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Chapter 4 | Michael S. Cross (continued) English-Canadians also illustrate the complexity of this McLuhanesque world. Electronic communications have created a “global village” in the sense that they have changed the scale of interrelationships. Simultaneous, world-wide communications throw very different sorts of communities together, just as people are forced together in a village. McLuhan pointed out that, in the contemporary world, the term “mass media” no longer refers, as in the traditional definition, to the size of the audience. Rather, it suggests the simultaneous involvement of people with the media (McLuhan, 1964; de Kerckhove, 1995). The global village concept does not imply a bucolic simplicity, however, nor does it require a single cultural template. The Canadian experience is that electronic media contribute to complexity and to cultural conflicts. Globalization generates localism, and it sets great cultures against small ones. The existence of a global bourgeois culture is apparent. Perhaps there has always been such a culture; Haydn and Mozart fit into cultural circles in England and France as comfortably as in Austria. Canada has experienced the reality of at least transnational cultures for generations. A famous example is that of the Cuban missile crisis in the autumn of 1962. The Canadian government was uncertain about American actions and declined to mobilize Canadian forces in support of the American blockade of Cuba. Canadian air force commanders put their planes on alert anyway, in defiance of their own government. Their prime loyalty was to their professional class of the military, a class which cut across national borders. The military is only one case of the global classes which have proliferated, alignments which often have only the loosest attachment to any particular national interest. Global business people, the Catholic Church hierarchy, popular entertainers, these are examples of transnational interest groups. David Welch, a historian at the University of Kent in England, sums it up well: “‘Empowered’ classes now transcend national boundaries. Middle class groups in Europe, for example, have more in common than different classes/groups within one nation state. They consume the same products and they hold the same aspirations” (Welch, 2000). Globalization has done more than provide common economic interests to dominant groups, however. There is evidence that the electronic media have contributed to a convergence of values, at least among certain social orders. The World Values Survey, which has been assessing social attitudes in many countries since the 1970’s, has found a convergence towards what are called “post-materialist” values of autonomy, cosmopolitanism, and lack of deference for authority. This convergence has been explained largely in terms of economic security, yet it is surely true that media have been the agents of dissemination of these values (Nevitte, Basanez and Inglehart, 1992; McChesney, 2001; Gruneau and Whitson, 1993). The connection of convergent values to affluence and to media access makes it a phenomenon particular to certain classes in national societies. Global citizenship belongs to those who have global information. Coverage of foreign news has declined substantially, at least in the press of the English-speaking world. In the United States, for example, the proportion of foreign news in newspapers fell from 20 percent to 2 percent over the last two decades, and the proportion of foreign news on television tumbled from 45 percent to 13 percent. Yet there is a niche or “demassified” audience which receives far more, and far better, foreign news. Philip M. Taylor points out that the best foreign coverage in Britain is provided by the Financial Times, a paper directed at an affluent, minority readership. “... technology allows those niche audiences to be less dependent on the profession of news journalism to mediate the doings of the few to the many — because the few can communicate to the few who can afford it” (Taylor, 2000; Hargreaves, 2000). Inherent in this global bourgeois culture is the reality that great societies hand down shop-worn versions of their cultural forms to small societies. That does not imply that globalization requires the elimination of national cultures. It is both more complicated, and more disquieting than that. David Rothkopf, a former official in the United States Department of Commerce and now an academic and consultant, makes the case best. He notes that elites in many countries have already recognized “that to compete in the global marketplace they must conform to the culture of that marketplace.” We have created, he argues, a multicultural international society. Successful multicultural societies ... discern those aspects of culture that do not threaten union, stability, or prosperity (such as food, holidays, rituals, and music) and allow them to flourish. But they counteract or eradicate the more subversive elements of culture (exclusionary aspects of religion, language, and political/ideological beliefs). ... The greater public good warrants eliminating those cultural characteristics that promote conflict or prevent harmony, even as less-divisive, more personally observed cultural distinctions are celebrated and preserved (Rothkopf, 1997). |
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