Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

20 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
telecommunications serve as the ‘backbone’ to the modern broadcasting
media and ICTs (on which print media are also increasingly dependent),
and has since colonial times served as the vital infrastructure of international
trade. Furthermore, they are the physical links to a pronounced
‘virtual’ reality as a major aspect of the Information Society. Broadcasting
similarly has been counted upon to define and construct national and
other identities and contribute to cultural and social cohesion historically.
Our aim is to address questions of global communications and media
policy that cut across cultures and geographies. One ‘unusual’ characteristic
with our book is that it does not address ‘case’ studies but moves
between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ economies, ‘dissimilar’ geopolitical
power and a wide range of political cultures. Through this logic we
address the broader spectrum of capitalist organization while acknowledging
the differences in cultural and socio-political locations, traditions
and methods of administration. Therefore we move from the study of
the dramatic impact of the dominance of the liberalization paradigm in
the field of telecommunications in ‘developing’ countries to the analysis
of the effects of privatization and the loss of the normative basis for public
ownership of broadcast media in the Western world. We address the
complex ideological, cultural and political dimensions of the vision for a
‘new world’ of information and communication through the study of the
powers that shape the policy agenda globally and we show why and how
the vision is neither perfect nor panoramic.
In the first two chapters, our aim is to provide the methodological,
theoretical and historical context of our approach to the study of communication
and media policy, which derives from the understanding that
the nation-state remains an important actor in the field of global policy,
despite claims announcing its ‘death’. It also derives from the position
that globalization is not always a helpful concept, although it has gained
such widespread popularity that often encompasses a number of complex
concepts and assumptions and provides us with a vehicle to communicate
the scope of analysis with our readers. In these two chapters we address
the role of the realm of ideas, values and language for institutions and
any actors with claims to authority and jurisdiction in their pursuit of
some form of minimum legitimation, even when this is limited to the
purpose of persuading the various publics to accept the shifts in policy
through processes of normalization. In the present chapter we have outlined
our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the state
and the market, focusing on how advances in communications and media
technologies have shaped both public and policy discourse.
In Chapter 2, we argue that the experiences of postcolonial states
in the context of the Cold War reveal pertinent lessons for current