> I'm fascinated by Naruto and Hello Kitty and how seemingly very
> Japanese media icons are being accepted in the West, across enormous
> barriers of language and culture.
>
> Is it something like that?
>
> Bollywood is an enormous international force.
>
> What is coming out of China?
Online videogames, Cantopop, some great films, though animation and comics are just starting to take off. China is also tightly linked with the Hong Kong film industry - it's hard to separate the two anymore.
What's fascinating isn't just the explosion of local media - FM radio stations are blossoming across the periphery, e.g. Bangladesh, West Africa. It's the powerful South-South linkages or links between semi-peripheries - Bollywood, source of 25% of the world's films, is the most famous example, of course, but there are tons of other examples:
- Russian mass media (music, film, TV) across Central Asia, Eastern Europe - Egyptian mss media across Arabic-speaking countries - Brazilian mass media across Lat Am and Lusophone Africa - S Korean mass media across East Asia (the Hallyu wave) - Nigeria mass media across West Africa, S Africa
The thing is... all these media explosions are happening *simultaneously*. To be perfectly honest, we media scholars don't have good models to explain this just yet. But we're definitely entering the world of post-American media.
-- DRR