Global Media Worlds and China

The 20th anniversary edition of Javnost - The Public The Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture is devoted to China. 

Global Media Worlds and China

Articles: 

Hu Zhengrong, Ji Deqiang

Retrospection, Prospection and the Pursuit of an Integrated Approach for China’s Communication and Journalism Studies 

Yuezhi Zhao

China’s Quest for “Soft Power”: Imperatives, Impediments and Irreconcilable Tensions? 

Daya Kishan Thussu

De-Americanising Media Studies and the Rise of “Chindia” 

Lena Rydholm

China and the World’s First Freedom of Information Act: The Swedish Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 

Susan Brownell

“Brand China” in the Olympic Context: Communications Challenges of China’s Soft Power Initiative 

Göran Svensson

“China Going Out” or the “World Going In”? The Shanghai World Expo 2010 in the Swedish Media

NOTE: While Javnost is freely available electronically beginning in 1994, the most recent years (last two) are not available online; 2012 and 2013 issues of the Journal in paper are available in the Annenberg Library. 

Media Industries Project

On the heels of last night's inaugural PARGC lecture, it's my pleasure to feature The Carsey-Wolf Center's Media Industries Project, which last night's speaker Michael Curtin directs at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The mission of the Project is as stated:

MIP examines the profound changes affecting media industries worldwide. In our research and programming initiatives, we foster collaboration between the industry and academy, encouraging innovative thinking and critical insights about the future prospects of modern media. Moreover, our thriving website publishes timely updates, interviews, and independent analyses of industry practices, policies, and trends. 

MIP has four strategic objectives: 

• Foster dialog and awareness among the industry, academy, and general public
• Generate critical resources for scholars, students, and industry professionals
• Conduct independent research initiatives 
• Build a global community of scholars devoted to media industries research

The Project currently has two featured initiatives, Connected Viewing, which focuses on digital distribution, cloud storage technologies, and multiple screen exhibition practices and Creative Labor which focuses on labor issues in the global film and TV industries.

There's lots on the website. Check out sections The Buzz, Things to Know and Places to Watch which highlight current issues and trends from all over the world. And Helpful Links points you to media industry data, other research centers, trade and labor organizations, media activist groups, law and policy organizations, filmmakers services organizations, and online archives. Good stuff.

Polity's Global Media and Communication Series

Polity Press has just published (2011) three excellent overviews of media systems and policy abroad.

European media : structures, policies and identity / Stylianos Papathanassopoulos and Ralph Negrine.

Indian media : global approaches / Adrian Athique.

Arab media : globalization and emerging media industries / Noha Mellor, Muhammad Ayish, Nabil Dajani, and Khali Rinnawi.

All three books are aimed at both students without prior knowledge of the media landscape of these areas as well as more seasoned readers who want to make sure they have good perspective on the the whole picture. These books are interdisciplinary and combine facts with theoretical insight.

All three titles are available at both Annenberg Reference and Van Pelt.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

The Social Science Resource Council has just released the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, focusing on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is "based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers [and]tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets."

Major Findings
* Prices are too high. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the retail price of a CD, DVD, or copy of MS Office is five to ten times higher than in the US or Europe. Legal media markets are correspondingly tiny and underdeveloped.

* Competition is good. The chief predictor of low prices in legal media markets is the presence of strong domestic companies that compete for local audiences and consumers. In the developing world, where global film, music, and software companies dominate the market, such conditions are largely absent.

* Antipiracy education has failed. The authors find no significant stigma attached to piracy in any of the countries examined. Rather, piracy is part of the daily media practices of large and growing portions of the population.

* Changing the law is easy. Changing the practice is hard. Industry lobbies have been very successful at changing laws to criminalize these practices, but largely unsuccessful at getting governments to apply them. There is, the authors argue, no realistic way to reconcile mass enforcement and due process, especially in countries with severely overburdened legal systems.

* Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.

* Enforcement hasn’t worked. After a decade of ramped up enforcement, the authors can find no impact on the overall supply of pirated goods.

Centre for Communication Rights

To meet the increasing demand for materials and resources about the right to communication, The World Association of Christian Communication (WACC) has launched the Centre for Communication Rights (CCR). The site, situated on the WACC homepage--righthand side, is a great place to find resources on policy related to communication rights, including case studies, training manuals and practical handbooks and links to media observatories (organizations that monitor policy and practice) in Europe and Latin America (so far). There are also resource sections on: Building and Recognizing Communication Rights, Development, Democratization, Gender, Language and Culture, and Ethics of Communication. Anyone interested international communication in the areas of policy, human rights, or development should make a beeline to this site!

February Commquote

February's rather contrarian quote on global ethics comes from Stefan Sonderling at the University of South Africa.

"It is commonly believed that the fabrication of common global ethics will provide the panacea for all the evils of the world, much like the belief in the myth of the magical power of communication. Global ethics are considered of great importance because they seem to respond to pressing practical needs of economy, business and about such attitudes is the fact that attempts to construct a new grand narrative of global ethics is emerging, even though the idea of grand narrative has been criticised by postmodern philosophy (Lyotard, 1984)...Globalisation is not a uniform world but could be understood as a paradox of unification and fragmentation, and is experienced as the 'return of the Middle Ages' (Eco, 1987), or as being a neo-medieval world of fragmented loyalties and overlapping sovereignties (Bull, 1985)...It is perhaps, as Latour (1993) suggests, that we have never been modern, or as Kaplan (2003) puts it: 'The world is not modern or postmodern, but only a continuation of the ancient'. According to Meyrowitz (1986), 'we may be returning to a world even older than that of the late Middle Ages. Many of the features of our 'information age' make us resemble the most primitive of social and political forms: the hunting and gathering society.' Indeed, the imagery of the medieval Dark Ages is an apt description of the contemporary discourses on ethics: some clamour for a return to medieval religious values, while the increasing enforcement of the new saccharine global ethics has brought back a new Dark Ages and growth of ignorance (Rauch 1994; Thompson 2008)."

--Stefan Sonderling, What If Morality Should Turn Out to be the Danger of Dangers? Global Ethics and the Growth of Ignorance, in Communicatio, Volume 34 (2), 2008, pp 290-327

December CommQuote

This month's quote comes from a fascinating essay in Cultural Studies Review (Volume 12, Number 1, 2006) by Ross Gibson titled "The Rise of Digital Multimedia Systems." The essay echoes Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel , the classic treatise on why the novel emerged in the beginning of the 18th century as such an influential "technology." Ross summarizes: "By studying how aesthetic and semantic systems engage with the intellect and the sensorium of the user, you can understand the temper of the times. When a new form of art or a popular mode of communication arises and takes hold, it reflects changes that have recently occurred or are presently occurring in psychology and society." This applies to the novel, but Ross extends the premise to what replaced the novel, cinema, followed by digital multimedia.

"A definitive characteristic of the movies is the way they 'lock off' their several dynamic parts into a final version, the 'release print.' This ultimate inflexibility of cinema is similar to the way most national-scale communities responded to the turbulence of modernity by insisting that their societies first synchronize energetically to the machine world and then stabilise permanently once the new political state was realised. As its production regimens drive toward 'lock off', cinema is a conservative form, like nationalism. Cinema and nationalism; each serves a popular, paradoxical desire for the acknowledgement and the cessation of change. Indeed, this is one of the traits we love about cinema: it shows us the thrill of energetic convergence and world-creation at the same time as it proposes an eventual end to flux and uncertainty. With a film, the final edit is a stable state, a kingdom of kinetic excitement with a reassuring climate of completion.

Comparing the nexus of cinema and nationalism with the contemporary dyad of digital media and transnationalism (or globalisation), we can ask whether digital multimedia systems have arisen to reflect and impel our contemporary psychic and social conditions. Like cinema, digital multimedia can federate disparate elements (sound, texts, graphics, perspectives, vistas and audio-visual rhythms) into astonishing new configurations...But unlike cinema (and unlike nationalism), digital multimedia produces syntheses that are always explicitly provisions. (Yes, in this respect it is like transnationalism.) Because of the dynamics of its file structures and the integrating, evolving codes that get applied to those files, any digital multimedia configuration is a contentious event in a continuous process rather than a completed, content-full object; it is always ready to be dismantled and re-assembled into new alignments as soon as the constituent files have been federated in response to momentarily prevailing 'world conditions.'

In other words, because multimedia rarely gets 'locked-off', its component element can always be pulled apart, sent back to their databases and then instantaneously rearranged into newly iterated federations. (Yes, in this respect it is like our unstable contemporary lives, so buffeted with ever-altering values, opportunities, anxieties and obligations all upwelling because of globalisation, migration and multiculturalism.)...Taking some of their dynamics from the channel-switching montage-effects that radio and television have always afforded, digital multimedia systems can re-conform themselves restlessly in ways that a cinema print is not designed to do. Such systems can reflect and impel how we live now in relational engagement within a myriad influences that are dynamically networked in constantly evolving systems of communication and stored, searchable information."

--Ross Gibson, "The Rise of Digial Multimedia Systems" Cultural Studies Review, Volume 12, Number 1, March 2006, p. 144-145

Conflicts and Tensions, Volume I in The Cultures and Globalization Series

Conflicts and Tensions, edited by Helmut K. Anheier (Center for Civil Society, School of Public Policy and Social Research, UCLA) and Yudhushthir Raj Isar (The American University of Paris) is the first title in The Cultures and Globalization Series, devoted to the economic and political consequences of globalization.

Analyzing the relationship between globalization and cultures is the core objective of this volume. In it leading experts track cultural trends in all regions of the world, covering issues ranging from the role of cultural difference in politics and governance to heritage conservation, artistic expression, and the cultural industries. --back of book description

Each volume in the series will include a suite of Indicators--"innovative information graphics" to convey information about various cultural phenomena across the globe. The suite is breathtaking visually and for all the information it conveys in this section qualifies the title as a reference book (and thus will have a home in ASC Reference). Visual representations of time spent watching television by country, the reach of Disney (and many other transnational cultural organizations) across cultures, languages of the web, telephone traffic flows in Europe, Latin America and Asia, growth in broadband use and internt use in general, per cent of world public wireless access points, blogs by region, growth in number of blogs and hosting sites, movie attendance, film investment, radio and television station comparisons are just some of the pages I pored over. The suite has a media section from which a lot of these examples come but it also includes other indicator sections on human rights, terrorism, current conflicts between nations, piracy, trafficking, tourism, transportation, patents, diplomacy, and others.

The article From Violence to Discourse: Conflict and Citizens' Radio Stations in Columbia, by Clemencia Rodriguez and Amparo Cadavid appears in a previous (less visual) section of the 600+ page volume.

The logic behind the series is that promoting understanding between cultures, in this and subsequent volumes, serves in the interest of peace. I'll be keeping an eye out for forthcoming volumes.