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Chapter 4 | Michael S. Cross (continued) There is a vast literature on globalization and culture, full of discussions of “cultural imperialism,” “core and periphery” models, and liberal internationalism (Lerner, 1963; Panitch and Leys, 1999, Eds.; Hamelink, 1996; Appadurai, 1990). A more useful model than these, from an English-Canadian perspective, may be that of cultural mediation. The mediation model complements McLuhan’s insights about the interactive nature of electronic media, which require intense sensory involvement in the user. Mediation is a “‘structuring process’ that arranges and rearranges both the interaction of the members of the audience with the media and their creation of the meaning of that interaction.” There is mediation at the individual level, influenced by the person’s sex, age and immediate cultural environment. There is “situational” mediation, for example the politics of the family which comes into play because a television set is watched at home. There is “institutional” mediation, which is the influence on the audience of membership in social institutions such as the family, neighbourhood or nation. And, finally, there is “technological” mediation, in the McLuhanesque sense. Television as an electronic medium, for example, interacts with the audience in very different ways than “hot” media such as books. All of these mediating factors are in play at the same time, often making it difficult to sort out the role of any particular factor (Orozco-Gomes, 1995; McLuhan, 1995). Canadian public policy has privileged a few of the forms of mediation. It has fostered state mediated cultural reception, and has, in the vein of David Rothkopf, encouraged certain unthreatening cultural institutions under the mantle of multiculturalism. However, individuals and groups read communications in their own ways and sometimes can use the electronic media for purposes less conventional. Music, it has been suggested, has helped some Canadians to communicate with others within their regions, to find a sense of cultural identity separate from that of global bourgeois culture. There are other examples. African-Americans have been subjected to wave after wave of cultural appropriation. From the cakewalk and ragtime, to jump blues and rhythm and blues, to hip hop and rap, their popular musical forms have been adopted and reshaped by European-Americans. Yet new forms have always emerged to express cultural needs. Even more telling, African-Americans have been able to employ their music for their own purposes, even while it was being appropriated by the mainstream society. Chuck D, of the controversial group Public Enemy, described rap as the “CNN of black people.” It has continued to fill such a role, even though white suburbanites purchase most rap. It has done so because the attitude and context of the music is crucially important, as it is in all cultural exchanges. A person who shares the very specific sense of place and time that informs much rap music, will understand it in a different way than someone who does not (Best and Kellner, 1999; Fernando Jr., 1994; Kleinhans, 1994). Music, whether rap or soul or punk, is at best a partly realized expression of difference or politics, of course — even in an acoustic world. It can, all the same, communicate the most important of messages; as Greil Marcus said of punk, “the music made a promise that things did not have to be as they seemed, and some brave people set out to keep that promise for themselves” (Marcus, 1993). None of this underestimates the difficulty of maintaining alternatives in the face of economic globalization. The very economic motivations of the great culture offer hope, in a perverse way, however. Erich Fromm, the theorist who did so much to aid our understanding of technological alienation, pointed out in 1968 that the greed of the media, their need for an audience, led them to disseminate dissenting ideas, so long as someone would pay to receive those ideas (Fromm, 1968). The commercial success of a revolutionary music group such as Rage Against the Machine confirms Fromm’s insight. So does nortec music, in a rather different way. This new Mexican form, a blend of techno dance music with traditional northern Mexican styles, emerged because of technological and economic impulses. San Diego, California, radio stations erected transmitters in Mexico to evade American government regulations. Musicians in Tijuana, Mexico, were introduced to a variety of electronic music forms from these transmitters. They began to shape their own version, aided by another modern technology. CD “burners” permitted them to create their own recordings very cheaply, without having to submit to record company dictation. The commercial motivations of American radio stations combined with American-Japanese recording technology to encourage the emergence of a regional style of music (Strauss, 2001). The Mexican example is instructive in many ways. The Zapatista rebellion in the province of Chiapas has emphasized the need to respect cultural difference. The rebellion has drawn the support of many different groups, including American musicians. Subcommandante Marcos, the spokesperson for the Zapatistas, appeared on a roundtable in October 1999 with, among others, Zach de la Rocha, the vocalist of Rage Against the Machine. Marcos explained the revolution: |
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