Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

82 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
development altogether, has clearly had contradictory outcomes. We can
see how similar arguments are made today about wireless, satellite and
broadband technologies, with the promise of technological and marketdriven
solutions to the global digital divide.
Financing affordable telecommunications access and ICT competence
for low-income communities has become a pressing area of concern for
policy-makers in the field of global communication governance more
broadly. In the next two chapters, we consider the policies that shaped
traditional media on the one hand, with an emphasis on the audiovisual
sectors, and the most current, futuristic expressions of communications,
the ‘Information Society’, on the other. The relationship between
the media and telecommunications sectors is quite visible in the light of
technological convergence, which becomes the object of new regulatory
reforms at an international level. As we will see, the development of technology
has been systematically utilized to further the aims of neoliberalism
with considerable success. The conflicting ideas about public interest,
communication and cultural rights and that of emphasis on market-led
normative framework for the shaping of communications are discussed as
they are found in the development of broadcasting and the Information
Society (IS).
Notes
1. For current information about privatization of basic telecommunications
see ITU figures: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/treg/profiles/
MainFixedOps.asp
2. For current information about conglomeration, mergers and crossownership
in the communication and media industries see the ‘Who
Owns What’ URL of the Columbia Journalism Review website:
http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/
3. For current information about changes in ownership the US telecommunications
industry, which has historically influenced changes
in other parts of the world, see: http://www.openairwaves.org/
telecommunication/industry.aspx? act=phone
4. A ‘first wave of privatization’ took place in the 1930s, especially in
Latin America and the Caribbean, but most countries nationalized
their telecommunications sectors in the 1950s and 1960s. See Hills
1998.
5. Feminist historical and ethnographic research has produced mounting
evidence about the gendered history of labour movements
throughout much of the world. The role of racial discrimination,
as well as discrimination and exclusion based on caste and ethnicity,