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Media and Communication Studies Going Global
Introduction
How is media research to be conducted in a globalized world? Are new paradigms and methodologies needed when the nation state is no longer an unproblematic measure of everything, or a presupposed conceptual frame, in a world where global interdependencies and transborder exchanges are supposedly more significant than structures and processes contained within national borders?
The geopolitical and geocultural consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union in conjunction with the information and communications technology revolution have changed the terms of everything “international” and caused academic concerns about “space” in general. Not only media systems, but also political and economic systems generally, are in flux in the new millennium. There is an often-noted new instability in the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crackdown in Beijing in 1989 and, not least, after 9/11 in 2001.
Media studies shares with sociology and political science difficulties in coming to grips with the realities of a transnationalized and transforming world. One explanation is a certain, lingering “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2002), implying that the nation state still provides the presupposed and mostly implicit conceptual frame – also when the focus is on phenomena beyond the nation state. Considerable thinking is called for and much is also going on, not least in the field of globalization studies, with its notorious problematization of all kinds of borders, including disciplinary ones.
For many decades, media and communication studies have contributed substantially to our general knowledge of international conditions and processes. There may be a problem with the older disciplines, from which communication research originated, in that they have not incorporated this body of knowledge into their own thinking, modern media and modern media studies now often being a blind spot (in sociology, political science, literary theory, etc.). This may also explain what seems to be a diminishing inflow into media studies from its “founding” disciplines. It should be remembered that a series of original, path-breaking thinkers in our field came from outside media and communication studies: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Raymond Williams, and many others. On the other side of the North Atlantic, we find many other scholars coming from the “outside” and producing modern classics in our field – from Robert Park and Paul Lazarsfeld to Herbert Schiller.1
It seems to be the case that media and communication studies, now a discipline in its own right, has lost touch with these other disciplines, which, in turn, have now largely eliminated media from their research agendas and curricula. As a consequence, they often regard media as epiphenomena, or neglect them altogether.2 This is the classical problem of an increasing division of intellectual labor at a time when integrated and truly interdisciplinary approaches and transnational theorizing are needed more than ever, owing to the increasing complexity of, and interdependencies in, a globalized world.
Media studies (and forerunners) originated as a cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary undertaking. Now it is, in most places, a discipline in its own right with regard to academic institutionalization. With this come academic prestige, professorships, and research funding. But there are also problems and costs associated with being a specialized discipline. In the field of media and communications, an increased division of intellectual labor runs counter to developments in the late-modern world, where the “system of the media is losing its specificity and becoming an integral part of the economic, cultural and political system” (Martín-Barbero 1993, 215). This is just one dimension of globalization that impacts on national systems. Globalization means increased complexity (change and heterogeneity) and this is the new raison d’être for cross-disciplinarity.
Media studies have always been international, long before the term “globalization” was popularized in the early 1990s by Roland Robertson (1992), sociologist of religion. There have been a number of approaches in internationally oriented media and communication studies, from international news and propaganda to Four Theories of the Press (Siebert et al. 1956), and media and development (Lerner 1958, Lerner and Schramm 1967, Pye 1963). Later came the cultural imperialism critique (Schiller 1969, 1976) and the New World Information and Communication Order process (see Carlsson 2005), then media globalization and new media studies. Much of this is covered by international communication (Thussu 2006), a field that has bordered on and sometimes been interfolded with international politics, international sociology, translocal anthropology, and other fields. Media studies has also taken on board, in innovative ways, theory complexes such as world system theory (McPhail 2006), modernity theory (Thompson 1995), media and migration (Appadurai 1996), the network society (Castells 1996), diaspora studies (e.g., Tsagarousianou 2004), and research on the new (informatized) wars (Kaldor 1999). Most recently, studies of new global social movements and media have proved to be fertile ground for cross-breeding between several fields, as in research on civil society media (e.g., Atton 2002, Couldry and Curran 2003).
I will continue on this track and argue for (1) more dialogue with “nonwestern” theory and research perspectives, (2) more basic cross-disciplinarity, and (3) a stronger focus on global inequalities and social transformation. These research concerns are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Globalization forces us not only to focus more on transnational phenomena in general, but also to highlight social change and difference, which are almost unprecedented in pace and scope and directly and indirectly caused by globalization processes. Stability and equality do not characterize contemporary societies. Further, as increasingly central institutions around the world, the media are deeply ingrained in most societal processes. This calls for broad and integrated approaches in media studies, for cross-disciplinarity in a very basic sense: as theorizing and empirical research across both disciplinary and sociocultural borders. Such transnational theory-building would seem necessary to take care of some of the new complexities in the contemporary world and its media-driven modernities. What they have in common are the facts of change and difference, and the centrality of the media as institutions. Theorizing media and social change in a globalized world implies questioning some received categories and distinctions based on assumptions that no longer hold.
These arguments will be developed below. Far from proposing a new theory of media and globalization, I will try to show how media studies can and need to be opened up to experiences and realities outside the center of the world system. I will first wind back half a century, when media and social development were frequently on the agenda of development research, then reflect on the contemporary scene, which is largely characterized by global divides and their concomitant media phenomena. Following this will be a brief section on the meanings of “dewesternization” and the decreased relevance of some firmly rooted disciplinary distinctions. This theme will then be concretized using Russian, Brazilian, and Chinese examples.
Media and the Development of Underdevelopment
A brief history of internationally oriented studies of media and social change could start with the Schramm, Lerner, and Pye era in mass communication research. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a strong reliance on the purportedly universal correlation between growth in media consumption and political democratization and social development in general (see e.g., Lerner 1958, Pye 1963, and Lerner and Schramm 1967). It was assumed, by Daniel Lerner and others, that the media created a psychic mobility among people living in the countryside in traditional (i.e., premodern) societies, in turn resulting in a geographic and then social mobility, owing to people’s longing for a modern life and salaried employment in the cities. The media served as “mobility multipliers,” thus contributing to the “passing of traditional society,” to refer to the title of Lerner’s famous book.3 This was before the decolonization of several countries in Africa and the democratization of Latin American countries, processes that had nothing to do with the rise of public media, at least not in the former colonies. This was also before the cultural imperialism thesis, associated above all with Herbert I. Schiller, who stated that the content of media worldwide was strongly dominated by imperial, that is, US, military, economic, political, and ideological interests (Schiller 1969, 1976). And the world had not yet seen the “barrios,” “favelas,” and “banlieus” surrounding the megacities of Asia, Africa, and South America, which housed millions of unemployed and destitute. This is where Lerner’s mobile hordes ended up, once they got moving – for reasons other than media consumption.
At the time, the given fact was that the statistical correlation between the number of radio and TV receivers per capita, on the one hand, and participation in elections and a number of welfare indicators, on the other, tended to be quite strong (around +0.40 across all countries). It should also be underlined that an important component of the theoretical setup was developmentalism, a belief in unilinear development.4 Socioeconomic differences between countries were translated into a time scale – there were underdeveloped, developing, and developed countries – assuming a considerable time-lag, separating the former from the latter.5 Difference related to dominance and exploitation in the contemporary world was not yet on the media research agenda, but was to be focused on by dependency theory in the 1970s.
The correlation was mostly a spurious one. If one bothered to look at partial correlations, one could easily see that it did not hold for most of the countries in the world – not for the “underdeveloped” or the most “developed.” In the poorest and richest countries, respectively, more media meant more market, but not more democracy – media development being above all a consequence and indicator of economic growth. For the 10 richest countries, there was even a strong negative correlation between the number of TV sets and political participation. There were also some significant clusters. One group of countries stood out as relatively media-saturated, but this had no relationship whatsoever to socioeconomic or political development: More media did not mean that these countries were better off in other respects. To this group belonged most of the Latin American countries, many of them then with authoritarian military regimes and a heavy influx of commercial US television, the developmental potential of which was questioned early on by Latin American intellectuals.6
The manifold lessons from these statistical exercises are still valid. These studies largely overlooked:
1 Socioeconomic differences within countries (Sklair 1995, 1997).
2 Global power relationships – center–periphery relations.
3 The relation between the two – norths and souths reproducing themselves on national and local levels (Lash 2002), thus producing a globalization of poverty (Nederveen Pieterse 2003, 2004).
4 Further, authoritarianism is perfectly compatible with free market commercialism. This historical fact creates problems for attempts at homogenizing categorizations of national media systems (cf post-Soviet Russia and China, below).
5 Media functions cannot be universally ascertained. In particular, socioeconomic level and position in the world system determine uses and political effects of the media system on social, cultural, and political life and processes.
A generation later, the difficulties in finding easily applicable classificatory principles for the purposes of comparative media research are reflected in attempts to sort countries in terms of their media systems, one reason being that these systems are reflections of complex and differentiated socioeconomic orders. Curran and Park, in their groundbreaking De-Westernizing Media Studies (2000), introduced the following two major dimensions as a way of sorting the media systems in today’s world: democratic vs. authoritarian and neoliberal vs. regulated. However, these authors had to include an extra, fifth category for “transitional or mixed societies,” including China, Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, and the Middle East. This category, particularly interesting from the point of view of theorizing media and social change, comprises the most dynamic regions, the new media modernities. It is obvious that we need to introduce other dimensions as well. It is even reasonable to ask whether there exist any nontransitional or nonmixed societies. At least it seems as if most countries are moving along both these dimensions – and others.
I will return to this comparative model, but already here we can use it to speculate about the directions in which these countries might be moving – given the axes of the model. In which of the four possible directions are China, Russia, and the rest of the “transitional and mixed” nations moving? And how far have they advanced since the publication of Curran and Park’s book? One thing we know for sure is that the direction of change, given the alternatives defined by this model, depends greatly on interdependent economic and political developments globally and nationally. We also know that things move fast in the globalized world and that that in itself creates social and political tensions that have to be taken into consideration when theorizing media and social change.
Postmodern Poverty
Fifty years after the “media and development” paradigm (and the Bandung conference) and 25 years after the cultural imperialism critique, the geopolitical structure of the first, second, and third worlds and one of the two superstates has evaporated with the Cold War. Some 50 new countries have seen the light of day and television and the Internet have turned into dominant media worldwide. Internet access is restricted, but nevertheless a significant factor in Third World countries. Television, however, has a strong presence even in poor countries. I will reflect on this fact below. During the same period, socioeconomic divides within as well as between countries have increased. This also runs parallel to the introduction of parliamentary democracy in Africa, Latin America, and most recently in the post-Soviet world. This “misfit” between economy and politics needs to be taken into account in any analysis of national or local media systems and cultures.7
The World Bank’s development reports show how the Gini index has developed in a select number of countries over the past 50 years.8 These are within-country measures, and there is a general long-term increase in economic inequality. Three groups of countries emerge from these statistics:
1 Extreme inequality: many Latin American countries (the situation in the Sub-Saharan region is even worse according to other data); Gini exceeds 0.50.
2 Strong and steadily increasing inequality: USA, UK, China, Russia, India; Gini within the 0.3–0.40 range.
3 Moderate inequality (as everything is relative): continental and northern Europe; Gini below 0.35.
This is about differences between countries with respect to differences within countries. How does this correlate with media systems and media cultures? The first group, with extreme inequality, is with few exceptions composed of democratic, capitalistic countries with colonial and authoritarian pasts (including apartheid) under military regimes. The media systems are advanced and strictly commercial, especially when it comes to broadcast media (e.g., the Globo and Televisa media empires). The second group is a mixed bag of old and new capitalistic economies, including some old empires, some of the largest parliamentary democracies, but also China (though according to other estimates, China belongs to the first group). The media systems vary considerably, but things in common include strong central (federal) governments and big, more or less globalized media corporations with large nationwide audiences. The third group includes a number of European countries (EU members or not), many of them, especially in the north, (post)welfare societies with public service media as one component of the media structure. Were we to use the above categories, these European systems would be deemed “democratic and regulated” (Curran and Park 2000), or “democratic corporatist/polarized pluralist,” to use the typology suggested by Hallin and Mancini (2004).
Inequalities based on economic factors, gender, ethnicity, and so forth, and class divides are the causes of many other conditions, such as crime, violence, corruption, trafficking, and HIV/AIDS (Marmot 2005, Wilkinson 2006). If equality is taken to be an aspect of democracy (for instance as equality of life chances), one has to conclude that economic growth and marketization have little, if anything, to do with democratization. This goes against the grain of liberal political science but, nevertheless, the empirical foundations for this conclusion are overwhelming.
In a study of 14 countries, picked to represent the three groups above, I plotted economic equality (global ranking based on Gini values) against press freedom (global ranking based on interviews and official data) and then dichotomized these variables (high and low positions in the world ranking). The overall correlation is almost nonexistent, meaning that the degree of equality is not linked to the level of press freedom. For instance, in Egypt there are restrictions on press freedom, but the country has relatively high equality. In South Africa, as in Brazil, the situation is the opposite: enormous divides and booming, noncensored commercial media. This is the static picture. In order to capture the dynamics of media and economic growth, I plotted economic growth between 1990 and 2004 (change in global ranking) against press freedom.
The important finding here is that the most expansive new capitalist economies have the poorest record when it comes to press freedoms, parliamentary democracies or not, but with old or neoauthoritarian traits. We are beginning to discern a pattern in which a number of fast-moving capitalist economies (Russia and China being two of them) are also moving in the direction of neoliberalism and neoauthoritarianism. This is happening not with the help of old-fashioned, state-driven propaganda machineries, but in media environments seemingly based more on the pleasure principle – which is supportive of both nationalism and patriotism – than on the reality principle, to put it in Freudian terms (Stallybrass 1996). This is not to say that reception is predictable, just that hundreds of millions of people are continuously exposed to the production of consensus from above.
More sophisticated indicators and statistical analyses could probably take us a little further along this path of enquiry, but in order to better understand media in a globalized world, we have to think through some concepts in media and communication studies, developed mostly within the European/Anglo-American orbit. What does it mean, for a start, to move beyond the national confines?
Dewesternizing as Dedisciplining
With the globalization rhetoric that came to the fore in the 1990s, a number of concepts have become problematic and there are many suggestions as to how to get “beyond” or “deconstruct” this and that. What follows is my own contribution to this particular genre.
First, the urge for “internationalization,” within academia and elsewhere, leads us to a number of related, but more far-reaching, concepts:
Internationalizing (for instance, media studies): In a strict sense, this refers to relations between or comparisons across nations or nation states. In international politics, a political science subdiscipline, this is often unproblematic. It is simply about interstate relations and activities, or nation-based comparisons. To the extent that the nation as such is problematized, however, “international” dissolves into something “foreign” or, for that matter, “global.”9 In a much broader sense, as pointed out in the Introduction, it may include both comparative approaches and global and transnational processes (Thussu 2006).
Transnationalizing, on the one hand, reflects the conceptual change from “multinational” (no center) to “transnational” corporations (operating from core centers in the world economy). On the other, it is an expression of an ambition to move beyond methodological nationalism and “transnationalize” theory, which I interpret as a way out of locally produced universalizations (wherever they are produced). A third meaning would be a focus on cross-border or translocal processes, mostly reflecting the “deterritorialization” of communication practices.
Dewesternizing (to pick up on Curran and Park’s book title) expresses an ambition to make room in media studies for perspectives in the east and south. It also implies that we, at the end of the day, give up our western canons in favor of African, Asian, and Latin American ones. Before that, it would be a great step forward to have these different canons productively confront each other in truly globalized media studies.
This agenda of caveats (or “de-” catchwords) for the global age is far from exhaustive. I have already pinpointed methodological nationalism, which would entail a denationalizing of media studies, a giving up of concepts firmly rooted in the figure of thought (or mental container) of the nation-state and its inherited institutions and national myths. A decolonizing of media and communication studies, originating in core imperial and colonial nation states, takes a great deal of imagination, a “planetary” perspective (Dussel 1998) or “thinking from the border,” from outside European and north-American modernities (Mignolo 2000).
All this adds up to a dedisciplining of media and communication studies. I started out with a call for more dialogue with “nonwestern” theory and research perspectives, more cross-disciplinarity, and a return to historical, disciplinary roots, reinserting media in the social and the cultural. From this follows, among other things, a questioning of basic categories and a deconstruction of disciplinary dichotomies such as politics/culture,10 symbolic/material, public/private, real/unreal, fact/fiction, time/space,11 production/consumption, word/image, text/reader, self/other, we/them.12 This is not the place to discuss these further, beyond the selective endnote explications. Instead, we shall see how the criticism applies to the situation in some concrete societies. Even cursory studies of some “nonwestern” worlds confirm that globalized media studies would benefit considerably from a further dissolution of these binary opposites or, as the case may be, from further inquiries into the inherent dialectics that come into play in actually existing societies. The deconstruction of some such dichotomies does not constitute philosophical word play, but something that is already affected by the media in their mediation, in its broadest sense, not least between institutions.
Difference and Change in Media Modernities
In recent years, I have studied media developments and media cultures in “postauthoritarian” and “neoauthoritarian” systems, “new democracies,” and whatever other labels have been used (Curran and Park’s fifth category). These societies, for instance Brazil, China, and Russia, have served as laboratories for natural experiments in media and social change (Ekecrantz et al. 2003).
They have many things in common, distinguishing them from most other countries: size; rapid immersion into the world capitalist system (ratified by WTO or Nafta membership);13 economic growth; democratic deficits by the exclusion of large groups in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity from public spheres; economic and social divides; and political, cultural, and regional divisions, thus problematizing the notion of the nation as a homogenous and meaningful unit. Divides are not only between countries in the north and south, respectively, but very much within nation-states, the poor and the rich often living quite close together.14
What they also have in common is that they are media modernities, or media-driven modernities. How do media mediate between the social classes and between other groupings, producing a mediated visibility with repercussions for social relations and struggles? National, urban bourgeoisies are certainly visible in news, entertainment, and advertising, and this applies to Brazil, Russia, and China (cf Lerner’s model).15
The media modernities of these huge polities are thus based on differentiations that are political, social, regional, and temporal, but also ideological and cultural. All of these are heightened by the rapid transformations. The different Chinas, for example (Zhao 2003), are bound to produce diverging discourses, impossible to harmonize in a unified hegemonic order, even when history is sometimes effectively suppressed – or when foreign news and the Internet are censored (Lagerkvist 2006).16
In post-Soviet Russia, the relationship between politics and economy, with media as mediator, defies most known models. The first years of the 1990s were characterized by independent media that operated as a “fourth power” (1991–5). Then entered a highly politicized media system that operated in a society turned into a spectacle (1996–2000). This fragmented “media-political system” (termed the “media-political complex” by Curran and Park 2000, 14) operates in a full-fledged commercial environment. However, the fluidity of the “Russian” media system17 has its spatial counterparts. In 87 out of 89 regions in Russia, one finds seven different “media models.”18 This raises doubts as to whether there exists a “Russian,” or for that matter, a “Brazilian” or “Chinese” media system.
Before Putin’s presidency (starting in 2000), Brian McNair saw the implications of the Russian system in terms of a new and unique form of capitalism that seriously threatens the democratic transition: “In this respect Russia, for all its robber-baron primitivism, may turn out to be a pioneer of the media-driven capitalism of the twenty-first century, in which the controller of information in all its commodity forms – journalism, entertainment, computer software, data services – are established as the key sub-sector of the capitalist owning class as a whole” (McNair 2000, 89). What could now best be described as media-driven state capitalism, a system yielding both financial and political profits, defies most known media models. Outside academia, however, it has been subjected to both intellectual criticism and literary satire.19 This appeals not least to the younger generations, who are turning away from television. These Russian generations today seem totally alienated from official politics, as enacted on national TV channels, today directly or indirectly controlled by the Kremlin.20 It tends to “adapt to any conditions and turn to private lives as spheres of self-realization while almost completely ignoring the virtual community of the nation state” (Zassoursky,2009). To the extent that this is a valid description of today’s Russian youth, it has gone a long way since the attempted coup in August 1991, when various groups of young people were active on the barricades, embodying a politics of pleasure, which challenged the dominant meaning of politics (Pilkington 1994, 303 ff), or since young protesters spread red paint on the White House in Moscow as a demonstration against the first war in Chechnya.
One may not agree with all of these analyses, but they have served here to concretize my thesis that some prevailing disciplinary dichotomies (politics/economy/culture) – and western institutional models – do not hold. A lack of institutional stability and national homogeneity undermines methodological nationalism. Political communication forms in northern and southern mainland China, closer to westernized Hong Kong, are almost as different as popular cultural forms in different parts of Brazil, from Afro-Brazilian capoeira in the north-east to favela hip hop in Rio, to gaucho cowboy culture in the south.
The spatial structures of modernity have a temporal side. The timing and speed of entry into the world capitalist system and the rate at which a society has been transformed in the recent past (“keeping pace with time” in today’s official Chinese rhetoric) seem to be significant factors for at least two reasons. First, there exists a collective experience of change in society and in everyday life for a large portion of the population. Zhen describes how this is related to “a larger cultural anxiety about temporality … the rapid transition from socialism to a market economy … different temporalities – old and new, socialist and capitalist, global and local – have collided … the perils of speed have made anxiety a central feature of public discourse” (Zhen 2001, 132). This quote certainly apostrophizes the collapse of some received dichotomies as far as rapidly transforming societies are concerned.
Conclusion
The emerging global system of social classes and power structures is the most significant trait pertaining to “globality,” which means that there are winners and losers and all kinds of widening gaps and divisions. The rise to power of global elites is mirrored at the other end of the socioeconomic scale in the masses of forced national and international migrants and hundreds of millions of unemployed owing to economic globalization – read capitalist expansion – into new world regions led by globalized elites with their feet in transnational corporations and neoliberal governments.21 Comparative cross-disciplinary case studies can take us a long way if we are interested in getting to know what all this means in actually existing media modernities. Let me conclude by returning to the introductory arguments for basic cross-disciplinarity in media studies and point at some such efforts under way.
A new macrosociology of media would focus on the intersection of global and national class systems and the ways in which they shape the media, media cultures, and mediated conflicts. Other cross-disciplinary encounters have already made an imprint in global media studies. Anthropology, for instance, is a relative newcomer in media studies, but it could contribute substantially to our understanding of translocality and “transmodernity,” based on a deterritorialized notion of culture that privileges routes instead of roots (Clifford 1997).
Comparative literature could show us experiences of media modernities outside the North Atlantic orbit. Latin America and Asia, for instance, provide us with a wealth of literary reflections on what it means to live in media-saturated urban environments (if read in that way) far away from the core areas of the modern world system – as did many of the classical modernist authors in Europe.22 Comparative media history is needed to unravel the deep historical structures of today’s global communications, such as the circuits of commerce that produced western and other modernities in the first place (“globalization” being the cause, not the consequence of modernity – in this perspective). I have already mentioned the field of new global social movements.
Globalizing media and communication studies thus implies more than an aggrandizement of the research object and more than adding countries to the bag of comparisons. For one thing, it is about the inclusion of other kinds of media users, cultural producers, and political animals, than those typified or implicated in much research – those who happen to live in rich countries, who are targeted as consumers or even citizens with entertainment or information, while sitting comfortably in their homes after work. This was the type codified within the paradigm of affluence out of which mass communication research sprung in the postwar period.23 As we all know, however, there are masses of nonrich people “out there” (also in the rich part of the world) and they are not consumers, do not think of themselves as citizens of a polity and they do not come home after work, because they have no work and hence no leisure time and no place to spend it anyway. But they also have in common that they inhabit and are dependent on what goes on in heavily media-saturated societies. This is a historically new equation or paradox, calling for new alliances in media studies, both between and beyond disciplines and their national habitats.
Notes
A version of this chapter was previously published in Nordicom Review, Jubilee Issue 2007, pp. 169–81. It draws on three papers presented, respectively, at the IAMCR conference in Cairo, July 24–28, 2006, the conference “Internationalising Media Studies: Imperatives and Impediments,” University of Westminster, London, September 15–16, 2006, and the Russia in Flux Research Programme Seminar, Academy of Finland, Helsinki, October 27, 2006.
1 Zelizer (2004) has reviewed a broad range of contributions to journalism studies from many different disciplines. A similar treatment of media studies, as a broader field, would require a book series.
2 See, for instance, Downing’s (1996) criticism of political science for its neglect of media and communication aspects, also when it is concerned with political influence.
3 See also Thompson’s retrospective discussion and contextualization of Lerner’s book, 40 years after the publication of The Passing of Traditional Society (Thompson 1995, 188–97).
4 See McPhail (2006) for brief overviews of models at the time, including the economic growth model. Rostow’s theory of stages is now, after 1989, being reintroduced in a new shape in much “transition” research. Updates of the debate on developmentalism are found in Hemer and Tufte (2005).
5 This was a form of “denial of coevalness”: people in “backward” parts of the world are not really our contemporaries (Fabian 1983).
6 For data on the phenomenal, continued growth of media around the world, Latin America included, between the 1970s and the late 1990s, see Carlsson (2005, 209).
7 In the following, I have used secondary data and done some simple calculations myself. My IAMCR paper, Cairo 2006, gives the more complete picture.
8 Roughly speaking, the Gini index measures the ratio between the income of the richest and that of the poorest. It ranges from 1 (maximum inequality: one person has all the income) to 0 (no one has more than any other).
9 In Swedish academia, an “international publication” may be a text (1) in an “international” journal (in one of the so-called world languages), or a text either (2) published in English, anywhere, for instance by Nordicom in Gothenburg, or (3) published abroad, in any language.
10 See Brooksbank Jones (2000, 1) on “the progressive ‘enculturing’ of politics in response to deepening social divisions,” “the political significance of cultural practices in extra-institutional politics,” and “the imbrication of culture and politics (as analytic categories and as practices).” See also Sassen (2006) on how cultural events become political, e.g., street activities, and about the increasing importance of the nonformal forms and places of politics: real political processes that cannot be contained within the formal political system. I have tried to systematize this thematic in Ekecrantz (2006).
11 See Bakhtin (1981/1934–5) on the study of chronotopes (timespaces) as determining, together, the capacities of fictional genres; Wallerstein (1997) shows how the temporal and the spatial are interlinked in sociological and historical forms of knowledge.
12 There is a risk that the ubiquitous criticism of this figure of thought just reproduces Orientalism by producing a similarly universalist (meta)discourse. Sardar voices a concern over representations of the “Other” in history, anthropology, and politics: “Postmodernism’s obsession with representation of the Other in fiction is designed to project this representation back as reality and hence shape and reshape the Other according to its own desires” (Sardar 1998, 176). We/them is an often taken-for-granted distinction, sometimes downplaying similarities and mystifying difference (not least when the “east–west” dyad is evoked).
13 In Brazil and China, half of their gigantic populations are younger than 25–27, which means that in China this group amounts to some 650 million people.
14 The richest person in Brazil, the owner of the Globo empire, has his well-guarded mansion on a slope in Rio de Janeiro, with favelas uphill.
15 A Russian reality soap showing the everyday life of the immensely rich in a secluded block on the edge of the Moscow River attracted a huge audience.
16 Chin-Chuan Lee catches this well: “In China the media have been battling a confluence of ideological currents and moulding a hybrid ideology ridden with conflicting identities, images, and subjectivities. In this sense, the media have been a site of ideological contestation and accommodation, derived from the ambiguities and contradictions between the revolutionary rhetoric of Communism and the practical discourses of marketization” (in Lee 2003, 17).
17 This is based on Zassoursky (2004), but there are other such short-term periodizations.
18 The market model; the transitional to market model; the conflict model; the modernized Soviet model; the paternalistic Soviet model; the authoritarian Soviet model; the depressed model (Koltsova 2006, 166).
19 As in the works of Viktor Pelevin, for instance Generation P, and the not yet translated Vampyre. Among other critical analysts, Irina Petrovskaya and Alexij Pankin should be mentioned.
20 Through state channels or large holdings in companies such as Gazprom, in its turn owner of major media since the ousting of media moguls and oligarchs such as Berezovskij and Guzinski.
21 The transnational capitalist class as conceived of by Leslie Sklair is composed of four groups or fractions: (1) transnational corporation executives and their local affiliates, (2) globalizing state bureaucrats, (3) globalizing politicians and professionals, and (4) consumerist elites (merchants, media) (Sklair 1998, 299 ff).
22 Like Josef Conrad and James Joyce, see Donovan (2001).
23 From Paddy Scannell’s presentation at the “Internationalising Media Studies: Imperatives and Impediments” conference, University of Westminster, London, September 15–16, 2006.
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