Reader Response (Draft 1)

In “Globalization of Culture Through the Media”, Kraidy (2002) discusses the different perspectives of the responsibility of mass media in the globalization of culture. Kraidy mentions that some argued the cultural imperialism theory, which refers to Western countries influencing the world with the media, was the initial driving force for globalization. After the Cold War, globalization theory evolved, and it is about different cultures coming together due to the mass media. Kraidy feels that the mass media intensifies the hybridization of different cultures that comes together through globalization.

I do agree with Kraidy from his point of view that the mass media intensifies the hybridization of different cultures that comes together through globalization. I find that this is highly relevant to Singapore. Singapore does not have her own culture unlike countries like Japan or Korea, where they both have their own cultures that are unique to them. Singapore is a multiracial country; we have different races living together in Singapore. With the hybridization of different cultures mainly from the Chinese, Malay, Indian and others, it gives Singapore a unique culture. In addition, Singapore culture was also influenced by the British, as they colonized Singapore in the past, Singapore had thus adopted English as the first language used. This shows that through cultural hybridization, Singapore’s unique culture was created.

With the mass media, it intensifies this cultural hybridization we could now search for the recipes of the different traditional food from the different races, or even watch the different television programmes that are in Chinese, Malay or Tamil. In addition, with globalization, people from around the world become more interconnected to one another. Mass media allows information to be transmitted from one place to another easily. Today, we can be informed with news of the United States, or other parts of the world with just a click away. This shows that mass media do helps to intensifies cultural hybridization even across the world.

However, I feel that Kraidy should give more examples of cultural hybridization in his article. He could talks about how mass media and cultural hybridization led on to the Korean popular music culture dominating the world today instead of only the American music culture in the past. This will gives a comparision of how cultural hybridization influenced the world with mass media.  

In conclusion, I feel that mass media further strengthen cultural hybridization today.