Promise or predicament? Negotiating identity in the context of globalization

Although globalization is not a recent development, global flows of human resources, money, products, and media are increasing rapidly, leading to a reorganization of global and national contexts. Frictions between globalizing forces and national/local cultural identities, while also not recent, increase as global flows become more intense. My interest with this project is to build knowledge about culturally expressed aspects of globalization as they surface in negotiations of local identities in cultural texts.

Existing cultural globalization research that address local identities generally deal with non-Western cultures. Insight developed in this work with regards to cultural globalization and imperialism is central, but a more complex understanding of globalization is needed. In the existing research, Northern European countries, for example, are seldom differentiated from the U.S., something which establishes a false dichotomy wherein tensions connected to globalization are seen as relevant only to non-Western cultures. The purpose of this dissertation, then, is to explore cultural identity negotiations within globalized consumer culture, specifically how privileged Western cultures react to globalizing processes. For the purpose of the dissertation, I situate my research in contemporary Norway.

Because mediated communication is an integral part of culture and a primary vehicle for cultural globalization, commercial cultural texts have the potential to serve as indicators of how cultural identities may be perceived and expressed within a consumer society. With this is mind, I will examine how cultural identity is articulated and negotiated in TV commercials presented in contemporary Norway. Via a critical cultural theoretical framework, I conduct rhetorical and semiotic analyses of TV commercials presented in contemporary Norway. Specifically, I examine which values, themes, and characteristics are articulated in these texts. Following this, I examine how these features speak to identity – specifically, local Norwegian identities as negotiated in relation to globalization forces, implicitly or explicitly. Finally, I address how the relationship between “local” identities and “global” cultural trends are negotiated collectively in these consumer texts.

Last ned avhandlingen her: http://gradworks.umi.com/33/18/3318683.html

Search web-site

Sitemap
Printerfriendly page