Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

8 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
governments have used the pretext of terrorism to introduce illegal
laws of spying and surveillance. The PHR report emphasizes the increased
volume of invasion of privacy and warns that the effects of these
laws on civil liberties will be only fully understood after many years.
The report identifies some major tendencies in countries across the
world:
New identification measures and new traveller pre-screening and
profiling systems
New anti-terrorism laws and governmental measures provide for
increased search capabilities and sharing of information among lawenforcement
authorities
Increased video surveillance
DNA and health information databases
Censorship measures
Radio frequency identification technologies
New electronic voting technologies
Mismanagement of personal data and major data leaks
In this moment when the US government exerts the moral superiority
of freedom and democracy to impose a very specific juridical system to
guide ‘free trade’ and ‘freedom of expression’, it is imperative to critically
consider the broader context of policy-making.
In this quest, understanding the historical change of capitalism and its
variations depending on local and regional conditions and the role of regions
(whether core or semi-peripheral) in the international regimes is of
primary importance. What globalization has achieved is not the unified
leap to higher profitability for all national industries or to wealth for all
parts of the world. Gordon, for example, explains that it is short-term
financial capital that rapidly moves across borders while at the same time
foreign direct investment has become increasingly selective (1994: 295).
Park (2000) also points to the varying degree of state presence for the
shaping of economies in the North and Southeast Asian countries, concluding
that the role of the state in protecting local economies from financial
crises has been more effective than in those countries that depended
totally on market forces. According to Gordon, the era of globalization
has been characterized by a process whereby TNCs have sought ‘stable
and insulated political and institutional protection against the increasing
volatility of international trade and the collapse of the dollar-based
‘free market’ expansion of international trade growth’ (1994: 295). Hay
(2004), examining the EU model, argues that market integration forges
divergent rather than convergent economies. Our understanding of the
symbiotic relationship between states, markets and society is influenced