Making Culture Part I - 1 Nation 2 Systems

Week 5 - 7th August 2012

Hong Kong
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E7%BB%B4%E6%B8%AF%E5%A4%9C%E8%89%B2.jpg

  The term national culture refers to the value system and pride associated with a nation. For me, a Hong Konger, national culture is an intriguing topic to talk about. Hong Kong is one of two special administrative regions of the People’s Republic of China (also known as OneNation, Two Systems) since 1997. The period of being colonised by the British Empire greatly influenced the current culture of Hong Kong, especially the culture variations from Mainland China.

  Firstly, identity has always been an important issue to every Hong Konger since the British resumed control in 1997. During 1990s, Hong Kong residents were afraid of being part of communistic society, or felt incredulous of 1 Nation 2 Systems, led to a massive number of people leave Hong Kong and immigrant to overseas. In which, it brought a great influence to Hong Kong political cinema.

  Hong Kong films such as Bodyguards of the Last Governor 港督最後一個保鏢 (Alfred Cheung, 1996), Gigolo ofChinese Hollywood 電影鴨 (Chung Shu Kai, 1999), Lan Yu 藍宇 (Stanley Kwan, 2001), trilogy of Infernal Affairs 無間道 (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak Siu-Fai, 2002, 2003) etc., these films known as political films are all expressed such identity concern and culture variation between Hong Kong and China, similarly and metaphorically.



http://www.wjl.cn/torrentimg/c378e171c7bba7e4e7bca2de69021fd117b9b946.jpeg

  In 2004, in order to have Hong Kong and Mainland get closer together economically, Chinese state had the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangemet (CEPA) implemented with Hong Kong. In which, it also provided a door of Mainland-Hong Kong cultural exchange, apart from economic development.

"We're destined to fall for a scam or two." - Love in the Buff 2012
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tZFbqG2PuAk/0.jpg

For example, a Hong Kong domestic style films – Love in a Puff 志明與春嬌 (Pang Ho-Cheung, 2010) greatly reflected the modern culture of Hong Kong – smoking and Hong Konger’s value of love and sex; and due to the Chinese micro-blog users’ promotion, the box office of Love in a Puff was even more impressive than expected.

In 2012, the continuation of Love in a Puff, Love in the Buff 春嬌與志明 (Pang Ho-Cheung, 2012) has expanded the issue of Mainland-Hong Kong culture variation, giving different value views of love and sex from Mainlander and Hong Konger by applying few Mainland actors/actresses. Such Mainland-Hong Kong co-production indicated the usual restrictions on style and content to domestic film because of CEPA (Zhu & Nakajima, 2010).

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg51kcOO9LF7sKOm_HzgAoB22hdICaOkicYvsPdjXqW5BkkTFeMkIW9fI-qydQ0I5N9xreaFEQi-qA1BKCmal_ATn-tHSJuMDs43SR_KlkRzpHAfjWGSQZGuIF7M2VY6RvP8Zy2xDRFMVDX/s1600/love+in+a+puff.jpg

Reference:

Rosen, S & Zhu, Y., 2010, ‘The Evolution of Chinese Film as an Industry’, Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, pp.15-33, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong

Olympic + sponsors = Global Event??

Week 4 - 31 July 2012

  There was a debate on this week tutorial – are the Olympic a truly global event? I prefer it is a matter for one’s own perspective and angle. The Olympic could be a positive and negative global event.

http://www.london2012.com/photos/galleryid=1303934/#fireworks-off-the-tower-bridge

  Politically, what counts as a ‘global’ event? In dictionary, global refers to involve the entire earth, covering, influencing and relating to the whole world. When I was watching the athletes walk in the stadium with their national flags on the opening ceremony, the number of nation is more than enough to rise an international gaming competition, even they have a ‘nation’ for independent Olympians. It seems the game is having every single nation joined and is fair and equal.

But when I looked into the International Olympiccommittee (IOC) or Organising Committees for the Olympic Games, I bet you that those members’ nationality of these committees never equal to the number of national flags that appear on the opening ceremony. Westerner always calls for democracy, then why would the choice of the host city depend on the vote of the IOC session but not a vote of people from all around the world??



Economically, there is no doubt that sponsors and the host city are the first unit benefited from the Olympic. The Olympic Games is a heaven for advertiser, it gives an effective and glorious platform for them to globalize their product. Indeed when facing a huge expends in the Olympic, sponsorship is the best solution. But negatively, it could have issues like - Has sponsorshipspoilt the Olympic spirit?, to the Olympic. Besides, the profit made from tourism and service industry is even more impressive under the European debt crisis.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYsGlZSFAeP9f9tdSkaQOyT6QtZEHP08WseLjO3LDIro-CJKc6weeoIQZGzeSugEo2AuTPwKf5q3UEjMgFbDegH7YxTAcu2CyCc9qJmFJFXwD_60scTUiOSRrn20QsUqbzBBO6CMvaOrM/s1600/Olympics+McDonalds.jpg

Culturally, apart from the content of the opening ceremony, there is only cultural exchange between athletes, and athletes and the host city/country.

http://www.london2012.com/photos/galleryid=1303934/#view-the-olympic-stadium-during-the-opening-ceremony

http://www.london2012.com/photos/galleryid=1303934/#france-fans-celebrate-trafalgar-square

Global Media Empires - Americanisation

Week 3 - 24th July, 2012

http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/east-vs-west.jpg

  Indeed, Western cultures have been played a dominant role in the world’s economic and culture for over the past few centuries. Especially, the United State America, the first world’s economic leading nation has the most affection on Western cultures. It seems no doubt for Americanisation when you are going McDonald for a lunch, watching The Dark Knight Rises – typical Hollywood made film, or listening to music that listed on The Billboard.com by using Apple iPod.

  In terms of media industry, most of the production / broadcasting / journalism companies are distribution companies of one Media Empire. For example, the News Corporation, the world second largest media empire, owned by Rupert Murdoch. One of the popular holdings of News Corporation is Fox Filmed Entertainment, a parent company of 20thCentury Fox. From 20t Century Fox, distribution companies included Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox 2000 Pictures, 20^th Century Fox Television. This is monopoly, or you could say oligopoly – a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers (Oxford Dictionary 2012).

http://news.doddleme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/20thcenturyfox1.jpg

  Media empires such as News Corporation and Walt Disney Corporation can be referred as dominant media. They consist of 3 conditions: “the ability of big media to limit diversity, to control key economic factors and to shape political agendas”, “the media function in ways that are both political as well as economic”, and “not only size alone but international reach and not only news or editorial content but also cultural and political influence” (Steven, 2003, pp.38-41).

  Apart from that 3 conditions to be a dominant media, Niall Ferguson, a historian suggested other reasons why Western cultures rise, at a TED speech in July 2011 - The 6 Killer Apps of Prosperity.

Reference:

Steven, P 2003, ‘Political economy: the howling, brawling, global market place’, The no-nonsense guide to the global media, New Internationalist, Oxford, pp. 37–59.

What is missing from that definition?

Week 2 - 17th July, 2012

 

  I found that it is so hard to define ‘globalisation’, neither scholarly nor unscholarly. Indeed, every scholar has their own recognition and interpretation of globalisation, which makes it harder to unify a definition and usually those definitions have something missing as time goes by.

  Albrow (1990: 45) defined globalisation as ‘all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society, global society’.

  Albrow’s definition might be good at the time of 1990 but it is an out-date definition after 22 years later.

  In my opinion, there are two ambiguous parts.

First, it undefined the processes of globalisation. I don’t get a chance to read the words before and after that definition, maybe it well defined the processes of globalisation on Albrow’s book. But if it reads independently, I wouldn’t understand what those processes are and how those processes make a single world society. It should be mentioned in the definition, that the processes of globalisation have occasioned a mixing of worldwide economic, political (e.g. a destabilizing of nationalist positions), cultural (e.g. the rise of hybrid cultures) and social relation (e.g. the study of postmodernism and post-colonialism). Besides, the key role of mediation in the process of globalisation should be also mentioned. It is important to look at the ways media and communications are present in politics, economic and culture, directly and indirectly (Rantanen, 2005, pp.5).

Second, in what ways the world becomes a single world society, a global society? It surely doesn’t mean there is no nationality, no race. It involves the flows of globalisation and mediation. For instant, it is a compression of time and space (Bauman, 1999), the movement of news and information from telegraph to radio and print, and to Facebook and Youtube.

Reference: Rantanen, T 2005, ‘Theorizing media globalization’, The media and globalization, Sage, London, pp. 1–18.

The Flows of Globalisation

10th July, 2012 - Week 1

  I would say that globalization descripts the transformation of, or the changing (from good to better, and the best) in the way that human being living style, what perspectives, attitude and contributions, and interaction between people and the world.

  Globalisation involves 5 crucial components that are all intertwined: physical flow, cultural flow, informational flow, media flow, and capital flow. In which, each component is also interacted to ethnoscapes, global cultural flows, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai, 1990). When we talk about globalization, informatisation, flexibilisation and deregulation also have to be part of the conditions, just like a package (Pieterse, 2004, pp.10).

  In terms of physical flow, or the technoscapes and finanscapes, globalization involves the reconfiguration of states, for instant, a race to the intelligent state (Connors, 1997, cited in Pieterse, 2004).

  “The accompanying growth of market forces has led government from local to national levels to attract foregin investment, and since they tend to follow similar strategies of fiscal concessions, infrastructure development, and ‘place marketing’, they have been characterized as ‘hostile brothers’” (Pieterse, 2004, pp.11).

  “Connectivity and ICT infrastructure as a strategic are inspires the idea that those cities, countries, or regions that have been able to position themselves most successfully in relation to globalization are those which have stressed the development of information and communication infrastructure” (Pieterse, 2004, pp.11).

  Besides, globalisatio is uneven, for example, the inequalities of wealth and power. Pieterse (2004) suggests that globalization does not refer to a global level playing field or an equal international relations.

 

Refernce: Nederveen Pieterse, J 2004, ‘Globalization: consensus and controversies’, Globalization and culture: global mélange, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 7–21.

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Hi readers.

I'm currently studying Media and Communication at Deakin.

This blog is all about ALC215 - Globalisation and The Media.

Kam