Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age

Dal Yong Jin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000681284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Global media expert Dal Yong Jin examines the nexus of globalization, digital media, and contemporary popular culture in this empirically rich, student-friendly book.

Offering an in-depth look at globalization processes, histories, texts, and state policies as they relate to the global media, Jin maps out the increasing role of digital platforms as they have shifted the contours of globalization. Case studies and examples focus on ubiquitous digital platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix, in tandem with globalization so that the readers are able to apply diverse theoretical frameworks of globalization in different media milieu. Readers are taught core theoretical concepts which they should apply critically to a broad range of contemporary media policies, practices, movements, and technologies in different geographic regions of the world – North America, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia – with a view to determining how they shape and are shaped by globalization.

End-of-chapter discussion questions prompt further critical thinking and research. Students doing coursework in digital media, global media, international communication, and globalization will find this new textbook to be an essential introduction to how media have influenced a complex set of globalization processes in broad international and comparative contexts.

1 Globalization in the Age of Digital Platforms?

Is Globalization Dying?

While globalization as a practice goes back to several hundred years ago, media globalization as part of academic discourse mainly started to appear in the 1990s. With the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and relevant socio-economic dimensions, including political, economic, and cultural elements developed during the same period, globalization has become one of the most popular topics and theories in all academic fields, and in particular in media studies. It is certain that “there was a period in which that word globalization seemed to many people to capture the essence of what was going on around them” (Rosenberg, 2005, 3). During the 1990s, many politicians, academics, and cultural producers observed the spread of economic liberalization, the rise of new ICTs, the increased salience of international organizations, and the resurgence of a cosmopolitan Human Rights Agenda; many of them believed that “the world was opening up to a new form of interconnectedness, and that a multi-layered, multilateral system of global governance was emerging” (Rosenberg, 2005, 3). As Toby Miller and Marwan Kraidy (2016, 22) point out, “global media studies, therefore, is an interdisciplinary rubric that emerged in the 1990s to describe the convergence of areas of study traditionally known as international communication and comparative media systems.” Global media studies reflects conceptual disciplinary and ideological changes, and its name notwithstanding, the field remains dominated by a few major forces, including the United States.

However, since around the mid-2000s, some theoreticians (Rosenberg, 2005) claim that “the age of globalization is over” as the world has not seemed to follow what the globalists predicted, which is the integration and/or interdependence of the globe, and consequently, the decreasing role of the nation-state. In the 2010s, the opposing paradigm to globalization has even become more pronounced. As can be seen with Brexit (British Exit) in Europe in late 2019 and the border wall issue between the United States and Mexico, which is under consideration by President Trump’s administration, many parts of the globe are dis-integrating and focusing on national priorities rather than global ones. The Guardian of the United Kingdom (Sharma, 2016) indeed claims,

even if Brexit does not herald the unravelling of Europe or of the global economy, it is the most important sign yet that the era of globalization as we have known it is over. Deglobalization will be the new buzzword.

As such, global politics and economy have continued to shift their dynamics as both the United States and the United Kingdom have changed their political and economic policies starting in the 1980s. These two countries initiated and forced neoliberal globalization—guaranteeing maximum profits to the private sector through deregulation, privatization, and liberalization while pursuing a small government function—but they have suddenly changed direction to focus on the separation of their countries from global affairs. Since they are the giants who decide the roles of nation-states in the global society, other small countries may follow this trajectory once again, and perhaps deglobalization may be realized in contemporary society.

However, globalization is not simple at all. While there is an increasing trend of national priority movements, global citizens, from both the West (e.g. the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) and the East (e.g., countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America) are still witnessing the borderless flow of information, people, and capital, which facilitates the integration of the world into one single global unit. In particular, in the realm of media and culture, the level of interconnectivity has increased. Globalization has become more complicated than ever instead of disappearing as several players, whether Western-based or non-Western-based actors, such as nation-states, international agencies, transnational corporations, and even consumers, are increasingly involved. How to comprehend globalization over the next decade or so, therefore, relies on people’s understanding of two major elements: the directions of flow of people, culture, and capital, and the role of major players in the globalization process.

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Globalization in the Era of Digital Platforms

Unlike the political and economic milieu surrounding the contemporary world in the early 21st century, globalization as a form of the integration of the globe into a single unit in the field of media and ICTs has continued and even substantially grown. With the rapid growth of digital platforms, such as social media (e.g., Facebook and YouTube), search engines (e.g., Google), smartphones and their operating systems (e.g., Android and iOS), digital games, and online streaming services (e.g., Netflix), the global cultural markets have been closely connected and increasingly interdependent. On the one hand, some digital platforms have played a key role as cultural producers, and on the other hand, other digital platforms have worked as cultural distributors, although the boundaries between production and distribution, which were previously clearly separated, are getting blurry.

Digital platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook in the United States have especially increased their market shares around the globe to continue and extend their hegemonic dominance. Although several emerging markets and cultural producers in non-Western countries like Mexico, Brazil, India, and South Korea (hereafter Korea) have developed their local-based popular culture and digital platforms to become a major part of the global society, their roles are still limited. These countries furthermore utilize American-based platforms, including YouTube, to disseminate their popular culture to both regional and global markets. Regardless of shifting power dynamics in politics and economy, the integrations in the realm of culture and technology have never stopped, and therefore, globalization is alive and vivid in this particular context.

What Is a Digital Platform?

Digital platform is a buzzword in our daily lives. “The rise of digital platforms is hailed as the driver of economic progress and technological innovation” (van Dijck et al., 2018, 1). Whenever we turn on TV and read newspaper articles, it is not uncommon to learn about digital platforms. From elementary school students to college students, watching YouTube and using smartphones are very common and daily routines. “Individuals can greatly benefit from this transformation because it empowers them to set up businesses, trade goods, and exchange information online while circumventing corporate or state intermediaries” (van Dijck et al., 2018, 1). Digital platforms heavily influence the contemporary cultural industries and their popular culture. The digital platform has been a relatively new concept in media studies; however, there are already several significant works of this new concept and phenomenon.

A few media scholars (Gillespie, 2010, 2018; Hands, 2013; Jin, 2015a; Srnicek, 2016; Steinberg, 2017; van Dijck et al., 2018) have adopted and used the notion of platforms; however, they barely developed any reliable definitions. In general, a platform describes the current use of digital technology and culture, and it explains “the online services of content intermediaries, both in their self-characterizations and in the broader public discourse of users, the press and commentaries” (Gillespie, 2010, 349). As Gillespie (2010, 349) points out, intermediaries like YouTube and Google provide “storage, navigation and delivery of the digital content of others.” As Lev Manovich (2013, 7) also points out, “platforms allow people to write new software,” and “these platforms, such as Google, Facebook, iOS, and Android, are in the center of the global economy, culture, social life, and, increasingly, politics.”

These explanations, however, do not convey the true nature of digital platforms, which can be explained in several different but interconnected ways. Most of all, as Van Dijck (2013, 29) points out,

a platform is a mediator rather than an intermediary: it shapes the performance of social acts instead of merely facilitating them. Technologically speaking, platforms are the providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture.

More specifically, digital platforms have various functions, which are connected. First, the term “platform” designated something like a computing infrastructure, the hardware basis for computational activities. Some people associate platforms with their computational meaning (Bodle, 2010), which is an infrastructure that closely supports the design and use of specific applications or operating systems in computer systems and/or smartphones.

However, the platform extends beyond the computational domain (Jin, 2015a). Platform has come to denote what we would call social media: sites or platforms as they were known, on which users could post, contribute, share, and so on, to a particular web-based and then app-based media interface—whether Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter (Steinberg, 2017). This trait does mean that the platform can be configured as a transactional or mediatory mechanism. In other words, digital platforms should be judged “by market forces and the process of commodity exchange” (Dijck, 2012, 162). Platforms have both a direct economic role as creators of surplus value through commodity production and exchange and an indirect role through advertising (Garnham, 1997). In this paradigm, the platform “signifies something akin to the mediation structure or intermediary that makes certain kinds of transactions possible. This is also arguably the cultural dominant form of platform” (Steinberg, 2017, 189). As some theoreticians argue (Feenberg, 1991; Salter, 2005), technologies are not value neutral but reflect the cultural bias, values, and communicative preferences of their designers. Platforms clearly reflect designers’ values and preferences that are oftentimes at odds with the values and preferences of the users (Bodle, 2010).

As such, it is critical to comprehensively understand the notion of platforms. Putting together these dimensions, we can consider that platforms have emerged not simply in a functional computational shape, but with cultural values and communicational aspects embedded in them. As the growth of new media cannot be separated from society, we must address digital platforms as a complicated but interconnected whole (Jin, 2015a). Digital forms of power are connected together through the three core pillars of digital platforms: hardware, corporate sphere, and cultural and political values. Domination over these three elements provides a great source of power to the United States over other countries. As Moran and Punathambekar (2019) point out, due to American dominance in the realm of digital platform, it is critical to understand the ways in which global digital platforms like YouTube and Facebook penetrate in the early 21st century. A closer understanding of the technological functions, characters of platforms as a corporate sphere, and their cultural values help people determine the distinctive prospects of platforms in the globalization process, which has been closely related to imperialism theory.

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Definitions of Globalization

Globalization is the major framework in international communication research in the early 21st century. There are several features characterizing globalization. Most of all, globalization implies the borderless flow of information between various countries. The flow of information can be made possible as countries, international agencies, and transnational corporations work together to integrate and interconnect, which means that many constituents attempt to converge their units, not politically but economically and culturally to make one big umbrella. Marshal McLuhan (1964) especially termed the integration of the world into one village through the use of electronic media as a “global village” in 1964. As for the definition, McLuhan (1964, 254) described the ways in which electronic technology has contracted the globe into a village because of “the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.” McLuhan’s definition of global village certainly provides several important conceptual ideas for understanding globalization, which are supported by media technology. Based on these basic characterizations, we can identify several keywords explaining globalization below.

Keywords in Globalization

• Borderless flow of information
• Integration
• Interconnectivity
• Interdependence
• Convergence
• Global village
• Global economy

While the significant role of media technology plays a part, there are several different dimensions expediting the globalization process, including flows of people and capital between various countries. People are moving from one country to another country, and some corporations like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts also have their stores in many countries. Consequently, globalization, driven by the flows of people, culture, and capital, conceptually makes a borderless, singular village. Globalization is thus a process by which the global politics, economy, and culture are becoming a connected and interactive whole (Giddens, 1999). However, as Anthony Giddens (1999) himself argued, “globalization is a complex set of processes, not a single one,” mainly because the flows of these elements occur in a more complicated way than in one simple direction. Ritzer (2007, 1) also defines globalization as “an accelerating set of processes involving flows that encompass ever-greater numbers of the world’s spaces and that lead to increasing integration and interconnectivity among those spaces.” Robertson (1992, 8) already defined globalization as a concept referring “both to the compression of the world and intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.” These scholarly definitions commonly emphasize the compression of time and space and the interconnectivity of the world as a result.

What I want to emphasize furthermore are the players who develop the globalization processes and the diversity of flows that shifts the globalization dynamics. Therefore, in this book, globalization is not only the integration of the world as a whole, but also the diversification of the processes in actors, flows, and dimensions in expediting global interdependence. There are many different actors and directions in the globalization process, and without understanding this complexity, people cannot fully comprehend the real nature of globalization. Previously, forces of globalization were linked with a few Western countries, in particular the United States, and they seemed to “subjugate weaker, national/cultural identities” (Shim, 2006, 26). However, as the case of BTS—a globally popular Korean boy band—in the late 2010s implies, several non-Western countries have expanded their roles to become major actors, which potentially changes the directions of cultural flows. This fundamental question requires us to contemplate who the major players are and in which directions people, capital, and culture flow. In this regard, we must identify several major paradigms and dimensions when we analyze globalization.

Three Paradigms to Globalization Studies

Globalization refers to the process and context of our world becoming integrated. There are several approaches explaining the globalization process, and mainly three major paradigms constitute globalization discourses: modernization, critical political economy, and cultural globalization, known as hybridization. As can be seen in Chapters 3 and 4, under these fabrics, there are several theoretical frameworks interpreting the globalization process.

Modernization Approach

One of the oldest approaches to globalization started with modernization theory in the 1960s. Modernization theory called upon dev...