When asked if they were embarrassed by this arrangement, the spokeswoman answered, “No. If he teaches us what we need to know, then that’s all right.” When asked if he found the situation a bit strange, the Detroit-born man also answered in the negative, “I was born in Detroit, but I do not know how to build a car.” In fact, it was one of the Inuit hunters who had taught him how to repair his snowmobile. So why shouldn’t he teach young Inuits to build igloos? In the last scene the igloo builders lay out their seal rugs and light a small fire using seal oil, enabling the heat to ice the inside walls, thus insulating the dwelling from the outside cold and creating warmth within. A final shot shows the lighted igloos against the black night sky.

Many things can be read into this short narrative. First, the typical, white, Canadian anchorman, by referring to concerns of southern Canadians (low building and maintenance costs, no taxes, clear air, and quiet neighborhoods), trivializes a technology that, over thousands of years, has allowed populations to survive and create specific societies and cultures in this particular environment. Second, we are made aware of the benefits of international trade: an Inuit teaches a Detroit-born American how to repair a motor vehicle and, in return, learns how to build an igloo. Third, we are led to understand that what the students expect from the teacher is basic working skills.

The temptation to build a case denouncing cultural imperialism, bemoaning the alienation of aboriginal cultures and the shredding of their social fabric, is strong here. On the basis of this one example, however, the argument would at best be flawed, at worst biased. However, for students of popular culture, national identity, and cultural industries, this is but one of the many thousand daily occurrences that exemplify the dynamic complexity of the concept of “Americanization.”

Embedded within that term are at least two notions: the American presence and the presence of an American. In this news story, both notions are at work. On the one hand, the viewer is made aware of the American presence, and the influence of American technology on this remote society, through the reference to the snowmobile. (Although the Quebec-born inventor of the snowmobile founded what later became the internationally renowned Canadian Bombardier industries, the fact that the Detroit-born American puts the snowmobile on the same footing as the automobile implicitly makes it seem to be an American invention.) On the other hand, the viewer sees and hears the American instructor.

It is the first form of presence that usually defines the concept of Americanization. The term usually refers to the presence of American products and technology, and it is against this presence that most critics argue. Surprisingly, few argue against the presence of Americans themselves. It is perhaps this distinction that has become most significant in light of the worldwide conglomeration of media industries. Rupert Murdoch’s forays into Asian and European national contexts via satellite broadcasting, the purchase of Universal Studios, first by Japanese and later by French owners, and the success of Hong Kong action cinema throughout the world all complicate notions of Americanization. Has Universal Television become Japanese, or French? Has Indian television become American (or Australian) in light of Murdoch’s incursions? These questions suggest the complicated nature of intersections of identity, culture, and technology.

One is led to believe that one will become an American, will be Americanized, not by interacting with citizens of the United States but by using American products, eating American (fast) food, and enjoying American cultural artifacts. One can go so far as to live and work in the United States while remaining staunchly Canadian or Australian or British, as many artists who have succeeded in the American music and film industries remind us. The danger of becoming Americanized seems greater, however, if one remains within the comfort of one’s home enjoying American cultural products such as magazines, novels, movies, music, comics, television shows and news, or computer software and games.

While these two embedded notions, the presence of Americans and the American presence, make for a fascinating debate, the concept of Americanization conceals the parallel dual notion of “the host.” Hosting the American presence seems to be more prevalent and more Americanizing than hosting Americans themselves. To be a host is to make the visitor feel welcome, to make the visitor seem familiar, nonthreatening, at home. In one case, the Canadian host makes the American visitor feel welcome, “at home away from home”; in the second case, the Canadian host is “at home” in the presence of American artifacts that are part of her or his everyday way of life. To become Americanized, it is not only presumed that one consumes a steady diet of readily accessible made-in-the-U.S. products but also that one consumes these cultural products with ease: that is, as would any American.

American products are distributed internationally but are not made for international markets: they are made for the U.S. market, by, for, and about Americans. Thus, one can conclude, to enjoy these easily accessible products, one must be or become American and the more one consumes, the more one becomes American, thereby enabling increasing pleasure and ease in this consumption. Americanization is a case in point of a basic process of acculturation. It results in sounding the alarms of cultural imperialism and cultural alienation: you become what you consume, because in order to consume, you must become the targeted consumer. This is the equivalent of saying, because science (as we believe we know it) is a product of Western European civilization, then to become a scientist one must become Westernized: that is, adopt Western mores, values, and ways of thinking.

In most host countries in the world, there is an overwhelming presence of American products. The pull and pressure of those products must not be underestimated. Still, the news story of the Inuit mechanic and the Detroit igloo builder serves as a reminder that culture, or at least certain types of culture, are less bound by the economics of their technological environment and modes of production than was once assumed and theorized.

The fact that the Inuit travel on snowmobiles, live in suburban dwellings, watch a great deal of television, and have forgotten how to build igloos does not necessarily make them more Americanized when compared with the Detroit-born teacher, who is made no less American by his ability to build an igloo. Skills, products, and ideas take root in historically given contexts: they bear witness to their times. When they travel, they bring with them elements of their place of origin. To use these ideas and products, one must have an understanding of their historical background or context, of their original intent, and of their mode of operation. If the invention and the corresponding mode of production of goods and ideas are context bound, so too are their uses, and, in many cases, these have an impact on the very nature of products and ideas. This perspective leads to a better understanding of Americanization.

American composers, playwrights, and various other artists have undoubtedly affected the popular arts of the world. With the same degree of certitude, one can proclaim that American entrepreneurs and American entrepreneurship have affected the cultural industries the world over. But perhaps the most profound impact of this particular historical culture and its modes of production is found in the social uses American society has made of these cultural products. If one wishes to speak of Americanization in the realm of popular (or mass) culture, one must focus on the social uses of industrially produced and commercially distributed sounds and images. To show American-made movies in local theaters, to watch American sitcoms on the television set, to listen to American music on the radio—or to use copycat versions of any of these materials—is not, necessarily, to become Americanized. To build into the local social fabric of a non-American society the kind of social uses that Americans have made of industrially produced cultural products is to become Americanized but not necessarily to become an American.

To live and work and play in a permanent kaleidoscope world of industrially produced images and sounds (for example, television sets turned on all day; ads overflowing in print, on buses, on T-shirts, talk radio, Walkmans, etc.) means to share a mediated worldview. This, it can be argued, is to become Americanized, and such results are among those most often cited when the reach of newer technologies and the concentration of media ownership are examined as global forces. Yet this, too, it can also be argued, does not mean one necessarily shares an American worldview.

The Dallas imperialism syndrome, and its legitimate heir, the O.J. Simpson trial, are good illustrations of this distinction. The debate surrounding the reception by viewers worldwide of the U.S. serial Dallas rekindles the debate that greeted the American penny press and Hollywood cinema. Its central question: Is communication technology a threat to basic (Western) values, local cultures, and the human psyche? Dallas symbolized this ongoing debate, a debate central to Western culture. But Dallas also symbolized a social evolution that has not received the attention it deserves. The worldwide popularity of Dallas revived the paradigm of the “magic bullet” theory of direct media effects, a theory suggesting that media content and style can be “injected” into the cultural life system, infecting and contaminating the “healthy” cultural body. It also revived discussions of cultural imperialism, but in a more sophisticated fashion and on a much grander scale. And it raised the counter-paradigm of the uses-and-gratifications model in communication studies.

Many researchers were eager to publish their claims that Dallas did not magically turn all its viewers into Americans, but that the program signified many things to many viewers. Moreover, they pointed out that, on the whole, national cultural products (including television programs) still outsold imported American ones. If they did not, they certainly enjoyed more popular support and provided more enjoyment.

Forgotten in this foray was the fact that Dallas symbolized the popularization and the banalization of television viewing, its normal integration within the activities of everyday life, its quiet nestling in the central foyer of the household environment. Television viewing, a remarkable new social practice in many locations, quickly and quietly became, inside and outside academia, a major source of everyday conversation, the measuring stick of many moral debates, the epitome of modern living. In so doing, television viewing displaced the boundaries of centuries-old institutions such as family, work, school, and religion. The Dallas syndrome symbolized the fact that in a large number of host countries, communication technology had become a permanent part of the everyday social environment, that its messages had become a permanent part of the social fabric, and that its spokespersons had joined the public club of opinion makers.

While one can debate the pros and cons of this social fact, one can also speculate that television is not the revolution that many of its critics as well as admirers had hoped or feared. It did not destroy a sacred treasure of Western values based on the technology of the written word. Rather, it revealed a blind spot among many social thinkers: the constructed centrality of the spoken word in modern societies. Television possibly revealed to the most industrialized society of the postwar era, the United States, that it was and still is, by and large, an oral society.

Communication technology did not trigger a revolution, social, moral, or sexual; it became part of the establishment in every way, shape, and form. Just as U.S. cultural industries have become an American institution, a part of the social order, and a sustainer of culture in American society, so too have cultural industries in many other societies. In this sense, other societies have become Americanized. Americanization is not to be found in the consumption of American cultural products. It lies in the establishment of a particular social formation. This formation is, to be sure, defined in part by the use of the products of national cultural industries. However, it is also defined by alterations in patterns of everyday life and by the emergence of “new” voices that take their place among existing relations and structures of power. The uses of television throughout the world are both cause and effect within these cultural and social shifts

Thus, Americanization is neither a boon nor a threat. Rather, it is a cultural and economic fact of life in most (Western) countries. The debate, therefore, should not concern whether to stop or to hasten the consumption of American cultural products. It should instead be centered on the impact of specific social uses of industrially mass-produced cultural products, whether foreign or national. For better or worse, the socialization of sounds and images, and socialization through sounds and images, have made more visible, and more mainstream, the oral traditions and the tradition of orality not only in American society but also in all (Western) Americanized societies.

It matters little whether television, and other technologically based cultural industries, were invented by the Americans or not. What Americans invented was a particular social use of these technologies: the massification of production, distribution, and consumption, and the commodification of industrially produced cultural products. In return, this particular social use revealed to American society, and to other industrialized societies that followed suit, the forgotten presence of traditional, nonnational, oral cultures. Cultural industries, and television in particular, revealed that print technology (the written word) had not subverted oral technology (the spoken word); the former had only partially silenced the latter by making it less “visible.” Television made words and sound once again “visible” and “audible” to the eyes and ears of the mind. In doing so, it also revealed to the heavily industrialized, print-oriented, Western societies that they were blinded by their most popular visual aid, television.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, a comparatively in nocuous story that appeared in the major Canadian newspapers revealed yet another shadowy dimension to the debate about Americanization, one that perhaps indicates a willingness to downplay the notion’s politics. While the event referred to here is rather anecdotal, and is presented in this vein, it does point to the reality of the imperialism of politics.

As one newspaper reported (the Toronto Globe and Mail), in his televised address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush thanked countries as far away as Australia and El Salvador for their support of the United States, but he “overlooked” Canada’s “housing and feeding 45,000 stranded U.S. airline passengers in the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”

On the very next day, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a joint press conference with Canada’s Minister of External Affairs John Manley, put a spin on the “incident” by thanking the Canadian “brothers and sisters” for their generosity and assistance. In a later meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, on September 25, President Bush is quoted as reiterating this notion that Canada is like “a brother” to the United States, so it should not need public acknowledgment of its efforts since the terrorist strikes. While Mexico may be the United States’s friend to the south, Canada is “family.” Canadians need no longer to debate whether they are Americanized, or becoming American; they have been “adopted.” From the status of neighbor to the north, to ally, to friend, Canada’s political relation to the United States has been upgraded to consanguinity. Canada took more than a half-century to become Americanized; it took less than a week to be designated, in a politically correct fashion, as American.