Beyond technophilia: A critique of media globalization

Abstract

In this paper, I revisit discourses of media globalization through a cultural approach. I do so by contextualizing theoretical possibilities of grasping media globalization by engaging with the conceptual categories of notable scholars. In doing so, I reposition the globalization debate from its decidedly technophilic and economic determinisms to a nuanced, culturally situated discussion. The paper provides a wider context for grasping how the globalization of the media shapes, configures, and reconstitutes everyday practice and conditions of local and globalized practices. Issues raised in this light include historical contexts framing globalization (for instance, is it a question of homogeneity, heterogeneity, cultural imperialism, hybridity, or what?), political economic perspectives on transnational media conglomerates and their work of empire as well as the work of resistance by nation states in regulating global flow.

Keywords:

• Culture
• globalization
• media
• homogeneity
• heterogeneity

1. Introduction

Globalization has never been a new phenomenon. In fact, it predates modernity (cf. Giddens, 1990; Innis, 1950; Thompson, 1995). It comes as no surprise, then, that scholarly tinkering on the subject is murky and intricately complex. For instance, the term globalization is often conflated with modernization, Westernization, Americanization, or McDonaldization. This myth, as Hafez (2007, 2012) calls it, is a far cry from thick theorizations of globalization in the human and social sciences, where scholars are more concerned with the diversity of globalizing spheres, the local/global dialectic, the connectedness of global cities, the transformation of the nation-state, and the macrostructures of the network society and their forms of veridical power. Political economists, in the same way, bring a geopolitical perspective to the study of globalization by focusing on forms of international relations, global governance, public accountability, and cosmopolitanism (Volkmer & Volkmer, 2012). It is only recently, say in the last three decades, that communication and media scholars’ interest in the subject has peaked, albeit from a decidedly media-centric framework (Chakravartty & Zhao, 2008; Hafez, 2007; Mattelart, 1996). Thus, the grand narratives in media globalization theory point to a somewhat fetishization of technophilia, technological determinism, and an unalloyed charisma for the power of media to flatten the time/space/distance trichotomies. Indeed, Volkmer and Volkmer (2012) has already mapped the field of global communication as belonging to six conceptual spheres. These are the transnational spheres of conflicts paradigm (the focus here is on the CNNization of news), transnational media extension, translocality paradigm and its study of contexts of hybridity. Others include subjectivity, and discourse such as the one theorized by Marwan Kraidy (2005), and regional network.

Although much ink continues to spill on the subject of globalization, there exist few studies that explore the cultural manifestations of media practices in relation to subjectivity, resistance, and collective agency (See Sehrawat et al., 2021). It has been suggested that a study of the cultural dimension of global communication must have as its agenda how much content is contained, absorbed, or assimilated within a given cultural domain, how this foreign content is being transmitted by print, electronic, and new media, and how domestic or indigenous cultures and languages are being impacted by this foreign content (McPhail, 2010). Again, the bulk of work on this approach has remained chillingly conceptual with too much emphasis on notions such as ideology, hegemony, and power dynamics (See Ang, 2003; Chakravartty & Zhao, 2008). Its corollary is that media studies is conspicuously just too Western in general, and Anglo-American, in particular, much to the dislikes of critics such as Mohammadi and Mohammadi (1997), Curran and Park (2000), Hackett and Zhao (2005), and more recently as articulated in the edited collection by Thussu (2010), and Cushion and Lewis (2010).

In this paper, I take a contrapuntal approach to explore the essences of media globalization theory. In doing so, I will engage in a healthy dialectic among critical theory, Marxist political economy, postcolonial theory, and media and communication studies to theorize the question concerning globalization, given that no singular discipline can by any means claim as its droit divin. Volkmer (1999), in his popularization of the “CNN factor”, was right in suggesting that globalization may become what he described as “a new paradigmatic future intellectual play zone” (p. 17). Throughout the paper, I attempt to situate the conversation within the orbit of media houses and televisual news, and explain how conditions of local news production are constrained and influenced by globalized news practices. Issues raised in this light include historical contexts framing globalization (for instance, is it a question of homogenization, heterogeneity, cultural imperialism, hybridity, or what?), political economic perspectives on transnational media conglomerates and their work of empire, and the work of resistance by nation states in regulating global flow (for example, is the decline of the state a myth or reality?)

2. Historical contexts of media globalization: the cultural dimension

Often defined as the shrinking of the time/space factor (Herman & McChesney, 2004; Mohammadi & Mohammadi, 1997), globalization has been unfortunately over theorized within the orbits of two basic determinisms: high technology and economics. One of its ardent believers, Thompson (1995), has traced its origin as far back as the late fifteenth century, though Tomlinson (1999) warns us to be weary of periodization because modern societies did not start at the same moment and developed uniformly within a single epoch. Thompson believes that the ineluctable presence of globalization is caused by developments in communication media, giant media industries, and new communication technologies. In The Media and Modernity, Thompson (1995) posits that the development of the media was interwoven in fundamental ways with the major institutional transformations which have shaped the modern world, a claim the French sociologist Mattelart (1996) supports in The Invention of Communication. Thompson’s (1995) work particularly focuses on the gradual expansion of networks of communication and information flow, and explains how these networks are interwoven with economic, political, military, coercive, and symbolic power. A major concern he addresses is that “the use of communication media transforms the spatial and temporal organization of social life, creating new forms of action and interaction, and new modes of exercising power, which are no longer linked to the sharing of a common locale” (p. 4). He terms this process symbolic distancing. Building on the original formulations of Robertson (1992), Thompson (1995) confirms the view that globalization refers to the uncoupling of time and space that brings us close to the essence of globalization, which he explains as how different parts of the world become interconnected. He argues that globalization arises through three main factors: (1) activities that take place in an arena which is mainly global rather than regional; (2) activities that are organized, planned, and coordinated on a global scale, and (3) activities that involve some degree of reciprocity and interdependency in ways that localized cultures situated in different parts of the globe are shaped by one another.

If Thompson is convinced of his media globalization thesis, it is so because he has identified key patterns in its discourse. He concurs with later theorists such as Chakravartty and Zhao (2008), and Volkmer and Volkmer (2012) that the globalization of communication has, over the years, been an asymmetrical relationship and an uneven process which has mostly benefited the more industrial nations than those at the periphery. Thompson attributes this unevenness to four main developments. These are (a) the emergence of transnational communication conglomerates as key players in the global system of communication and information diffusion; (b) the social impact of new technologies such as the satellite television pioneered by CNN (for a comprehensive discussion on the CNN effect across the globe see the edited collection of Cushion & Lewis, 2010); (c) the asymmetrical flow of information and communication products within the global system; and (d) the variations and inequalities in terms of access to the global networks of communication.

On the strengths of these suggestions, Thompson insists that theories such as cultural imperialism are no longer useful in accounting for the globalization of communication. According to him, this theory as expounded by Schiller (1969) is fixated on the economic imperative of globalization and the dominance of the United States as the world’s foremost superpower, thus neglecting the fact that the economic power of America is becoming weaker by the day in view of the ongoing economic boom in other nations. Cultural imperialism, Thompson continues, also assumes, though we might admit tacitly, that imported media products are thought to affect their recipients in subaltern states in very significant ways. It is a kind of magic bullet theory that assumes a priori that media consumers in the Third World countries are passive recipients who can make little or no adjustment to the content of the product they consume, and are therefore conditioned by the product’s content. One may also add that the cultural imperialism thesis takes as given that it is only the most formidable culture that affects weaker ones, and that it is hardly possible for the media products from Third World countries to be consumed by recipients in the most advanced centers of the globe. There is also negotiation and hybridity to consider as well. Uses and gratifications are possible on both sides of the media divide. Cunningham and Flew (2000), for example, have shown with clarity that Australians are very alive to the de-Westernization of their media outlets from the claws of British and American influences.

Given these limitations, Thompson proposes that a more sophisticated theory of media globalization needs to grapple with two considerations. The first is that “we need to construct historically the ways in which the process of globalization has taken hold, retracing this development with regard to each of the four—economic, political, coercive, and symbolic—forms of power and their interrelations” (p. 173). The second concerns the relation between structured patterns of global communication, on the one hand, and the local conditions under which media products are appropriated, on the other. The central tenet of Thompson’s theory of media globalization is that media globalization is made possible when a media product is consumed by a local culture through the process of appropriation. He considers it so because appropriation “always involves specific individuals who are situated in specific historical contexts, and who draw on the resources available to them in their lives” (p. 174). He adds that it is the local resources of individuals that enable them to transform media products and therefore appropriate them to suit their individuality and identity. For Thompson, it is wrong to assume that the globalization of communication has eroded individual agency and autonomy. At worse, there are globalized diffusions and localized appropriations.

Two basic things happen in the process of appropriating globalized media products, says Thompson; often they are contextualized and made sense of hermeneutically. As he puts it, “… the significance which media messages has for individuals and the uses to which mediated symbolic materials are put by recipients depend crucially on the contexts of reception process” (p. 174). This means that localized appropriated media products are often embedded in sets of practices which shape their significance. Therefore, to understand the social impact of localized appropriation of globalized materials, we need to account for the symbolic distancing from the spatio-temporal contexts of everyday life, says Thompson (1995). In this context, symbolic distancing “enables individuals to take some distance from the conditions of their day-to-day lives—not literally but symbolically, imaginatively, vicariously … to gain some conception of the regions of the world which are far removed from their own locales” (p. 175). But appropriation does not always achieve the work of allure. Sometimes, says Thompson, localized appropriation of global media breeds tension and self-conflict with the symbolic content of the product. Chakravartty and Zhao (2008) prefer friction, a term they use to indicate processes of diverse and conflicting social encounters that make up the transnational capitalist integration. This involves the process of reconciliation and rejection.

It must, however, be noted that Thompson’s attempt at making a distinction between global and local is not without its own challenges. At best, he treats these phenomena as two disparate and separate entities, the former always affecting the latter. There appears to be little room in his theory for the possibility of an overlap between local and global communication processes. Two years prior to the publication of Thompson’s (1995) Media and Modernity, Ngűgï (1993) argued against the West’s penchant to generalize its experience of history as the universal experience of the world. Ngugi posited that there is no virtue in measuring local knowledge by the degree of its distance from Western metropolis. He resisted the idea of generalizing historical particularities into timeless and spaceless universalities, and warned against the sharp dichotomy between what is perceived as local as distinct from the universal. This is certainly what poststructuralism responds to in a large degree. “The problem arises from the tendency to see the local and the universal in mechanical opposition; and the relativity of cultures in a temporal ground of equality almost as if cultures within a nation and between nations have developed on parallel bars towards parallel ends that never meet, or if they meet, they do so in infinity. The universal is contained in the particular just as the particular is contained in the universal” (p. 26). So, for Ngűgï (1993), culture develops within the process of a people wrestling with their natural and social environment so much so that the struggle forms part of their psychological make-up. As he pointed out, “Local knowledge is not an island unto itself; it is part of the main, part of the sea. Its limits lie in the boundless universality of our creative potentiality as human beings” (p. 29).

Defenders of globalization, nonetheless, insist that globalization lies at the heart of modern culture. This is what Tomlinson (1999) believes by stressing that “the huge transformative processes of our time cannot be properly understood until they are grasped through the conceptual vocabulary of culture” (p. 1). By singling out the cultural dimension of globalization, he argues that the multidimensionality of the complex phenomenon has often been studied from an arcane economic perspective. Central to his work is the connectivity thesis, which he distinguishes from such notions as “proximity” and “unicity” in the sense that these terms carry with them a sense of space/time compression when in reality, it is the temporal dimension of the relation that has been transgressed. For Tomlinson, locality is the theater where the everyday is rehearsed, practiced, and acted. As he writes, “The journey into localities then is a journey into the challenging reality of cultural difference, posing the question of how far connectivity establishes ‘proximity’ beyond the technological modality of increasing access” (Tomlinson, 1993: p. 8).

Tomlinson’s (1993) discussion of the cultural scope of globalization appears very convincing. He starts by noting that a focus on the cultural dimension of globalization carries with it two dangers. It could lead to a reductive analysis of this complex phenomenon as in focusing on culture only, if and only if culture is not defined in very specific ways. Relatedly, a broad understanding of the term culture in relation to the study of globalization, Tomlinson warns, could lead to “pot-au-feu theorizing”, which he defines as “the throwing of anything and everything into the conceptual stew as ‘the complex whole of human existence” (p. 17). What then matters in the definition of culture? A Tomlinsonian conception of culture takes as an article of faith the existential significance of meaning. Culture, as Tomlinson sees it, is “the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through practices of symbolic representation” (p. 18). In a word, culture is the making of life meaningful. In fact, this definitional position separates him from those (e.g., Appadurai, 1996; Kraidy, 2005) who posit culture is an instrumental symbolization that has affinities with the technical and economic domains of life. For Tomlinson, the cultural dimension of globalization ought to emphasize meanings as ends in themselves and not simply instrumental meanings. Another significant point he makes is that we should not be deluded into thinking about globalization only in relation to technologies of information transmission, and that if culture matters for globalization, in the way he sees it, it is because “it is an intrinsic aspect of the whole process of complex connectivity” (p. 22). Thompson avers that globalization disturbs the way we conceptualize culture. It challenges, for example, the primordial notion of coherent, stable, and geographically bounded communities and nation-states (See also Appadurai, 1996; Chakravartty & Zhao, 2008; Kraidy, 2005; Volkmer & Volkmer, 2012). In a sense this is a project of Enlightenment. Complicating Clifford’s notion of travelling cultures, Tomlinson argues that the cultural logic of globalization should consider mobility not only in terms of physical movements of people, but also as having a consequence on the existential significance of humans even if they do not migrate. They can pass for citizens of other communities, a phenomenon Appadurai (1996) attributes to what Anderson (1983) referred to as the work of the imagination.

Given his reading of culture, Tomlinson (1999) proposes a revision of the foci of current anthropology. He says that such terms as “culture,” “village,” “field,” and “dwelling” reinforce the coherence and boundedness of cultures as autonomous organic communities unaffected by what Kraidy (2005) terms endogenous and exogenous forces. There is considerable disagreement on how media consumers and cultures experience the influence of media globalization. While some scholars (e.g., Thompson, 1995; Tomlinson, 1999) admit that globalization results in homogenization, others (e.g., Hafez, 2007; Kraidy, 2005; Pieterse, 2009) hold that the same process leads to the heterogeneity and hybridization of experiences.

3. Experiencing media globalization: homogeneity, heterogeneity, or hybridity?

Some scholars strongly insist that the homogenization thesis of globalization is a myth. They hold that globalization is a myth that fuses both truth and falsehood. In a book bearing the same title, The Myth of Media Globalization, Hafez (2007) vociferously speaks against the claim that international media relations are growing in importance, and that human and economic capital have traversed geographical, cultural, and national borders. According to Hafez, there is too little empirical evidence to support the homogenization thesis. It is on this basis that he cautions us not to believe in media globalization preached on the power of new media and new communication technologies à la Tomlinson (1999). The problem with research in media globalization, in the words of Hafez, is that it “has been marred by its almost exclusive focus on the ‘new media’ of the Internet and satellite television,” and so, “we lack an appraisal of media globalization” (p. 3). He argues that neither the existence of satellite radio nor television should delude us into thinking that we live in a McLuhanian “global village” because these technologies are not a sufficient condition for global communication in the sense that they tell us little about their actual reach and potential to change cultures and societies. Hafez also claims that people’s media habits and how they organize their lives are not changing as radically as has frequently been assumed. In his view, media and mass communication studies have uncritically accepted the terms “global village” and “networked society” without much theorization and empirical rigor such that the way it examines the subject of globalization in the field is often unimpressive. For example, current scholarship in communication studies has so far not been able to determine the influence of other societies on cultural change, and that this task is daunting in view of the complex processes of indigenization and local adaptation which play a role in both the import of media and the construction of world-views within international reporting.

What is truly global about international reporting within national media systems is yet to be explored. Globalization is a myth, Hafez reiterates, because despite the push for cultural harmonization and Western style-democratization of the world, many nation-states have maintained and are constantly developing unique media formats different in content and cultural flavor (See McGregor, 1997; Allan, 2010; Bednarek & Caple, 2012 on media culture and news values). We have only to look at the compiled volume edited by Cushion and Lewis (2010) The Rise of 24-Hour News Television to come to terms with the extent to which France, India, China, and Germany, for example, are making frantic efforts at developing their own news epistemes and local resistance to the hegemony of the CNN effect on local consumption. (I shall return to the counter view of political economists on the role of the nation-states in resisting global cultural flows). Hafez (2007) goes to a great length to demonstrate that the globalization of international news reporting is a myth. He says it suffers from one basic problem: the domestication of the world. According to him, it is increasingly becoming difficult if not impossible for journalists to keep to their mandate of objective, fair, and balanced reportage because international reporting takes place within the prism of unipolar, national interests, cultural stereotypes, and a biased Othering of nation-states. It is more about reporting about countries rather than with countries. He notes that international reporting is itself a very difficult concept to pin down; it is not all too certain whether international reporting corresponds to the ideal of a multi-perspective intermediary linking nations and cultures, or whether it accords a global pluralistic view of international news. International reporting, therefore, defies the definitional logic of news and news values of topicality, novelty, and universality (general interest), and in the main overemphasizes irrelevant news, engages in misapplication by implication, produces negative concepts of the Other as legitimation for action, and fails to examine significant developments and problems. For all these mistakes, international news, Hafez (2007) observes, is guilty of regionalism and metropolitan leanings, conflict perspective, political focus, elitism, and decontextualization. Hafez (2007) writes, “one might formulate the thesis that the conflict perspective of international reporting stands in diametrical opposition to the ‘harmony perspective’ in local reporting and thus the construction of a negative-chaotic distant world correlates with the construction of a positive-harmonious familiar world” (p. 31).

The homogenization thesis of media globalization is thus looked at with suspicious eyes in Africanist postcolonial discourses in particular. The emergence of global media in African nations, purists like Zeleza (2003) intimate, marks the return to conquest, domination, exploitation, and the production of inequality, disorder, and crisis. In Rethinking Africa’s Globalization, Zeleza (2003) contends that the gains and ideals of globalization are suspect because they are wrapped in the ideological impulses of imperialist discourses and the dialectic of Enlightenment. He rejects the view that the processes identified with contemporary globalization are new, omnipresent, and ineluctable, let alone universally beneficial. He writes, “… we must eschew the totalizing pretensions and presentist periodization of globalization discourses” (p. vi). For one thing, the nationalism of African states cannot be pitched on equal footing with that of the West: the former is communalist, the latter imperialist, he points out. When Zeleza (2003) says this, he says so on the basis of the almost rapturous usurpation of the cultural, economic, and political space of the South by the agglomerated force of the North masqueraded under the banner of a neo-liberalist market economy and the new work order. I have already noted that defenders of global homogenization such as Thompson insist that the interconnectedness of the world is such that there can be no islands of separatist ideologues, and that market systems seeking to succeed on their individual effort will simply will fail. Detractors, however, claim that globalization is the new word for the old system of imperialism and Western self-styled interests, and go as far as to show that it leads to “the expansion of global capitalism that is subject to age-old processes and patterns of capitalist accumulation with all their social and spatial inequalities and divisions of labor” (Zeleza, 2003, p. 14). The solution, in his view, must deal with how cultural globalization focuses on flows of information, ideas, imaginations, visions, values, and tastes.

Appadurai (1996) cautioned scholars not to simply associate globalization with modernity. He told us that globalization is far more complex than it is a process of homogenization. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai (1996) clinically examines the question concerning the cultural politics of the global modern by focusing on the social forces of mass migration and electronic mediation. In his theory of rupture, he convincingly argues that both migration and the media are constitutive features of modern subjectivity because they have an effect on the work of the imagination. According to him, electronic mediation, for example, transforms preexisting worlds of communication and conduct, and therefore provide resources for self-imaginings as an everyday social project. Thus “electronic media decisively change the wider field of mass media and other traditional media” (p. 3) says Appadurai (1996). This is important because the relationship between mass mediated events and migratory audiences, though often a mobile but unforeseeable relationship, defines the core of the link between globalization and modernity, he adds. Appadurai cautions us not to fall victims into associating globalization with cultural homogeneity because the consumption of mass media throughout the world is equally met with the work of resistance, irony, selectivity, and agency. For Appadurai (1996), as for Thompson (1995), media are always appropriated throughout the world, although the extent of appropriation by media houses and managers and their consumers is often speculative and regrettably less empirically verifiable. Appadurai’s (1996) theory is useful on grounds that it does not seek to offer a teleological account of globalization discourses; its focus is not on the economic but with the cultural, the everyday and the taken-for-granted.

Appadurai’s (1996) work accounts for chaos, rootlessness, alienation, and ruptures due to cultural flows that defy the borders of nation-states. It challenges the idea of the global village by insisting that the notion overestimates the communitarian implications of the new media because media create communities with no sense of place. Acknowledging that the central problem of globalization is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization, and that existing accounts such as the center-periphery model, push and pull theory, or cultural imperialism lack rigor, Appadurai (1996) insists that “the complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics” (p. 33). He therefore proposes that a rigorous analysis of global flows must account for the relationship among five dimensions which he terms scapes: (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes. Put simply, scapes explain the conditions under which current global flows occur”. They need to be conceived of as fluid, irregular shapes and landscapes that characterize international capital, and are not pre-determined objective relations, but rather perspectival constructs inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors. These include nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, and subnational groups, and movements. Scapes are not predetermined algorithms, and thus make room for individual subjectivity. Appadurai’s theory of locality is of utmost importance for two main reasons. Of particular interest for Appadurai is that locality is a phenomenological property of social life because it produces material effects that cannot be separated from the actual settings in and through which social life is reproduced. This means that the production of neighborhoods is always historically grounded and contextual. Neighborhoods are imagined, produced, and maintained against some sort of ground (social, material, environmental), and that they require and produce contexts against which their own responsibility takes place. Thus, locality is context-generative. But to what extent is the locality a product of the hybridization of two or more cultural flows or scapes? How do mobility and electronic mediation enhance the work of hybridity? Current work suggests that hybridity is the cultural logic of globalization. Some even posit that it is the rhizome of culture, and that it becomes a problem theorizing it only from the point of view of boundary essentialism (Pieterse, 2009; see also Volkmer & Volkmer, 2012). It must therefore be noted that hybridity varies over time and is context-specific. In his influential book Hybridity, Kraidy (2005) argues that any theory of hybridity should be given as a relation that holds among three contingencies: (a) the development of vocabulary of racial and cultural mixture from the mid-nineteenth century onward, (b) the historical basis of contemporary hybrid identities, and (c) the juncture at which the language of hybridity entered the study of international communication. He is convinced the rhetoric of hybridity connects the discourses of anti-cultural imperialism and pro-cultural globalization. If Kraidy (2005) prefers the term hybridity to others such as syncretism, creolization, metissage, and mestizaje, it is because he believes that it is a rhetorical notion that involves “the fusion of two hitherto relatively distinct forms, styles, or identities, cross cultural contact, which often occurs across national borders as well as cultural boundaries” (p. 5). A study of hybridity seeks answers to questions of social agency, material and symbolic power, and cultural influence.

Up to this point, the discourses of globalization, in my estimation, engender six basic problems: (i) technophilia bias and technological utopia; (ii) fixation on medium theory, (iii) the mass migration myth, (iv) local/global dualism, (v) new versions of cultural imperialism, and (vi) hybridization/hybridity. In the final strand of this essay, I turn attention to a discussion of the role of nation-states in dealing with global cultural flows. Here I am interested in dealing with larger frameworks of media institutions and their regulatory frameworks both within and without the borders of local, national, and transnational concerns. As Chakravartty and Zhao (2008, p. 13) remark: “Any scholarly work on globalization that attempts to provide a transnational or translocal analysis attentive to difference is doomed to fail without some clear recognition of the limited conceit of the global”.

4. The role of the nation-state in curbing global cultural flows

Some political economists posit that the state and its media networks are under serious threat as a result of the unparalleled influence of global media giants. They hold that transnational media corporations are in fact shadow states working in the interests of their mother-nations. This thesis is lucidly developed in Monroe Price’s Media and Sovereignty in which he explores the forces that undercut the autonomy of nation-states in their control and regulation of their broadcasting houses by international media influence and domination. Price (2002) argues that new technologies, the convergence of media conglomerates, political upheavals, and newly emerging concepts of human rights make it difficult for subaltern nation-states to offer resistance and restrictions of mediascapes. New communication technologies, for example, in his words, have led to “a widespread discounting of the capacity of the state to maintain control over the flow of images within its borders (p. 17). These technologies, he contends, have a negative effect on the sustenance of local languages in individual states, the enrichment of their history, and the strengthening of their internal political and creative processes. Developed nations and territories like Canada, China, and Hong Kong, for example, may be exceptional cases as they have mapped out active strategies of state responses to challenges to their authority by the CNNization of their home broadcasting houses. These include the use of ownership rules to reliably affect content. Canada’s regulatory regime and its Income Tax Act, for instance, were enacted to favor Canadian advertisers using Canadian stations and other Canadian options before giving space to those from the United States (Price, 2002). Another coping strategy against the global tide is Malaysia’s technology of boundary which regulates activities on the direct-to-home broadcasting by one of its own private service provider Malaysia EastAsia Satellite (MEASAT).

There also are scholars who go as far as insisting that the nation-state itself is dead, and that it was from the word go destined to fail because it is an artificial political construct. Proponents of this extremist view consequently maintain that economically feeble states are no match to the capitalist drive of giant media conglomerates. According to Herman and McChesney (2004), the global media indeed are the new missionaries of corporate capitalism, and that their business is to consolidate economic and political power. As they put it, “We regard the primary effect of the globalization process—the crucial feature of globalization, and the manifestation of the strength of the great powers and TNCs, such as News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, and Sony, whose interests they serve—to be the implantation of the commercial model of communication, its extension to broadcasting and the ‘new media’, and its gradual intensification under the force of competition and bottom-line pressures” (Herman & McChesney, 2004, p. 9). They are convinced that media outputs are commodified, and are designed to serve market ends, not citizenship needs. They say that the work of the media, viz. the film, radio, and television industries, is to promote the aspiration of empire for the countries they work (Coker & Opoku-Mensah, 2014). These industries, while promoting Westphalian ideologies and values, also engage in propaganda and suppress any resistance of subaltern nations to the hegemony. One such is the Reagan-Thatcher New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that led to the passing of the free flow of information law by UNESCO. Many critics agree that it is the NWICO that paved the way for the penetration of the global media apparatus into national territories and crashed their national media on their heads. Such critics have also noted that international media policies and regulations are seriously anti-democratic, and thus weaken the sovereignty of feeble nation-states. This lack of resistance, contrary to Price’s (2002) empirical accounts, is made possible through the work of global corporate ideology championed by the global media.

There is therefore a growing discontent among purists that international media policies are skewed in such a way to promote Western interests only. These include a free market economy, political freedom and deregulation, a strong private sector, and the belief that the proper objective of the economy and economic policies should be sustainable economic growth. The editors of Democratizing Media, Zhao and Hackett (2005), have observed that these policies are very harmful to the growth of nation-states at the periphery. As they note, “Transnational media conglomerates are probably more concerned with protection of intellectual property rights and their bottom-line issues than with diversity and freedom of public expression” (Zhao & Hackett, 2005, p. 16). In fact, Zhao and Hackett strongly insist that TNCs are shadow states. Examining the nexus among globalization, media, and democracy, they argue that the globalization of media flows implies the globalization of media effects, and therefore identify four waves of media democratization: (a) the huge gap in the worldwide distribution of the means of communication between technologically advanced nations and non-technologically poor nations; (b) the commodification of information and its negative implications for universal access, (c) major imbalances in the flow of information and media content between North and South, (d) the threat posed to the information/communications sovereignty of nations, and (e) the development of grassroot or alternative communication forms.

Meanwhile, the commercialization of global media also has dire consequences on the values of peripheral states as it promotes consumption, individual freedom to choose, and weakens collective social action. As laments Aginam (2005) in the case of Nigeria and South Africa, Herman and McChesney (2004) similarly bemoan that the commercial ethos of the global media is vigorously displacing the public sphere with entertainment, and is committed to meeting consumers’ needs than informing and educating the citizenry (see also Price, 2002), and therefore gradually eroding local cultures. On the basis of these arguments Herman and McChesney reached four basic conclusions: (a) the presence of a commercial global media shapes and directs the content of national media, leaving them incapacitated; (b) the global mediascape is increasingly dominated by Anglo-American transnational corporations with a market-model ethos; (c) the global media system is an indispensable component of the globalizing market economy as a whole, and that (d) the oligopolistic tendencies of global media have fundamental flaws that weaken and militate against the thriving of democracies and are a barrier to meaningful self-government and public participation. If states offer resistance to the hegemony of international media, it is because they are committed to territorial integrity. These include, inter alia, acts of defense, protection of domestic producers, self-creativity, and support for valuable aspects of their national identity and citizenship, through bilateral relations. It seems to me that despite Price’s (2002) positive remark of the place of globalization the creation of the development of a common international “language” (or vocabulary), the distribution of information and entertainment (what some critics term Americanization of consumerism), he tends to underscore the negative influence of media globalization as leading to the incapacity of nation-states to maintain control of images invading its borders, that globalization has negative consequences for national identity and state sovereignty. Price (2002) writes, “It is certainly inevitable, and often desirable, that states concern themselves with the sustenance of their language, enrichment of their history, and strengthening of their internal political and creative processes. Yet each of these has implications for the weight and impact of information across national borders” (p. 28).

Others, however, take an extremist position as far as to say that “all nations are themselves artificial, historically constituted politico-cultural units” which are “not the natural destiny of pre-given cultures”, but merely a construct of the modern industrial state (Ang, 2003). If Price is a face-saver, Herman and McChesney may not be. They take a hard bite on the subject. According to Herman and McChesney (2004), the global media indeed are the new missionaries of corporate capitalism, and that the telos of media globalization is the drive for economic and political power. “The global market system has not ushered in a liberal democratic utopia and history is not at an end; quite the reverse, as economic polarization, ethnic strife, and a market-based paralysis of democracy hold forth possibilities of rapid and substantial social, political, and economic upheaval” (p. 205). In this light, they trace the emergence of the global media system and chronicle the political, economic, and technological factors that have led to its ascension in order to contribute to an understanding of the political and economic dynamics of growth and the effects of globalization of the media, while pointing up alternative structures of media and policy. The authors argue that the rise of the global media poses an incredible threat to the notion of the public sphere in view of the entertainment-like nature and commercialization and market-driven model of transnational corporations most of which are American-centered. This is also followed by government control and censorship, private systems of control (or self-censorship).

Although they concede with scholars who refer to the positive of media globalization such as the spread and intensification of commercialization (thereby taking a shot in their feet), the rapid dissemination of popular cultures (let’s call it Americanization), the spread of Western human values (individualism), skepticism of authority, and women’s rights, Herman and McChesney strongly insist that such a reading is an exercise in cherry-picking. For them the basic motivation of the globalization of the media is economic. As they put it, “We regard the primary effect of the globalization process—the crucial feature of globalization, and the manifestation of the strength of the great powers and TNCs, such as News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, and Sony, whose interests they serve—to be the implantation of the commercial model of communication, its extension to broadcasting and the ‘new media’, and its gradual intensification under the force of competition and bottom-line pressures” (Herman & McChesney, 2004, p. 9). They are convinced that media outputs are commodified and are designed to serve market ends, not citizenship needs. They say that the work of the media, namely the film, radio, and television industries, is to promote the aspiration of empire for the countries they work. These industries while promoting Western of ideologies and values, also engage in propaganda and suppress any resistance of subaltern nation states to Western hegemony. In fact, their book paints a very dark picture of how TNCs backed by the power of America thrive on the notion of the free flow of information and the new world information and communication order (NWICO) dominate the market scene.

Their work clearly supports the end of the nation state thesis. It argues that the economic/productivity merits of the global market are seriously anti-democratic, and thus weakens the sovereignty of nation states. This lack of resistance, contrary to Price (2002), is made possible through the work of global corporate ideology championed by the global media. These include a free market economy, political freedom and deregulation, a strong private sector, and the belief that the proper objective of the economy and economic policy should be sustainable economic growth (p. 35–38). In fact, Herman and McChesney (2004) conclude thus that these ideologies cause four negative effects of media globalization on other weak nations, whether through cultural imperialism or cultural dependency. The commercialization of global media has an effect on the values of subaltern nation states as it promotes consumption, individual freedom to choose, and weakens collective social action, say the authors. They also argue that the commercial ethos of the global media is vigorously displacing the public sphere with entertainment and is committed to meeting consumers’ needs than informing and educating the citizenry (see also Price, 2002), and therefore gradually eroding local cultures. On the basis of their arguments Herman and McChesney (2004) reached four basic conclusion: (1) the presence of a commercial global media shapes and directs the content of national media in many parts of the world, that tend to offer little resistance; (2) the global mediascape is increasingly dominated by Anglo-American transnational corporations with a market-model ethos; (3) the global media system is an indispensable component of the globalizing market economy as a whole, and that (4) the oligopolistic tendencies of global media have fundamental flaws that weaken and militate against the thriving of democracies and a barrier to meaningful self-government and public participation.

In fact, Zhao and Hackett (2005) strongly insist that TNCs are shadow states. Concentrating on the nexus between globalization, media, and democracy, they argue that the globalization of media flows implies the globalization of media effects, and therefore identify four waves of media democratization: (a) the huge gap in the worldwide distribution of the means of communication between technologically advanced nations and non-technologically poor nations; (b) the commodification of information and its negative implications for universal access, (c) major imbalances in the flow of information and media content between North and South, (d) the threat posed to the information/communications sovereignty of nations, and (e) the development of grassroot or alternative communication forms. We also need to remember that often the argument tends to tilt towards seeing globalization as an outgrowth of modernity, with little said on the anti-modernist manifestation of the subject. The editors therefore conclude that a rigorous study of the dialectic between media globalization and democratization must focus on the medium, content, and context of both endogenous and exogenous politics, the political and theoretical implications of the apparent diversification of media ownership and the multidirectional nature of global media flows, how adequate or relevant Western models and concepts are in understanding processes of political and media democratization throughout the world, and to what extent democratization is not simply a political process but also a cultural one, involving the media in processes of identity formation much broader than the provision of political information.

An effective means of dealing with the relationship between the media and their power structure, then, is to find out if those societies are democratic vs. authoritarian, neo-liberal vs. regulated, in order to broaden media theory and understanding in a way that takes accounts of the experience of countries outside of the Anglo-American orbit. Aginam (2005), in the context of Nigeria and South Africa, tells of the move of African nations to transform their already propaganda-driven, weak and state-controlled public service media systems into commercial ones, given the pressure from the West as a symbol and response to the aspirations of neoliberal democracy and free-market economics (See also Cunningham and Flew, 2000 for Australia). Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen (1998) have noted that national news agencies became the natural vocal business partners for the western-based international agencies: they provided a conduit, albeit government controlled, through which international news could be funnelled to local media, and domestic news released to the wider world. Aginam (2005, p. 122) writes: “In the gospel of neoliberalism, democracy and market economics are not presented as distant cousins who could coexist in certain contexts and situations but more as Siamese twins, so inextricably linked that one can hardly exist independently of the other”. He thus traces this problematic to the root of models being adopted in many African nations—state-private, public-private, commercially private, and concludes that any effort to study media in a democracy must simultaneously look at power and access to the media, at what interests they serve, and at how they manage social plurality, all of which are implicated in the structure of power.

Indeed, Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen (1998) further explain that global news agencies such as the Big Four western ones, AFP, AP, Reuters, and UPI, and the two leading ones in the communist world, TASS (in former Soviet Union) and Xinhua (China) negatively interfere with the local political news content of weaker nations in an effort to control them and maximize profit margins for the rich nations. These global news agencies, Boyd-Barrett (1998) notes, are powerful because of their defining features of diversity, location, autonomy, competition, clients, and technology. There was simply put a dependency theory by which the latter had to operate. The authors cite the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) movement, which was passed in the 1970s by UNESCO and the McBride Report of 1980. They are of the view that news is a commodity that lies deep at the heart of modern capitalism, and is produced for the purposes of political communication (including propaganda), trade, and pleasure. In the words of Ang (2003), transnational corporations basically transgress established boundaries and subvert existing territories, as a result of their turbulent transformation of the global media environment through technology and institutionalization of such notions as “the information revolution” and “postmodernity”. For Ang (2003), these indices are symbols of Western hegemony which he defines as “the cultural leadership of the dominant classes in the production of generalized meanings, of ‘spontaneous’ consent to the prevailing arrangement of social relations” due to ideology, “the way the world is made to appear in society” (p. 363). Ang consequently maintains that the structural and global configurations of hegemony influence contemporary practices of media reception and consumption. Ang examines the broad range of creative but what he perceives as contradictory practices which people in different parts of the world are inventing today in their everyday dealings with the changing media environment that surrounds them, and proposes that only a critical ethnographic approach can capture the contradictions. We tend to understand where Ang is coming from as he identifies the local and global as two separate phenomena in a sub-section “Where the Global and the Local Meet” of his work. It also has to be pointed that he takes for granted that the world is homogeneously interconnected by evoking what seems to be a canine media-centric and technophilic account of the power of global media agencies and high technology. to be sure as a critique of the container model of national societies and media cultures (cf. Couldry & Hepp, 2012).

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I have sought to raise three important points in mapping the literature of media globalization. The first situates globalization of the media within larger cultural frameworks, thereby adding context to the technophilic theorization of media. Secondly and consequently, I have argued that a cultural dialectic is by no means a critical approach to the study of media globalization in recognition of the fact that there are both seen and occluded manifestation of power dynamics, ideology, and hegemony at play in media institutions. Third, I have shown that any meaningful study of media globalization ought to be, as a matter of methodological rigor, interdisciplinary in scope. Throughout this essay, I have drawn on my knowledge of critical Marxist theory, cultural studies, postcolonial scholarship, and media and communication studies to theorize the question concerning globalization. This contrapuntal approach recognizes that a mediacentric perspective to the study of media globalization is theoretically weak and less rewarding because globalization straddles the walls of one single discipline.

In repositioning arguments about media globalization from culturally situated perspective, I urge scholars of communication and media studies to nuance discussions of the effects and influences of media globalization in society. Scholars need to move beyond questions of economic and technological determinisms in relation to studies in media globalization to carefully unearth how ideas of, for example, cultural imperialism, hybridity, and political economy shape media work.

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Wincharles Coker

Wincharles Coker(PhD, Michigan) is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Cape Coast, Ghana, where he was, three years prior, Coordinator of the Writing Unit. Dr. Coker is a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (African Humanities Program) and Visiting Scholar at Uppsala University, Sweden. Dr. Coker is a communication theorist who specializes in political rhetoric, critical communication, communication education, and science communication. He is the author of Ghana in the Geopolitics of Africa: A Diachronic Perspective of Strategic Political Communication (2022, Galda Verlag). His seven book chapters can be found in entries such as Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Retorikförlaget, and IGI Global, and has penned over 30 research articles some of which have been published in African Journal of Rhetoric, Journal of Black Studies, Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, South African Journal of Information and Communication, and Discourse & Communication.