ABSTRACT
For scholars such as Armand Mattelart there is nothing new about today’s media or imperialism. “The conquest of the cyber-frontier”, Mattelart argues, “is a sequel to the grand technological narrative of the conquest of space” (2003, 1). In his view, just as in the 19th century, when London was the undisputed hub of the transcontinental network of underwater cables, today the United States has become the nodal point through which Net users from less-developed countries must go in order to connect with each other (148). Territorial colonialism has given way to virtual spaces of power, but the hierarchies of centre and periphery created by unequal access to information technologies remain. This kind of mediated neo-imperialism is often thought to go hand in hand with cultural imperialism, in which American media giants control not just the access ports, but also the content of what the world watches. In the 1970s Walt Disney’s comics and animation were famously criticized by Mattelart and his co-writer Ariel Dorfman as examples of cultural imperialism in Latin America (Dorfman and Mattelart 1975).
Theorists of media globalization such as Lee Artz have likewise condemned the “corporate media hegemony” (2003, 26) of “Disney’s menu for global hierarchy” (2005, 75) well into the 21st century. “Disneyfication” stands as a catchword for American media neo-imperialism: a form of “networking the globe” that ensnares media consumers around the world as much as it interconnects them.
