Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

44 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
policy struggles. In chapters 5 and 6 we will consider the postnational
ideal of the governance of the global information society, as multiple
stakeholders formulate the rules of Internet governance through specialized
bodies such as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers) or even reimagine the ‘governance of governance’ at the
WSIS. We argue that while we must explore why there is limited public
awareness of these issues, much less public participation in these institutions
and processes, we should not too quickly assume that the fault
lies with uninformed global citizens who are disengaged or hopelessly
misinformed about communication and information resources or media
access, content and accountability. And in fact we argue quite the contrary
position later in the book. Throughout this chapter we have argued that
political, economic and technological transformations have altered how
national governments regulate communication industries and content in
ways that defy older forms of national regulation. In the next chapter, we
address the reregulation of public interest in the field of telecommunications
policy, seen by many commentators as the central nervous system
of the global information economy.
Notes
1. In the postwar era, social scientists and development experts divided
up the world according to stages of development. The First World
was the industrialized, capitalist nations in the North (with the addition
of Japan), the Second World was the Socialist Bloc of nations in
Eastern Europe and the Third World was the former colonized world
in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The First World
also correlated with the term ‘developed’ world while Third
World stood for ‘undeveloped’ or the ‘underdeveloped’ world. We
will discuss the making and unmaking of the ‘Third World’ as a collective
political voice in the international arena in subsequent sections of
this chapter.
2. Neoliberalism refers to the shift in thinking as well as in macroecomic
policy from Keynesian welfare or state-led models of economic
growth which were dominant in the postwar era, towards the
adoption of monetarism, privileging the role of markets over state
intervention. We discuss this transition in much greater detail in the
second half of this chapter.
3. Most significantly, in 1948 the UN passed the Declaration of Human
Rights. Article 19 of this document states: ‘Everyone has the right
to freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes freedom
to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and