Understanding Global Media

Terry Flew

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137446541
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306448
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Periodismo

This key textbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date account of developments in international communication worldwide. Taking a comparative approach to the major theories of global media, Terry Flew looks at the rise of global media production networks and the emergence of 'media cities', multiculturalism, and the question of a global media culture. This engaging book raises the question of whether we are now in a 'post-global' age, and discusses whether there is a stable global communications order, or instead a stage of increased competition among digital and traditional media, and between the US and emergent powers such as China. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives, and written by a renowned author, this is an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, communication studies and cultural studies, and anyone interested in the study of media and globalization.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to global media: key concepts

Media as technologies, institutions and culture

Communications media have long been central to the major developments of modern societies. The creation of nation-states and national identities; ideas of citizenship and freedom; the development of political culture and the public sphere; the growth of capitalist commercial enterprises; and modern consumer culture – all of these developments owe a great deal to the development of communications media. Historically, communications media have been integral to the rise and fall of empires, to diplomacy, war, the spread of languages and cultural norms, and to the processes we refer to today under the general terms of globalization and modernity. In the twenty-first century, we find that social media, carried through digital networks and the global internet, are enabling a highly diverse array of individuals, groups, organizations and movements to produce and globally distribute media content. This presents new challenges to how we understand the media, as it blurs mass communication era distinctions between media producers and audience-consumers, and between professional and amateur creators and distributors of media content.

When we refer to media, we are using the term in a threefold sense. First, it refers to the technological means of communication. The term ‘media’ is an extension of ‘medium’, or the technical means through which a message is sent and received, and associated questions of how messages are stored and distributed over time and space. Technical media that have been prominent through human history have included print (paper and movable type), broadcasting (radio and television), telecommunications and the internet.

When thinking about a media technology, we need to acknowledge that the particular technological device we are referring to constitutes only one of an ensemble of elements requiring our attention. We also need to consider the practices that were associated with that technology, as well as the institutions that have shaped, and are shaping, its ongoing development. Lievrouw and Livingstone (2006) argued that communications and media studies needs to get beyond the level of artefacts and devices, or technologies in the narrow sense. To understand why a new media device, or indeed a new content form, is new, we always need to ask not only why this is a new device or form, but also what is new for society about it. They argued that this requires a threefold concern with:

1.The artefacts or devices that enable and extend our capacities to communicate;

2.The activities and practices that people engage in to use these devices for communication;

3.The social institutions and organizational forms that develop around those devices and practices.

They make the point that the relationship between these three elements is circular rather than linear. This ensemble of relationships between technological devices, communication practices and social institutions is shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 Constituent elements of media

Source: Author’s own diagram based on Lievrouw & Livingstone (2006).

Adapting this framework, we therefore think of the media in three dimensions. First, it consists of the technologies of production, distribution and reception, and the associated infrastructures that enable media messages to be shared, which is the first precondition of technologically mediated communication, i.e. all forms other than direct, face-to-face communication. Second, the media consists of the industries and institutions through which decisions are made about what media content is produced and distributed for audiences or other groups of users larger than those that can be gathered together for direct interpersonal communication. Third, the media consists of its content, or the cultural and symbolic forms that are shared, and which generate meaning for individuals, communities, nations and – potentially – the global population. It is noted later in this chapter that these three dimensions of media interact with four overarching frameworks: the economic framework; the policy framework; the cultural framework; and the digital framework.

Media technologies and infrastructures

In order to better understand the relationship between media forms and social change, there is a need to reflect upon the relationship of mass communications media to the emergence of modern societies. The rise of mass media is generally associated with the print revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which enabled the dissemination of written works in the forms of books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets etc., as well as the rise of a ‘reading public’ that had both the capacity to read and write – print literacy – and a preparedness to engage collectively with ideas and insights derived from such printed works. In The Media and Modernity, John Thompson (1995) observed that ‘the important point about mass communication is not that a given number of individuals … receives the product, but rather that the products are available in principle to a plurality of recipients’ (Thompson, 1995, p. 24). Thompson argued that mass communication forms have five characteristics:

1.They make use of a technical medium that allows information and symbolic content to be ‘fixed and transmitted from producer to receiver’ (p. 18);

2.They are the products of media industries, as ‘organizations which … have been concerned with the commercial exploitation of technical innovations’ (p. 27);

3.They are associated with a ‘structured break between the production of symbolic forms and their reception’ (p. 29), which may be over space, over time, or both;

4.They become increasingly mass media forms, i.e. they ‘are made available to more individuals across larger expanses of space and at greater speeds’ (p. 30);

5.Mass communication involves ‘the public circulation of symbolic forms’, playing a key role in ordering (and transforming) public space and public culture through being ‘made visible and observable to a multiplicity of individuals who may be, and typically are, scattered across diverse and dispersed contexts’ (p. 31).

The technological means of communication constitute the infrastructure that makes media communication possible. While the component elements of this infrastructure may be technical mediums – printing presses, TV and radio antennas, copper wires, broadband cables, satel-lites orbiting the globe, and so on – their broader impacts are social and cultural. Questions of ‘how to infrastructure’ (Star & Bowker, 2006), have frequently been approached from a technical or engineering perspective, but there is also a need to consider their impacts upon social relations and human interactions, alongside an awareness of the technical properties of different media. The history of media infrastructures also reveals a complex and ongoing relationship between the national and global scales. The internet emerged as a global information infrastructure developed by and for the US scientific community and the military, but it possessed an ‘architecture of openness’ and freedom from government controls that have been a vital part of its evolution as a global communications network ever since (Castells, 2001).

At the same time, as the internet became more of a global network from the mid-1990s onwards, the role played by nation-states, most notably the United States, in shaping its evolution became increasingly apparent. In particular, the development of a National Information Infrastructure (NII) strategy by the Clinton Administration in 1993, and Vice-President Al Gore’s guidelines for a Global Information Infrastructure (GII) at the International Telecommunications Union Summit in Buenos Aires in 1994, were critical moments in shaping the global internet in the preferred interests of dominant players. The associated policies were by no means value-neutral and purely technical: the guiding principles of the GII as articulated by Clinton and Gore favoured private investment over public in infrastructure provision, free markets and competition over national monopolies, and the removal of all barriers to foreign investment in telecommunications systems (Mattelart, 2003, pp. 117–123; Flew & McElhinney, 2006).

Media industries and institutions

The second sense in which we refer to media is in terms of the media industries. Media industries provide the institutional and organizational forms through which media content is produced and distributed. The study of media industries draws attention to media economics, and the distinctive features of media economics and markets will be discussed below. It is important to note that there are different traditions in media economics, most notably between those who approach the field from the perspective of mainstream economic theories, also known as neoclassical economics (Picard, 1989; Finn et al., 2004; Albarran, 2010; Doyle, 2013), and those who analyse media industries from the perspective of critical political economy (discussed at length in Chapter 3). While these have been antagonistic traditions, there is significant recent work which suggests the possibility of reconciling them. Drawing upon analytical tools provided by media economics to develop critical accounts of media industries, Napoli (2009), Picard, (2011a), Winseck (2011), Ballon (2014) and others have drawn attention to the implications of concentration of media ownership and the relationship between the economic power of media companies and the ‘public interest’ expectations that exist around media as technologies of public communication.

The media industries perspective draws attention to the critical position of media production. Media producers include those who generate original creative content, and include actors, animators, producers, directors, designers, journalists, photographers and camera people. There are also other professionals whose work contributes to the sustainability and growth of media industries, such as advertisers, marketers, public relations professionals, lawyers, accountants, etc. (Deuze, 2007). In the influential theory of the creative class proposed by Richard Florida (2002), those directly engaged with the generation of new ideas, concepts, designs and creative works were the ‘creative core’, and their work was supported by creative professionals working across a range of knowledge-intensive industries. For Florida, this creative class was the fastest-growing segment of the US economy, and its values of individuality, creative self-expression, meritocracy and commitment to diversity and openness were transforming society and culture, particularly in those urban centres where they were most concentrated (Florida, 2002, pp. 72–80).

From a more critical perspective, Hesmondhalgh (2013) and McRobbie (2016) have identified that distinctive features of cultural labour, such as the desire for creative autonomy, are often pursued in the context of irregular employment and uncertain career prospects, making such work often highly stressful and prone to exploitation and self-exploitation. Creative workers have distinctive relations to creative managers, with the latter often preferring ‘soft control’ and management by contract over direct oversight of the creative process, and to cultural intermediaries in industries such as advertising, fashion, public relations, publishing, arts management and other sectors, who undertake ‘the symbolic work of shaping the perception and reception of goods, services, and ideas’, and are ‘key market makers in contemporary consumer economies’ (Matthews & Maguire, 2014, pp. 3–4).

Understanding media as institutions has a dual element to it. At one level, they are firms that produce, package and distribute media content in particular ways in order to achieve particular objectives, be they profit maximization for commercial media enterprises, or a range of ‘public interest’ goals for publicly funded media (Doyle, 2013, p. 5). But an institution is much more than a ‘black box’ through which inputs are turned into outputs. From an institutional economics perspective, Douglass North has defined institutions as ‘the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’, arguing that they ‘reduce uncertainty by providing a structure to everyday life … [and] a guide to human interaction’ (North, 1990, p. 3). Formal and informal institutions shape the rules of the game by which media systems operate, which can be changed through conscious human action, but which also appear as historically derived constraints at any point in time.

Following Williamson (2000), we can think about media institutions as operating across four levels, with each having its own historical timeframe:

1.Institutional arrangements within the media organization itself (e.g. how production and distribution of content are organized internally) and its dealings with other key market participants (interactions between media buyers, advertising agencies and corporate clients, dealings with rights holders, etc.);

2.Interactions between media institutions and policy and regulatory institutions that shape regimes of media policy and governance;

3.Interactions with formal institutions that shape the institutional environment and enforce its rules, which include media companies, but also government agencies, trade unions and producer guilds, industry associations, lobby groups etc.;

4.Relationships to informal institutions, which include the norms of behaviour, conventions, customs, traditions, norms and values, codes of conduct, ideologies and belief systems through which institutional arrangements are shaped, which differ from one nation to the next and are subject to historical path dependency.

As institutions are culturally embedded in society, there is more to understanding media institutions than simply approaching them as either profit-maximiz-ing agents indifferent to the society in which they operate, or as the neutral

arbiters of the public good as it pertains to media and culture. Moreover, there are both national and international institutions associated with media governance, and the interactions between these two levels as they shape media industries is a matter that will be considered in detail in this book.

Media content and cultures

The third sense in which we understand the media is in terms of culture. The media can be formally described as the informational and symbolic content received and consumed by readers, audiences and users. This is the ‘common sense’ understanding of what the media are, as it refers to the content that comes to us through our newspapers, magazines, radios, televisions, personal computers, mobile phones and other devices. It is received through the technical infrastructures and institutions that enable its production, distribution and reception.

When we consider the nature and significance of media content as it is received in the public domain, the question that arises is the extent to which media now define the culture of modern societies. Thompson has referred to ‘the mediatization of modern culture … [where] the transmission of symbolic forms becomes increasingly mediated by the technical and institutional apparatuses of the media industries’ (1990, pp. 3–4). Douglas Kellner has argued that ‘we are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society, and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret and criticize its meanings and values’ (Kellner, 1995, p. 5).

As we will note in later chapters, culture is a notoriously slippery term to define. Thompson (1990) identified two principal conceptions of culture. One is the descriptive conception of culture as what people do in a particular place or at a particular time, or ‘the varied array of values, beliefs, customs, conventions, habits and practices characteristic of a particular society or historical period’ (p. 123). The other is the symbolic conception of culture, or the underlying system of social, cultural, linguistic and psychological relationship...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction to global media: key concepts
• Chapter 2: Modernization theories and development communication
• Chapter 3: Critical political economy
• Chapter 4: Globalization theories
• Chapter 5: The changing geography of global media production
• Chapter 6: Global media cultures
• Chapter 7: Globalization, nation-states and media policy
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index