Wednesday, 18 February 2015

Entry 3 - Globalisation


The reading is about the production of media at a ‘global level’. Allowing me to understand how one media company could come to own a variety of media practices around the world. For example News Corporation is one of the leading conglomerates with various subsidiaries in England (The Sun, The Times) but also in America (20th Century Fox).  However it isn't just the fact there are large media conglomerates buying most of the market, with the introduction of the internet, globalisation became more effective whether it was seen as good or bad. For instance, as information circulated online, people could access it without having to read a printed newspaper or even watch the TV. Due to this, Newspapers began to suffer and more recently have started to release there articles online so that they can keep themselves in business. But this isn't that great as search engines such as Google can determine ‘what information is internationally available’ (Balnaves et al., 2008) meaning a website such as the New York Times might not be available in the UK.

One of the big issues that is highlighted in the chapter is the fact conglomerates own more than just one type of media. This poses the question about how we as the audience know what the difference between fact and propaganda is because everything we know of is being fed to us from the same source. For me this was important because even as a photographer you are at risk of your images being seen as supplying ideas due to the invention of Photoshop.

Along with globalisation comes one major issue. Now that the whole world is connected in one way or another, how much of someone’s life is private, especially in terms of social networking and the internet in general. Even saying this, does it matter? I’m asking this as its now become so normal to share everything. This just shows how our culture has become overly mediated (Stevenson, 2014:1).

Overall, I feel that the reading I have done proves how much the internet has changed the way things are done. For instance it allows you to achieve things much quicker than before but it shows how reliant everyone is on one thing. For me, I am able to share photographs with people from across the world, which wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. Thus showing that globalisation can be effective in some terms of the media, whereas in others it can be damaging.

Bibliography

Long, P and Wall, T (2012) Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2nd Edition), London: Pearson.

Balnaves, M., Donald D. and Donald, S.H. (2008) The Global Media Atlas, London: British Film Institute.

Stevenson, N (2014) The Transformation of the Media: Globalisation, Morality and Ethics, London: Routledge.

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