Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

6 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
analysis of communications policy takes as its ‘measuring standard’ not
the outcomes for media industries or transnational actors but the interest
of the publics, in terms of recognition as political subjects, democratic participation
in policy processes and equality of social outcome. Therefore,
throughout this work, we take into account the hegemonic constructions
of meanings surrounding major policy directions and we juxtapose them
to the realities of material and symbolic experience of the minoritized
majorities. In this process, two factors central to the contextualization
and affirmation of communication policy occupy a prominent position
in our study: technology and the state. Their role within the context of
capitalism (and its ideologue of ‘free market’) in serving as and constructing
hegemonic discourses about the drives and necessity for policy will
be systematically investigated in the following pages.
Making sense of global markets, the state and communications
Early analysts of globalizing trends in communications argued that we
were witnessing a significant change in the role and power of the nationstate
to govern in matters of national interest. For proponents of globalization,
new ‘technologies of freedom’ allowed citizens to subvert government
control (Pool 1983) enhanced by a ‘borderless world’ where
nation-states were rendered powerless over market forces that they could
no longer control (Ohmae 1990: 80). They argued that the rapid proliferation
of new technologies coupled with the decline of the role of
governments in regulating national broadcasting and telecommunications
would expand the range of choices for consumers. The expansion
of private communication networks across national boundaries and the
rapid circulation of information through new media – threatened the notion
of state sovereignty and promised greater accountability and overall
efficiency of communications services. For critics, the perceived, diminishing
power of nation-state has to be understood in the context of the
growing influence of transnational corporations (TNCs) to override national
sovereignty and undermine democratic accountability. Political
economists of communication asserted that the freedom of the market
celebrated by critics of government intervention failed to account for
the anti-democratic tendencies associated with the shrinking of public
debate resulting from global media conglomeration and the information
disparities between the wealthy and poor, a consequence of privatization
and deregulation (Herman and McChesney 1997; Schiller 1996).
Social scientists today are generally more circumspect about the ‘withering
away of the state’ and the emergence of a ‘borderless world’. While
some question the very idea that any kind of historical transformation has