About the Author(s)
Eman and Laiba Gul are students in their fifth semester of the Media and Culture program at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi. With a passion for storytelling and a keen interest in exploring the intersection of media and society, they embarked on a collaborative journey to write this article.
Introduction.
Media provides a platform for debate and discussion, critical for a healthy democracy. The impact of the media on cultural practices is this: how it affects rural societies is far different from how it does urban ones. What happens in urban areas? There’s an incredibly high density of media outlets. This leads to information travelling quickly and cultural convergence taking place. On the flip side, what happens in rural areas? Media access is limited. This means that while traditional practices are being maintained, they’re also slowly but gradually being introduced to new ideas. Urban media exposure nurtures a multicultural environment. It hastens cultural changes and fosters commercialization and consumerism, thereby shaping individual and collective identities. Its influence extends to social attitudes as well as personal beliefs and cultural practices. The media in urban societies is, fittingly, as diverse as the cities themselves.
The media is the way through which the people are introduced to the world. It brings out and supports the norms and values of the society, uncovering corruption and advocating for transparency in governance. In urban, fast-paced media, facts get mixed up with opinions. Urban media reinforces national identity and state power, while rural media strengthens local traditions and community identity. Limited access to the media means that cultural practices are less influenced by global trends. Media is unique in creating awareness that change is possible. It may be slow to introduce educational programs or social advocacy, but they do play a role in shifting cultural practices, as community-centric media fosters bonds among community members which helps keep alive various local customs.
- Giving information about events and conditions in society.
- Showing relations of power Express the dominant culture, recognizing subcultures, and developing a new culture.
- Providing amusement and diversions.
Role of Media in Rural Areas.
Opportunities:
Access to Information: In rural areas, mass communication is an important way of obtaining new information and resources. People receive useful information from mass media, such as information campaigns and health programs, agriculture, or education that gear towards development.
Hybridization of Culture: The step-by-step proliferation of media in rural areas makes it possible to hybridize cultures. Rural people can still adopt new concepts without totally abandoning the old practices; thus, the rural culture is a blend of new and old concepts.
Challenges:
Limited Knowledge Transfer and Exposure: Poorly accessed media in rural areas may hinder the transfer of new ideas and innovation. Consequently, the cultural evolution and assimilation process is likely to be longer, possibly putting rural areas behind urban centres in many respects.
Wake of Cultural Pollution: With the rise of digital media, there is a risk of the old practices becoming watered down. New media may insert new practices and elements into a society that has remained largely unchanged for centuries.
Literature.
- Manuel Castells : The Rise of the Network society (Princeton: Blackwell, 1996).
Castells examines in this book that people living in such highly media saturated and connected urban environments experience the more profound cultural changes. Urban culture creates a constant explosion of media, globalization influences induce the integration of local and global, and the rate of change of culture becomes ‘sick.’. Urban cultures are on the move and constantly recreate their cultural identity in this global setting.
- David Buckingham – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (2008)
Buckingham expounds upon the idea of the media being not just a commodity, but also an instrument for fostering identity formation and cultural expression among a specific subset of population – the urban youth. In many forms, the media allows people living in the city to participate in and articulate their cultural identity on a variety of levels, in the interplay of the old and the new.
- Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
Geertz is of the opinion that rural communities conserve traditional practices as they tend to rely more on oral traditions and local media due to lack of media exposure. The lower levels of media penetration help to uphold and protect local cultures.
- John Postill – Localizing the Internet: Local Media, Language, and Culture (2012)
Postill examines the role of media technologies such as radio and television, in presenting new ideas and practices that merge with existing rural cultures. Media becomes a tool of modernization and leads to a culture becoming hybrid.
Critical Thinking.
The role of media is quite pronounced in urban and rural cultures, although in distinct ways. For urban populations, the abundance of media encourages cultural interaction through the availability of various forms of cross-cutural expression and communicative engagement, but it also poses the threats of cultural imperialism and fragmentation, as one can hardly avoid in Asia the overwhelming presence of Western cultures. On the other hand, rural areas have very few opportunities to engage with the media, and therefore experience slow cultural evolution, however, media is still viewed as a facilitation of change and sharing of ideas hence all the practices do not shed off entirely pledging to an incorporation of culture. In urban centres, cultural change is always in tandem with the development of different sources of information while in rural centres, this is often a slow process that takes time to avoid attitudinal extinction. Ethical issues tackle issues such as the incorporation of the local culture and economic inadequacies that may constrain the consumption of media content. Therefore, this paper concludes that when it comes to the cultural practices of people in society, it is really a matter of culture changing and culture not changing, so whether it be new or old culture it is the intersection of opportunities and difficulties and urban as well as rural landscapes have their own unique dynamics in this multifaceted process.
Conclusion.
Both rural and urban areas have different ways, but the media can bridge cultural gaps between them. The expansion of digital media is solidifying the relationship between rural and urban influence by facilitating cultural exchange and fusion. Media literacy is important in influencing cultural practices to enable individuals to navigate the media landscape in making sense of it.
