... Other explanations focus on changes internal to these national systems. An important distinction can also be made between mediacentric perspectives, for which changes in media systems are autonomous developments which then influence political and social systems, and those which see social and political changes as causally prior to media system change. Americanization and Globalization The phenomenon of homogenization in world media systems was first emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory of external influence (e.g. Schiller, 1969, 1976; Boyd-Barret, 1977). It saw homogenization as a result of cultural domination. The global expansion of mass media industries based in advanced capitalist countries and particularly in the United States resulted in the destruction of local cultures and their replacement by a single, standardized set of cultural forms tied to consumer capitalism and American political hegemony. Europe occupied an ...

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