CIRCA 89 Art Education Supplement
GLOBALISATION, TELEVISION AND EDUCATION
Most contemporary thinking about globalisation focuses on the theme of ‘time-space distanciation' [1] or ‘time-space compression' [2]), elaborating the original reflection of Marx on the tendency of capitalism to ‘annihilate space with time' through improvements in communication and transportation that decrease the significance of distance as a brake on the expansion of capital. Time-space compression now tends to occur in short and intense bursts which bring rapid social change and increases in uncertainty, in what Ulrich Beck [3] calls the "risk society." Social relations become more stretched across greater distances, radically freed from local contexts, and spatial distances become less important, disappearing altogether at those moments of intense group consciousness when live global television coverage of a single event is carried by satellite to widespread global locations through the reach of news carriers, producing an almost apocalyptic sense of globalised reality: moments in contemporary wars fought by the militarily sophisticated and media-saturated Western powers, or sudden, major political transformations (the implosion of East European governments that heralded the collapse of Communism) or dramatic civil-state confrontations (Tiananmen Square). The local rootedness of time also disappears, as live global television is experienced by large numbers of people worldwide.
This lateral extension of social connections across time and space is at the core of the notion of globalisation understood as action at a distance. The effect of distanciation is not only the compression of material interdependence but also, as Roland Robertson points out, intensified consciousness of the wholeness of the globe [4]. It is accelerated by such forces as increases in international tourism and other forms of human migration; the internationalisation of corporate ownership of media enterprises; the more intense sharing across borders of cultural icons and media texts; the increasing consumption of a diversity of material goods by large numbers of people at points very distant from where they were produced.
In collapsing physical distance and bringing subordinate cultures into closer contact with dominant ones, developments in global communications undoubtedly force a rethinking of how cultures evolve. What is less tenable than ever is the notion of an authentic culture as an extremely cohesive space based on unquestioned cultural assumptions and self-images, nurturing a self-confident, stable cultural identity that is safely insulated by the power of distance. Domestic media, and all the visual and aural art forms out of which they are constituted, play a major role in the continual re-shaping of cultural identity. In a previous era, the press and other forms of print had the effect, in many parts of the world, of reorganising into continuous geographical space what were formerly perceived to be distinct spaces. They also constructed a shared experience of time and a collective memory for groups of people who had previously lived by different calendars. Benedict Anderson points out that nations, as "imagined communities," often started out as media audiences [5].
Contemporary media, particularly radio and television, actively construct people's identities (across the dimensions of nation, race, class, gender and ethnicity) in a number of ways by organising artistic and popular discourses so as to articulate the meanings and expectations associated with particular social identities. Increasingly they do this now in a globalised context as they articulate with images and viewpoints imported from distant places. This suggests that we must take account of the notion of cultural hybridisation in both dominant and subordinate cultures as television systems in particular become ever more globalised. Despite many decades of access through the cinema to large volumes of films produced at a distance (mostly Hollywood), it is television, with its ideology of presentness, immediacy and liveness, with its direct mode of address and the real or implied actuality of its news programming, that is predominantly associated with the intensified consciousness of the wholeness of the globe that is at the core of the academic discourse about globalisation. Global television has served to reinforce political, popular and academic perceptions of globalisation as a social, economic and media-defined reality. For this reason, it is primarily television (and all the arts that contribute to it as a medium) that is the primary focus of what might be called critical globalisation theory.
This explains the resurgence of interest in the political economy of television because media developments at local level increasingly can be understood only by reference to global changes. Following strategies of radical institutional spatialisation already pursued in manufacturing, financial services, information technology and other sectors, several large media companies (Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, TCI, Bertelsmann, etc.) over the last decade have become delinked from their home nation states as they evolved rapidly into global conglomerates with unprecedented concentrations of corporate strength, based on new forms of vertical and horizontal integration. Much of this cross-media conglomeration, of which Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the obvious paradigm, was made possible by media deregulation in major Western economies. These conglomerates not only have access to enormous quantities of investment capital but also the ability to minimise financial risk by managing their media products across different world markets both inside and outside their geolinguistic areas of influence. News Corporation, for instance, began as a print enterprise in Australia, spread into television in the U.K. in the 1970s and into network television (Fox) in the U.S. in the 1980s. It is now poised to attack the huge Chinese and Indian markets with its Star TV system which currently broadcasts in over 20 Asian languages. In Ireland, one of our four terrestrial television channels is part of a Canadian-based company which has television interests also in Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. CanWest is not only the biggest buyer of Hollywood product outside of the U.S. but also has the power to achieve economies of scale by making output deals with the major suppliers for all their territories.
One of the most spectacular instances of media globalisation at this moment in time is the deployment of digital television, itself an outcome of global economic and technological forces that impact on domestic broadcasting arrangements even of small economies like Ireland. Decisions have already been made in Europe to eschew digital television's capacity for delivering a new high definition widescreen standard and to exploit instead its capacity for compression, which will deliver a large number of channels. There is now a clear realisation among broadcasters that content, not technology, will drive the adoption of digital television, that "content is king." It is likely that new, profitable server-based forms of content will emerge in time, whose early adopters will be today's youth, increasingly fluent with the interactive challenges presented by video games and the Internet. But the majority of viewers are still a long way from finding pleasure in interactivity and in the new forms of multimedia narrativity it enables. It is almost certain that audience viewing habits and preferences will remain fixed in the medium term on the output of the mainstream broadcasting companies that currently dominate analogue distribution channels. It is instructive therefore to examine existing trends in the global flow of television fiction in order to understand how distribution patterns in the digital age might be structured.
In recent years the U.S. has enjoyed a growing trade surplus for audiovisual products (TV, video, cinema) with the E.U., much of the expansion being attributable to increased U.S. exports to new satellite TV channels. U.S. exports of feature films to the E.U. are about ten times greater than imports to the U.S. Those for television programmes are seventeen times greater [6]. Globally the U.S. accounts for about 75% of all television programme exports, although there is evidence of increasing export success for major producers in some regional television markets in outselling U.S. producers in their regions [7]. The most tradable type of programming generally is drama, particularly programmes focused on crime, conflict or fantasy.
But as digital television deepens the flow patterns of analogue television, the local-global dialectic doesn't just wither away. Even same-language television markets are dominated by cultural differences which severely inhibit the flow of programmes. Every cultural product that is sold across borders carries with it some degree of ‘cultural discount' or diminished appeal that is based on viewer's difficulty in identifying with aspects of its form and content. As Collins et al. point out, a condition of consistent success in the international television market is the production of programmes that appeal to international tastes, in which national content is confined to the internationally current stereotypes of national histories and formations [8]. The U.S., for instance, is mainly represented to the rest of the world in terms of contemporary melodrama in which the values of capitalist business and the family are shown, both positively and negatively.
What about local production, which theoretically at least draws on the creativity of a wide range of aural and visual arts at the national level? The global meets the local in new ways still not adequately analysed and digital television will accelerate these trends [9]. In late 1989, only eight domestic soaps (six in the U.K., one in Ireland, one in Germany) existed in a continent dominated by U.S. soaps. Today almost 50 exist, most of them domestically produced or co-produced, and normally screened in or just before prime time. The driving force behind these apparent successes is the role of co-production partners like the Australian company Grundy International (now part of the British Pearson Group) in reworking serial formulae and scripts into localised versions tailored to different cultural and narrative configurations in each European country [10]. New forms of serial drama are emerging that have evolved from common artistic ancestors invented elsewhere, in effect global prototypes, adapted to the tolerances of domestic audiences and likely to flourish behind national boundaries otherwise impervious to the flow of serial television fiction. ‘Localisation' has already become another mantra in the international television trade press, signifying the many ways in which pressures within global television markets respond to the evidence that domestic content has become more popular than imports. It now signifies a range of adaptive manoeuvres applied across different world regions, which are currently being implemented most forcefully by television companies as diverse as Star TV, ESPN, MTV and the Jim Henson Company. These include international franchising formats, providing ‘produce-it-yourself' kits to local companies for ‘reality-based' programmes; shooting local sequences for insertion into programmes aimed at a whole range of markets across different national cultures; selling localised versions of game shows that have attracted large audiences in major television markets; designing different versions of content in drama co-productions to reflect local accents and attitudes and eliminate what might be seen as ‘an American slant'; including local hosts and voice-overs in natural science programmes designed for global audiences and as narrative links in the interstices of magazine formats for which most of the edited documentary material is imported. These ways of locally customising and culturally adapting what is designed essentially as an international product build on the economies of scale and the business strategies established by U.S.-based global companies like Coca Cola over the course of a century, paying close attention to local partnerships that handle the brand and its marketing. In the long run, one major impact of digital television may be to accelerate the tendencies towards localisation that have lain dormant for many years in Hollywood's infrequent interest in co-production.
For arts education in general, some questions remain. Is the widening and deepening of international flows of trade, finance and information in a single integrated market leading to the emergence of a ‘global culture'? How fast is this happening and in what ways are exogenous ideas and values being mixed with and superimposed on national identities? It is obvious that there is a growing similarity, transcending frontiers, in styles of dress, consumption of sports, music preferences, eating habits, even crime patterns. But to what extent is this an effect of global communication? How can a global political economy of culture get beyond the temptation to conflate economic power with cultural effects and the economistic notion that culture is just a by-product of the capitalist world economy? Is globalisation itself just another new master narrative (sometimes utopian, sometimes dystopian), a teleologically-loaded paradigm whose grand universalisms will be shown to be too totalising to catch and explain the fine grain of artistic text and cultural change in any meaningful way? While we ponder these questions, it is worth remembering that much of our speculation ignores the extent to which globalisation is a North-North phenomenon. Its generation of media-driven imaginary worlds involves no more than one third of the earth's population. We ignore at our peril the persistence of powerful, identity-anchoring social formations, such as class, caste, race, gender, tribe and ethnic group, which are unlikely to be subverted in the foreseeable future by more global sources of identity.
[1] Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990
[2] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989
[3] Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992
[4] Roland Robertson, Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage, 1992, p. 8
[5] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983
[6] Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 28
[7] John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka, and Stuart Cunningham, New Patterns in Global Television, Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996
[8] Richard Collins, Nicholas Garnham, and Gareth Locksley, The Economics of Television, London: Sage, 1988, p. 57
[9] Farrel Corcoran, Towards Digital Television in Europe: A Race or A Crawl? Javnost—The Public, Vol. 6, in press
[10] Hugh O'Donnell, Good Times, Bad Times: Soap Operas and Society in Western Europe, London: Cassell, 1998
Farrel Corcoran is Professor of Communications at Dublin City University and Chairman of the RTÉ Authority.
