THE TELEVISION AND THE CONTINUATION OF CULTURAL COLONIALISM IN THE THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO TELEDRAMAS

This paper will make an effort to examine the current trap of cultural colonialism and its impact on the Third World with special reference to Sri Lanka. The objectives of this paper is to examine conceptually how far cultural colonialism is affected in the determination of the future of the Third World countries while studying how far mass television of Sri Lanka made a positive involvement in continuation of cultural colonialism and to examine the influence on spectators through the variety of tele dramas offered by various channels in Sri Lanka. The study mainly depends on the secondary data. Further the programs which telecast on major national TV channels of Sri Lanka were observed to examine the nature, content and other details of the programs, especially Teledramas. Further the data of a national study carried out by the author (unpublished) was used. In a nutshell the mass and one of the popular media of TV is a product of the West and it is used directly or indirectly for the continuation of the cultural colonialism to a great extent due to the dependency syndrome. The Teledramas and the majority of its contents are the archetype of the modern version of the imperialism which is known as cultural colonization.