imomus | (Don't want to live in a) hub and spoke world

Do you like stats? I like them when they add up to a shape. I like them even when I hate the picture that emerges. Here are some stats for you today. They're about cultural markets.

Only 3% of books published in the UK every year were originally written in another language. (Source)

Worldwide, between 50% and 60% of all translations of books originate from English originals. It's sometimes higher: 70% of all books translated into Serbian have English originals.

Only 3% to 6% of all worldwide book translations are into English. (Source)

Okay, that presents quite a clear picture. At least as far as publishing goes, the Anglo world is talking a lot, and listening very little. It's a bit of a one-way street. We may talk about other countries, but we're not interested in listening to what they have to say about themselves, to themselves.

Rüdiger Wischenbart, who wrote the article those figures are from (it's about the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions), concludes that "centrifugal forces are working against globalisation, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between".

Centrifugal -- a one-way centre-out force pulling elements arranged around a hub apart from each other, keeping them related only to the centre. But is it working that way in publishing? Are countries right next to each other facing away from each other and towards Anglo countries, or are they listening to the information coming to them from all directions? If this were an aviation business model, would we be talking about Point To Point or Hub and Spoke? In other words, do Poles have to fly to London to get from Warsaw to Berlin?

Although he doesn't call it that, Wischenbart describes a Hub and Spoke world rather than the Point to Point world UNESCO would like. "In 2005," he says, "a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals... Yet this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well intentioned process [ie UNESCO's cultural diversity initiative] will ever mend this imbalance. A very similar pattern is seen in French translation. According to Livres Hebdo in 2006, 58 percent of French translations were from English originals, as compared to 7.2 percent from German, or a mere 0.2 percent from Polish. Even worse is the situation between smaller languages. Between neighbouring countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, the 'horizontal' flows of books comprises a tiny trickle, making up on average less than one or two percent of all translations in those countries."

Okay, the picture is clear. Not only is the hub talking (but not listening) to all the spokes, the spokes aren't listening to each other, they're just listening to the hub. Another word for this situation is "empire".

But that's just books. What about film?

"I got my cinematic education from television," says Nick James, editor of UK film journal Sight and Sound. "But it would be hard to imagine anyone doing that now. What you see in the schedules now is an extreme geographical narrowness combined with an extreme lack of memory. On the terrestrial channels, there's really nothing made before 1980 unless it's very famous indeed. Not much, even, from Hollywood's great golden era. And hardly anything that's in a foreign language. It's pathetic and it's parochial." (Source)

The US in 2001 had a film and video market worth 104 billion dollars. Japan was next with a 12 billion dollar market. The US has 46% of all world broadcasting revenues, including free and pay TV. Japan is second with 18%, the UK third with 10%. (Source)

In 2002, six companies had a combined U.S. box office market share of approximately 70%: Walt Disney; Viacom; Sony; Fox Entertainment Group; AOL Time Warner; and Universal Studios, Inc. (Source)

Again, we see the "hub" thing. The force is one-way. The hub doesn't want to import, only to export. It doesn't want to listen, only to talk. And it doesn't want its customers talking to each other.

"The map of international TV program flows has been quite stable for many years now," says a paper called International Financial Components of French Television Production. "The most notable trend concerns sales : the erosion of the European zone (minus 6 points in structure) is exactly compensated by an increase in America. Some fluctuations, more or less pronounced, continued to occur inside each geographical zone. In Europe, [French] sales to the German-speaking basin, which is traditionally the biggest outlet for French TV programs, kept on receding, down to the level of Italy and the English-speaking basin (United Kingdom and Eire)."

Hub and spoke. Fewer of the Euro-spokes are listening to each other. More of them are listening to the hub. And it's a long-term trend.

"The American studios' share of the box office in Europe grew from 30 percent by 1950 to over 80 percent by 1990," says Slate in a truly shocking article about how the Hollywood studios played the German subsidy system to their own advantage. "Moreover, European films without American stars could not count on being released other than in art houses in the American markets. Even successful European films such as the French comedy 3 Hommes et un Couffin (Three Men and a Baby), the French thriller La Femme Nikita, and the Franco-Dutch drama Spoorloos (The Vanishing), had to be remade with American stars in order to gain access to wide distribution in America. American movies have increased their share of the German box office, accounting for more than 85 percent of it last year."

"European movies have won only 5 percent of the American market. Of the 100 highest-grossing movies in the world last year, 88 were American, and seven more were co-productions involving American producers. After aircraft production, the entertainment industry is America's largest source of trade surplus," says an anti-cultural protectionism article on ReasonOnline. (I don't agree with its argument, I'm just giving you the stats.) "The European Community requires all TV channels to carry at least 50 percent European programming. France has upped this total to 60 percent for European programs, with at least 40 percent of the total devoted by law to native French programs."

Reason describes how the French film industry was unseated:

Pathé, France's leading production company, controlled one-third of the world film business in 1908. By 1919, the French share of the world market had fallen to 15 percent. At the end of the 1920s, the French film industry ranked fifth in the world. By the end of the 1930s, however, French production had doubled, and the French industry ranked behind only the United States. In 1936, for example, the six most popular films in France were all native French productions. Of the 75 most popular films, 56 were French; only 15 were American. In 1935, 70 percent of all film receipts in France went to French-produced movies. The postwar French government negotiated a quota agreement with the United States in an attempt to protect French filmmakers. The French government required cinemas to show 16 weeks of French movies a year.

It sounds like a classic case of what I've called Pluricide, and what others call global monoculture. "A few decades ago," says the Turning Point Project, "it was still possible to leave home and go somewhere else: the architecture was different, the landscape was different, the language, lifestyle, dress, and values were different. That was a time when we could speak of cultural diversity. But with economic globalization, diversity is fast disappearing. The goal of the global economy is that all countries should be homogenized. When global hotel chains advertise to tourists that all their rooms in every city of the world are identical, they don't mention that the cities are becoming identical too: cars, noise, smog, corporate high-rises, violence, fast food, McDonalds, Nikes, Levis, Barbie Dolls, American TV and film. What's the point of leaving home? There are many causes for this dreary turn of events, but one is central: economic globalization and institutions like the World Bank and the WTO promote a specific kind of homogenizing development that frees the largest corporations in the world to invest and operate in every market, everywhere. For these agencies and corporations, diversity is not a primary value: efficiency is. Diversity is an enemy because it requires differentiated sales appeal. What corporations love is creating the same values, the same tastes, using the same advertising, selling the same products, and driving out small local competitors. Mass marketers prefer homogenized consumers. They also prefer places with low wages, cheap resources, and the least restrictive environmental and labor laws."

What about Japan? Well, as you can see from the box office chart, it's a losing battle as far as film goes. Sure, "the total number of feature films produced in Japan has increased to 500 this year, twice as many as three years ago," as Shuji Sato from Pony Canyon Inc. says. That matches Japan's peak years in the 1950s, when between 400 and 600 Japanese films were released a year. But today's films go to small screens in multiplexes. The big picture is the one the graph shows -- that if current trends continue (and I doubt they will, but that's for another day), by about 2040 no Japanese films will be watched in Japan; they'll all be American.

Overview: In Japan domestic films earned more than 70% of box office at their peak in late 1950s. Japan's domestic share was more than 60% until early 1960s. It decreased to 50% in the 1980s and to a low of 40% in the late 1990s (when Japanese film production dipped to a low of about 250 films a year). American movies accounted for nearly all of the remaining 60%. (Hub and spoke logic again: it's not as if that non-Japanese 60% is Chinese or Korean films. Nope, it's the hub, not the other spokes.)

In a 1998 study (reported here) of worldwide TV markets, Dupagne and Waterman found that the higher the GDP, the lower the amount of American fiction was imported into the country. The more revenue TV brought in locally, the less American stuff was on local TV. The country with a bigger domestic market will impose its products on the country with smaller ones. The study supported the view that economic development was the way to protect local markets, not government intervention.

Personally, I'm for cultural protectionism and market vigour as bulwarks against the hub and spoke effect, monoculture and pluricide. Japan's domestic TV is amazingly successful -- thanks to strong political regulation and protection -- at not only capturing viewers' attention, but also keeping the kind of strong national identity that cultural diversity is all about. We may yet be able to change a hub and spoke world into a point to point one, unipolarity into multipolarity, and monologue into dialogue.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com

Tobacco should be banned worldwide, some say, because of its proven physical harm. How do we do that while avoiding a monoculture? Can cultures only be diverse where they don't matter?

From:

zenicurean.livejournal.com

Personally, I'm for cultural protectionism

I, on the other hand, am almost categorically against it, because it is practically never executed according to my political whims but according to those of others. What policy of cultural protectionism - as opposed to market-based solutions - would you prescribe and where? What does this mean practically? What would you make it harder for me to read? To see? To ponder over? What possible justification could you offer for supporting people whose policy is designed solely to make it more difficult for me to access information?

In my experience the arguments are always the same. Foreign culture is "mass-culture", corrupt art, if art at all. It does not serve imaginary national values, derived from a romantic conception of some sort of agrarian utopia that might or might not have existed in the unspecified past. It is violent and serves political agendas detrimental to the health and welfare of the ordinary public, so the ordinary public, being rather stupid and unable to choose rationally between cultural products, must be sheltered against its nefarious influence. The typical cultural protectionist (I do not believe you are one, though) argues that I owe something to the cultural conservatives who might or might not be in power in my cultural sphere or country, that being a member of some arbitrarily selected genetic line it is my inherent duty to support the continuation of that culture as depicted in visions of a fantastic history-less Plato Land, forever locked in splendid isolation from, among other things, whoever it was who brought along the Latin alphabet, the wheel, and the transistor.

This history-blind cultural panic tells me that I must not eat Czech food, must not touch Indian curry, must not read bad American novels, must not worship alien gods, must not talk to people of the wrong colour, and must not invite them to live in my country or, just you wait, they'll put up a Mosque. That the ostensibly benevolent, "left-wing", arguments are geared towards a powerful, commercially strong Christian culture do not change the essence of this outlook. It does not matter that any given consumer often lives in cultural crossroads that have typically seen cultural mixing for hundreds of years; neither does it matter much that this consumer with his or her arbitrary choices of consumption is fundamentally the living essence of the culture with which everyone is so keen on protecting against itself.

The most grievous insult, unfortunately, often comes from the well-meaning American academician who is so besotten with whatever quaint little funny-hat-wearing culture he finds that he is determined to protect it against its own renewal. The message almost inevitably mutates with time - it becomes "Stop wanting to drink all this Coca-Cola, stop wanting to write in English on your foreign-made computers! Our whole tourism experience will be ruined if you change and stop wearing those hilarious hats of yours!" What is a local businessman or worker to do then? Certainly not comply, and certainly not under the pressure of whatever cultural conservatives the academician wishes to put into power for his ostensible benefit.

From:

uberdionysus.livejournal.com

I would say you're looking at it the wrong way.

You are correct, but consider the opposing ramifications of monoculture:

Consider the strengths and diversity of our best art, and how our best art rests on the backs of the strengths and diversities of arts that have influenced our own, and that are usually foreign.

Art becomes moribund and boring when it is ruled by monoculture. In visual art, think of the worst parts of Egyptian art, or the Post-Caravaggio mannerists, or the French Academy. In cinema, think of Hollywood movies from the 50s, or Hollywood today.

Monoculture is bad for art, and especially rough on creators and consumers who want to discover new voices and new ways of seeing.

For example, all of the influences on Funky Forest and Taste of Tea are common in the U.S. and Europe (Ozu, Bergman, Cronenberg, etc.), but the Japanese take on those influences resulted in specific films that gave us something fresh and new. Same with African writing from the 60s, French movies from the 60s, the discovery of Japanese prints in the 1880s, the discovery of African art at the turn of century, or contemporary Iranian film-making.

It's a trade off. Kurosawa (Japan) is influenced by Ford (U.S.), and Sergio Leone (Italy) is influenced by influenced by Kurosawa. It comes full circle when Clint Eastwood makes a film that is influenced by all of the above. The give and take that gave us magical realism also gave us modernist poetry and dark literary fantasy. But without protection, a lot of that stuff wouldn't have existed.

Cultural protectionism tends to be conservative, but it paradoxically forces the youth to rebel against the conservative national output. Monoculture doesn't do that, since there's no national film culture to rebel against. The techniques of filmmaking become Other and lost. In a protected environment, the young filmmakers will take aspects from the monoculture and also, inadvertantly, what is needed from their own (protected) culture.

Without cultural protectionism, the Taiwanese New Wave would not have happened, John Woo wouldn't have made movies, Abbas Kiarostami wouldn't have made movies, The Host wouldn't have been made, the French New Wave wouldn't exist, on and on. All of those people created niches that work economicly, but they needed help to get started. And without those singular voices, our own movies would be a lot worse.

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