Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

1 Capitalism, technology,
institutions and the study
of communications and
media policy
This book is about communication and media policies in the context
of globalization. Its central focus is the analysis of the conditions and
the nature of the policies that have shaped and are actively structuring
the world’s communication infrastructure. In this book we argue that the
processes of globalization have been accompanied by a continuous transformation
of the communication and media landscapes around the world
sustained by a complex net of interdependent factors. The changes experienced
in media landscapes are facilitated by de facto structural changes in
the mode of production and terms of international trade. These changes
are also ‘normalized’ through a set of policy-making processes that increasingly
involves new regulatory processes and institutional actors, signalling
a profound shift in the role of nation-states in the policy-making
process. We argue that these changes are not experienced as homogenous
processes across the globe and draw attention to the cultural, social
and political contexts that render such transformations distinct. However,
we also stress, and indeed turn our attention to the fact that, there are
overarching questions that cut across the specific positions of groups of
societies, countries, cultures and even economies. We further argue that
the study of communications and media policy needs to develop tools for
making macro-level observations of patterns without losing sight of the
micro-level of realities of experience.
In this chapter, we begin by examining the nature and conditions of
global communication and media policy analysis. We first address the
common assumption that policy-making is an apolitical processes based
on value-free principles, and trace how these assumptions are rooted in
similar claims about the supposed neutrality of communications technologies.
Our study of communication and media policy draws from
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