Reading Analysis - 10/16

A.) So I read the article "The Case for Contamination" by Kwame Appiah, and among other things, I thought it was interesting that Appiah used people's responses to popular Western television shows in his argument aganist cultural imperialism. The point he was trying to make was that the audience of the shows (Israeli Arabs, Dutch, Moroccan Jews, etc.) did not all have the same response to the shows and therefore were affected differently by them. "Media-cultural imperialists" say that the center of the ruling sector (ie the West) essentially controls the peripheral sectors through various means, including advertising. If this is true, then all of these groups after watching American TV shows should take away the exact same message, or, the message that the West intended to provide. But as proven by Appiah, each group takes something different away. For example, Zulu college students talked about how they began to understand relationships between a man and a woman as well as a person and his father after watching the soap opera "Days of Our Lives." Why would "multinational capitalism" try to instill this message in their "subjects" if it's more concerned with spreading the word of capitalism and advanced technology and the such? So, different cultures' responses to these TV shows proves that these cultures are not controlled by a centralized superpower and have the ability to make decisions for themselves.

B.) Can we really say that homogeneity as a result of globalization is really homogeneity at all if everyone has such a wide array of "things" to choose from and therefore has such different lives anyway?
      If we asked the members of numerous exotic cultures whether or not they would embrace change, what do you think a majority of them would say?
      Does the increased price of cultural artifacts and items provide incentives for these cultures to change to a more Western way of life?

C.) This article was assigned because it shows how there are some groups of people who are potentially slowing down modernization in places where it is most likely inevitable and necessary. It also ties back to the Inustrial Revolution because it talks about how newer generations now have the ability to pursue their own interests as opposed to just following in their parents' footsteps. This was one of the main reasons the IR got started when and where it did. Basically, the articl is saying that change is good.