Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 123
(EC 2005b: 11). The EU is largely more focused on the social impact of
IS and the future of the public service ethos. This can be understood
as an ideological and political tradition related to the historical development
of nation-states and the role of governments in the European
space, but also the role of cultural contexts and diversity of these political
traditions for the EU project. Increasingly, the pressures of transnational
capital may appear to win ground over the social argument but the institutional
arrangement of the EU is such that can maintain the space
for the development of debates resistant to the pan-market argument.
This takes place at both national levels (as political representatives also
make national cases) and at the supranational (EU) level as the European
Parliament with its role in the constitutional and legislative processes of
the EU and its presence in the international arena strengthens the infrastructure
of counter-policies. As the French Régulation School (FRS) also
suggests, it becomes clear that the integration of markets at a global scale
does not exclude ‘individual’ or ‘national’ approaches as long as these do
not fundamentally interfere with the neoliberalist project. At the same
time, the spaces for resistance, but also paradoxically the structures that
will legitimize and allow market integration, depend on institutional arrangements.
The availability of resources and means for the participation
of citizens, whether as protesting forces or within the planning of policies,
are crucial elements for maintaining resistance. The IS is characterized
by new geographies of power exemplified by the construction of market
powers across spaces and products. At the same time a new constellation
of financial and economic ‘hubs’ or ‘nodes’ is accompanied by global institutional
structures that provide the necessary institutional hegemony.
The emergence of translocal urban spaces in the e-economy energizes
the lifeblood of another level of social relations dis/empowered by the
position of social groups in the digital web of networks that produce and
distribute resources. Importantly, these resources constitute not only the
framework of the digital economy or concern the domain of virtual consumption
but are also directly linked to the materiality of labour, hardware
and time as well as the impact upon the norms of recognition of ‘valuable’
social groups and their symbolic and material existence. We discuss these
implications of structure and policy further in the following pages.
The myth goes global: the Global Information Society
At the G7 Information Society summit in Brussels of 1995, a set of principles
was identified and became known as the ‘Brussels Principles’. According
to these policy principles, the pursuit of market liberalization
and the support of private enterprise in the Global Information Society