Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire
434
Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire
434eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire, an international team of experts analyzes and critiques the political economy of media communications worldwide. Their analysis takes particular account of the sometimes conflicting pressures of globalization and “neo-imperialism.” The first is commonly defined as the dismantling of barriers to trade and cultural exchange and responds significantly to lobbying of the world’s largest corporations, including media corporations. The second concerns US pursuit of national security interests as response to “terrorism,” at one level and, at others, to intensifying competition among both nations and corporations for global natural resources.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780861969142 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 434 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor in the Department of Communication, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Read an Excerpt
Communications Media, Globalization and Empire
By Oliver Boyd-Barrett
John Libbey Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 John Libbey Publishing Ltd.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86196-914-2
CHAPTER 1
Globalization, Media and Empire: An Introduction
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
The act of communication in itself is an arguably insufficient object of study: communication is no more nor less important than the universe of both silence and noise from which communication emerges and which gives it shape, just as the spaces between objects represented in a painting have vitality no less essential to the scope for meaning of the whole. To understand communication we must understand that which is not "there". To communicate is simultaneously not to communicate; to enlighten may at the same time obscure; to inform may deceive. From such a premise, we should conclude that the title of this book is much less than the product of its silences.
For many decades from its inception during the first half of the twentieth century scholars advanced the study of media when more correctly they may be said to have promoted a propaganda of public opinion and pluralism; they concentrated on the place of media within the nation rather than media's role in construction of the nation. In dealing with the administrative entity that we call the state, and the cultural product to which it lays claim and that we call the nation, they understated the dependence of these upon the play of symbolic power through media. Their focus on media within the nation took insufficient account of the play of international interests, technologies, finance, and ideologies in shaping media; and marginalized the adventures of national media on international markets, and the role of media in securing the compliance of populations both domestic and foreign with the international political and economic ambitions of domestic and transnational elites. Transnational dimensions of media activity were first presented (in the 1960s) in the context of benign discourses of modernization and democratization, or discourses of cultural protection for local (often elite) cultural products, in preference to malign discourses of imperialism, whose relevance should surely have been acute in the decolonization context of that period. When in the 1970s scholarship did seize on the importance of media as tools of political, economic and cultural subjugation of nations, classes, genders and races, in competition for the earth's resource and for the precious time and trusting fealty of citizens, subjects and employees, discussion soon reverted to audiences and the nebulous processes by which human beings struggle to make meaning from texts on the basis of limited cognitive and cultural resources. The political economy of media as agents of both imperialism and resistance, was further diverted, hijacked even, during the 1990s, by discourses of globalization that focused on markets and regulation more than interests and social classes, on discontinuities between modern and pre-modern more than continuities, on the surface chatter of trade and cultural policies more than long-term strategies of power. Discourses of globalization, attending to interdependencies, networks, transformations of space and time, transnational corporate networks, the seductions and utilities of corporate products, constant assurances of goodwill for mankind and a better future, stand in sharp opposition to the discourses of imperialism, with their attention to hubris and control, victimage and justice, and the critical interrogation of media as vehicles of product promotion, distraction, and self-exculpatory consolations for, diversions from and denials of an incessant savagery and enslavement that, with particular intensity these past few hundred years, has visited alike colored and white, man and woman, and the very earth itself, its creatures, forests, oceans, and air. Neither set of these incompatible narratives is complete: globalization theories focus on the benefit of liberal markets and understate the continuance of protected markets (e.g. US government subventions and favorable tax policies in such areas as agriculture and movies). Imperialism theories excoriate the nefariousness of the empire's cultural product yet are reluctant to acknowledge the potential for liberation in exposure to new informational and entertainment paradigms and technologies.
Globalization, as I argue in Chapter Four, is not new; if it is remarkable this may be because many of us have been reared within the walls of the nation state, a recent innovation. Many things we profess to find surprising about globalization, such as homogenization and hybridization of cultural forms, complexity of trade relations, human mobility, the undermining of local authority are in fact ancient. Think, if you will, of world religions such as Catholicism that over fifteen hundred years ago exercised a highly standardizing impact on the most intimate beliefs and behaviors (e.g. sexual relations), while subtly accommodating previous cultural forms, over many thousands of miles, through complex networks of agents (priests, monks and nuns organized into national and international orders and administrative units) and mass media (e.g. the systematic production of bibles and books of learning by teams of monastery scribes using manual, illustrated lettering). Or recall the silk road that for three thousand years established trading connections stretching from the Mediterranean to China via Central Asia and Kazakhstan, permitting the flow of "silk from China, precious stones from India, silver goods from Iran, Byzantine cloths, Turkic slaves, Afrasiabian ceramics" (Anon., 2006). Consider, too, the demographics of Southern California in the middle of the nineteenth century including numerous indigenous tribes; the descendants of missionaries and soldiers from Mexico City, many of whom had originated in Spain; gold prospectors from every part of Europe and Asia, including large numbers of Chinese; whale hunters from Russia; traders from South America. And as for the undermining of local sovereignty one has only to recollect the province of Israel and the subservience of its rulers and priests, through Pontius Pilate, to Caesar at the time of Christ. If contemporary globalization has a claim to distinction it is in the combination of the scale to which the different countries of the globe are participants in the global economy; the role of transnational corporations rather than governments in activating such participation (albeit subject to regulation by intergovernmental bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization); and the role of advanced media and communications technologies in supporting the global economy, for example by enabling instantaneous informational, entertainment symbolic exchange almost regardless of distance.
This descriptive conceptualization, however, has more than a few flaws. It may imply that the global economy operates neutrally for the general benefit of all, when some would prefer to argue that it is driven by transnational corporations headquartered in a handful of western countries, for the benefit of wealthy elites. It implies that the exchange of information and entertainment is essentially egalitarian and benign, when some would prefer to argue that much of the information and entertainment comes from the western world, predominantly the United States of America, often highly unbalanced in its representations of the world and world issues. Discourses of globalization render largely invisible the fragility of a global economic system that threatens to exhaust the earth's productive resources, is overwhelmingly dependent on soon-to-be extinct gasoline energy, under conditions of global warming and other forms of incipient human-induced natural catastrophe, that may yet reverse the process of globalization back to a "dominance of the local". The troubled history of these discourses is itself much older than many of their adherents appreciate.
Chapters in Part One pose the question as to the extent to which global media are global extensions of (a few) national media or represent a media universe in which all human groups are well represented. In Chapter Two, Graham Murdock shows that the dualistic conception of globalization as either progressive interdependency or intrusive invasion, either a liberal project of cosmopolitans or an acquisitive design of conquistadores, was acknowledged at least as far back as the writings of Immanuel Kant in 1795. Murdock shows how this dialectic has been transformed by the changing relations, under contemporary globalization, between transnational and local media in their struggle for a claim to truly "indigenous" cultural product, within a market template that both share and that reduces the "authentically" national or local to a marketable, symbolic commodity. Competition also often yields to interdependent collaborations between transnational and local. These enhance the commercialization and marketability of media product and undermine older, state-supported or public service media. Thus they advance the inevitability of the internationalization of capitalism, both through classic advertising and newer, more comprehensive strategies of product promotion, including product placement. Both glorify the moment of purchase and pleasure of ownership, while hiding from view the conditions and externalities of processes of production. What has changed in recent decades, Murdock argues, is the role of nation states, which used to be major impediments to the internationalization of capital, as in the case of both India and China during the Cold War. Neither country wanted to buy into western conceptions of the modern. Now, with the entry of these giants to the global economy, capitalism has achieved what Murdock calls a "mobile consumerism", its success fed by an expanding middle class, and consumer-oriented youth cultures.
Sources of resistance remain, in particular the rise of fundamentalisms. These mobilize pre-modern sentiments even as they leverage the tools of modernity to achieve their ends, which usually have to do with nationalist, ethnic or religious purity. While this suggests an opposition between mobile consumerism and fundamentalism, Murdock argues there is a complicating, third force at work, namely "critical cosmopolitanism". This is represented by forces that do not uncritically buy into the consumerism project, but remain aware of and concerned about the externalities and conditions of the processes of production. They make extensive and imaginative use of new communications spaces that become manifest when technology evolves faster than the capability of regulators to control it. While access to the resources and possibilities of the Internet are unequally shared, and its overall influence possibility limited, critical cosmopolitanism often makes effective use of it to foster a global, moral consciousness and citizenship.
US representation of itself and the "other" through Hollywood film is likely a paradoxical factor that helps provoke fundamentalist resistance to mobile consumerism, even if Hollywood imagery has mostly and positively served US interests through the promotion of western modernity. It is a truism of media research that local audiences prefer local product, yet Hollywood is still the foremost example of US-based media imperialism. In Chapter Three, Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell note that although non-US film makers of color make most movies, the public history of film is largely the history of Hollywood. Hollywood movies dominate screen entertainment around the globe, accounting for between 40–90 per cent of the movies shown in most countries, and sucking up most global investment in film. While the industry likes to account for its success as a perfect example of the operation of market response to popular demand, Miller and Maxwell argue that precisely the opposite is true, that Hollywood is sustained not by the market but by state subsidies, whether of the US itself or of other nations competing for movie production dollars. State interests are fourfold: movies promote American goods and consumerism, directly or indirectly; movies are effective propaganda – the authors refer to American movies teaching "American values" to Japanese moviegoers after the US dropped H-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; moviemaking serves the military, both through propaganda, and in the transfer of animation skills to battlefield training software; movie production has positive multiplier effects for local economies.
Another truism of media research is that the explosion of television outlets through terrestrial, cable, satellite, video and DVD distribution stimulates local entertainment production. Yet as a source of movies shown on all these channels, Hollywood has grown more rather than less influential in most countries, while its once strongest rival, European movie production, has declined. Europe remains Hollywood's most valuable overseas market. Through much of its history, Hollywood has all but wiped out local film industries, and now dominates in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Egypt that once had strong domestic industries. Vertical integration, Fordist production principles, and innovation, have played their part in this saga, but so too have state subsidies. State-supported Hollywood imperialism is represented through subsidies for overseas export activity, inducements to make use of cheap non-US labor, and outsourcing. With China and India in the global economy, Hollywood relishes the prospect of penetrating the countries that account for two thirds of the world's screens. Even while Chinese import controls restrict entry of Hollywood movies to a mere handful, these nonetheless account for substantial percentages of revenues earned.
In sum, one might conclude from Miller and Maxwell's analysis, as from most other contributions to this volume, that Giddens' claim (2005) that "media imperialism makes no sense, really" demonstrates a profound misconception of the relationship between aggressive territorial and cultural interventions by nation states – often in alliance with economic elites – and communications media. Media imperialism theory is the specific focus of Chapter Four, where Boyd-Barrett analyses the importance of information and communication technology (ICT) industries in supporting US global economic dominance in the period 1975–2000. He argues that ICT represented a focus of US response to the comprehensive swirl of threat that it confronted in the 1970s, and an arena for the application of deregulatory, neo-liberal policies in the 1980s. The break-up of AT+T, in particular, heralded a shaking-up of telecommunications, facilitating the mass application of networked microprocessor technologies (NMT) throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Boyd-Barrett charts NMT-supported US global hegemony at the turn of the 21st century, and the strong representation among US and US-allied transnational corporations (TNCs) of knowledge-based and ICT industries. Simultaneously, he charts a strong relative decline in the strength of US global dominance, also represented by a decline in its lead of ICT, mainly at the hands of Indian and Chinese competition. Assessing the implications of the growth of ICT in India and China, Boyd-Barrett inclines to the view that although interdependencies are thereby established between the USA and Asia, these may be less significant in the long term than mutual perceptions of the intentions of each of these major powers with respect to the leveraging of their economic power for the pursuit of national security and ambition. Concerns that feed such ambitions embrace estimations of future conflict in competition for global energy supplies during the difficult upcoming transition from a gasoline to a post-gasoline energy era, in the face of mounting ecological and environmental sources of global catastrophe. Such a view helps explain neo-conservative politics. Neo-conservatism is a response to the prevailing weakness, from a US point of view, of neo-liberalism which, while underwriting US dominance for a quarter century also nurtured its relative demise by accelerating the rise of Asian powers. Once again, globalization has everything to do with imperialism; and communications media likewise have everything to do with imperialism, and resistance to it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Communications Media, Globalization and Empire by Oliver Boyd-Barrett. Copyright © 2016 John Libbey Publishing Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of John Libbey Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Notes on Contributors
1. Globzlization, Media, and Empire: An Introduction by Oliver Boyd-Barrett
I. Global Media or Local Media Globalized?
2. Cosmopolitans and Conquistadors: Empires, Nations, and Networks by Graham Murdock
3. Film and Globalization by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell
4. Cyberspace, Globalization, and US Empire by Oliver Boyd-Barrett
II. Regulation and Cultural Competition
5. Globalization, Public Service Broadcasting, and Citizen Responses by Granville Williams
6. Regulating globalization: Domestic Response to International Investment in China's Media Market by Jia Lin
III. Global, National and Local—Mutual Accommodations
7. Xinhua News Agency and Globalization: Negotiating Between the Global, the Local, and the National by Xin Xin
8. Localization Strategies of International Media Companies: Entering India in the 1990s by Geetika Pathania-Jain
9. Transnational Media and National Vision: Television in Liberalized Indian by Anshu Chatterjee
10. Hispanic Media Globalization by Mercedes Medina
IV. Global Media, Global Economy
11. Deregulation, Privatization, and the Changing Global Media Environment by Richard A. Gershon
12. Global Advertising in Asia: Penetration and Transformation of the Transnational Advertising Agencies by Kwangmi Ko Kim
13. Toward Globalization or Localization: Multinational Advertising in Eastern Europe by Izabella Zandberg
14. Global Corporations, Global Public Relations by Liese L. Hutchinson and John J. Pauly
Index