John Tomlinson and Cultural Imperialism

Original source of the text below is" http://www.bfe2009.net/3.html

John Tomlinson is Professor of Cultural Sociology; Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham; Head of Research for Cultural, Communications and Media Studies (RAE Unit 66); and Chair of the School Professorial Group at Nottingham Trent University. John Tomlinson is an authority on the cultural aspects of the globalization process and has lectured at many distinguished universities across Europe, the United States and East Asia as well as at venues such as The Bauhaus Institute, Dessau; Tate Britain; The Council of Europe; the Festival Filosofia, Modena and Demos, Hungary. He has worked as a consultant on issues of globalization, culture and politics to several international public sector institutions including UNESCO, The Council of Europe, The Commonwealth Secretariat, and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and Nato Defence College. Articles, profiles and interviews on his work have been published in national newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, the Guanming Daily, Beijing, the Hufvudsbladet, Helsinki and on Finnish Television, YLE TV1 and Italian National Television and Radio (RAI).


John Tomlinson is on the editorial advisory boards of several journals, including Theory, Culture and Society, Journal of International Communication, Global Media and Communication and the Asian Journal of International Studies. Published books include Cultural Imperialism and Globalisation and Culture, and John Tomlinson's recent work has explored the place of speed within modern telemediated culture, resulting in his latest book, The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy published by Sage Publications in October 2007. He is currently developing research into the constitution of public culture and cultural values within contemporary capitalist societies.



KEYNOTE ABSTRACT


Emergent Agendas of Cultural Globalization

After nearly two decades of analysis of the cultural dimensions of globalization, the overall picture remains far from clear. The early - largely speculative - scenarios of the emergence of either a unified or a uniform global culture have mostly been abandoned, as the inherent complexity of the globalization process has been more properly understood. But we seem to be left with a set of familiar, seemingly intractable, issues. These are either problems of empirical difficulty – for example the nature, extent and significance of Western cultural dominance - or of essential theoretical dispute or value incompatibility - such as the unresolved debate over the competing claims of cultural cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity.

In one way or another, these debates have all been about the contents of global cultures - be these artefacts and their symbolic meanings, beliefs, tastes, styles, values, or identities. However, if we approach culture in a different way – focussing instead upon the core dynamics of global modernity itself – some new issues and perspectives present themselves. The lecture will explore two of these emerging agendas.

The first of these is what I will call the global management of cultural diversity. Whilst it is increasingly clear that global cultural diversity is not directly threatened by an overwhelming tendency towards homogenization, we are nonetheless witnessing a deep transformation in the context in which the diversity of culture exists. The inherently modern drive towards institutional regulation, combined with the ever-rising gradient of the commodification of culture, is producing new - and sometimes perverse - ways in which cultural difference is understood, promoted and valued.

The second agenda concerns the impact of the combination of an accelerating global capitalist economy - ‘fast capitalism’ - and the ubiquity of globalizing media and communications technologies on the common texture of everyday life. The reiterated practices, protocols and routines associated with these core features of contemporary modernity are producing a new and challenging condition that I call ‘global immediacy’, which is displacing some of the founding assumptions of the earlier industrial modernity which gave rise to the globalization process. The coming of immediacy has potentially far-reaching implications for the way in which we understand future cultural production and consumption practices and the values we attach to them.

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Vernacular Culture

As an analytical category in cultural theory, "vernacular" appeared as early as 1960 in an American Anthropologist article entitled " Vernacular Culture." In this article, Margaret Lantis used the term to refer to "the commonplace" (p. 202). "High" culture was only accessible by the elites of a society, but "vernacular culture" remained accessible to all. From this usage, two vectors of meaning came to be associated with the term. On the one hand, vernacular forms are those available to individuals or groups who are subordinated to institutions, and on the other, they are a common resource made available to everyone through informal social interaction. Based on this dual meaning, the vernacular came to refer to discourse that coexists with dominant culture but is held separate from it.

As the concept emerged in communication studies however, it became bifurcated along these two lines. On the one hand, the vernacular is imagined as local discourse that is distinct from larger institutional discourses. In this "subaltern" view, the vernacular voice is that of the subordinate counteragent seeking to be heard over hegemony. On the other hand, the vernacular is imagined asa shared resource, a sensus communis, or community doxa, In this "common" view, the vernacular is a communal chorus that emerges from the multiplicity of voices speaking in the noninstitutional discursive spaces of quotidian life. Both of these conceptions, however, rely on a strict division that fails to fully account for the vernacular's hybrid characteristics (p. 493).

Howard, G, H. (2008). The vernacular web of participatory media, Critical studies in media communicaition Vol 25(5). pp. 490-513.

Charles Hedrick

http://polebridgepress.com/Fellows/hedrick.html
Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies
Southwest Missouri State University

Eric Clapton - Crossroads Guitar Festival 2004

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