"From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the age of Globalization" Robert Stam and Ella Shohat

In discussions of globalization and identity one must look at the media because they are the way we are able to interact with foreign places and peoples . Because the media has such a global reach it allows for culture to move around the world and outside of just one nation .Because or this the third and first worlds have become interlinked and depend on one another

I think in our society the term globalization has both negative and positive connotations . We see it as a way to interact with the world around us and all learn to live together as tolerant people but it also become a way with which to homogenize the cultures of the world . To avoid both extremes we need to find a place in the middle in which to exist.

Right now we seem to inhabit a world of neo-colonialism where the first world exports culture and the third world receives it . We can see an example with the show Bay-watch , which is the most watched show world wide mostly because it has been exported to so many countries . Yet here in the west we rarly see productions from other parts of the world other than a few telenovellas which is mostly due to the high number of Spanish speaking Americans.

All this exchange of information takes ideologies with it . Meaning that the west is exporting it's media and ideologies around the world. When people see the show friends on TV they want to live like the people they see on the show and adopt a more western lifestyle.

I think an artist who deals with this well is Banksy because he mixes pop culture media images to create new meanings and make us question the world we live in and how passive we have become to the media both that we produce on a larger scale and that we take in on a personally level.