The Newness of New Technology

Every new technology transforms the world around it. A century ago, in a gentle preface to his novel Under the Greenwood Tree Thomas Hardy wrote of the transformation of little church orchestras in village England. Humble and amateur community instrumentalists were being displaced by an isolated organist employing a newly manufactured and more cheaply distributed technology, the harmonium or barrel organ. The new device presented certain advantages in control and accomplishment, but, he suggested, the change caused the stultification of the clergy\u27s aims and resulted in loss of interest among parishioners. In these tiny hamlets the technology of musical development had consequences for participation, organization of the institution, the nature of the music that was played, and, Hardy seemed to be saying, for country life as well. Of these multiple and small transformations major changes in society take place

Civil Society and the Global Market for Loyalties

My purpose in this chapter is to suggest a particular mode of thinking about media and global civil society: ways in which major groups that seek to mould opinion around the world interact with each other, with states and corporations, with domestic regulatory systems and with international organisations and structures. I start with an approach I developed in a book called Television, Ihe Public Sphere, and National Identity (Price 1995) and expanded in Media and Sovereignty: The Global Information Revolution and its Challenge to State Power (Price 2002). There I described the existence of a \u27market for loyalties\u27, in which large-scale competitors for power, in a shuffle for allegiances, often use the regulation of communications to organise a cartel of imagery and identity among themselves. In the retrospectively simple state centred version of a market for loyalties, government is usually not only the mechanism that allows the cartel to operate, but is often part of the cartel itself. Management of the market yields the mix of ideas and narratives employed by a dominant group or coalition to maintain power. For fulfilling that process - or attempting to do so - control over participation in the market has been, for many countries, a condition of political stability

On Seizing the Olympic Platform

When Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz wrote Media Events, their masterful analysis of mass ceremonies of the twentieth century (coronations, the moon landing, the Kennedy funeral), the emphasis was on the celebratory or cohesion-building qualities of such global incidents. Now, reflecting on geopolitical changes that have intensified since the publication of the book, they have come to think more of the brutal competition that occurs to appropriate these phenomenona by a variety of groups and powers in society. Katz has argued that terrorism has created a new category of media event. Dayan, with whose modification this chapter is more concerned, has used the word hijack to imply the sometimes forceful, but certainly involuntary or antagonistic, seizure of world attention by altering the expected and legitimated narrative of these singular moments (2005). Dayan reflects the hunger by a multitude of groups to gain the extraordinary benefit of huge investments in platforms established by others, and, in so doing, take advantage of elaborately created fora to advance political and commercial messages. Media events become marked by efforts by free riders or interlopers to seize the opportunity to perform in a global theater of representation

The Enabling Environment for Free and Independent Media

This volume seeks to show why media matters. But understanding why media matters depends on the mode of operation of the press and the particular context in which the media exist. Shaping an effective democratic society requires many steps. The formation of media law and media institutions is one of the most important. Laws are frequently looked at in isolation and as interchangeable parts that are separately advanced for the creation of effective and democracy-promoting media. They are also often analyzed and discussed with attention paid merely to their wording. However, each society has a cluster of activities, interactions of laws and the setting in which they exist, that make those laws more or less effective. Different states, at different stages of development, require different strategies for thinking about the role of media and, as a result, for thinking about the design and structure of the environment in which they operate. Media can only matter – we would argue – in an environment (an enabling environment ) that allows for a vigorous, demanding and informative press. It is significant, then, to identify components of the complex legal process that enables media to advance democratic goals

Governance, Globalism and Satellites

Governing and regulating the use of communication satellites and their signals is becoming increasingly difficult for governments and multilateral organizations. This article takes forward the question arising from the characterization of satellites as `trade routes in the sky\u27 (Price, 1999), as to whether it is more appropriate to look for regional themes and models for state intervention rather than a global system of governance