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Media industries in 2026 are fundamentally global. A Korean drama dominates Netflix worldwide; a Swedish streaming service (Spotify) carries music from every continent; a Chinese-owned platform (TikTok) shapes popular culture in the West; Hollywood studios depend on Chinese box office; British public service broadcasters must compete with US streaming giants. None of this was obvious thirty years ago. Understanding globalisation — what it is, how it works, and what its cultural and economic effects are — is essential for the AQA Industries component.
In this lesson we examine Terry Flew on globalisation; cultural imperialism vs hybridity; global/local tensions; Bollywood and Indian cinema; K-pop and the Korean Wave; Netflix's "global English" strategy; and what all this means for UK media.
Globalisation refers to the increasing interconnectedness of economies, societies, and cultures across borders. In media it manifests as:
Terry Flew, an Australian media scholar (not to be confused with other Flews), is associated on many A-Level courses with a nuanced account of globalisation. In Understanding Global Media (2018, second edition) he argues that globalisation is not simply Americanisation or Westernisation — it is a complex, multidirectional process producing both homogenisation and hybridity.
Flew's key points:
Flew rejects both extreme cultural imperialism theses (which see globalisation as one-way Americanisation) and naive cosmopolitanism (which imagines a universal global culture). He sits between, emphasising complexity and agency.
The cultural imperialism thesis was developed by scholars like Herbert Schiller (1969, 1976) and others from the 1960s onward. It argues:
Schiller documented US media exports (Hollywood, advertising, news) and connected them to US corporate and political interests. In the 1970s, UNESCO's MacBride Commission produced a report (Many Voices, One World, 1980) arguing for a New World Information and Communication Order to counter Western media dominance. The US and UK rejected these proposals.
Cultural imperialism has been criticised for being:
Still, it captures real dynamics — Hollywood's global reach, Disney's cultural prominence, English-language dominance in corporate communication.
The alternative to cultural imperialism is hybridity, associated with theorists like Marwan Kraidy and Jan Nederveen Pieterse. The idea is that global media flows produce hybrid forms: mixtures of global and local, new cultural products that are neither fully imported nor purely indigenous.
Examples:
Hybridity suggests globalisation is neither simply imperialist nor simply homogenising — it produces new forms.
flowchart LR
A[Global Media Flows] --> B[Cultural Imperialism<br/>one-way flow]
A --> C[Hybridity<br/>mixing and adaptation]
A --> D[Regional Powers<br/>Bollywood, K-pop, Nollywood]
B --> E[Critics: passive audiences, outdated]
C --> F[Examples: K-pop, Bollywood, anime]
D --> G[Non-Western globalisation]
A useful concept is "glocalisation" — global products adapted for local markets. Roland Robertson (1995) coined the term. Examples:
Glocalisation highlights that global reach often requires local sensitivity.
Hollywood is simultaneously the textbook case for cultural imperialism and a complicated case in practice.
Arguments for Hollywood dominance:
Complications:
Flew would read Hollywood as globally powerful but not monolithically imperialist — its outputs are shaped by global markets in complex ways.
Bollywood (the Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry) is the world's largest by number of films produced — around 1,500–2,000 films a year across all Indian languages, about a fifth to a third in Hindi. Its characteristics:
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