Reaction paper 6

Chapter 5 explores the effects of the rapid evolution of international communication and its relationship with globalization. The chapter particularly talks of the way globalization can be said to have become synonymous with Americanization, and how this Americanization impacts global communication.

The Americanization trend involves the sheer number of imported products, especially entertainment-related programs, from the major Western states and most notably from the United States to other countries. Case in point, in Latin America almost all imports are from the US, and even in the UK and the EU, which already have fairly solid production systems of their own, there is a lot of reliance on US imports for entertainment programming. Here, the chapter talks of a “Hollywood Hegemony”, which the author proves through statistics showing the dominance of movies coming from the United States in foreign markets, as they take a huge chunk of that market even compared to locally-produced movies. 

When it comes to Europe, the market for movies is usually considered when it comes to statistics as homogeneous, which is one of the explanations that can be offered for US domination: since Europe is an eclectic mix of languages and has no official “lingua franca”, English is one language that “works” all throughout the continent. When it comes to movies that are locally- produced, it is evident that they would not profit from the same distribution as English-language movies since they can only target a much smaller portion of the population worldwide. In general, this is an issue that concerns all non-English movies. Usually, people tend to stick with the languages and the culture they know, and since everyone is so exposed to the American/English-language culture, and considering the enormous quality of Hollywood productions that cannot be compared to any other market today, US domination in entertainment is only natural.
I think this can be changed by encouraging people to open up to other markets, cultures and other genres of movies away from "blockbuster" movies that are intended to mass audiences. The language barrier can also be improved by promoting the use of subtitles and dubbing.
But I would not qualify the Americanization trend as hegemony, as I believe each market does allow space for other trends as well. In Morocco, as much as the U.S. has a huge influence, there were also trends that were very influential coming from Mexican productions, Egyptian productions, and most recently Turkish productions. These trends have not translated to the filmmaking industry, but their presence on television, which is the biggest media influencer in the country, is undeniably impactful.