Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

14 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
the way for the representation of the universal virtuality of cyberspace as
a separate and unadulterated place; like the creation of a new market-led
Eden where floating cyberidentities are free from the shackles of the physical
world and can therefore be formed and transformed. Miller’s study of
WiReD magazine from 1993 to 1998, these most crucial and defining years
of the contemporary era of ‘information society’ and convergence, shows
how the representation of technology perpetuates demagogic dilemmas
about the relevance and validity of information technologies, rendering
its critics as Luddite and retrograde. This is a common strategy against
proponents of oppositional politics, especially when critique is addressed
to the dominant configuration of the assumed technophile, what Stewart
Miller calls the ‘hypermacho man’. Picking up a copy of WiReD in January
2005, we can see that the political outlook remains constant despite
booms and busts within the information industry. The cover page depicts
Richard Branson in a space suit, preparing to take us to the final frontier.
The article presents Branson, ‘The Rocket Man’, as an all-conquering
(white, male, Anglo) entrepreneur not only embracing but also leading
the new information age with his next crusade to conquer the cosmos
for his space travel customers. True to the spirit of techno-capitalism,
all other major stories in the issue generate odes to masculinist cultures
paying homage to technological invention, as a process of controlling
or reconfiguring nature (article: O. Morton, ‘Life Reinvented’ WiReD,
January 2005).
The celebratory discourse of WiReD magazine has influenced the field
of global communication and media policy in ways that are both obvious
and harder to identify. If we consider telecommunications policy –
the backbone of modern communications and media industries (Internet,
new media, broadcasting) – as the necessary infrastructure for the
information economy, we see how these associated myths translate into
legitimate policy practice. For instance, scholarly expertise in policy was
increasingly cultivated, most often in US Business and Law Schools,
where the consensus about the nature and direction of the liberalization
of the telecommunications infrastructure crystallized into practice. The
dominant approach in terms of the scholarship on telecommunications
communication policy is prescriptive and, particularly from the 1980s onwards,
technologically deterministic with the assumption that the market
and technology are inherently neutral forces (Pool 1997). This dominant
model espouses an evolutionary understanding of technological innovation
based on the ‘natural’ dynamic of a competitive market place. From
this perspective, technological innovation is understood as a source or
cause of social change, what influential ‘futurologists’ beginning in the
1970s referred to as the mark of a ‘postindustrial society’ (Bell 1973).