S
N
L
DF
broadcasting in English. Russia has also joined in the
global discussion with RT—Russia Today—a news net-
work (in English, Spanish, and Arabic versions) and a
website, founded in 2005 by Vladimir Putin.
Similar changes are under way in entertainment.
Old types of amusements, such as radio and comic
strips, have been joined by innovative means of media
coverage, including cable television with MTV, and
all-sports channels. These changes have given birth
to extravagantly popular fi gures: Michael Jackson
(1958–2009), superstar of the mid-1980s; Madonna
(b. 1959), queen of popular songs in the early 1990s;
and Eminem (born Marshall Mathers III in 1972), a
white rapper and the king of pop music in the last de-
cade. As entertainment continues to evolve, probably
the most highly visible and infl uential development in
recent years has been the birth of hip-hop—the voice
of the people in the street.
The rise of hip-hop began in the 1970s. With ori-
gins in break dancing, graffi ti art, rap rhyming, and
disc jockeys playing with turntables and “scratch” ef-
fects, hip-hop music emerged in black and Hispanic
America, spoken in either English or Spanish. By
2001, hip-hop was paramount in American pop mu-
sic, largely because of the same forces mainstreaming
African Americans in Hollywood fi lms and on tele-
vision. Hip-hop has spread to Mexico, much of latin
America, parts of Canada, the Far East, and Europe,
especially within immigrant communities. And hip-
hop played a role in the 2011 Arab Spring, with its lyr-
ics serving as a battle cry for protesters as they took
to the streets.
gender roles, and their ambiguous nature made her
controversial, especially to feminists. In the eighties,
she made a series called History Portraits, in which she
impersonated famous art subjects. In the nineties, she
made photographs using pornographic subjects, mock
fashion images, and fairy-tale characters. Sherman’s
art, with its staged and rather tacky quality, seeks to
dethrone high art and bring it down to earth for to-
day’s audiences.
Mass Culture
The information boom spread American culture around
the world and transformed it into a global village.
Television provided the initial means of communica-
tion, but the videocassette recorder, the compact-disc
player, the digital recorder, the camcorder, the com-
puter, the Internet, the cell phone, and the World Wide
Web have connected the globe’s peoples with unfore-
seen consequences.
With this infor mation explosion has come the Age of
Infotainment, that is, a blend of information and enter-
tainment, a phenomenon that can be observed across
the mass media. Older mass media—newspapers, mag-
azines, and radio—have declined, while newer outlets,
such as television and computers, have grown. Even
newer types of media are under siege; for example, the
nightly televised news has taken second place to the
24-hour news network format pioneered by CNN in
the early 1980s. CNN itself is now challenged by a Pan-
African news channel, using French and English, and
Qatar-based Al Jazeera, the global voice of the Arabs,
SUMMARY
After 1970 the world turned a corner. The United
States and the USSR moved toward a détente and their
relations slowly improved. Then, in 1990, the Soviet
empire collapsed and the cold war was over. The tri-
umph of a single superpower—the United States—did
not last long. The Western bloc fragmented as fi ssures
emerged between the United States and Europe. Oil-
rich nations,such as Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia,
presented challenges to America’s hegemony and se-
curity. And the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India
and China) began to play more important roles in the
global economy. liberal democracy and free-market
economics were threatened on many fronts: the re-
vival of militant nationalism and ethnic warfare, the
populist reaction in poorer countries against global-
ization, the spread of terrorism, the worldwide credit
crisis and recession, and the uncertainties brought on
by the Arab Spring in 2011.
Postmodernism struggled to explain and deal with
the changes in literature and the arts. It embraced
mass culture, displaying a more playful approach to
creativity, and grew more inclusive as it envisioned a
global culture, including writers from latin America,
Asia, and the Middle East. Realism and fi gurative
painting returned to the art world, while many art-
ists continued to push the boundaries of the creative
process via installation art, environmental art, per-
formance art, and video art. Architects adopted new
materials and designs, built multipurpose structures,
and planned people-friendly urban complexes.
Philosophical debates remained confi ned to aca-
demic and literary circles, but religious issues moved
662 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE CONTEMPORARY WORlD
mat76655_Ch23_628-664.indd 662 11/26/12 3:08 PM
