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CONCLUSION 175
political systems, similar to the EU, but also on the international level.
The lack of public representation in the highest decision-making echelons
in the international system renders policies illegitimate in the eyes of
the citizenry. Research is needed to explore the consequences of that ‘legitimation
crisis’ as operationalized through communication and cultural
policy. Finally, the lack of public involvement in the definition and shaping
of what ultimately constitutes the very means of human expression
(especially the ‘creative’ industries) raises a number of questions about
the relationship between political and economic systems and the experience
of being ‘human’. In other words, our understanding about the
human condition represented as the content of stories told on national
television or in the press, increasingly through converged technological
platforms, and as the agency with the force and creativity to shape the
future, depends upon the functionality and independence of channels of
communication and democratic deliberation.
The last two chapters turn from a focus on specific communication
sectors as discrete fields of policy to the meta-policy field of the emerging
‘Information Society’. This ‘meta-policy’ arena is indicative of the
tendency of convergence among technological outlets and equipment,
communications media and institutional constituencies. Convergence is
also actively pursued in the very exercise of policy-making. Here, the
discourse of IS echoes the technological determinism that drove earlier
visions of international communications policy practice, most notably the
early optimism of ‘communications for development’ associated with US
academic and foreign policy interests during the Cold War. Once again,
the architects for this deeply ahistorical and technology-led mode of rapid
modernization are institutional actors located in the ‘developed’ world,
but this time the geography of ‘development’ has shifted. The centres
of the post-Fordist economy are based as much in Tokyo as in London
and New York, but also incorporate cities and regions from across
Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and, to a lesser
extent, Africa. We saw in Chapter 5 how this new form of splintered
urbanism fosters uneven global integration within Europe and North
America, raising new redistributive questions about ICTs and social policies.
These range from education and employment to the environment
and affect low-income communities, historically marginalized minority
groups and new immigrants, and of course women members of all these
communities will experience the burdens of poverty and inequality even
more intensely. There are similar sets of concerns emerging in the global
cities and regions of the South, but here the promise of the IS is based on
the often implicit assumption that reregulating policy objectives to attract
foreign investment in ICT industries will in itself lead to educational and