ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and early 1980s, radical critical studies of international mass communication were dominated by the concepts of ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘media imperialism’, and by variants of these ideas, such as ‘cultural dependency’ and ‘electronic colonialism’. The aim of many of the writers who used these terms was to understand and criticise the way that the cultures of lessdeveloped countries were being affected by the arrival of cultural forms and technologies (especially broadcasting) associated with the West-wealthier countries, many of which had been colonial powers right up until the 1970s, and beyond (Britain, France, Germany, but also the neo-colonialist United States). Although some Marxist writers use the term in a particular technical sense (see later), imperialism literally means the ‘building of empires’. The use of the term ‘cultural imperialism’ implied that, now that the age of direct political and economic domination by colonial powers was (supposedly) ending, a new form of international domination was beginning. This new hegemony was based on a more indirect form of power: the fostering of cultural forms which would sap the cultural strengths of the less-developed countries, and which would allow Western-based transnational corporations to dominate non-Western economies, by encouraging a desire on the part of the post-colonial peoples for Western products and lifestyles.
