Media Policy and Globalization

Atsushi Tajima
State University of New York, Geneseo

Book Title: Media Policy and Globalization

Authors: Paula Chakravartty and Katharine Sarikakis

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

ISBN: 0-7486-1849-X

Date: 20006

Since the 1990s, humanities and social science scholars have agreed that globalization is a key concept when examining the modern world. This observation is noteworthy, not only for various academic disciplines, but also for corporations and policy makers. The discipline of communication/media studies is not an exception to this trend. In fact, it has been one of the most critical arenas concerning globalization because, as Manuel Castells has put it, communication is the "central nervous system of the very process of globalization." Since this nervous system involves vast infrastructure, technological adaptation, multilateral negotiation, and global commerce, assessments over policy, essentially "who gets access" and "who gets control," have been central to this debate.

Previous works assessing global media and policy debates fall into several categories. In the early stage (early and mid-1990’s), the inequality in production and distribution of news and cultural media products between the North and South was one of the core debates. Others paid attention to the structure of global corporate capitalism and international organizations. In Media Policy and Globalization, Paula Chakravartty and Katharine Sarikakis attempt to integrate multiple perspectives. They integrate policy, political economy, technology, culture, and gender into their media policy discussion. Their attempt to connect culture and cultural studies to media policy makes this book especially noteworthy.

This book contains succinct and up-to-date reviews. We can easily use them as references for global media studies. Chapter 2 reviews the history of global media regulation. Chapter 3 more concretely reviews global telecommunication regulatory actors and institutions. Chapter 5 provides data regarding global inequality in accessing telecommunication infrastructure. These chapters themselves are handy up-to-date references for anyone teaching and researching global media debates today.

However, Chakravartty and Sarikakis do not merely provide simple reviews of literature. Each review contains clear themes and arguments. For example, the central theme throughout their historical review in Chapter 2 is the shift from the "Fordist mode of regulation" to a "flexible post-Fordist regulatory era" (p. 24). This focus rationalizes their analytical framework for the entire book. They point out the limitations of nation-state-based Fordist modes of analysis, and propose that we need to pay more attention to various non-national and transnational players, such as the market itself and civil society and its actors, in order to understand global media policy today. To explore these areas and actors the authors urge us to take culture seriously because of "the dislocating effects of rapid global integration... …reinforcing and also creating new divisions based on race, gender and sexuality, as well as ethnicity, religion and nationality" (p. 39).

While Chapter 3 concretely discusses how the shift to post-Fordist telecommunication policy has taken place, Chakravartty and Sarikakis specifically contrast its scenarios in the North and in the South, particularly India, Brazil, and China. They then conclude with the following caveat: to pay attention to the South, "not only because of their relative economic power as emerging economies but also because they offer us different kinds of examples of support as well as visible resistance to the norms of global governance" (p. 78). They discuss the relatively rapid and radical reform of telecommunication in South starting around the mid-80s and its success as well as strains, as they present "Corruption index: privatization and telecommunications corruption" (pp. 80-81). We have rapidly begun to realize that the South cannot be an isolated telecommunication entity from global telecommunication today; hence, knowing its different kinds of development, reform, and "policy culture" apart from the North’s culture becomes a necessity.

Chakravartty and Sarikakis provide concrete contextual analyses. Chapter 4 features broadcasting policy and its reform of European Union, where they examine the importance of EU as a post-Fordist "international and supranational policy actor" since EU "offers more spaces open to citizens’ input than other international organization" (p. 21). In particular, they focus on Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs). The European PSBs have traditionally been a national medium in many ways including their function to provide cultural contents and "to reinforce a sense of homogeneous national culture – a tangible imagined community" (p. 88). Yet, they were not an exception to the neo-liberal shift of global market economy, along with the large export of the US media products, in the 80s. They could no longer be an isolated national medium in both content and operation.

Their discussion featuring the EU exemplifies a complexity of the policy debate of global telecommunication in a comprehensive manner. First, the EU itself and its attempt to create an integrated market and society is relatively familiar background knowledge for the average readers who read this book. At the same time, we tend to view Europe as a "within the West" context. So we expect a lesser degree of conflict than what we would perceive as a North-South negotiation. This presupposition may be true. But what is effective here is this "within the West" context paradoxically illuminates various national and transnational players and their complex roles. If we see them in terms of a North-South context, the debate, particularly the discussion over inequality, is rather clear. When we view what the South claims apart from what the North argues, our observation is clearly dichotomous. Thus, by looking at a North-South negotiation, the roles of each region's actors may also be clear, and we may not be able to grasp complex roles of telecommunication policy actors. However, what Chakravartty and Sarikakis reveal through the EU case is the complex and fluid roles assumed by European policy actors, in part because their "proximity" highlights many subtle "clashes of interests," which cannot be defined and discussed in a dichotomous manner.

In Chapter 5, Chakravartty and Sarikakis discuss what they call the Information Society (IS). They first provide a "re-mapping of the terrain" of this frequently used phrase, in terms of societal meaning, infrastructure, economy, technology, and so on. This map leads to their subsequent discussions about "within the West/First World (e.g., US vs. Europe)" and "between First and Third World" policy debates. Although the bottom line of IS generates a free flow of information, each society has a different expectation that it desires to maximize. The authors also introduce a question about this notion of "free flow" as a "USA-imposed "free-flow argument" or "global policy hegemony and local tension: the pressure for privatization" (p. 131). We often see the Reaganomics-Thatcherism neoliberalism as an already existing norm of global commerce and interaction. However, the authors reintroduce it as a debatable issue. While we tend to simply see IS as a universal "free" communicative tool, its usage is first grounded within each society’s political, economic and cultural context. More concretely, the degrees to which each society censors the web, allocate web resources for social welfare, such as health and education, and generate capital to develop IS infrastructure vary. Perhaps, despite the notion of IS as a universal communicative tool, it is rather culturally, economically, and politically environment-specific because of its wider capability in capturing and transmitting people’s everyday activities and cultures.

Yet, this does not necessarily mean that nations (region-specific) regain their exclusive Fordist-mode of control. In Chapter 6, Chakravartty and Sarikakis look at civil-society players, mostly NGOs. This discussion is also informed by the author’s critical eye on culture, particularly feminist cultural critique, which plays a key role. They argue that the current status of telecommunication is highly gendered. They quote, "… from the beginning that a sense of technological determinism, insensitivity to gender inequalities and the dominance of male ‘experts’ was rampant across all three ‘multistakeholder bodies, including civil society organizations that promoted ‘gender-blind and hence male-centered’ policy interventions" (p. 160). Furthermore, the existing policy debates treat gender as a "subcategory." As they argue, "gender is seen as a secondary rather than an organizing factor, an ‘added’ element in the policy agenda that is dealt with after the ‘urgent’ business is attended to" (p. 159).

In this chapter, they provide several lenses. For example, IS, which is relatively a new telecommunicative environment in the past decade or two, was no way free from gender segregation, even though it is developed in our modern political environment where gender equality is an unquestionable norm. Furthermore, given that our recent telecommunicative environment still is characterized by cultural inequality, the authors assert that arguments of feminist telecommunication studies should be valuable guidance for us to critically examine other possible inequalities, such as race, ethnicity, and class, in telecommunication policy debate.

Chakravartty and Sarikakis performed an ambitious task in scaffolding multiple theoretical approaches (e.g., policy and political economy to feminist culture), and various contexts to explore this rapidly changing subject. Their integration of culture, particularly culture of both media market and policy actors, gives their work much depth. One might feel that they do not quite provide their own suggestions. Nonetheless, this book presents many rich clues for us to look further at on-going policy debates. Those clues point us toward inclusion of a variety of national, non-national, international, regional, and civil players as well as their organic connections. For any researcher, graduate student, or upper-division undergraduate student interested in global media debate today, this book provides not only the most up-to-date references, but also a fresh way to look at multiple-level analytical levels of analysis.