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Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

“Influencing” is not the same as “manipulating” or “controlling” in this context.

Some kid in eastern europe watched Kobe Bryant play and got inspired to sign up for a local basketball team and took it seriously - that’s influencing. People in some countries outside of the US that never had Halloween as a holiday now unofficially observe it (due to the holiday’s portrayal in western media and it being almost a staple for a sitcom series to have an episode dedicated to it) - that’s influencing.

But you are right, it isnt the type of an influence you are thinking about, with an evil man twirling his moustache and trying to manipulate people on the other side of the globe to do his bidding via harry potter movies.

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> the type of an influence you are thinking about, with an evil man twirling his moustache

No I never imagined or implied that.

> some kid in eastern europe watched Kobe Bryant play and got inspired to sign up for a local basketball team

That's just the cultural adoption reproducing itself. No American is influencing i.e. changing the course of events meaningfully in their advantage. Some cultural export that's all.

> People in some countries outside of the US that never had Halloween as a holiday now unofficially observe it

Again, just the same cultural adoption reproducing. At best this represents some incremental exports in intangibles. Pay-per-view games, some costumes from China. Hey now American influence is favoring the Chinese economy.

Yeah there's cultural hegemony. There's a lot of talk and hand wrangling about "soft power" and "influence" but even letting your imagination run the best you could come up were nothing more than some examples of aesthetics choices.

>cultural adoption reproducing itself … what? You’ve gone to great lengths here to fabricate a phrase that is semantically equivalent to “influence” in the most obfuscated way possible.

>cultural hegemony See previous … what?

Let’s get down to brass tax.

A does foo. B notices A has done foo. B decides it will also do foo. A has influenced B.

There are other aspects about the original comment which were better targets than attacking the meaning of “influence”, such as America’s status as a melting pot whose traditions are in great part just the collection of influences from the multitude of ethnicities which can be represented by the single term “American”. Thinking America has such dramatic unique influence while ignoring its composition of influences from other cultures is not giving honest context. That’s the part I would have gone after.

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