> In this case, people
> around the world started seeing how ugly this country is - and has
> been - beneath the rosy images manufactured by Hollywood.
There's also the issue of transnational audiences. Nearly every large country of more than 50 million people has its own indigenous TV, music, radio and print culture these days. (Film, interestingly, is a less useful metric: Hollywood movies still sell the most tickets globally, but cinemas are only a small part of the world's media diet - and of course Bollywood film still reigns supreme in India). There are huge videogame and digital media cultures in the BRIC nations (Vkontake, Qzone), as well as in most middle-income nations. The scale of media change in the past 10 years is really extraordinary -- previous media revolutions were much more limited, moved more slowly, and were mostly confined to circuits of power and privilege.
What's happening is that all those cameras, lenses, blogs and microphones are starting to look back at the former Empire - and what they're seeing isn't pretty.
-- DRR