Lee, Sang Yup; Wildman, Steven S. --- "Protecting and Promoting National Cultures in a World Where Bits Want to Flow Freely" [2012] ELECD 704; in Pager, A. Sean; Candeub, Adam (eds), "Transnational Culture in the Internet Age" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Transnational Culture in the Internet Age

Editor(s): Pager, A. Sean; Candeub, Adam

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857931337

Section: Chapter 17

Section Title: Protecting and Promoting National Cultures in a World Where Bits Want to Flow Freely

Author(s): Lee, Sang Yup; Wildman, Steven S.

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

17. Protecting and promoting national
cultures in a world where bits want
to flow freely
Sang Yup Lee and Steven S. Wildman

17.1 INTRODUCTION

While it might be difficult to demonstrate empirically, the proposition
that media play critical roles in nurturing and disseminating a nation's
domestic culture is perhaps too obvious to be plausibly disputed.
Not surprisingly, media feature prominently in proposals for policies
intended to promote and protect national cultures. The protection-
ist components of such proposals are typically responses to concerns
that imported media products might dilute or in other ways undermine
domestic culture by displacing indigenous works on domestic media
outlets. While even the most ardent cultural protectionists would not
advocate hermetically sealing a nation's borders against content with
foreign origins, the possibility that market forces operating on their
own might result in the importation of too much of a good thing must
be accepted as a valid policy concern. Identifying causes for concern
and designing policies that effectively address these concerns are very
different things, however. In this chapter we offer a closer look at the
economic context in which policies for cultural protection and promo-
tion must be implemented, and examine the implications for the design
of cultural promotion policies.
The chapter is organized as follows. Section 17.2 presents recent data
on the international motion picture trade to illustrate the character of the
international media flows that have been the source of so much concern
to cultural protectionists outside the United ...