Observations and stray thoughts for the eclectic-minded
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Eponymous 16 Nov 2008

as a kind of generalized Medienschmerz

Thanks to Google Books I've been able to track down a reference to a concept of Medienschmerz that predates this blog.

From Internationalizing Media Theory by John Downing (p. 223)

Cultural imperialism is a perspective that has largely been identified with leftist analysts such as Schiller (1969, 1989), and is therefore often dismissed, especially in Schiller's case as a kind of generalized Medienschmerz that blots out any capacity of the world's citizens to resist or appropriate in their own fashion the messages of global advertising or US television, and additionally presumes that worries about cultural survival are uniquely provoked by policies of the major powers, and not equally by nation states against ethnic minorities within their own frontiers.

That's one (compound) sentence by the way. Downing's thick writing style verily reminds me a lot of media studies exam books in the university. Can it be just a coincidence that the scholar menitioned in the passage is called Schiller?

Posted by Mesq at 20:48 to meta | Trackback


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