The Global Content Community

For the last 100 years, storytelling on screens has been an American phenomenon.  Hollywood narrative is one of the United States’ top export industries from a trade balance perspective.  When it comes to storytelling and mythmaking for popular global culture, whether it’s movies, tv or games, Americans and the melting pot influences  that created us, have ruled this world.

But this is about to change.  Even before the internet, broadcasting and video accelerated the proliferation of, and immersion into, this content and this culture, such that young people all over the world have grown up with Bart Simpson and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

They now understand the cultural and narrative forms that drive successful storytelling on screens .  And while in earlier times, these international storytellers would migrate to Hollywood to work – because the creative, technical and business infrastructures were lacking at home,  now they don’t have to come here to do their work, and do it successfully, and at a creative and technical level that equals what we do in the U.S..

We need to get used to the idea that we’re going to be going where the jobs are, and all the jobs aren’t necessarily going to be here.   It is no coincidence that universities all around the world are adding media studies programs to their curricula, and that many countries are providing increased incentives to spur the development of local media content businesses.