[lbo-talk] "Cultural" Imperialism and $784 Billion NetTransferfrom the South to the North

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Sean:

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my missive.  I hardly disagree with
any specifics that you listed, especially the highly negative role played by
intellectual property rights.  My concern is with a more general causal
model of media influence.  Are you implying that the media really make
people think what they do, and the leftist denunciatory diatribes sometimes
claim to explain their own dismal failure to capture people's attention? 

I think it is a far more complex causal relationship of mutual causality -
advertisers pickup up popular themes already existing in their target
audience and gently manipulating and steering them in the desired direction,
so the audience never ceases to believe that they reflections of their own
thoughts on TV as opposed to something being broadcasted to them.  And that
indeed is not far away from the truth - good propaganda does reflect what
people actually think and want to think and only directs it in the desired
direction.  There is far more consensus and far less manipulation in
propaganda than many media critics on the left want to admit. 

Then you come with the concept of "cultural imperialism: which again is
something from the denunciatory repertoire of the left that has little
analytical value.  The relationship that you describe, i.e. certain cultural
products achieving dominant position in the natural effect of the market.
The intense competition among various products force them to the lowest
common denominator, which is pandering to the most basic human emotions and
the most widely entrenched cultural stereotypes. Those products that do this
most effectively - as many US commercial products do - win.  End of story.  

The concept of cultural imperialism not only does not explain anything new
in this process, but obscures the fact that all commercial competitive
markets work like that, whether they are US, French, Islamic or Chinese.  US
cultural products win because they do a better job in pandering to the
debased popular tastes and instincts than the cultural products of other
countries.  Pandering to Third World anti-Americanism is not science but
propaganda on a par with that produced by Hollywood.

Wojtek