Category: BLOG: Recent & ongoing reflections on ACIC & cultural flow

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Too many (all?) global media and culture theories ignore the unique position of the United States

Dal Jong Yin’s “Hierarchy in Globalization Trends.” The model is quite useful. However, I believe it needs to be adjusted to account for the unique situation/positionality of the United States.

I am currently reading, and reviewing, a well-done text book, Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age, written by Simon Fraser scholar Dal Yong Jin. Jin, unlike many global media and communication scholars, has not been fully seduced by the cultural globalization, hybridization and glocalization perspectives whose adherents have dominated global media and communication studies for more than two decades — is this the longest ever dialectical swing away from one pole (cultural imperialism) to the other (cultural globalization), I sometimes wonder? 😉

Jin develops a solid middle ground between cultural imperialism and cultural globalization in this textbook, published in 2019. That is, he is careful to acknowledge that the reality of hybridization, which sees cultures inevitably mixed in cultural products and objects, does not erase substantial differences in cultural and political economic power. Jin also smartly acknowledges the fact that everything is indeed a hybrid, to one extent or another,  does not prevent hegemonic forces of globalization from co-opting and (ab)using hybridization and glocalization to suit their own globalizing (cultural) interests.

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Deconstructing cultural globalization and its valorization of individual agency

So, my work very much tilts toward the cultural imperialism side of a continuum of cultural imperialism vs. cultural globalization in the field of global media and communication studies. That is, I do not see individuals as having all that much power in terms of the age-old structure-agency debate.

I believe that we are primarily structured by forces outside of ourselves — long-running historical forces such as politics, ideology, culture, religion, socially-proscribed gender roles, etc. — primarily shape us and largely direct what sorts of “choices” we do (not) have.

I am especially very much opposed to the claim made by libertarian theorists that we do things own our “own.” We NEVER do anything completely on our own. NEVER!

What do I mean by this?

What I mean is that the entire history of the universe, the earth, and most importantly, the entire history of humanity — meaning the history of all human beings who have ever lived — precedes us. All of those human beings collectively, across time, through their also historically and socially situated being and actions created the social conditions and structures in which we today live as “individuals.” Continue reading “Deconstructing cultural globalization and its valorization of individual agency”

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Large video streaming platforms are driving more dubbing — and more language options for viewers

The Amazon Original movie One Night in Miami is available in German to U.S.-based consumers. It is part of a larger trend toward Amazon and Netflix offering their own original content in more different languages to more subscribers — regardless of their geographic location.

One of my greatest and most long-running frustrations with cultural content, especially with movies and television, has been the lack of language options offered for this content. In theory, with the advent of the DVD in 1990s, it became possible to easily encode countless language options for films for the consumer.

This did NOT happen, thanks mostly to a still-in-place and archaic and infuriatingly restrictive region encoding system that ensured that consumers in one place, for instance, in the United States, would NOT have access to filmic content dubbed into languages other than, for the most part, Spanish.

In my long-term quest to raise both of my daughters, now 14 and 16 respectively, as English-German bilinguals, I bought a region-free DVD player in 2004 — the year my oldest daughter was born — and immediately began ordering large numbers of DVDs from Amazon.de (Amazon Germany) to ensure that we had a good library of mostly, but not only, American-made films (Pixar, Disney, etc.) that we could consume in German. Our DVD library eventually hit several hundred DVDs, all of these sent to us “illegally” by Amazon.de — illegally because, technically, there is a warning at the very beginning when you play each of these DVDs that it is “illegal” to purchase them from a region in which you are not living and play them on a DVD player not located in that region 🙄!

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Is Netflix sneakily serving up only Netflix Originals to VPN users?

A PrivateVPN web page
Netflix appears to be “end-running” VPN users trying to access content walled off by arcane but also deeply entrenched nationally-based copyright laws by simply allowing VPN users into its various Netflix national iterations BUT then offering access ONLY to Netflix Originals, or Netflix produced content, and surreptitiously blocking access to non-Netflix produced content.

I’ve been using a VPN in order to mask my IP address and so that I can stream content from Germany-located content providers such as Videoload.de and Maxdome.de and Netflix Germany from here in Littleton, Colorado in the United States. I’ve been using a VPN for more than a decade for this purpose, though I have not always used ExpressVPN.

I’ve been doing this to circumvent the anachronistic and MADDENING cultural content borders that block access to content based on one’s geophysical location in the world, which, online, is marked by one’s IP address, or the string of numbers that identifies your computer, phone, tablet etc. so that information you are pulling off the internet can be directed to your device. And I’ve been trying to circumvent these content borders on the Internet so that I can use cultural content — primarily American-produced content that is dubbed into German — to help raise my two daughters bilingually in German and English.

It has not always worked. Cultural content distributors such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, Videoload.De and Maxdome.De are locked in a constant battle with VPN producers with each trying to outdo the other. Unfortunately for me, cultural content distributors mostly seem to win this battle: They write code that allows them to identify if someone is coming to their content from outside of the limited national boundaries in which they are permitted to distribute content to due to MADDENING copyright laws that require cultural distributors to pay more for the rights to distribute content if they want to distribute that content to more viewers in more places around the world.

ARGGGHHHH!!!! It is all so damn MADDENING!!!!

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