Communication, culture?

With more Singaporean youths being exposed to foreign media, more are embracing other cultures portrayed in foreign television shows instead of their own. Television shows ranging from Korean dramas like Women in the Sun, and American sitcoms like Gossip Girl and Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), are proving more popular amongst Singaporean youths.

Media conglomerates are aggressively targeting the youth market and youths, are increasingly being influenced by whatever they see on the media around them. The younger generation is what most researchers call the ‘MTV generation’, with many youths trying to follow the look and lifestyles of their Western idols. Even for Singapore, more locally produced TV shows are beginning to exhibit more Western values like the acceptance of pre-marital sex or couples cohabiting. As a result, the younger generation of Singapore citizens are showing signs of cultural erosion.

The power of America’s cultural imperialism needs no description, for the grip of American influence has been felt from all corners of the globe. Singapore’s very own Minister Mentor (MM) Lee Kuan Yew, a founding father and opinion leader of the nation, has always been a famous critic of Western influence.

MM Lee has always held the sentiment that opening the floodgates to Western cultural imperialism would undermine the important “Asian values” that have purportedly made the nation what it is today. MM Lee also stated in 1971 that “[Singaporeans] must give our children roots in their own language and culture… then we shall become more cohesive a people, all rooted in their traditional values, cultures and languages”

The issue of powerful Western media influence has been much debated since the emergence of Western culture after the Cold War. David Croteau and William Hoyness, in the book MEDIA/SOCIETY: Industries, Images, and Audiences, defines the phenomenon of “cultural imperiaism” as “the theory that media products from the West, especially the United States, so powerfully shape the cultures of other nations that they amount to a cultural form of domination” Croteau and Hoyness also brings up the example of the 1985 gathering of popular singers to record the song, “We Are The World” for the “USA for Africa”. As the source succinctly puts it, “American pop artists were affirming the global nature of their efforts – sung in English – with very little participation from the rest of the world.”

The permeation of Western media throughout the rest of the world has sprung up concerns that this form of cultural imperialism has adverse effects on the originality of media content, especially in Asian countries.

Although there are countries that retain their own “media culture”, such as Thailand, Japan and India, most media environments has allowed the Western influences to invade their media content. Singapore, boasting herself as an epitome of the finest of “East and West”, is constantly a subject to all forms of cultural imperialism through the media.

In such a highly developed media environment, Singapore youths have easy access to all forms of content, providing a plethora of media alternatives to local ones. Local shows also frequently “borrow” from the success of Western shows to appeal to the mass market. Tania Lim, in her paper, Let the contests begin! ‘Singapore slings’ into action, describes the rising trend of how Asian networks “[have] tried their hand at reversioning game shows”. Indeed, these formatted game shows are seen as ratings magnets, for the broad nature of the programming means that they are accessible to an extremely wide demographic.

As such, even local media networks are influenced by the success of Western ones. Instead of producing localised programmes for our population, our networks have taken the financially rewarding short cut of emulating the success of Western ones.

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