Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

22 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
technological advancement, the era of convergence and consumer
sovereignty, are explored through the lenses of public interest and the
participation of publics in active self-expression.
Chapters 5 and 6 (Part Three) address the new ‘paradigm’ of communications
policy, one that involves an increasing ‘convergence’ of policy
areas under the rubric of the ‘Information Society’ and its technologically
focused framing, and the increasing attention to non-traditional
policy actors in the policy-making process, such as corporations and civil
society.
The question of technology is taken up in Chapter 5, which seeks to
grasp the concept and object of policy known as the ‘Information Society’.
On the technology determined front of the knowledge economy hi-tech,
futuristic and often dry, incomprehensible language may be closer to the
language and everyday experiences of some but its optimistic overtones
remain distant to the majority of the citizens on the planet. Increasingly
it has come to include everything, from new broadcasting techniques
and the digitalization of the content of services to the Internet, from
cyberidentities to optic and glass-fibre architectures, determined by the
demands of the material not virtual infrastructure. Similarly, the ‘Knowledge
Economy’ symbolizes a transition from the manual/machineassisted
production line of material things to an abstract, placeless interaction
between human and electronic brains for the production of
services. ‘Knowledge’, a questionable term, refers to the collection and
trafficking of data, in particular personal data, and their analysis for predominantly
marketing purposes. These discourses represent some aspects
of the condition of the Western industrialized economies but often
overgeneralizations made in relation to their usefulness and character
overshadow realities and visions that suggest a different almost radical
reading.
In Chapter 6 we pick up on the politics of civil society as an institutional
actor engaged in global communication and media governance.
We trace historically the continuities and disjunctures of this seemingly
‘new’ social actor, to argue that the presence of civil society organizations,
whether locally or nationally delivering services or playing a central role
in framing policy at the WTO or WSIS, does not in itself challenge
the reproduction of symbolic dominance by traditional actors, nationstates
and transnational firms. Assessing the specific case of the WSIS,
an institutional site where civil society actors are in theory given unprecedented
access, we focus on the gap between policy and politics that
exists in current formulations of the normative basis for civil society intervention
to argue that addressing issues of recognition are as crucial as
redistribution.