THEMATIC FOCUS

Arts, entertainment, and popular culture increasingly reflected the influence of a globalized society

§ Music: Reggae

• Originated in the former British colony of Jamaica

  • • example of Cultural syncretism

      • • blended: Traditional mento, American jazz and rhythm & blues (especially New Orleans R&B practiced by Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint), Local christian church singing, Calypso, and African music

• Black Nationalism

  • • The reggae music of Jamaican Bob Marley (1945–1981) spread throughout the world, rallying people of African ancestry to the cause

    • Reggae is noted for its tradition of social criticism (ie. Buffalo Soldier, Get Up Stand Up)

    • Marley’s song “Get Up Stand Up,” although written as a form of resistance to persistent racism and poverty in Jamaica, nonetheless spoke to millions of people of African ancestry struggling for their freedom

      • • In his song, Marley urged people to stand up for their rights and to continue fighting for them

§ Movies: Bollywood

Indian movie making industry

• began in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1930s

• several genres emerged in the first 70 years

  • • the historical epic

    • the curry western

    • the courtesan film

    • the mythological movie

Early 21st century

• Indian film industry remained the largest component

  • • producing as many as 1,000 feature films annually in all of India's major languages and in a variety of cities

    • international audiences began to develop among South Asians in the United Kingdom and in the United States

liberalization of India's television markets

• until the early 2000s, there were only two national television channels in India, both government-owned

• the proliferation of private television channels resulted in Bollywood films and pop entertainment were broadcast virtually nonstop.

• Muslim families

  • • Muslim families that observe purdah had little access to Bollywood before the early 2000s

      • • purdah -- meaning that the women are supposed to stay out of sight of men they're not related to

    • with Bollywood being broadcast into homes, these families now had access to the cultural influence of this medium

    • Controversy

      • • secret gatherings where girls and boys from conservative Muslim families meet to practice Bollywood dance moves

        • attempt to live out their own version of a whirlwind Bollywood romance

        • The boys and girls at the party are matched up by height. They dance together. Maybe they do a little grinding. They talk about love ... and marriage

        • That doesn't sound like a radical event for an American teenager, but in a predominantly conservative Muslim neighborhoods in the Indian it was unheard of

§ Social media: Facebook, Twitter

Facebook

• Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook

• 2010s -- it was the most downloaded mobile app globally

• May 17, 2012 -- initial public offering (IPO) at $38 a share (The company was valued at $104 billion)

• December 2018 -- Facebook claimed that it had more than 2.3 billion monthly active users

• Facebook has been subject to extensive media coverage and many controversies

  • • user privacy (Cambridge Analytica data scandal)

    • political manipulation (2016 U.S. election)

    • psychological effects such as addiction and low self-esteem

    • uncontrolled content including: fake news, conspiracy theories, copyright infringement, hate speech, etc.

    • Commentators have accused Facebook of willingly facilitating the spread of such content

Twitter

• launched in July 2006

• 2012 -- more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day

• November 7, 2013 -- initial public offering (IPO) at $26 a share ( valuation of around US$31 billion)

• 2014 -- revealed that the United Kingdom's GCHS has a tool named BIRDSONG for "automated posting of Twitter updates", and a tool named BIRDSTRIKE for "Twitter monitoring and profile collection

• 2018 -- Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users

• Twitter has been subject to extensive media coverage and many controversies

  • • multiple examples of compromised accounts sending falsified tweets (high-profile hacks of official accounts)

    • 2016 -- U.S. national intelligence reported both Sputnik and RT had been used as vehicles for Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

    • 2017 -- revealed that Twitter was avoided paying taxes by using offshore companies

    • Twitter bot

      • • capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products, and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication

    • Twitter is banned completely in Iran, China, and North Korea and has been intermittently blocked in numerous countries

    • May 2020 -- Twitter limited the reach of two separate tweets from President Donald Trump

      • • Twitter determined that it violated rules involving the glorification of violence and placed a notice on the tweet.

        • the tweet is hidden from Trump’s timeline but is accessible once a user clicks a “view” button

§ Television: BBC

• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

  • • world's oldest national broadcaster

      • • first radio live public broadcast in 1920

        • 1930 -- Experimental television broadcasts were started

        • 1934 -- Limited regular broadcasts

        • WWII -- Television broadcasting was suspended from 1 September 1939 to 7 June 1946

    • world's largest national broadcaster

      • • as of 2020-- total number of staff is 35,402

• BBC World Service Television launched on 14 October 1991

  • • competes against CNN

    • launched in Asia on 14 October 1991

    • launched in Africa on 15 April 1992

    • launched in the Arab world on 11 March 2008

    • 2020--operates in more than 40 languages

• criticism

  • • accusations from the political right

      • • Peter Sisson (a main news presenter at the BBC) said in2001, "at the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left"

    • accusations from the political left

      • • Owen Jones (columnist for The Guardian stated, "the truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers"

    • 2018 opinion poll by BMG Research found that 40% of the British public think that the BBC is politically partisan, with a nearly even split between those that believe it leans to the left or right

§ Sports: World Cup soccer, the Olympics

Olympics

• The Olympic Games were athletic competitions held in Greece approximately every four years from 776 B.C.E. to 393 C.E..

• After several years of planning, the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896.

• The Olympics means different things to different people

  • • Global cooperation

      • • The ideals of the Olympics brings the youth of the world together in friendly competition.

    • Gender Equality

      • • women were first allowed to compete in the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris

          • • By 1992 -- 35 countries fielded all-male deligations

            • By 2010 -- only 3 countries had never sent female Athletes to the games (Brunei, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar)

            • 2012- London Olympics

              • • every country competing included female athletes

                • female athletes were able to compete in all the same sports as men

      • Nationalism

        • • the games have been used as a platform to promote political ideologies almost from its inception

          • 1936 Olympics in Berlin

            • • Nazi Germany wished to portray the National Socialist Party as benevolent and peace-loving when they hosted the games

              • Also they used the Games to display Aryan superiority

                • this goal was blunted by African American Jesse Owens (won 4 gold medals) and Hungarian Jew Ibolya Csák.

      • Cold War Politics

        • • 1956 Olympics-Blood in the Water match (Hungary vs USSR)

          • 1972 Olympic basketball

          • 1980 Olympic in Moscow

            • • United States and sixty-five other countries boycotted the Olympic in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

              • 1980 Olympic hockey

          • 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles

            • • The Soviet Union and 15 other nations countered by boycotting the 1984 games in the United States (they boycotted the boycott)

              • Romania, a Warsaw Pact country, opted to compete despite Soviet demands

      • Olympic Project for Human Rights (1968)

        • • The story behind this iconic Olympics protest

World Cup Soccer

• Russia Uses the World Cup to Score Publicity Points | The Daily Show

• The Simpsons take on soccer

• The Simpsons - Brazil World Cup 2014

• FIFA and the World Cup: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO-breaks are for language) (0:17-3:29; 3:58-7:46; 7:48-13:10)

Consumer culture became globalized and transcended national borders

§ Online commerce: Alibaba, eBay

Alibaba

• a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology

• Founded on April 4, 1999 in Hangzhou China

  • • company's name came from the character Ali Baba from the Middle Eastern folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights because of its universal appeal.

• world's largest retailer and e-commerce company

  • • September 19, 2014 -- Alibaba was the biggest US IPO in history

    • online sales and profits surpassed all US retailers (including Walmart, Amazon, and eBay) combined since 2015

• Controversies

  • • 2011 -- accused of defrauding Gold Supplier members and then falsifying the corrective actions

    • May 2012 -- a US law enforcement agent posing as an American broker representing persons in Iran posted an advertisement on Alibaba.com seeking to purchase uranium

      • • August 2013 -- man from Sierra Leone was arrested in New York attempting to fulfill the request

        • determined that the samples contained an insignificant amount of uranium, and the man was acquitted at trial.

    • counterfeit items

      • • brands whose sales have been affected by the counterfeit products continue to blame Alibaba for not taking any action against the issue

    • Alibaba reached a settlement agreement in December 2018 to allegations of violations to the Securities Act in the U.S.

      • • agreed to pay $75 million to settle the lawsuit

eBay

• eBay was founded in 1995 by a French born Iranian-American

• company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide

• September 1997 -- changed name from AuctionWeb to eBay

• October 3, 2002 -- PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay

• January 2007 -- eBay acquired StubHub

Classifieds

• One of the Internets oldest businesses

  • • EBay's classifieds business was first known as DBA, a popular Danish all-classifieds newspaper that started publishing in the 1970s

• 2008 -- EBay bought DBA (and a ton of other classifieds businesses around the world) to form eBay Classifieds Group

• first quarter of 2020 -- Classifieds made-up just over 10% of the company's total

• July 2020 -- Norway's Adevinta announced it's buying eBay's (EBAY) classified ads business for $9.2 billion to create the world's largest online classifieds company.

Controversy

• Common eBay criticisms involve:

  • • the policy of requiring the use of PayPal for payments

    • concerns over fraud

    • forgeries

    • intellectual property violations

• 2012 -- eBay has been criticized for not paying UK taxes

• 2014 -- company revealed that the consumer database of usernames, passwords, phone numbers, and physical addresses had been breached

  • • Syrian Electronic Army took responsibility for the attack

§ Global brands: Toyota, Coca-Cola

Toyota

• 1924 -- Sakichi Toyoda invented the Toyoda Model G Automatic Loom

  • • 1929 -- the patent for the automatic loom was sold to a British company generating the starting capital for automobile development

• 1933 -- production of Toyota automobiles was started

• 1937 -- Toyota Motor Company was established

  • • cars sold under the name "Toyoda"

    • toyoda literally means "fertile rice paddies"

    • Japanese government supported the company by preventing foreign competitors Ford and General Motors from importing automobiles into Japan

• 1973 oil crisis

• • • consumers in the lucrative US market began turning to making small cars with better fuel economy

• Tariff avoidance --began building plants in the US by the early 1980s

• 1989 -- launch of their luxury division Lexus

Coca-Cola

• company began in the late-19th century in Atlanta, Georgia

• distinctive glass bottle introduced in 1916

Advertising

• • • early controversy

      • • marketing a product containing caffeine as "pure"

          • • also consumed by children

        • 1911 - Federal case The United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of CocaCola

          • • Result:

              • • promised not to depict children in advertising (maintained until 1986)

                • sale (of the caffeinated drink) to children was legally sanctioned

    • 1931 -- posters depicting Santa Claus frinking Coca-Cola

    • 1971 - 'Hilltop'

    • Max Headroom Coke (1986)

    • Bringing India & Pakistan Together

World War II

• 1942 -- after lobbying Congress, Coca Cola was exempted from sugar rationing on the grounds that it was essential to the war effort

• Established 64 military bottling plants around the world

  • • served approximately 10-Billion drinks

• By the end of WWII, Coca Cola had established itself on every inhabited continent on earth (wherever the US military was)

Coca Cola and the Cold War

• the term Coca-Colonization was first used by communist sympathizers in France

• the brand became synonymous with the United States

  • • this enabled Pepsi to gain market share behind the Iron Curtain

• mid-1990s -- will the fall of the Soviet Union Coke would overtake Pepsi's market share

Globalization

• Middle east

  • • the brand became synonymous with the United States resulting in domestic boycotts until the late-1980s

      • • Pepsi once again filled the gap

• Globally, by 2006 the company supplied 3% of humanities total liquid intake