Global Television Formats

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GLOBAL TELEVISION FORMATSIN AFRICA

Localizing Idol

Martin Nkosi Ndlela

Introduction

During the last decade, popular television formats have been replicated across the globe for local or regional consumption as program imports, adaptations, clones or imitations, raising questions on the possible ramifications of such cultural inflows. For Africa the international program flow and the influence of Western media content has been a contentious issue for decades, underlying the cultural imperial ism thesis of the 1970s and 1980s, and the centre–periphery paradigms which conceptualized the series of dependency relationships. In African media research concepts like cultural colonialism, media imperialism, neocolonialism, American ization, homogenization, ...