Global Media Journal

Volume 7, Issue 12 | Spring 2008 | Table of Contents

graduate guest Editor’s note

Contested Intersections: Publics, movements, institutions

In the current climate of global uncertainty and turmoil, exploring the junctures where public, movements, and institutions meet is critically important in order to craft a collective strategy for the future. This issue’s selection of graduate papers offer a multi-perspective, fascinating look into the dynamic intersections of memory, history, business strategy and cultural consequences of the “iron logic” of neoliberal capital. Two of the papers explore contesting a painful past in order to understand the process of creating historical and cultural memory, and two of the papers analyze how business strategies to expand and remain competitive in the current global environment are being crafted and how these strategies are not without important cultural consequences.

In his essay, Disciplining Civil War: Serbian and U.S. Press Coverage of the 1990s Conflicts in Yugoslavia, Martin Marinos takes a novel approach inspired by Delueze and Guattari’s theoretical work on fascism and the national self-destruction it inspires in order to explore the failure of both the U.S. and the Serbian media to offer adequate coverage of the war. Marinos contends that both the U.S. and the Serbian media sources offered a narrow and deficient account of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, focusing instead on oversimplified narratives which did not reflect the real complexity of the conflicts. The story told in the West of the collapse of Yugoslavia was refracted through the dichotomy of “victim,” e.g. the non-Serbs vs “perpetrator,” e.g., the Serbs, disregarding the dynamics of a much more multi-faceted and complex ethnic conflict. More important, U.S. news media treated Yugoslav media as a unified whole, as an entity bound on nationalistic and self-destructive tendencies, completing ignoring the complexity of the mediascape and the importance of the Serbian opposition voice, which served as a locus of dissent at the time. Marinos does a remarkable job in bringing a sophisticated analysis to the role of the paramilitary groups in the Yugoslavian war, and the failure of the media to recognize the complexity of their existence and the extreme violence they perpetrated. Failing to even acknowledge the expression of collective hatred and desire for annihilation at the grassroot levels, the U.S. media and their Serbian counterparts, Marinos argues at the end, narrowly focused only on the surface manifestation of violence engaging in what he calls “overcoding” of the news and eventually, creating a “moralizing discourse” in the words of Tzetan Todorov, a good vs. evil metaphor, negating the true complexity of the war.

In her paper, The Political Economy of Call-Centers: Understanding the Intersections between Capitalism, De-Culturalization, and Information Technology-Driven Globalization, Lubna Asif takes on a multi-perspective approach to exploring this recent consequence of the global economy. While the world of business has grown accustomed to outsourcing customer service centers to more “cost-efficient” destinations in the developing world, these call-centers, Asif argues, become more than just vehicles of economic revenue. They become a locus of both economic exploitation and cultural-decontextualization. As Asif argues, “this capitalist mode of production has innovatively designed a digital network that never sleeps and evidently gives more to the capitalist economies than what it receives in exchange.” One of the most glaring examples of how the logic of capital has forced itself into processes of cultural definition is the sophisticated system that business in the Unites States have adopted of selecting only those companies for outsourcing customer service which offer adequate language training in accent-free English; a process which while appearing to be a sound business strategy guaranteeing solid return of investment, is in many ways a token of imperialistic tendencies. As Asif concludes, the consequences of these phenomena are already being felt in the intersection of neoliberal capital, imperialist tendencies, and the hegemonic takeover of the English language as the Franca lingua of the globe.

Third in this journal’s issue is the invited essay of Assem Nasr entitled, A Fragmented Unity: Lebanon’s War and Peace in Cultural Memory, whose take on the contested intersections of movements and publics explores the struggle of the Lebanese people to reconstruct a collective narrative of their past. In Nasr’s provocative essay, history, civil strife and forgiveness meet at Beirut’s Martyr Square—the terrain where cultural memory is constructed in an attempt to reconcile the schisms of a painful past and imagine a collective future. While Nasr makes only a brief mention of the media as agents of the cultural construction of trauma, nonetheless, his poignant cultural and historical critique of Lebanon’s failure to find a meaningful solution to the civil strife that has plague the country is incredibly well suited for a global discussion of contested intersections. How can history serve as a tool to privilege a particular political agenda while ignoring other, contesting historical interpretations? More important, in view of the current political instability in Lebanon which has rendered the country virtually at a complete stalemate, how can a new, “engineered” historical narrative shape the future of the country? These are a few of the questions which Nasr poses and masterfully explores in his essay. By analyzing the narativizing of historical memory through the reconstruction of the physical and cultural space that is Martyr Squre, Nasr argues that the Lebanese people must engage in a process of addressing the past, facing the horror of war and genuinely acknowledging the trauma it left behind. As Nasr argues, despite attempts to offer reconciliation, “while on the surface all is forgiven, the fact remains that on the ground, there was no appropriate closure for all atrocities committed.”

Finally, the second invited paper, Acquisitions vs. Joint Ventures: The Internet Expansion Strategy of U.S. Media Companies, explores the contested intersection between the Internet as the new media technology all media conglomerates dream of in their strategic growth, and their decision to either enter in an acquisition or a joint venture deal. In his paper, Guosong Shao argues that the rapid development of the Internet is changing not only the way we communicate as a public, but also the business models, which media institutions adopt in order to remain viable in today’s highly competitive media environment. Shao also proposes a model of predicting whether a media company opts for a joint venture or an acquisition, based upon a sophisticated analysis of several variables emerging from the business and media studies field. After analyzing 155 media deals completed by eighteen of the largest U.S. media companies, Shao demonstrates that a number of specific conditions must exist in order for an acquisition of an Internet business to be triggered. In addition, Shao’s model becomes useful for media scholars not only because it successfully predicted ninety percent of the media’s strategic choices to expand, but also because it shows us that the calculated logic of capitalism has now spread to and fully applicable to the Internet, a medium in which no company officially holds a financial stake.

Elza Ibroscheva

GMJ Graduate Paper Section

Guest Editor, Spring 2008