Media and Globalization

Media from Marxian interpretation

Habermass emphasizes the importance of media as a central component for a robust democracy.
positive and celebratory globophilia or
- negative and rejective globophobia
- Marshall McLuhan was one of the first to theorize the emerging global character of
communications media.
- Postmodern theorists of globalization and media such as Jean Baudrillard (1975, 1983),
- Debord (1967) called ‘the society of the spectacle’.
- Stuart Hall views the spread of information and communication technologies as not necessarily
translating into domination and subjugation to a global market and spectacle
- Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s seminal essay on the
‘Culture Industry’
- Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory
 GLOBAL MEDIA CULTURE
• During the 1980s, the rise of neoliberal politics and satellite and cable
technology rapidly disseminated privatized media
• Megamergers
• The superstructure created by this global media oligopoly is an example of
‘globalization from above’ where the flow of information, images, cultural
artefacts and entertainment is distributed from a uniform and increasingly
unregulated source.
• ‘globalization from above’ model.
• George Ritzer’s ‘McDonaldization’
• modern processes of rationalization
• Morley and Robins argue (1995), this new communications geography has
reconfigured how information, cultural images and commodities flow between
nations and geographic boundaries.
• Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004) perspective, resistance to ‘Empire’ will be a shifting
and constantly transformative movement from below.
• the politicization of local and global media and communication and information
technologies
• the Live 8 concerts
• Global media spectacles such as the 2000 US presidential election, the 11 September
terror attacks, and the Afghanistan and the Iraq Wars have signaled a qualitative shift
in our media driven society where politics and media have seamlessly merged into
one
• Similarly, the July 2005 London terror bombings also became a global media spectacle
that utilized new technologies such as digital video phones to capture the immediate
aftermath of train and bus bombings in the middle of London’s morning commute.
• Spectacle of disasters can produce critical political discourse as well as
allow governments to engage in propaganda and to push through their
agendas, as the Bush administration manipulated the 9/11 tragedy (see
Kellner 2003b).
• Undoubtedly, globalization from above has made its mark across the
globe and continues to reproduce oppressive and anti-democratic uses
of media and social relations.

• . Manuel Castells’ newest work, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social

Movements in the Internet Age, speaks to the sudden historical moments
that made up the bevy of revolutions colouring the world during this
time
• Castells covers the political crises that took place in Tunisia, Iceland, Egypt,
the affairs of the Arab Spring, the 15-M or indignada movement in Spain, and
the Occupy Wall Street movement that swept through North America. 
• the theory of communication power: the central form of power in any society
today “is the battle for the construction of meaning in the minds of people.”
• The occupation of public spaces organized through the use of internet and
wireless technology over social media networks ultimately changed the
traditional protest or demonstration into what Castells and many others call
the new social movement.
• The hybrid nature of these movements is what made them different and
arguably stronger than their traditional counterparts. The use of public
spaces—the “networked space between the digital space and the urban
space”
Globalization and terrorism
• International terrorism is certainly not a new phenomenon
• Its organizational, operational and motivational profiles have changed
significantly in the newly globalized world.
• One of the central attributes of the New Terrorism is its influence on the
affairs of the global community.
• In this new era, advanced communications technologies such as the Internet
and cable news outlets confer an unprecedented ability for terrorists to
influence the international community quickly, cheaply, and with little risk to
the extremists themselves.
• The modern era is one of immense potential for dedicated extremists who
possess sophisticated technical, operational and public relations skills. In
addition, self-supported terrorist networks have emerged within the context
of modern integrated economies and regional trade areas. These new
attributes define globalized terrorism.
 GLOBALIZED TERRORISM
• In many respects, the contemporary international environment is perfectly configured to
facilitate transnational political violence.
e.g. New political and economic alignments such as the European Union and the
expansion of NATO provide revolutionaries with the ability to cross national borders
under minimal restrictions to attack highly symbolic targets.
• Advanced communications technologies augment the ability of the media to consistently
broadcast, and seamlessly disseminate, images and information on terrorist incidents
and objectives. It gathers attention of the global community in no time.
• Terrorism reaches a much broader, sometimes global audience – and in an era in which
most people get their political information from television, mass-mediated depictions of
terrorism can have a profound effect upon the way we think about and engage in
discourse about terrorism
• International terrorism is a specific typology characterized by explicit international
implications.
• The calculation for stirring international ramifications centres on two alternative
courses of action: either launching operations outside of the perpetrator’s home
country, or conducting local operations against targets with internationally symbolic
personas.
• By executing violent international spillovers on behalf of their struggle, extremists
effectively garner the attention of a much broader and more influential global
audience.
• Those who engage in political violence on an international scale do so with the
expectation that it will have a positive effect on their cause at home – thus reasoning
that international exposure will bring about compensation for perceived injustices.
• In the modern era, the first international terrorists were nationalists
fighting self described wars of national liberation, or the adherents of
some variant of Marxist ideology, or an amalgam of both tendencies.
e.g. nationalists crossing international borders to assault symbolic
representations of their perceived oppressor.
violence committed by ideological extremists, usually nihilistic West
European Marxists, acting in solidarity with their championed oppressed
group in the Third World.

Globalized terrorism incorporates many technology-driven potentialities

such as immediate information dissemination, vastly enhanced influence
over much larger audiences and all of the attributes of the New
Terrorism.