"Only some of the media texts produced around the world are able to find audiences in the United States." Jenkins, Henry;
Ford, Sam; Green, Joshua (2013-01-21). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and
Meaning in a Networked Culture (p. 260). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
What makes an international piece of media popular in the United States? It seems as though it is the continual mixing and remixing of our culture with others that allows content produced internationally to resonate culturally with us. For instance, Selena Gomez's song "Come and Get It" shown above features Bollywood beats. The term Bollywood, though, is derived from Hollywood when India was setting up their own film industry in imitation of the then popular musicals in Hollywood.
So, we have an American artist of Mexican and Italian ancestry incorporating into her style Bollywood music and costumes while Bollywood itself was originally a mixture of traditional Indian theater and Hollywood. Mind Boggling!
Though Hollywood eventually moved away from movies like "Singing in the Rain," Bollywood is still largely characterized by its unique musicals for which it is known internationally. The 2007 movie "Partner" from India, however, shows how Indian movies have continued to incorporate exported American culture. Even the chorus is in English while the rest of the song is in Hindi. So, while we have artists like Selena Gomez using traditional Bollywood beats, Indian artists like those shown above are now using styles from a mix of American rap and music videos in an endless cycle of cultural appropriation.
India is not the only nation that has made cultural inroads into the United States. China's Martial Arts films have been hugely popular since the 1970's arrival of Bruce Lee on the screen. More recently, media from South Korea has also become hugely popular here. For instance, the "Gagnam Style" video has become the most watched video on the American site YouTube with around 1.5 billion views. This is just one of the wave of K-Pop song phenomenons from that country, and there are even Korean dramas on Netflix such as "Protect the Boss" and "Miss Ripley" that have become quite popular with American audiences (my best friend is obsessed with them).
As Jenkins points out, however, "there are also many
countries (especially in the Global South — much of Africa, parts of Latin
America and Asia) not yet able to actively participate in such exchanges" (260). Such countries are still bombarded with American culture, but their own culture has not circulated quite as successfully outside of their borders as others have. The Makmende myth, for instance, reflects some of American culture in that it is similar to our Chuck Norris and "The Most Interesting Man in the World" legends. Yet, as funny and similar as Makmende is to our own icons, he has not really spread throughout the world.
This is because media is rooted in culture and requires a minimum level of knowledge for comprehension and interpretation. So, jokes like “Makmende hangs his clothes on a Safaricom line to dry” are lost on us because we don't have enough knowledge about the area to understand that "Safaricom, Kenya’s leading mobile phone network, doesn’t maintain any wired telephone lines" (262). To take a phrase from Malcolm Gladwell, there is a "tipping point" of cultural awareness that has to be reached before media can cross cultural and national boundaries in significant amounts as American culture does; "However . . . the informal spread of media content through networked
communications may circumnavigate if not circumvent some of the factors
(political, legal, economic, cultural) which have allowed U.S. mass media to
maintain its dominance throughout much of the twentieth century" (261). So, in many ways, the grassroots spreading of media has greatly increased intercultural awareness. In the end, though, it is an uneven spreading most notably because of the lack in developing countries of tools such as the internet, computers, and iphones that we take for granted.
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