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.