Locating Emerging Media

Germaine R. Halegoua, Ben Aslinger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415818858
• eBook ISBN: 9781136683039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Locating Emerging Media focuses on the tensions between the local and global in the design, distribution, and use of emerging media forms, building on scholarship on the cultural geography of new media networks and products and the relationships between the "global" and the "local." Authors consider new media practices, texts, services, software, policies, infrastructures, and design discourses that enrich existing relationships between creative industries and cultures of production, reception, and engagement. This consideration highlights the relationships between global and local perspectives and new media technologies and practices emerging within (and through) the geography and culture of particular places. Areas examined include East Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, South Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Middle East. Through all is the recognition that what is new or emergent around the globe is unique in each locality.

Part I

Policy

As Cardoso and Castells note, policies can be understood as strategic decisions intended to regulate uncertainty and/or observable lived realities within a given location.¹ This can be said of “official” policy enacted or proposed by governments, institutions, or industries, as well as less “official” regulations or “vernacular policies” that aim to govern interactions, exchanges, and relationships among populations. Kirkpatrick draws on John Fiske’s work within cultural studies to explain that in order to fully understand media policy it is necessary to analyze official policy (enforced by top-down representatives and organizations) and vernacular policy (which might emanate from local, domestic, or intimate relationships such as rules enforced by parents, social networks, local businesses, or community organizations), as well as any intermediaries or intermediary sites that play a role in policy decisions.² In the case of digital media, uncertainty can be linked to managing and fostering innovation, property, boundaries, information, and the labor, industries, and activities associated with digital media and its impact. In terms of lived experiences, official and vernacular policy can intervene in numerous ways to manage relationships among people, information, locations; national, global, and local scales; and the intersection of these categories within public and private spaces.

In “Media Policies and the Blindspots of Media Globalization,” Silvio Waisbord points out that: “Government policies, civic mobilization, coalitions and alliances, and political opportunities are important dimensions of media policies that are not central to the ‘media globalization’ paradigm.”³ He goes on to suggest that it is in the ruptures between globalization theory and local politics that the intricacies and contradictory tendencies of media policy can be gleaned. For example, Flew and Waisbord explore case studies in China, Brazil, and Australia in order to illustrate the ways that internet policies are continually shaped by national and domestic actors as well as by global flows.⁴ The chapters in this section examine not only the ruptures, but also the unique sutures between globalization and local politics that manifest in the regulation and access to (or lack of access to) digital media. Each chapter examines local politics and domestic policy in relationship to larger ideas about the promise of new media or what regulatory or government actors imagine digital media development, implementation, and industry ought to be. The institutions and actors in these chapters often operate in the spaces between the global and the local trying to coordinate or control the construction, access to, and use of digital technologies, digital texts, and multi-scalar information flows within particular locales. A few of these chapters highlight the complicated role of the nation-state and national policies within global digital media studies, while other chapters illustrate the role that individuals and communities can play in local politics and policymaking via digital technologies.

Digital media hardware and software are often considered “global” or universal. However, the chapters in this section focus on policies and regulations emanating from national, municipal, and local organizations and actors who construct digital media technologies and practices that are simultaneously local and global. These chapters also highlight the tensions evident in policy initiatives, both official and vernacular, due to the uneasy overlap of different visions, knowledge, and access to digital media. This section on official and vernacular policy focuses on examples from South Korea, Turkey, rural Australia, and Nairobi, Kenya. The case studies that follow analyze or present unique situations in which policy and place are closely linked and an understanding of place-based histories and relationships augments our understandings of policies related to digital divides, globalization strategies, information and communication technologies for development initiatives (ICT4D), and government-mandated digital information and access policies.

In Chapter 1, Germaine R. Halegoua investigates the concept of “media capital” and how this concept can be reimagined in terms of digital media and digital policy and in light of state-sponsored urban development activities. She builds on Michael Curtin’s concept of media capital in order to investigate the boundaries of this concept and suggest that researchers recognize “official media capitals” as different yet increasingly prevalent urban forms, particularly in regard to the cultivation of state-sponsored urban centers for digital innovation and consumption.

In Chapter 2, Bilge Yesil continues this section’s focus on officially mandated policy initiatives by highlighting some of the tensions between global communication and local culture in Turkey. Yesil focuses on recent attempts at regulating and censoring internet access and content. She notes that more recently, with the increased availability of global communication media, public officials’ concern with “indecent” and “illegal” content has resulted in the blocking of hundreds of websites by Turkish courts. Yesil frames the court-ordered censorship of YouTube, Blogger, Metacafe, and certain Google services, as well as the monitoring and regulation of cyber cafés within a larger Turkish context of media content regulation amid international criticism. By focusing on Turkish digital policies, the author aims to explore how technologies of global communication impact and challenge the sustenance of Turkish local culture; how local cultural forces attempt to inhibit or control technologies of global communication; and what role digital technologies and practices play in the debates surrounding media regulation, government control, and censorship.

In contrast to the previous chapter, Chapter 3 explores official and vernacular policies that aim to promote and proliferate access to digital technologies, activities, and information. Tracey Benson argues that despite Australia’s position as an industrialized nation there are still significant limitations to broadband access in rural and remote locations. She looks at the creative workarounds developed by residents in these remote areas (often involving mobile phones) and how they work to ameliorate particular types of digital divides. This chapter focuses on official policies, community initiatives, and hyperlocal practices that aim at “closing the gap” between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. As Benson points out, these initiatives may have implications for a range of issues, most significantly access to health and education.

Part I concludes with Melissa Tully’s analysis of the role that “implementers”— in this case people and groups responsible for carrying out an “information and communication technologies for development” (ICT4D) initiative—play in the development and deployment of ICT4D in Kenya. Tully’s chapter presents a typology of these implementers based on their technical and sector expertise and argues that “hybrids,” or people with high technology and local or regional expertise who understand the technical side as well as the environment in which the technology will be implemented, are in a particularly strong position to build or tweak ICTs for development. To support this claim, Tully draws on interviews with “hybrids,” “techies,” “development practitioners,” and “outsiders” over the course of 10 months of observational research conducted in Nairobi, Kenya, around the Map Kibera and Voice of Kibera projects.

Notes

1. Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso (eds.) The Network Society from Knowledge to Policy (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations, 2005), 29.

2. Bill Kirkpatrick. “Play, Power, and Policy: Putting John Fiske Back into Media Policy Studies.” Fiske Matters: A Conference on John Fiske’s Continuing Legacy for Cultural Studies. University of Wisconsin–Madison, June 11, 2010.

3. Silvio Waisbord. “Media Policies and the Blindspots of Media Globalization: Insights from Latin America.” Media, Culture & Society, 35 (January 2013): 133.

4. Terry Flew and Silvio Waisbord. “The Ongoing Significance of National Media Systems in the Context of Media Globalization.” Media, Culture & Society (2015).

1 Cultivating Digital Media Capitals

Place, Policy, and “Ubiquitous Cities”

Germaine R. Halegoua

Introduction

Certain locations house particular culture industry clusters and become control and command centers for global networks of capital, goods, services, talent and labor, and media texts and technologies, while other places do not. While some scholars have attributed this phenomenon to happenstance or serendipity, other scholars have attempted to show that culture industry clustering and places of media innovation do not develop entirely by accident. Various factors such as climate, logistic location, social context, popular culture, migration patterns, social networks and cultural offerings, favorable government policies, and cheap real estate prices, as well as other place-based factors have been noted as explanations for the existence of certain media industries in particular places at particular times.¹ Over the past decade, literature on globalization has noted the prominence of cities (sometimes in lieu of the nation-state) as spaces of innovation, capitalist centers of accumulation, laboratories for cultural production and practice, and landscapes that attract service and knowledge industry labor and creative talent.

Michael Curtin’s concept of “media capitals” has garnered growing significance among researchers investigating processes of globalization, cultural geographies of media, and urban studies. Scholars have utilized his theory of media capital to analyze Havana’s prominence within 1940s and 1950s Latin American media landscapes,² understand Lagos’ position within global Nollywood networks,³ explore the cultural geography of media industry development in East Asia,⁴ conceptualize how intersections of film and digital media help shape Bombay’s status as a media capital over time,⁵ and examine Fiji as a telecommunication capital.⁶ Media capitals, as Curtin describes them, are sites that represent “centers of media activity that have specific logics of their own; ones that do not necessarily correspond to the geography, interests or policies of particular nation-states.”⁷ In other words, although a media capital is a central node or hub of media activity, the strategies and knowledges that shape the media activities and texts produced are more influenced by international cities, international or diasporic audiences, and industry desires than by national governments and interests of the state. Through international case studies, Curtin encourages people to read the nation as an “important but not sufficient site of analysis,” recognizing that the power of the nation-state in media production, distribution, exhibition and reception is significant but not singular. Curtin’s definitions and case studies of media capital show how the nation-state is never wholly responsible for the creation or cultivation of centers of cultural production. While government regulations might play a role in shaping media capitals, in general, Curtin’s media capitals can be understood as more “bottom up” than “top down” or more “organic” than “official.”

However, contemporary centers of digital media production, innovation, and distribution yield slightly different models of media capital—where government policies, regulations, and public-private partnerships tend to play a more overt role in the clustering of industry, fostering of innovation, and creation of urban space. While Curtin’s conc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Locating Emerging Media
• Part I Policy
• Part II Industry
• Part III Texts
• Part IV Geographies
• List of Contributors
• Index