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August 25, 2002
EXCERPTS: Globalizing the media
Under the slogan of the free flow of information and television without frontiers, freewheeling media businesses have claimed the right to market their products and services across borders, thus promoting a global consumer culture, writes Kevin Robins
THE prevailing scenario for a future media order may be described as the corporate ideology of globalization. Media conglomerates — like Time Warner, News Corporation, Sony, Disney, and so on — have become the champions of this agenda for global cultural empire. Driven by the pure logic of profit and competition, the strategy of these corporate giants is clearly to try to get their products to the largest number of consumers that is possible.
The overriding imperative is to break down what are now perceived and presented as the arbitrary boundaries and frontiers of national communities — national borders have come to be seen as imposing arbitrary limitations on the expansion of markets, and are regarded as anachronistic and unreasonable obstacles to the corporate imperative of rationalizing business practices and strategies. Since the 1980s, then, we have consequently seen a corporate offensive intended to undermine the authority of the national and public service model of broadcasting.
Under the slogans of the ‘free flow of information’ and ‘television without frontiers’, freewheeling media businesses have claimed the right to market their audiovisual products and services across borders, wherever they can find welcoming and paying cultural consumers. The aim is to dissolve the old order of national boundaries and particularities in the cause of the new universalism of a global consumer culture.
What we have, then, in this new corporate agenda is a particular model of transnationalization and globalization, and one that we should take seriously. We need to consider it carefully because, however problematical it might be, it has a powerful resonance, and because it threatens to impose itself as the hegemonic vision of cultural globalization. Consider the clarion call made, at the beginning of the l990s, by the late Steve Ross, who was then head of Time Warner. In his so-called ‘world address’ to the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1990, Ross argued forcefully on behalf of the benevolent and progressive potential of post-national media systems.
“The new reality of international media is,” said Ross, “driven more by market opportunity than by national identity.” And the culture of the market — imagined in terms of market harmony — can work to dissolve the conflictual legacy of national cultures.....
So, the market institutes a common agenda and a common set of values — it becomes the means to counter the divisiveness of national cultures and to bring us all together in ‘one world’. On the basis of what he calls “consumers’ tastes and desires”, then, Ross envisages a new global order characterized by the “interconnection of cultures” — the new universalism and ecumenicism of a global consumer culture.
This is an agenda that has developed and gathered pace in the ten years since Ross’s keynote address, extending from broadcasting to new media. Thus, the idea of a global or transnational community — the idea of “one world” culture — has come to be taken up in many of the debates around the Internet and the project for a global network society. So, Bill Gates (1995) believes the transnational information superhighway will “make all communication easier”, and he tells us of how “bulletin boards and other online forums allow people to be in touch, one- to-one, or one-to-many, or many-to-many, in very efficient ways”.
I don’t know what “efficient ways” means, but here again there is the conviction that global commercial media can provide a common focus for the people of the world to come together in a transnational electronic community. Or, as Al Gore (1994) puts it, in relation to the US information superhighway project, the new networks make possible “a kind of global conversation in which everyone who wants can have his or her say”. In the idea of a global conversation, we have the sense of a community of interest, a global community of shared values and common objectives.
This vision that is being projected by Steve Ross, in relation to broadcasting, and, more recently, by Bill Gates and Al Gore, for the future of the information superhighway, is about creating what seems to be a post-national universalism, a new market- driven cosmopolitanism, if you like, across the planet. We must all surely be sceptical about this corporate “vision”. And there are good reasons, it seems to me, for being sceptical.
The new technologies, it is assumed, both audiovisual media and new network technologies, will bring people closer together, at a global scale. They will help to finally create what Marshall McLuhan thought of as the “global village”. Through these new technologies, it becomes possible to overcome the barriers of distance and for people across the world to communicate directly with one another, just as they would in a face-to-face community. And, with this, we are back to the agenda of community — the corporate ideology of mediated global community.
This is one vision, then, of a new media order. It is a vision that we should take seriously, however much we find it problematical (as I clearly do). For it can have a certain popular resonance, with its idealistic anticipation of a one- world future (what is effectively a global consumer order). And it is able to mobilize established discourses of electronic utopia, suggesting that the electronic media will allow us to create some kind of new communicative order. But it does all this — all this futuristic rhetorical work, we might say, — whilst at the same time sustaining the comforting and conservative discourse of imagined community, albeit on the basis of a new global geography.
In this scenario, which privileges the identity of the global consumer, the principles of community closure remain operative. The global community is a unitary community, and — as with all such communitarian visions — it seeks to ensure that the differences associated with ethnicity, gender, culture, religion or class are fundamentally neutralized. The corporate vision of (media) globalization is fundamentally a difference-blind vision.
Excerpted with permission from
Images of the ‘modern woman’ in Asia: global media, local meanings
Edited by Shoma Munshi
Curzon, Surrey. Distributed in Pakistan by Vanguard Books, 45 The Mall, Lahore Tel: 042-7243783
Email: vbl@brain.net.pk
ISBN 0-7007-1353-0 211pp. £14.99
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