Media and the Practice of Globalization

Patrick D. Murphy
Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville

The Media and Globalization by Terhi Rantanen. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2005.
 

How does one study and make sense of mediated globalization? Moving away from the early conceptual roots of media and globalization theory (e.g. relations between international organizations and national governments), in The Media and Globalization

Terhi Rantanen focuses on “globalization, media and people” (p. 18). While this may seem straight forward enough, Rantanen argues that such a project has largely been avoided as international communication scholars have primarily wrestled with issues of structure, showing little interest in people, while intercultural work has privileged people while neglecting macro concerns. Rantanen is interested in collapsing the macro and micro division that has defined past research in an effort to interrogate how people engage media through their lives across time and in different places, and how those experiences with media shape activities and social practices which contribute to globalization.

To pursue this goal, Rantanen offers a new methodology for studying media globalization, which she calls “mediagraphy.” To elaborate this methodological adjustment, the author looks at individual life-stories and draws from American anthropologist George Marcus’s notion of multi-sited ethnography as a mean to look at “places rather than place” (p. 12). The shift in ethnographic focus is important considering how, as a phenomenon, globalization is shaped by the connectivity of people, places, flows and relationships, and Rantanen is deliberate in selecting the term mediagraphy over ethnography to express the central place of media and mediation in her analysis. At the heart of this mediagraphic approach is “how people connect or disconnect via media and communications” (p. 14), and in turn how the actions related to those mediated moments become practices, that is, reoccurring behavioral patterns that to some degree or another articulate global overlaps. Here the author is not just interested in how agents in different places across time might become affected by globalization, but also how they contribute to it.

The subjects of Rantanen’s mediagraphy are what she describes as “four generations of three families and their mediated globalization” (p. 14). These participants are all members of extended families that have experienced various degrees of diaspora, and are connected to family webs involving five countries: China, England, Finland, Israel and Latvia. It is through this multi-sited connectivity that Rantanen’s book serves to explore, tease out and making sense of how media globalization “takes place at different tempos in different places around the world” (p. 12).

The book is theoretically grounded in the scholarship of Robertson, Giddens, Appadurai, Beck, Hannerz, Lull, and McLuhan. Appadurai’s scholarship, in particular, serves as its primary theoretical mooring, as Rantanen considers how his approach to “scapes” (mediascapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and ethnoscapes) can enable an analysis of her research subjects’ relationship to mediated globalization. Methodologically, Rantanen’s mediagraphy is noteworthy as she pursues the study of mediated globalization with her research participants through oral histories, self and comparative introspection (e.g., narrative interpretations of autobiographies and family photographs), and reflexive ethnography. This mixing of methods and data collecting technique provides for some qualitatively rich descriptions, and Rantanen’s interpretations in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are empirically dense and theoretically provocative. Indeed, here there is much to be learned from and taken by others hoping to find a methodologically innovative path for the study of media, globalization and cultural life. In fact, perhaps the main contributions of Rantanen’s book is how it demonstrates how empirically engaged, qualitative research can take dispersed but ethnographically accessible personal biographical tales and family experiences in different social spaces and explicate them in a way that sheds light on broader, “macro” historical issues (e.g., “cosmopolitanism”) involving the current unfolding of globalization.

But like many other media studies that attempt to employ ethnographic methods, the connection between media use and people’s lives is not always clear and easily discernable. Rantanen does a good job of trying to maintain focus on the complex interrelationship between media use, social context and cultural practice, but within her attempt to look at issues of language, travel, residency and locality, media sometime slip from view. However, even here the author is able to produce an interesting dialogical tension between mediated globalization and people’s individual media-related experiences by asking participants to share and compare personal accounts and memories of media use which draw into discussion identity issues and temporal factors within and between different generations of the families studied. Judging from the depth and detail of her mediagraphic descriptions of the three families, this method seems to work well among the various participants as a means to engender introspection and evoke detailed stories, and thus gather data for interpretation.

Ironically, though, despite Rantanen’s innovative methodological contributions, her thickly descriptive chapters on the participants’ lives, memories and practices, and the book’s overall degree of theoretical sophistication, the mediagraphy is oddly void of ethnographic voices. Not only are the participants themselves rarely quoted in their own words, Rantanen’s own ethnographic voice doesn’t surface and it is often unclear as to what constituted “the field” of her mediagraphy. That is, other than the two pages of acknowledgements located at the end of the book and one photo in which she appears as a child, we learn little about how the people represented in her mediagraphic text responded to her (e.g., as a scholar, family member, friend), how she met them (e.g., entrÈe into “the field”), who she is as a researcher (e.g., her values, preoccupations, subjectivity), or how she interacted with the people represented in her study. In short, Rantanen crafts a mediagraphic text that is not unlike the expository ethnographies produced in traditional anthropology, where the writers were largely unreflexive and invisible in their own monographs.

This last point makes The Media and Globalization a somewhat uneven read. Indeed, it is a book that suggests exciting possibilities for future research while at the same time appears oddly silent in others. It is clear that Rantanen’s study has much to offer the student of media and globalization as it is theoretically rigorous and methodologically imaginative. Her qualitative, multi-method approach provides an innovative methodological map for researchers of media, globalization and everyday life and merits emulation. However, for a study so reliant on oral tradition, introspection and comparative self-reflection, it is unfortunate that the author doesn’t take the opportunity to reflect on her own interpretive work and translative role as the story-teller of this otherwise detailed and original “mediagraphy.”