Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

12 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
to address the reinforcement and reproduction of power structures that
maintain sexism and racism through the gendered logic of communication
and cultural policy. For these scholars, the role of the state is explored
in its contradictory position to facilitate remedies against discrimination,
on the one hand, and also to continue and exacerbate symbolic and structural
inequalities on the other (Beale 1999; McLaughlin 2004; Meehan
and Riordan 2001). Nowhere is this more visible in the field of communication
and media policy than in the very technologies that have been
heralded as the panacea of all ills and have been identified as the core
defining factors of policy development.
The cultural ingredients in the making of myths: technology
From advertising to trade shows, from demonstration projects to conferences,
there is a widespread effort to market the magic, to surround
computer communication with power, speed, and the promise of freedom.
There is nothing new here. Students of the history of technology
will recall similar attempts to make electricity a spectacle by lighting
up streets and buildings in the downtowns of many cities and towns,
turning them into miniature versions of New York’s Great White Way.
(Mosco 2004: 45–6)
Technological advances have repeatedly been seen as catalysts for social
change – communications technology in particular. Techno-capitalist and
organizational prophets from academia, government bodies, think-tanks
and private industry have sanctified the existence and importance of what
we today call the ‘information society’. Each group has produced its own
(predominantly White, and occasionally Asian, male) guru to bring the
message of technocracy to their respective audiences. The cooperation
of university research with the state and the private sector reshapes public
policy discourse to focus almost exclusively on priorities defined by
concerns about market expansion. The IT and telecommunications industries,
often amalgamated in one mega industrial complex, expand their
reign over more traditional cultural economies and are integral gatekeepers
in the organization of the Information Society. Gates, Gore and Negroponte
were the early (white, male) gurus of an information age that is
based on a virtual reorganization of the ‘atom’ economy. All three of them
helped to define the terms of reference of techno- or informational capitalism
through their positions in their respective constituencies, in the
world of business, politics, research and publication. Bill Gates’s Business
@ the Speed of Thought (2004), Al Gore’s National Information Infrastructure
(1993) and Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995) and WiReD