Assignment #2 (For Dept of English and Media study): Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises.

 Barriers of time and space have fallen because of the giant strides in technology.  Barriers to trade and investment that segmented the world economy have fallen as well because of government policies. These two mutually reinforcing developments over the past fifty years have in large part fashioned the world economy, fueling globalization that has become the mantra of this era and the multinational enterprise (MNE) its priest.

A different paradigm is to be applied as capital and technology are becoming extremely mobile. In principle, then, borderless economy is a crucial issue with important implications for individual behavior as distinctive national attributes_ the most important, perhaps is home biasness_ are being eroded in Borderless World and Nation less business.  

 As the erosion of discontinuities inherent in globalization is likely to continue; locations and geography will cease to matter. Put succinctly, there is good reason to believe that the “home bias” will be less marked over the next decades, though it will not disappear in macro patterns. As border barriers and discontinuities continue to shrink, both intra- and extra level there will be increased tendency toward capability convergence among businesses in different nations. Many observers predict differentiation as more likely to result contrary to homogenization as predicted by numerous observers of globalization. Convergence is, however, inevitable besides the question of confident prediction.

Importance of assignment:

Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises help you to

Foster cosmopolitan outlook of and on life. Help you to know what to do when change becomes chaos, and when home base is the globe. Help you to be cosmopolitan leaders at a time when world is changing faster than the ability of leaders to reinvent themselves. Help you to be globally literate at a time when leadership styles are in transition.

Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises give you

(a)             Additional strengths to assimilate and implement a global strategic vision by thinking globally but acting locally. Strengths to build on the awareness of the nuances of intra-cultural and cross-cultural differences.

(b)             Strengths to manage emotional intelligence to negotiate diverse cultures and people.

(c)             Strengths to develop motivational strategies that transcend culture, enabling you to deal with the additional motivational challenges of having people indentify with you and you with _ the skill to adjust to cross-culturally will be more challenging as well as more necessary_ them.

Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises

Introduce you to skills of intra- national  and multinational management that are maneuvers for sustenance and crafting activities to achieve strategic objectives of dealing with more than one perceptive within one culture or beyond. This formation helps to take on the added challenges of dealing with opportunities exist only with the realization of alternative solutions.

Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises help you

To surmount the challenge of the blurring of boundaries, thus reaching beyond domestic borders. In today’s Internet-connected world, one has little choice but to grow out of parochialism as dealing with people of diverse background are daily facts of life.

Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises

Help you to find your niche. Other cultures make sense of the world very differently but there is an entrenched resistance to acknowledge that difference does not automatically make other cultures wrong. This tendency leaves niches uncontested.  This exercise help you find these uncontested niches. You can do well by finding niches and satisfying the needs in that niche.

Harness textual analysis as a methodology in doing Textual analysis project & Questions and exercises to:

·       Understand how other human beings make sense of the world and the ways in which members of various cultures and subcultures make sense of who they are, and of how they fit into the world in which they live. 

·       Obtain a sense of the ways in which, in particular cultures at particular times, people make sense of the world around them. And, importantly, by seeing the variety of ways in which it is possible to interpret reality, you also understand your own cultures better because you can start to see the limitations and advantages of your own sense-making practices.

·       Understand differences in reason and thinking. The way in which it's possible to construct an argument in Western culture is commonly based on logical reasoning systems that they inherit from classical Greece. These underlie their mathematical systems as well, and they often think of them as being the only correct way in which such reasoning can take place. After all, 2 + 2 = 4.

·       Analyze the political communication of West, the phrase "you're either with us, or against us" and similar variations are used to depict situations as being polarized and to force witnesses, bystanders, or others unaligned with some form of pre-existing conflict to either become allies of the speaking party or lose favor. The implied consequence of not joining the team effort is to be deemed an enemy. An example is the statement of the former US President George W. Bush, who banged the tribal war drum by saying after 9/11 at the launch of his anti-terrorism campaign in the form "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. When done with this Western two-valued logic . . . every statement has two possible truth values: it is either true or false . . . Go for a non-Western culture, so to find a more sophisticated attitude towards the truth status of statements. The possibility that a statement might be indeterminate is admitted.

·       Understand the most surprising differences come in evidence that people living in different sense-making systems can literally see the world differently as psychology argues that `what a person sees is determined by what he guesses he sees' and to know people from different sense-making systems can literally see the world differently.

By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

Textual analysis project to probe unfamiliar questions

Familiar questions that academics use textual analysis to answer include those that concern party politics:

·       How are particular political parties represented in the media?

·        How is an election campaign covered?

·       Which forms of social organization are presented as most attractive in the media?

·       How are men/women/l/older people/etc. represented in the media?

But you have to show interests in other areas; the beauty of textual analysis is that it can be applied to any texts to answer any question about sense-making.

·       Analyze different versions of the Bible to see how ideas about the relationship between God and man have changed over hundreds of years.

·        Analyze graffiti in toilets to see how cultural differences between men and women work in these private spaces, etc.

Read lots of histories and theories of culture for new ideas, perspectives and questions.

2 Focus your question to become more specific.
Let’s say your initial question was ‘How does the media contribute to men’s sense of what it means to be a man?’. That would be a massive research project. Try to make it more focused, both by limiting the number of texts you are discussing, and looking for a specific question that you can actually find an answer to.
Avoid vast questions that want to generalize about the whole of culture. Even before we start studying and researching culture, we all have a lot of knowledge about how the media works in our culture – promoting stereotypes, avoiding positive images, dumbing down and looking for the lowest common demoninator . . . This attitude is based on profound ignorance.
Think honestly – what do you actually know about how people consume texts? You’ve probably got a series of prejudices in your head – the masses are hypnotised by television, magazines and tabloid newspapers that sensationalize and trivialize stories because readers are stupid and have short attention spans . . . that all of this is rubbish. Everyone thinks that other people are affected by, and mindlessly consume, the media in this way.
Nobody actually does it. If you want to find out how readers actually make sense of texts, then you need evidence about that. We think that we can just say, ‘our culture represents men like this’. But you really can’t generalize very easily about these things, and it will take years of research before you know enough about the vastly different kinds of masculinity in culture across, for example, news programmes, soap operas, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, self-help books, DIY manuals, Rotary club newsletters, etc., to make these kinds of
generalizations. When you’re starting out, it’s best to keep focused, and try to answer specific questions, that you can find specific answers for. For example: ‘How do ‘‘lad mags’’ teach their readers to be men?’
Note
These questions have been discussed for over a century in a number of university disciplines,
and even writers in the same disciplines don’t always use the same words to mean the
same things. On top of all this, the words are borrowed and used with different meanings across disciplines. Because of all this, it’s impossible to produce labels for these tendencies that will make sense to all readers in all disciplines. The descriptions I’ve chosen are fair enough uses of the words within cultural studies, literary studies and anthropology – and, I hope, everyday language. They don’t fit in well with the way these words are used in philosophy: better labels for philosophers would be (in the same order): cultural chauvinism; anthropological structuralism; and cultural relativism (Gibson, 2002)

Textual analysis project to understand sense-making.

·       Write down some topics about culture and how people make sense of the world that interests you.

·       Which parts of culture, and which questions about it, interest you?

This can come from academic reading, or from your own experience of culture. Textual analysis can provide information about the way in which culture works; the way that particular groups or parts of the world are being represented; or about how people are making sense of the world (‘sense-making’) more generally.

Questions and exercises

1       Spend an afternoon listening to the radio. Tune in not only to your usual station, but to the stations aimed at different groups: talkback radio stations, easy listening music, news channels, youth music stations. Spend some time listening to each one.
Make a detailed list of the differences in their assumptions about the world. What do they think is interesting to listen to or talk about? What issues do they raise? What views do callers present?
Are callers allowed to talk at all? What is challenged by the host and what is left unchallenged? What kinds of language do they use? Make a list of things you hear that just seem so ridiculous that surely nobody could believe them.

2       Go to a news agent. Browse through the magazines, and see what subcultures they serve. Buy a few (or, if you’re lucky, find a library that stocks them). Get one that speaks to a group that you don’tbelong to, and that you wouldn’t normally read. If you’re male, buy a woman’s mag; if you’re female, buy a man’s. Get one that’s aimed at an interest group that you have never heard of (if I hadnever picked up a copy of Modern Ferret magazine, I would never have realized that a community of ferret-fanciers existed, what an important part ferrets played in their lives, nor how much of their social, ethical and even political thinking was tied to their ferret owning pursuits). Again, make a detailed list: what do these cultures think are worth reading about? What assumptions do they make about their readers? Does this group have an enemy that they have to struggle against? What does the magazine say is different between its readers and other people? What function does the magazine serve for the community? How do readers see the magazine? Does the magazine
engage with party politics, the government, issues of policy? Or does it focus on private and personal life?

3       Go to a library. Find more than one newspaper from the same day (it’s best if they serve different contituencies, for example, get some local and some national papers; or tabloids and broadsheets; or left-wing and right-wing papers). Find their coverage of the same story. Write a detailed list of the differences between the stories: what elements do they emphasize in their headlines? What photos do they use? Whose voices are heard? How many different perspectives are given? With whom is the reader meant to sympathize? And any other elements that seem relevant to you. Choose the story that seems to you to be most ‘unbiased’. Does it fit in with your own beliefs? Or do you disagree with its
position?

4        Do the same thing with newspapers from more than one country
– how do they cover the same story differently?

5        Go on the Internet and go to www.google.com. Type in the phrase: ‘the truth of the situation is’ (including the quotation marks), and press the ‘Google search’ button. Visit a number of the websites that contain this phrase. How often do writers use this phrase to present a truth that doesn’t fit in with how they personally see the world? How often do they use it as a synonym for ‘This is how I see the situation’?