Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

176 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
employment opportunities for significant numbers of workers, including
women targeted by the ‘pink-collar’ service industries and manufacturing.
We argue that, in both the North and the South, there is a compelling
need to research such implicit policy questions, balancing the central
concerns of employment generation with broader social concerns about
the environment and sustainability, and claims for access to the benefits
of the ‘new economy’ by those who have remained at its margins. This
requires incorporating perspectives of workers and communities who are
linked by industries across national borders, as well as paying attention
to those left behind and outside the necessarily limited imagination of
the dominant IS vision.
In Chapter 5 we saw how competing but symmetrical visions of the
IS as imagined by EU and US state representatives institutionalized the
legitimacy of corporate actors to set the parameters of policy design.
Northern state actors, especially the US and the UK, have not flinched
at capitulating on the new bounds of the ‘free flow of information’ in
the current context of the ‘War on Terror’. The militarization of new
communication technologies and their use as surveillance machinery is
being supported by a transnational industrial complex eager to protect
the domain of e-commerce at any cost. Control of communications reflects
the political and economic restraints of the market economy, on
the one hand, and the ‘paradox’ of the seeming diffusion of politics and
economics through globalization/internationalization with the increase
in restrictive civic policies in the local/national territory, on the other.
These trends, increased securitization of communication policy, militarization
of technology, subjugation of the civic to the ‘economic’ in
matters of communication liberties, are not exclusive of the ‘digital’ age,
but they are exacerbated when contrasting the euphoric proclamations
of the potential of ICTs. As with multistakeholderism within the WSIS,
civil society organizations are positioned to raise welfare and humanitarian
concerns in contrast to state and corporate actors, and their role is
often seen as oppositional or at least reformist in multilateral governance.
In Chapter 6, we argued that any humanitarian agenda that seeks to
displace the dominant neoliberal vision of the information society must
contend with questions of recognition, redistribution and representation.
We drew from feminist theory and practice that has grappled with the
difficult dilemma of articulating a transnational social justice platform
while recognizing the foundational need to acknowledge difference. In
this chapter, we traced how the shift from the failed state-centric NWICO
vision of social justice was replaced by the institutional ascendancy of
CSOs based primarily in the North to define and articulate a social justice
alternative within the WSIS process. We argued that despite progress