I attended a public lecture by Dr. Divya McMillin, who presented the spring 2013 Robert M. Pockrass Memorial Lecture on Monday, April 8. The title of her lecture was “Curing Taste: Lifestyle Television and the Globalizing Subject,” which was co-sponsored by the Penn State College of Communications and University Libraries.

Although the title of her lecture does not show it, she covered post-colonialism, India, modernity and television formats. We previously read an article co-authored by her for Dr. McAllister’s class, which was titled “Local Identities in Globalized Regions: Teens, Everyday Life, and Television.” Dr. McMillin is a professor of International Communication and these are some of the topics she covered that are important in that field.

I was especially interested in the idea of TV formats and their global export. This is an important phenomenon in international communication because it allows adopting global formats to local contents. The connection between local and global is explored in this kind of interaction. Another interesting and important idea in her lecture was India’s “soft-power.” This idea shows that India’s rise as a power is mostly economic and related to technologies and software and culture. I thought she did a great job of showing “global interdependencies” and how the flow of cultural products are involved in these interdependencies. I especially found the discussion of travel shows interesting, and they way a country like India is constructed in the language of media.

This lecture was well attended and audiences asked many questions at the end.