Media Globalization

The NBS hit show "Heroes" gives a very good example of media globalization. By creating a show about everyday people from around the world with abnormal powers, it is able to address a number of other very important issues. Numbers of controversial topics are brought up subtly using the removed context of abnormality through superpowers. Things like alienation brought on by race, social status or sexuality have some light shed on them. By creating this pretext and subtext the show is able to be extremely liberal without being liberal at all, appearing as just a TV show to those who want to see it as such and something much more to those who look a little deeper.

Because of the wide variety of cultures and demographics represented in the show, it has a wide viewership all over the world. The fact that almost immediately after the show airs it is available to watch online at NBC.com only helps this process along, making is available virtually anywhere with an internet connection. To emphasize this I would like to mention the "Heroes World Tour" in which cast and crew travelled together to a number of different countries and were greeted by huge, excited crowds. By having that subtext which is discernible from the allusion- and connotation-filled social pretext, it is understandable to a wide number of people from drastically different backgrounds.

Don't get me wrong, the show isn't 100% about deep messages and truths about mankind. On its own it's an incredibly entertaining and well-done story, with dramatic action sequences and funny quips and cultural references. In the same way that it is universal it is very definitively American, and no other nation could claim a phenomenon as varied and full as this one. Each pocket of the national culture can view it in terms of their own values, and it responds to each of those value-sets by having, somewhere, a storyline that will fit them.

McLuhan said "the medium is the message", and here we see that it's very true. The trick is to identify the lense through which that message is viewed.

Asking Questions About Paramore

Paramore (Hayley Williams)

Is their audience what is presumed to be a traditional male-dominated, rock-and-roll audience or have they also significance for female fans?

Paramore, despite having a well-known female lead-singer, is actually more popular with males than with females (and a lot of this probably has to do with the femininity of the singer). One of the appeals of more modern pop-punk bands is the attractiveness of the singer, and female fans are much less likely to respond to an attractive female singer than they are a male. The females who respond to this band do so more out of praise and support for a woman who was able to break into an extremely male-dominated field, as female singers or even musicians in this genre of music are very few and far inbetween, if found at all.

What other kinds of demographic factors such as age, class or ethnicity shape their fan base?

The average interest age goes from the late teens to the eary twenties (basically high school to college). As moreso the hipsters and scenesters are attracted to the band, the class where most fans are found is middle to upper-middle (since these are basically the type of people who have the money and interest to be hipsters in the first place). The ethnicity of Paramore fans is mostly white since local scenes (where Paramore was originally spread) are mostly white, though they have also found a small foothold in small pockets of the black community due to radio and TV exposure.

"The Medium is the Message"

The first picture in the series shows a steam ship. Around the turn of the century, ocean-crossing steam ships including luxury liners and transport ships were becoming more and more common. Because of the dependable nature of the ship's machinery and the regularity of the trips, such a journey became less of a journey and much more affordable. In that way steam ships came to represent an easier connection to new lands and as a medium conveyed the idea of progress.

One of the precious cargos the steam ships carried were droves and droves of immigrants. Finally having the affordable oppourtunity to travel across and start anew, they boarded the ships and set out. As a medium these people represented change and hope, as the middle picture is widely understood to mean.

This second medium carried within it a third. Every immigrant arriving to new lands (notably America) brought with them their culture. This culture as a medium represented a very different way of living, and even between people from the same country the culture could vary greatly. As a result this culture became imbedded in the places where they settled, turning them into something more familiar or welcoming.

So while the three pictures above are not traditional mediums, they are each symbols containing well understood messages, one within the other, each in some way an extension of the one that came before. In that way they are the messages themselves, completely indistinguishable their central concepts.