Understanding Global Media, Second Edition

239 Pages·2018·2.944 MB·English

by  Terry Flew

Understanding Global Media

© Terry Flew, under exclusive licence to Macmillan Publishers Ltd,
part of Springer Nature 2007, 2018
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First edition published 2007
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Contents
List of figures and tables viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xii
Chapter 1: Introduction to global media: key concepts 1
—Media as technologies, institutions and culture 1
—Media technologies and infrastructures 3
—Media industries and institutions 5
—Media content and cultures 7
—Media-centric and non-media-centric approaches to global media 8
—Media and power 11
—The economic framework 15
—The policy framework 17
—The cultural framework 20
—The digital framework 22
—Conclusion 25
—Note 26
Chapter 2: Modernization theories and development
communication 27
—The rise of nation-states 27
—Nations and nationalism 29
—New nations, the mass media and national cultural identities 32

—Modernization theories and development communication 34

—Crisis of the modernization paradigm 38
— Participatory communication and rethinking development
communication 40

—Modernization 2.0? ICTs for development (ICT4D) 43
—Modernization and globalization 47
— Political economy of non-governmental development

organizations 48

v
vi   Contents
Chapter 3: Critical political economy 51
—Defining critical political economy 51
—Critical political economy as media economics 53
—Critical political economy as critical theory 55
— Global critical political economy: dependency theory and the 
‘first generation’ of theorists 57
—‘First generation’ global political economy: an assessment 61
—Global critical political economy in the twenty-first century 65
—Political economy of the global internet 68
—Debating critical political economy 70
—Changing media industry dynamics 70
—Economic power and cultural power: the neoliberalism debate 73
—Nationalism and globalism 75
—Note 76
Chapter 4: Globalization theories 77
—Globalization: definitions and clarifications 77
—Strong globalization? 81
—Globalization, culture and power 83
—Globalization and cultural identities: beyond cultural imperialism 88
—Globalization and media production: the rise of the regions 90
—Critically assessing globalization theories 94
—Notes 99
Chapter 5: The changing geography of global media production 100
—Media geography, space and power 100
—How the media became national 104
—Approaches to media globalization 107
— Critical political economy: global media giants and the new
international division of cultural labour 110
—Globalization or glocalization? 116
—Media capitals 119
—The frameworks compared 123

—US-China film co-productions as a case study 124
—Conclusion 128
—Note 128

Chapter 6: Global media cultures 129
—Five definitions of culture 129
—Cultural studies and cultural policy 132
— Three perspectives on global culture: modernization, global
capitalism and cultural hybridity 134
—Modernization theories 135

—Critical political economy 138
—Globalization theories 141
Contents   vii
—Identity, hybridity and deterritorialization 144
—Conclusion: how global is culture? 150
—Notes 152
Chapter 7: Globalization, nation-states and media policy 154
—Nation-states and the global system of states 154
—Media policies and national media systems 157
—The importance of history and institutions 159
—The developmental state, copyright and creative industries 162
—Globalization and the ‘declining state’ thesis 166
—Soft power and international broadcasting 172
—Cosmopolitanism, civil society and the internet 174
—The limits of cosmopolitanism and civil society 178
—Notes 179
Chapter 8: Conclusion 181
—A new nationalism? 181
—Assessing the competing frameworks 183
—Post-globalization 189
—Notes 192
Bibliography 193
Index 219
List of figures and tables
Figures
1.1 Constituent elements of media 2
1.2 The nature of media markets 16
2.1 Mass media, modernization and behavioural change 37
4.1 The global field 79
4.2 Institutions of modernity 84
5.1 I ndicators of foreign investment, assets and sales
growth 1990–2015 109
5.2 Factors influencing feature film location decisions 117
Tables
1.1 Forms of power 13
2.1 The creation and disappearance of states 1813–2016 32
3.1 D ifferences between mainstream neoclassical economics
and critical political economy 54
5.1 S elected indicators of foreign direct investment and
international production, 1982–2015 108
5.2 T ransnational index (TNI) indicators for major media and
related corporations, 2015 113

5.3 Comparison of theories of global media production 124
6.1 Three ways of seeing cultural difference 149

viii
Preface
Any current book on global media has to face up to three challenges. First,
there is a need to reconcile an interest in the global dimensions of media
with a preparedness to critically scrutinize claims that we now live in an
unprecedented era of ‘the global’ that supersedes earlier stages of human
history, particularly those where the nation-state had primacy. Such
perspectives have been associated with globalization theories and, as we will
see in this book, there are considerable grounds for questioning the claim
that nation-states and territorially based forms of culture and identity are in
inexorable decline. Understanding the global dimensions of media without
succumbing to an ideology of globalism is an important test of scholarship
in this field.
The second challenge is to clarify what is now meant by ‘the media’ in an
age of digital networks, convergent platforms and user-generated content.
Key perspectives considered in this book, such as modernization theory and
critical political economy, were initially framed around film and broadcast
media, and have had to be significantly retooled for understanding the
global internet and social media. As with globalization, the divide between
‘old’ and ‘new’ media can be overstated – television is now clearly a digital
media platform, and many of the world’s most accessed websites are the
online versions of traditional media brands – but there are clearly challenges
in setting the parameters of the media in an age where digital platforms carry
virtually everything. It reminds us of the need to conceive of media in terms
of technologies that enable people to communicate, rather than tying it to
particular industry structures, types of content or forms of carriage.

Finally, there is the question of ‘media-centric’ approaches and those
that stress the social, political, economic and cultural contexts in which
media operate. All media theories have had to balance this question, from
mass communication debates about media effects to questions of whether
the internet presages a new version of what Marshall McLuhan termed the

‘Global Village’ (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967). This book does place a stress on
the relationship of media to social relations, and particularly power relations,

ix
x   Preface
as they play out on local, national and global scales. But in doing so, the
intention is not to subsume what is interesting and important about the
media itself in the thickets of social theory.
In developing the ideas that underpin this book, I have benefited from
engagement with the International Communication Association (ICA), and
particularly the Global Communication and Social Change division, of which
I was Vice-Chair from 2013 to 2015 and Chair from 2015 to 2017. Thanks
to Rashmi Luthra, Silvio Waisbord, Robert Huesca, Joe Khalil, Antonio la
Pastina, Joe Straubhaar, Karin Wilkins, Daya Thussu, Jack Linchuan Qiu,
Colin Sparks, Anthony Fung, Ju Oak Kim, Will Youmans, Shiv Ganesh,
Radhika Gajjala and others with whom I have shared ideas in the Division.
And of course thanks to the wider ICA community, particularly Cynthia
Stohl, Amy Jordan, Francois Heinderyckx, Peter Vorderer, Patricia Moy, Peng
Hwa Ang, Paula Gardner, Larry Gross, Michael Haley and Laura Sawyer.
The book benefited from the opportunity to present key ideas at confer-
ences and university symposia in the United States, China, South Korea,
Russia, Indonesia, Austria, New Zealand and Australia. Thanks to Wenshan
Jia, David Craig, Clayton Dube, Jiannu Bao, Wen Wen, Elena Vartanova,
Donald Matheson, Shin Dong Kim, Josef Trappel, Li Benqian, Li Jiashan,
Zhu Lian, Zhang Xiaoyang, Xiao Han, Endah Triastuti, Billy Sarwono, Wang
Xiaohua, Li Xiaomu and Haiyan Wang for inviting me to speak to their
colleagues and to graduate students. Parts of this book have been presented
at:
ICA-SJTU International Forum on New Media, Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, Shanghai, China.
National Institute for Cultural Development, Beijing International Studies
University, Beijing, China.
Center for Information and Communication Technologies & Society,
Department of Communication Studies, University of Salzburg, Austria.
Institute for Cultural Industries, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.

U.S.-China Institute, USC Annenberg School of Communication and

Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Asia Media Forum, Communication University of China, Beijing, China.
Thanks to my colleagues in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland

University of Technology for their insights and support. Among those who
have helped to shape the arguments in this book are Stuart Cunningham,
Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns, Nic Suzor, Adam Swift, Brian McNair, Stephen
Harrington, Greg Hearn, Emma Baulch, Patrik Wikström, Liangen Yin,

Bonnie Liu and Donna Hancox. Thanks to my graduate students, notably