IJASOS- International E-journal of Advances in Social Sciences

Abstract

The cultural imperialism in the broadest sense is the domination of one
country over another by means of culture. In the book "Culture and
Imperialism" (1993) Edward Said has given a conceptual character to a
notion of cultural imperialism and has proved theoretically intellectual approach
realized by him in relation to the analysis of an imperialism and its
demonstrations in culture. He understood two interconnected processes as the
cultural imperialism: cultural domination and cultural expansion of one country
into culture structure and cultural development of another country.

E. Said defined a phenomenon of "a cultural imperialism" as
multilateral cultural suppression as a result of which the dominating culture
forces out and subordinates to himself all manifestations of the subordinated
culture — from high to local, from personal to public, from the system of
values to consumer interests, from symbols and rituals before their imitations
in mass art. Culture as integrity forms imperial feelings, thoughts and
imperial imagination.

Today the cultural imperialism is investigated by Y. J. Dal, P. Golding,
P. Harris, S.P. Mains, G. Munkler, H. Schiller, and others have given. They
consider a cultural imperialism as a way of realization of the symbolical power
which manifestations can be cultural submission of other people by means of
advance of language of the mother country as state and language of the
international communication (a communication imperialism), domination in
production and distribution of a cultural product (a media imperialism),
domination in financing of the cultural industries (an investment imperialism).
New and easy to interpret definition of the cultural imperialism was elaborated
by S.P. Mains: "The cultural imperialism is a process of disproportional
influence on social practices and ideologies of one sociopolitical group on
politically weaker and (often) less healthy groups".

The cultural imperialism can be directed to the outside world and can be
directed to the remote regions of the country. This article is devoted to the
phenomenon of internal cultural imperialism. The analysis of a cultural
imperialism as a difficult system of the relations in the system “Center and
Periphery” on principal directions of the social and cultural interaction of
the present is a current scientific problem. We will consider an internal
cultural imperialism on the example of a media and communication imperialism in
modern Russia.

In the modern Russian media space, the capital's center broadcasts most
of the information content to the regional periphery. Some Russian regions do
not exchange news information, the entire information flow moves two-way: the
capital - regions, regions - the capital. It is the Periphery that produces
events that the Central media acquire the status of news. Such interpretation
is produced by journalists trained to see events through the eyes of the
Domination Center and to set up a communication chain through filters and
processes events so that they correspond to the dominant pattern. For this
purpose, regional correspondent points of the central mass media work in the
Russian regions, and a learning system for representatives of central media in
regions is organized through Moscow.