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An Empirical Critique of Global Communications Debates

Review by
Thomas Hove 
Michigan State University

Cosmopolitan Communications: Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World, by Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-521-73838-5. 429pp.

Media effects researchers have generally given up the assumption that mass communications have strong and direct effects on individuals. However, that assumption lingers on implicitly in various debates about the macro-level effects of mass communications on nations, cultures, and societies. In Cosmopolitan Communications, political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart explore a key question that haunts these debates: whether the spread of global communications threatens cultural diversity around the globe. Specifically, they investigate whether the information and cultural products that flow from the more affluent societies of the global north have a powerful and direct influence on the less affluent societies that are located predominantly in the global south. To begin answering this question, they identify the array of conditions that either advance or block the spread of what they call “cosmopolitan communications.”

This is Norris and Inglehart’s third book-length collaboration, and they very clearly position it as an empirical intervention into debates that have for the most part remained speculative and, for that reason, reached a stalemate. The targets of their criticism are three views that have for decades informed both scholarly and policy debates about how the global mass media affect local societies, particularly in the developing world. Norris and Inglehart classify each of these views with a pair of labels: cultural convergence, or “the L.A. Effect”; cultural polarization, or “the Taliban Effect”; and cultural fusion, or “the Bangalore Effect.” Cultural convergence refers to the assumption that a dominant media system such as America’s Hollywood will have a direct and homogenizing effect on local cultures in the rest of the world (p. 14). By contrast, cultural polarization refers to the opposing process, in which “traditional societies consciously attempt to distance themselves and to protect their cultures from the foreign values, ideas, and images commonly conveyed by imported Western and American media” (p. 17). Finally, cultural fusion assumes a more balanced power dynamic, in which “easier and faster communications among societies generate a creative global mélange that mixes genres, programs, and contents derived from different times or places” (p. 19).

The basic corrective claim this study develops is that many of the cultural critics, media scholars, and policy makers who subscribe to either of these views have exaggerated the global media’s impact on local societies. Instead, to offer a more empirically grounded alternative view, the authors analyze an international range of individual- and societal-level data, predominantly drawn from the World Values Survey that Inglehart helps administer. Their analysis grounds what they call “The Firewall Model of Cosmopolitan Communications.” According to this model, information, communications, and cultural products do not simply flow freely around the globe. Rather, as this study takes great pains to demonstrate, they can be blocked, particularly in developing countries, by social barriers or “firewalls,” most notably poverty, isolation, press restrictions, and traditional local socialization processes.

Briefly put, cosmopolitan communications are those that “reflect openness toward ideas and information derived from divergent cultures, as well as a growing awareness of other places and peoples, including their languages, habits, and customs” (p. 136). Among the countries Norris and Inglehart ranked high in cosmopolitanism are Luxembourg, Switzerland, all the Scandinavian countries, and the U.S. By contrast, they define “provincial societies” (the adjective is intended to be descriptive, not evaluative) as those in which “communication and information networks are more strongly rooted within a particular local community or region, with more rigid barriers to external forces” (p. 161). Among the countries identified as relatively provincial are Burma, China, and Russia, mainly because they have low levels of press freedom. However, other countries that have relatively high levels of press freedom, such as Mali, Ghana, and Benin, are also classified as provincial because of other barriers to global cultural influence, most notably poverty, isolation from global trade, and low levels of public access to mass communications.

While Norris and Inglehart spend the first part of the book explicating their firewall model, in the second part they analyze the WVS data. The goal of this analysis is to test what consequences cosmopolitan communications have on citizen identities, consumer values, moral values, and civic engagement. Among their many findings about these consequences are the following: use of the news media is associated with stronger feelings of nationalism in provincial societies, but not in cosmopolitan societies (pp. 196-197); exposure to news media strengthens trust and tolerance of national and religious outsiders (p. 197); use of news media encourages the development of individualistic values associated with capitalist consumer culture, but mainly in societies that are relatively provincial, poor, and restricted in press freedom (p. 219). When discussing economic values, the authors highlight one of their most interesting findings as a challenge to the cultural convergence view. Specifically, they raise serious doubts about the strong cultural imperialism claims that have been made by scholars such as Herbert Schiller, Edward Herman, and Robert McChesney. Questioning the view that dominant media systems have managed to spread the gospel of individualistic consumerism around the globe, Norris and Inglehart instead found “a gradual trend in economic values toward more collectivist or leftist values” (p. 275). But as is characteristic of this book, there are complex nuances that their data analysis lends to their counterarguments. For example, while this trend toward collectivist economic values seems to exist, it also seems to differ across societies that are more or less cosmopolitan. The reason why is that the more affluent and open societies around the globe are progressing toward cosmopolitanism at a faster pace than less affluent, closed, and developing societies (p. 281).

On the topic of civic engagement, Norris and Inglehart offer another forceful challenge to an influential view, the “media malaise” thesis, which predicts that an increase in media use leads to a decrease in civic engagement. Contrary to what scholars such as Neil Postman, Roderick Hart, and Robert Putnam have famously argued, Norris’s and Inglehart’s analysis instead supports the opposing thesis of the “virtuous circle.” Based on earlier work of Norris and others, the virtuous circle thesis argues that “habitual use of the news media … contributes to greater awareness about current events and knowledge about public affairs, which in turn reduces the cognitive and informational barriers to political participation” (p. 242).

The fundamental, and well-realized, strategy of this study is to problematize what many people have taken for granted, and to provide instead a “more cautious interpretation of developments” (p. 134). On several topics, the authors convincingly challenge, or at least qualify, many scholars’ and policy makers’ assumptions about strong and direct media effects at the societal level. Through their effort to identify which social conditions will either help or hinder the spread of cosmopolitan communications, Norris and Inglehart find that cosmopolitan values are most likely to take hold in societies that participate in world markets, that protect the freedom of the press, and that provide widespread access to the mass media for many of their citizens.

Throughout their analysis, the authors frequently and very precisely point out the limitations of their data and methods. In doing so, they provide an indispensable guide for future empirical studies on how media influence works at the national, regional, and global levels. In particular, they acknowledge the need for data about the impact of mass communications other than journalism, for example popular music, television, film, and new media.

Much of this book will interest mainly empirical researchers in media effects, mass communications, and political science. Other readers who are interested in the subject matter it covers might wish that the authors would have occasionally loosened up a bit and further developed some of their own speculations about the cultural and normative implications of their findings. But that is another book. This book will be of great value to anyone who wants to read a well-organized and empirically rich diagnosis of current issues in global communications.