Thank You Very Much and Good Luck: Media

Abstract

Developments in communications media are important in all the processes of globalisation. There are three dimensions to this. Firstly, media constitute the technologies and service delivery platforms through which international flows are transacted. Secondly, the media industries are leaders in the push towards global expansion and integration. Thirdly, the media provide informational content and images of the world through which people seek to make sense of events in distant places. It follows that media are central to the globalisation debates, partly because of their role as communications technologies that enable the international distribution of messages and meanings, but mainly because of their perceived role in weakening the cultural bonds that tie people to nation-states and national communities. Chris Barker has argued that global media - and global broadcast media in particular - are globalising in both their form and their content. Television, Barker has claimed, is 'globalised because it is an institution of capitalist modernity' and, at the same time, it is 'contributing to the globalisation of modernity through the worldwide circulation of images and discourses' .1 The element in this which has generated particular concern for national governments is the way in which the rise of global broadcast media is seen as leading to an uncoupling of polity and culture within the nation-state, analogous to the uncoupling of polity and economy that is associated with the rise of transnational corporations and global financial markets..