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imperialism. For instance, Boyd-Barrett (1977) speaks about ‘media imperialism’, Galtung (1979) employs the term ‘structural imperialism’, also there are such terms as ‘cultural dependency and domination’ (Link 1984, Mohammadi 1995), ‘cultural synchronization’ (Hamelink 1983), and many others that are closely related to one and the same notion of cultural imperialism.
On taking into consideration such a variety of terms it would be logical to find out what cultural imperialism is and define its essence. At this respect it is possible to say that one of the main implications of cultural imperialism is that this concept proposes that “a society is brought into the modern world system, when its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping its social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system” (Schiller 1976, p.103). To put it more precisely, in cultural terms it means that nowadays the cultural imperialism is expressed through the development and spread of the influence of certain cultures worldwide. It is noteworthy that nowadays, there is actually one hegemonic state, the US, which spread its cultural impact all over the world and the problem of Americanisation of the world culture is very important and in some countries it leads to internal conflict between local historical traditions and modern impact of the American culture on the local communities.
In this respect, it should be said that many specialists, including Tomlinson, underline the role of media in the development of cultural imperialism that nowadays practically results in cultural hegemony of the US. In fact, the role of media in the contemporary society should not be underestimated because the modern technologies, especially IT and computing, development of Internet, made media very influential ideological and cultural tool. The main reason of such increased role of media is the high level of informatization of human society when people are getting information twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and in the future this trend would be even stronger. As a result, people are dramatically influenced by the information they receive from the media, and very often they get acquainted with an absolutely new lifestyle that is brought to them via media. Eventually, it leads to the situation when new generations, especially in developing countries, are influenced by media, which are often internationalised, to the extent that the lifestyle they learn from media comes into clashes with their traditional culture.

Not surprisingly that in such a situation the local culture can also tend to cultural imperialism that is basically expressed in the development of nationalist ideas, which deliberately underline the difference of local culture from the culture, which is nowadays considered to be predominant in the whole world, i.e. American culture. In other words, cultural imperialism results in the enforcing of nationalism and extremism.
Furthermore, John Tomlinson characterises such a situation as a ‘cultural loss’ that is basically the result of ‘cultural weakness’ of capitalist modernity. He underlines that the spread of capitalism and modernity contributes to a significant cultural shift and it results in cultural imperialism, which aims at satisfaction cultural needs of people. For instance he estimates that “people need something mo