Cultural hegemony
One of most popular internet articles among Japanese young girls is ‘how to make Gaijin face”, Gaijin means foreigner/s, mostly American and western European. It shows that large number of Japanese young girls want to have a face like American and western Europeans. Most of all Japanese grow up with Disney’s movies, Fox dramas, and Hollywood movies, so they have longings for hiroines in those dramas and movies. And internet advertisement help them to keep their longings. To make Japanese girls buy certain types of cosmetic products, internet advertisement encourages them to change their face to “Gaijin face”, sometimes they even imply that having typical Japanese face is embarrassing.
(reference image )
Frantz Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, which is a book about the psychological effect on colonised figure and showed Martinique native’s mimicry. Assame as Martinique people, Japanese girls are effect on Western white people even though Japanese were not totally colonised politically. But culturally, Japanese girls really are.
Also an article of The Guardian points out the risk of the control over and re-writing of history, particularly that of marginalized and poorer sections of the world population. The article states: “The global south can be users of Internet services, knowledge, software and hardware, but will not be its creators. As an example, archival processes in the First World are more organized / better equipped, they can therefore record African or Latin American history (usually through a paternalistic stand point – often falling into the trap of utilizing an educator v. native narrative).”
Watching foreign websites and “[g]iven the existing architecture of the Internet, it costs the same to send a data packet around the world as it does to your next door neighbor – this reduces the barriers to long distance data flow thereby enabling content to be beamed into the global South from the global North. As we have seen, most content is generated in the global North – this can have huge negative effects on local cultures.”
(refer to the article)