One-way traffic
This post is a bit academic, and is taken from something I'm putting together today, so I may as well leave in all the in-text references for greater coherence. One of the interesting things about globalization theory is the wide range of opinion on it (Held 2000). While several critics (Tunstall 1977; Schiller 1976; Fejes 1981; Golding 1983; MacBride 1980, etc.) have argued that globalization necessarily implies a Westernization of developing societies, and hence a form of cultural imperialism, several others have also called it an inevitable by-product of the process of universal and simultaneous modernization, thereby undercutting the idea of intentionality or its relation to "imperialism" (Tomlinson 1991; Barker 1997, Giddens 2002). In academic theory, there is growing consensus that the multifarious processes of globalization imvolve complex interactions between the global (mostly understood to mean Western) and local (mostly non-Western), emphasizing hybridity,...