhodes University Professor of Music Christine Lucia points to yet further influences in the creation of the hybrid sound that characterizes Ibrahim's music: "Ibrahim used the piano, an instrument central to Western classical music for 200 years and central to jazz for 100 years, as a vehicle for expressing a kind of South African music that contained American and South African jazz styles, Islamic chant, Cape Malay drumming, African traditional music, European parlour songs, hymns and gospel music."

The result of this mix has in turn had an impact on modern music around the world. As Swenson points out, "His knowledge of and sympathy for Africa makes him a first-hand practitioner of styles and feelings many other musicians have adopted from afar, while his wide-ranging control of rhythmic dynamics and melodic improvisations mark him as a musical modernist."

To return to the mass media: do the arguments I have put forward mean that we should uncritically welcome into our local spaces global media images, sounds, and stories? To give a categorical answer is not possible. Despite the fact that receivers of global media often decode messages in ways not intended by the makers, there are still messages sent out and received which espouse the values of consumerism, competition, individualism and so on.

Thus arguing for the power audiences have to use media messages as they will should not blind us to the fact that meanings generated and circulated by particular media can, and do, in specific contexts, help sustain relationships of domination and subordination. In Britain the homophobia of some of the tabloids has played a part in periodic bouts of gay bashing. In South Africa we need to ask to what extent the misogynous sentiments evident in much of gangsta rap and our own home-grown Kwaito help naturalize those social values underpinning our high incidence of domestic violence and rape.

Furthermore, it is one thing to "remake" the meanings on offer, while quite another to be offered radically different ways of understanding and making sense of the world. Where pressure to attract audiences to advertisers is increasingly the imperative for the commercial media, there is usually little desire to work outside of the ambit of whatever everyone already feels comfortable with and to present us with radically different ways of understanding and making sense of our world. As George Gerbner, the well-known American media theorist, argues, "Competition for the largest possible audience at the least cost means striving for the broadest and most conventional appeals, blurring sharp conflicts...and presenting divergent or deviant images as mostly to be shunned, feared, or suppressed."

The globalization of media messages is a complex issue requiring much more debate and study. Meanwhile, we should resist making simplistic assumptions about either how good or bad their effects are. TBS

Larry Strelitz is a senior lecturer in research methodology and teaches Media and Cultural Studies at Rhodes University's Department of Journalism and Media Studies. His current research is in the field of media consumption.