lOMoARcPSD|8475147

Pamantasan ng Cabuyao
(University of Cabuyao)
Katapatan Mutual Homes, Brgy. Banay-banay, Cabuyao City, Laguna 4025

CONTEMPORARY WORLD
LEARNING MATERIALS
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Chapter 7: The Globalization of Religion

Introduction:

The conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault line
separating civilizations.
- Samuel Huntington

Globalization has played a tremendous role in providing a context for the

current revival and the resurgence of religion. Today, most religions are
not relegated to the countries where they began. Religious have, in fact,
spread and scattered on a global scale. Globalization provided religions a
fertile milieu to spread and thrive.

Globalization has also allowed religion on faith to gain considerable

significance and importance as a non-territorial touchstone of identity.
Being a source of identity and pride, religion has always been promoted
by its practitioners so that it could reach the level of globality and be
embraced by as many people as possible.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this topic, learners should be able to:

1. Grasp the nuances, strengths, and weaknesses of the theses

on secularization and the resurgence of religion;
2. Unravel the relationship between conflicts and religions; and 3.
Apply the theoretical tools discussed in the real-world contexts.

Discussion:

Universal Definition of “Religion”

- It is derived from the Latin word: “religare”, meaning, to bind together
again that which was once bound but has since been torn apart or
broken.
- It is known primarily to be the “system of beliefs and practices”
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- It is also a human relationship with the Absolute

Specified Definition on the concept of “Religion” along the two (2) aspects:
a. On spiritual sense, and

In accordance to Haynes (2006), he defined religion in three (3)

ways, which is based primarily on how social and individual
behavior of believers are organized:
1. It involves the idea of transcendence (that refers to
“supernatural realities”);
2. It relates with sacredness or holiness and system of practice and
language; and
3. It concerns ultimacy (on how “it relates people to the ultimate
conditions of existence”).

b. On material sense.

In like manner, Haynes (2006) states that religious beliefs are

capable of motivating individuals and groups to collectively
mobilize to achieve political goals and consequently, suppress
mass actions as a tool of repression.

Different Forms of Religion (on a Worldwide Basis)

There are a total of 4,300 religions of the world according to Adherents

(NOTE: Adherents are independent, non-religiously affiliated organization
that monitors the number and size of the world’s religions.)

There are nearly 75% of the world’s population practices the five (5) most
influential religions of the world namely the following:

1. Buddhism,
2. Christianity,
3. Hinduism,
4. Islam, and
5. Judaism

Christianity & Islam

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 They are the two (2) religions’ most widely spread across the
world.
 They both cover the religious affiliation of more than half of the
world’s population

World’s Top 20 Largest Religions Respective Number of

Believers
1) Christianity = 2.1 billion
2) Islam = 1.3 billion
3) Non-religious sector = 1.1 billion
(i.e. Secular/Agnostic/Atheist

4) Hinduism = 900 million

5) Chinese Traditional Religion = 394 million

6) Buddhism = 376 million

7) Primal-Indigenous = 300 million
8) African Traditional and Diasporic = 100 million

9) Sikhism = 23 million
10) Juche = 19 million
11) Spiritism = 15 million
12) Judaism = 14 million
13) Bahai = 7 million
14) Jainism = 4.2 million
15) Shinto = 4 million
16) Cao Dai = 4 million
17) Zoroastrianism = 2.6 million
18) Tenrikyo = 2 million
19) Neo-Paganism = 1 million
20) Unitarian- = 800,000
Universalism
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Distribution of the Different Religions throughout the Globe

This map shows both the size and distribution of world religions.
This map conveys not just the size but also the distribution of world
religions, at both a global and national level.
It's an infographic rather than a map. The circles represent countries,
their varying sizes reflect population sizes, and the slices in each circle
indicate religious affiliation.
The result is both panoramic and detailed. In other words, this is the
best, simplest map of world religions ever.

o Christianity (blue) dominates in the Americas, Europe and the

southern half of Africa.

o Islam (green) is the top religion in a string of countries from northern

Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia.

o India stands out as a huge Hindu bloc (dark orange).

o Buddhism (light orange) is the majority religion in South East Asia

and Japan.

o China is the country with the world's largest 'atheist/agnostic'

population (grey) as well as worshippers of 'other' religions (yellow).
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o The Americas are (mostly) solidly Christian

What are the Most Religious Countries?

The Most Religious Countries

1. Israel
2. Saudi Arabia
3. India
4. United Arab Emirates
5. Egypt
6. Jordan
7. Turkey
8. Qatar
9. Oman
10. Lebanon
 -In some countries, religion isn't just a way of life – it's the law.
 The Jewish homeland of Israel is again perceived to be the most
religious in the world, according to data from the 2020 Best
Countries rankings, a characterization of 73 countries based on a
survey of more than 20,000 global citizens. In the survey,
respondents answered how closely they related each of the 73
countries to the term "religious," an adjective that Merriam Webster
defines as a "faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate
reality or deity," but can hold different meanings for different
people.
 The Basic Law in Israel describes the country as a Jewish state
and "protects the freedom of conscience, faith, religion, and
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worship, regardless of an individual’s religious affiliation,"

according to the U.S. Department of State's International Religious
Freedom Report for 2016.
 -Saudi Arabia and India rank No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in
terms of perceived religiosity. Saudi Arabia has a theocratic
monarchy with a legal system based on Islamic Shariah law and
India is the birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism.

What are the Least Religious Countries?

Least Religious Countries 2020

For thousands of years, religion has brought people of nations together …
and in some cases, has torn them apart. Surveys and studies are used
to show the most and least religious countries based on religious
beliefs, the number of residents that “feel” religious, and how nations
perceive other nations.
When analyzing the data of WIN/Gallup International polls, China is
found to be the least religious country. Less than 10% of residents
stated that they feel religious in this nation and over 60% are
“convinced atheists.”
According to the poll, Japan is the second least-religious nation, with just
13% of residents stating that they feel religious. Ranking third in the
poll is Estonia, where just 16% of the population feel religious.
Rounding out the top 10 least religious countries based on this data are:
1. China (7% feel religious)
2. Japan (13% feel religious)
3. Estonia (16% feel religious)
4. Sweden (19% feel religious)
5. Norway (21% feel religious)
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6. Czech Republic (23% feel religious)

7. Hong Kong (26% feel religious)
8. Netherlands (26% feel religious)
9. Israel (30% feel religious)
10. United Kingdom (30% feel religious)
o China is the least religious country in the world, with 90% of
residents claiming no religious affiliation. Though the Chinese state
officially recognizes the five religions of Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism,
Protestantism, and Taoism, the state claims to permits its citizens to
practice any religion of their own while also encouraging atheism.
However, the Communist Party of China holds the right to persecute
organized religions in the country, given that they deem the practice of
such to be a threat to the country’s regime or a threat to the religious
freedoms of other Chinese citizens.

o Sweden is also one of the least religious countries in the world,

with 73% of Swedes denying that religion has any involvement in their
everyday lives.

o The Czechs are considered to be one of the least religious

populations in the world, with concurrently very low church
attendance and lack of formal affiliation within the greater part of the
Czech population to any church. The Czech Republic is also one of the
most secular countries in the world. Only 28% of the country’s
population regards religion as an important part of their daily lives.
However, the idea that Czechs are complete non-believers in not
entirely true. Even though most are not strict followers of any formal
religion, many believe in magic and alternative, or "invisible", religions.
For example, a significant number of Czechs believe in the powers of
the fortune tellers, and in the magical properties of lucky charms.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND GLOBALISM:

(A Summary of the Diversified Ideas)
Religion Globalism
 It is concerned with the  It places value on material
sacred; wealth;
 It follows divine  It abides human made
commandments; and laws; and
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 It assumes that there is “the  It serves as a yardstick on

possibility of communication how much of human
between humans and the actions can lead to the
transcendent”. highest material
satisfaction.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGIOUS AND GLOBALIST

PERSONALITIES

Religious Globalist
 They aspire to become saints;  They train to be shrewd
business
persons;
 They detest politics and the  They value politics and the
quest for power for they are quest for power as both
evidence of humanity’s means and ends to open up
weakness; further the economies of the
world;

 They treat evangelization is in  They focused on the realm of

itself a form of globalization; market:
and and

 They are concerned with  They wish to spread goods and

spreading holy ideas globally. services.

STATE OF RELIGION IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION

- Listed below the succeeding parts of this academic paper, are its two
(2) broad and main arguments:

1) Secularization Paradigm, and

 where religion has been viewed to have lost its influence to
some extent with the advent of modernization; and
 refers to the belief that religion would lose its significance with
economic development and modernization
 .
1) Religious Resurgence Thesis.
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 where modernization has caused a backlash and urged

society to seek refuge in religion due to the imposition of
liberal and Western values that are incompatible with
people’s culture, beliefs and identity.

*** Indeed, with the globalization of economics and politics, individuals

feel insecure “as the life they once led is being contested and changed at the
same time” ***
*** Hence, “in order for a person to maintain a sense of psychological wellbeing
and avoid existential anxiety”, individuals turn to scripture stories and
teaching that provide a version about how they can be found to a,
“meaningful world”, a world that is quickly changing day by day. ***

Secularization: The Consequence of Modernization

SECULARIZATION- A simple definition of secularization is the declining

importance of religion in a society.

Wilson (1966) defined secularization as “the process whereby religious

thinking, practices and institutions lose social significance”.

*** It is important to recognize that although many theorists for have

explored the concept of secularization over a century, there is no
single theory of secularization. Likewise, scholars tend to have
different perspectives on why secularization occurs in society ***

Contributors (or Scholars) of the Different Classical Theories about

Secularization Paradigm:

 AUGUSTE COMTE,
 One of the first theorists of secularization
 He posited that society undergoes three (3) stages:
i. Theological Stage,
 It refers to the explosion by personified deities
 During the earlier stages, people believed that all the phenomena of
nature are the creation of the divine or supernatural.
ii. Metaphysical Stage, and
• It is the extension of the theological stage
• It refers to the explanation by impersonal abstract concepts
• People believe that an abstract power or force guides and
determines events in the world.

iii. Positivist Stage.

 It is also known as the “scientific stage”
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 It refers to the scientific explanation based on observation,

experiment and comparison.
 Positive explanations rely upon a distinct method,
(the scientific method), for their justification.
 This is the highest, most evolved behavior from among the
other two stages according to him (Comte).
 MAX WEBER,
 He argues that men will undergo modernization, which is a “process of
the disenchantment of the universe with the replacement of bureaucratization,
rationalization and secularization over the magical, the metaphysical and the
religious”.

 EMILE DURKHEIM, and

 He argues that the individualization of the societies break the bonds
of community.

 KARL MARX.
 He views religion as the opium of the people created by the material
conditions.
 He believed that religion would have no place in a communist society
where all individuals are treated equally with the eradication of class
division and the existence of the state.

Contributors (or Scholars) on the General Overviews of Secularization

Paradigm Development (and Convergences and Divergences of the Classical
Theories):

 TSCHANNEN (1991),
 He provides a systematic overview of theories that would constitute
the secularization paradigm (since 1963), which is based on three (3) core
“concepts”:
i. Differentiation,
• He argues that religion becomes differentiated and autonomous from
other institutions, “which thus, loses its power of social control and
guidance over the rest of society” as seen in the differentiation among the
relationships of the church, the state and education.
• Religion reorganizes itself in terms of ___location and function within
the society as it becomes privatized as a personalized religion,
generalized to pervade across secular (economic or political) institutions,
pluralized into several competing denominations or as religion declines
in practice

ii. Rationalization, and

 He views this process based from the following aspects:
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1) scientization which is related to the emergence of

science that would compete with religious
worldviews; and
2) sociologization where social life is determined in a
scientific and rational fashion that is free from
religious influence.
 It is concomitant to the weakening of religion, which
manifests in the societal level where there is the collapse
of the worldview and in the individual level where people
no longer believe in God.

i. Worldliness.
ii.  The impact of the processes of differentiation and rationalization
on religion is its loss of specificity and shift to worldliness where
religious organizations begin to cater to their members’
psychological needs.
(NOTE: These abovementioned concepts are drawn from the theories of:
Thomas Luckmann, Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, David Martin, Richard
Fenn, Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah.)

 In other words, he suggested secularization theories as a paradigm and

has described different “exemplars” (or shared examples) that are typical
for the paradigm.

 In its entirety, he also views the secularization paradigm as standing

under two (2) preliminary assumptions:
• “some roots of the secularization process can be found within religion
itself”; and “religion is related to human conduction” and thus, will
not completely disappear.

*** The secularization paradigm is a family of theories that vary in terms

of the extent of the decline or displacement of religion, the direction of
the process and the driving forces they ascribe to the secularization ***
HISTORICAL (OR KEY) EVENTS THAT LEAD TO THE RESURGENCE OF
RELIGION IN THE GLOBALIZED ERA

- They involve the emergence of armed conflicts fought under the banner
of religious beliefs because of the confronted challenges in the
secularization paradigm’s relevance and validity (Thomas, 2005):

 Iranian Revolution- The Islamic Revolution occurred in 1979, in the

Muslim majority country of Iran. Islamist revolutionaries opposed the
western secular policies of the authoritarian Shah of Iran Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi.
Supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini organized protests in opposition to the
authoritarian government of the Shah. Khomeini became the new Leader
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of Iran. 98.2% of the Iranian voters voted "yes" in a referendum for the
creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the Leadership of
Ayatollah Khomeini (also known as Imam Khomeini). It replaced an
authoritarian monarchy with a theocratic republic. The West claims the
republic is authoritarian.

 September 11, 2001 Tragedy- On September 11, 2001, 19 militants

associated with the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four
airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United
States. Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just
outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed during the
9/11 terrorist attacks, which triggered major U.S. initiatives to combat
terrorism and defined the presidency of George W. Bush.

CONCLUSION OF THIS LESSON

Enumerated below are the following realizations that has been
acquired throughout the whole content of this lesson:
 It presented the complexity of the contradicting paradigms on
the states of religion in the context of globalization.
฀ This was brought about the varying and opposing understanding
of the concepts of culture and modernity;
 There are dangers in arguing in dichotomies and
generalizations regarding the interpretations of religion’s role in
armed conflicts and political movements.
฀ In doing so, people become complicit in reinforcing racism,
Islamophobia, exclusion and marginalization;
 Be mindful of the problems and ideological implications of
employing a singular definition and understanding of modernization;
 Culture is neither static nor monolithic; and
 Whether people refer to either Western, Islamic or East Asian
civilizations, the complexity and diversity among and within
identities must not be dismissed.

References:
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• Abelos, A.V., et. al. (2018). The Contemporary World. Chapter 8: The
Globalization of Religion pp. 121-133. Mutya Publishing House, Inc.
• Coronacion, D.C., et.al. (2018). Convergence: A College Textbook in
Contemporary World. Chapter 7: The Globalization of Religion pp.
133143. Books Atpb. Publishing Corp.
• Lobo, J.L. (2019). The Contemporary World. Chapter 10 and 12: The
Globalization of Religion and A World of Ideas: Globalization of Religion
pp 161-178 and pp 209-224. Books Atbp. Publishing Corp.
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Chapter 6: Global Media Cultures

Introduction
This chapter explores the relationship between the
media, culture and globalization. It also focuses on the past and
current challenges concerning international communication and
explores and problematizes the power of media representation.

Learning Objectives:
At the end of this chapter, learners must be able to:
1. Understand how scholars have approached the relationship
between media and globalization;
2. Differentiate the paradigms that developed in international
communications development;
3. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the paradigm which
led to its loss of appeal;
4. Analyze how various media drive various forms of global
integration; and
5. Create a stance about the film industry in the Philippines in
contrast to South Korean film industry.

Discussion:
Mass Media
Mass Media is a term denoting that section of the media
specifically designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least
as large as the whole population of a nation-state), today including
not only radio and television, which tend to be limited to the local or
national level, but also the Internet, which is global.
The mass media audience has been viewed by some as forming a
"mass society" with special characteristics, notably atomization or
lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to
the influence of modern mass media techniques of persuasion such
as advertising and propaganda.
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Etymology and Usage

Media (the plural of "medium") is a truncation of the term
"media of communication," referring to those organized means of
dissemination of fact, opinion, entertainment, and other information,
such as newspapers, magazines, outdoor advertising, film, radio,
television, the World Wide Web, books, CDs, DVDs, videocassettes,
computer games, and other forms of publishing.

History
The evolution of mass media is an elongated, marked with
milestones journey that is still being continued. The earliest form of
information for the masses was inscribed on stones, caves and
pillars, there always has been necessary to pass on important
information through generations along with spreading it to the
masses.
The modern mass communication bloomed with the printing press
and it has not stopped since.
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Evolution of Mass Media

Pre-Industrial Age
1041 Movable Clay type printing in China
1440 The First Printing Press in the world by
German Goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg
1477 First Printed advertisement in a book by
William Caxton
1918 First colored movie shot Cupid Angling
1920 Invention of TV by John Logie Baird and
First Radio Commercial Broadcast by
KDKA radio station
1923 The first news Magazine was Launched -
TIME
1927 First TV transmission by Philo Farnsworth

Evolution of New Media (21st Century)

The 1990s to 2000s Invention of the Internet, Birth of Social

Networking Sites, and Emergence of Social
Media.
1991 World Wide Web came into being by Sir
Timothy John-Berners Lee
1995 Microsoft Internet Explorer was launched
1997 DVDs replaced VCR

2001 Instant Messaging Services

2002 Satellite Radio is launched
2004 Facebook
2005 YouTube
2006 Twitter
2007 Tumblr
2010 Instagram
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FORMS
- Electronic media and print media include a variety of forms:

Public Media- It is the sum of the public mass distributors of news

and entertainment and other information: the newspapers, television
and radio broadcasting, book publishers, and so on.
More recently, the Internet, podcasting, blogging, and others have
been added to this list. All of these public media sources have better
informed the general public of what is going on in the world today.
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Globalization and Mass Media

HOW DOES MASS MEDIA INFLUENCE GLOBALIZATION?
Through its various formats, the mass media can reach most
people on earth. This is an incredible opportunity for communication
and education among the peoples of the planet. As these technologies
become cheaper, they are becoming universal and closing the
technological divide that exists between the rich and poor. As the
technology necessary for mass communication becomes cheaper and
more widespread, the planet will indeed become smaller as news
travels even faster among all people of the world.
By this we can now define it as Global Media, “the mass
communication on a global level, allowing people across the world to
share and access the same information.” It is indeed that technologies
made people’s lives easier all over the globe. Today people all over the
world have easy access to communicate with each other and to be
aware of the news all over the world. There are many advantages in
global media. Now, people have easier access of television, radio,
internet and in fact, they have access of others countries’ satellite TV
channels.

Free flow of information: the road to Modernization?

The post-World War II period would mark the prominence of the
models of development through mass media and free flow of
information, particularly under the leadership of the U.S.
Several scholars term the model of communication and development
as the Modernization Paradigm which views that the reason for the
absence of modernization in the
developing world is not due to the
lack of natural resources. The
primary hindrance to a country’s
development is the lack of human
resources, and education and mass
media would have the fundamental
tasks of human capital.
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Proponents of Communication and Development Paradigm

A. Wilbur Schramm (1964)
•One of the pioneering scholars of this paradigm, observed a positive
association between communication
components to that of the social, political
and economic components in national
growth. According to him, “the task of
mass media of information and the “new
media” of education is to speed and ease
the long, slow social transformation
required for economic development and, in
particular, to speed and smooth the task
of mobilizing human resources behind the
national effort.”

B. David Lerner (1958)

• Who proposed that developing
societies must follow the Western
concept of modernity in order to
achieve development.
• He emphasized the importance of
empathy, stating that “as people are
more exposed to media, the greater is
their capability to imagine themselves as
strange persons in strange situations,
places and time than did people in any
previous historical epoch”
• He posited that mass media has
the power to foster the learning of
emphatic skills. The interactive and
integrative capabilities of media that
prevent societal disintegration are
critical to the success of efforts to
modernize
• This view resonates with Benedict
Anderson, he emphasized the role of printed communication and
capitalism in instilling nationalism and the sense of belongingness
among people who don’t know each other, by creating imagined
communities.
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C. Everett Rogers (1965 – 1966), whose

ideas were influenced by Lerner, espoused the
same paradigm but forwards a nuanced
relationship by treating mass media as a
factor that intervenes between antecedents
and consequences of modernizations.

In his theoretical model, the socioeconomic

antecedents would determine the capacity of
mass media exposure to result to the
indicators of modernization as illustrated
below

ANTECEDENTS PROCESS CONSEQUENCE

•Functional literacy • Mass Media •Empathy

•Education Exposure •Agricultural and Home
•Social Status innovativeness
•Age
•Political knowledge
•Cosmo politeness
•Achievement motivation
•Educational and
occupational aspirations

*NOTE: The terms “antecedents” and “Consequences” are used here in the sense
of a probable time order, but not necessarily in the sense of cause-result.

Modernization Paradigm
The presence of mass media in societies have been observed
by modernization scholars as correlated to the social, economic,
and political indices of development. The strength and power of
mass media to influence societies lies in its “one-way, top-down and
simultaneous and wide dissemination” and its capacity to shape
social processes, make meanings, identifies, and aspirations of a
community.
On that tine when world influence was polarized by two
superpowers:
the United States and the Soviet Union. Their influence reached every
sphere of the international scenario, including development. In this
context, the modernization paradigm promoted by political scientists
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and scholars of Western countries became so strong and so pervasive

in every dimension of social life that it became also known as the
"dominant paradigm”.
By the end of the 1970’s, criticism against the modernization
paradigm grew in the strength and influence questioning the
assumptions and conceptualizing of the paradigm especially in the
context of non-Western and developing societies. This period would
mark the shift to the cultural imperialism paradigm.

Demanding for the balanced flow of information: a

Fight against Cultural Imperialism
The cultural imperialism paradigm grew in influence from the
1960s to the 1980s in the context of the Cold War and the period of
decolonization and post-colonialism. Third world countries formed the
Non-Aligned Movement with a united purpose stated in the Non-
Aligned Countries Declaration of 1979, also known as the Havana
Declaration:
“the common struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-
colonialism, expansionism, racism, including Zionism, apartheid,
exploitation, power politics and all forms and manifestation of foreign
occupation, domination, and hegemony.”
The movement was also against the uneven flows of information
associated with uneven development through the pretense of the free
flow of information and the freedom of expression. In actuality, it
“meant” “free market” expression, meaning those who owned the
media had the right to decide what was expressed in it.

Proponents of Cultural Imperialism Paradigm

A. Herbert Schiller (1976)
The clearest and
most influential
theorists of the
cultural imperialism
tradition. He defines it
as:

“The •
concept of
cultural imperialism today best described the sum of the
processes by which a society is brought into
the modern world system and how its dominating stratum
is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes bribed into
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shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even

promote, the values and structures of the dominating
center of the system.”
• The theory takes on a macro-perspective of global power
dynamics and struggles among state economic relations,
particularly the concentration of control and resources at
the expense of the development of the rest of the world.
• Cultural imperialism theory argues that global audiences
are exposed to media messages dominantly deriving from
Western industrialized states.
• The concepts “cultural imperialism” and “media
imperialism” have minor differences but most of the
international communication literature consider the latter
as a category of the former.

B. Boyd Barret (1977)

• He defined
structure, distribution or content of
the media in any one country are
singly or together are subject to
substantial external pressures from
the media interests of any other
country or countries without
proportionate reciprocation of
influence by the country so affected.
• Media imperiali
having been designed to
maintain and expand
dependence and domination over the
world.  It is stark
contradiction to the
assumption of the modernization paradigm that sees
communication media as tools for
development. Cultural and media imperialism
approaches, together with its variant concepts of “cultural
dependency” and “electronic colonialism”, view media as
an instrument of major powers that serve as an obstacle
to steady progress between
developed and developing world.

C. Hesmondhalgh (2005)
• The concept of imperialism means
“building of empires” however the
use of the term cultural imperialism
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implies that with the end of the age of direct political and
economic control by colonial states a new form of indirect
power and concern has emerged.
• Cultural domination over less-developed countries that
would foster desires for western lifestyle and products
among postcolonial societies that would pave the way for
the entry of Western-based transnational corporations
that would then dominate non- Western economies.

D. Zenith Optimedia’s annual global ranking of the largest

media companies in the world. Television remains to be the
most important advertising medium, but it is now followed
by internet which has replaced print media as the second.
Digital advertising has been on the rise, with five digital
companies – Google, Facebook, Baidu, Yahoo, and Microsoft -
included in the top and representing 65% of the entire
internet advertising market, and accounting for more than a
third of the revenues of the largest
media owners listed.
The United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), demand change in its
communication policies with the goal of
balancing the relationship between
developed and developing states.
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The New World Information and

Communication Order (NWICO) movement was a collective resistance
to pressure UNESCO to
change the dynamics of news media that has been dismissive of the
interest and needs of the less affluent world, to change the “one-way
flow” of news, media, and cultural products of between the North and
South to a “two-way” flow.
NWICO movement resulted to the report of the MacBride
Commission entitled Many Voices, One World, which forwarded
recommendations that aimed to promote independence, diversity, and
pluralism of media and to strengthen the national media of the South.
The report aimed to address the problems of unequal access and flow
of communication due to media commercialization and concentration.
The recommendations were fruitless and failures, USA and UK
opposed the request and withdrew from UNESCO but eventually
rejoined.
Despite the arguments against cultural imperialism, the merits
of the approach continue to recognized by scholars.

Tomlinson (1999)
The paradigm maintains its relevance as it highlights the
expansionist nature of capitalism and its capacity to shape global
culture.
Rantanen (2005)
Sees the strength of the paradigm through its macro-level
analysis that is based on the uneven and asymmetrical political,
economic relations of the world system, and the implications of such
in developing societies.
Sparks (2012)
Cultural imperialism framework into the current context of
intensifying media corporations, and widening of gaps between North
and South. Also, array of competing states of varying powers and
influence compete and in some instances coordinate their political
and economic power to exert control over less developed and weaker
countries.

Transition from Communication and Development and

Cultural Imperialism to Cultural Pluralism
Criticisms against the cultural imperialism paradigm would
eventually pave the way for the emergence of a new paradigm termed
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“cultural pluralism”, other scholars would also refer to the paradigm

as “cultural globalization”.
The paradigm shift was a departure from the “one-way” model
of cultural imperialism towards a more sophisticated analysis of
“multidirectional flows” among country relations.
Cultural globalization refers to the transmission of ideas,
meanings, and values around the world in such a way as to extend
and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common
consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet,
popular culture media. The circulation of cultures enables individuals
to partake in extended social relations that cross national and
regional borders. It brings increasing interconnectedness among
different populations and cultures.

Proponents of Cultural Pluralism

A. Rantanen (2005),
- Called the shifts of paradigm as the
homogenization-heterogenization debate.
Homogenization is that mighty
culture has invaded local culture as well
as it has become the dominant culture in
local area that aims to eliminate the local
culture. Society becomes homogenous.
Everyone conforms to western ideal. It also
results that loss of individual culture and
religions. There are more market
competition as well.
Cultural heterogenization or
multicultural society, means region
culture was widely disseminated and accepted by other societies and
cultures and meanwhile enhance the cultural
diversity in local society. It could be resulted that richer countries
gives incentive to poorer countries to protect them as well as to adopt
more sustainable practices.
She said that the past two paradigms, the modernization and
imperialism approach as being under the homogenization. While,
heterogenization is for Cultural pluralism.

Paradigm Global media seen Consequences

as?
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A. Communications and Homogeneous Homogeneous

development

Homogeneous Homogeneous
B. Cultural Imperialism

Heterogeneous Heterogeneous
C. Cultural Pluralism

References

• Abelos, A.V., et. al. (2018). The Contemporary World. Chapter

7: Globalization and Media: Creating The Global Village pp. 93-
115. Mutya Publishing House, Inc.

• Coronacion, D.C., et.al. (2018). Convergence: A College

Textbook in Contemporary World. Chapter 6: Global Media
Cultures pp. 111-124. Books Atpb. Publishing Corp.

• Lobo, J.L. (2019). The Contemporary World. Chapter 11: A

World of Ideas: Global Media Cultures pp 179-208. Books
Atbp. Publishing Corp.