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122 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
and Ways Forward into the 21 st Century White Paper, the 1997 report on
living and working in the IS and the 1999 public consultations about
the convergence of new media, tend to emphasize the positive effects of
ICTs and new technologies in general. The lack of any serious investigation
into the impact of inequality, deterioration of work conditions, the
casualization of work, the withdrawal of the welfare state and the decline
in pensions and health provision, as well as the costs of directing public
funds towards the mainstreaming of ICTs without at the same time
correcting social and economic ills were some of the weak points of EU
policy in that period. Especially for the non-‘core’ economies of the EU,
the rate of technological adoption has proved to make these issues visible
(Sarikakis and Terzis 2000).
Despite their overt concentration on the marketability of ICTs, the
communications policies surrounding the European and American models
of IS are not identical. Venturelli (2002) suggests that there are fundamental
political philosophic differences between the ways in which
the EU and USA approach their analysis of the role of the individual and
therefore of the marketplace and of the role of the state, and therefore the
very functioning of democracy. These differences can be largely located
in the hierarchical arrangement of importance between citizenship and
democracy and market. In the European political philosophical tradition,
the ‘polis’ – as the space to which citizens have access to and may participate
within the life of their communities – is a notion interconnected
with the principles of universal access and with the public service model
of regulation. As Venturelli asserts, it is in the constitutional backbone
of the EU and the national member states where we find public interest
clauses particularly emphasized, such as universal access, protection of
privacy, content regulation and public investment in research and innovation
among others (2002: 77). Nevertheless, these philosophical differences
have not proven unsurpassable: EU policy continues to make strong
references to social and cultural goals with a rather systematic – albeit very
modest – network of initiatives that aims to foster cultural production and
protection of private data, but the course of liberalization is unmistakeable.
The most recent EU policy addresses the ‘maturing’ of the IS in the
European space, but with a very clear mandate for market-oriented regulations.
These are the integration of the ‘European Information Space’
which involves the convergence of communications policies (a parallel
initiative to the current revision of TVWF as we discussed in the previous
chapter); more technological research and an emphasis on security (which
takes a number of forms from security of software to that of private data).
Social aims involve the quality of life in the EU with three priorities: ‘the
needs of the ageing society, safe and clean transport and cultural diversity’