Introduction : globalizing communications

Understanding the relationship between globalization and communication is central to understanding the multiple ways in which we live in the twenty-first century. It is certainly not the case as some writers have expressed that it was a communications revolution that initiated or explains the latest stage of intensifying globalization" social relations are far too complex to be reduced to the determinations of one mode of practice. Despite the spread of electronic interconnectivity, globalizing communications are not blanketing or totalizing. Nor is the relationship between communications and globalization particularly new. However, there is no doubt that changes in the dominant mode of communications are central to any understanding of globalization, including the projection of questions about how we are to live in the present. What we have been concerned to achieve in this introduction, firstly, is to explore ways of synthesizing detailed empirical work with informed theoretical analysis that take seriously both sides of the usually alternative emphases on social form versus media content and structure versus agency. Secondly, we have sought out the political implications of different understandings of the media, from questions of dominant ideologies to alternative projections of laboratory potential. Here the local-global media, and particularly those media that have extended beyond mass broadcasting, have emerged as key areas for contestation over reflexively-constructed public spaces. In Piet Strydom's words, 'democratic legitimacy can be attained only under conditions where communication is sufficiently open to allow an adequate discursive mediation of all the participants as well as the observing, evaluating and judging public'. This for us is a good starting point; however, it needs to be understood in relation to the mediating processes of abstracted communication. The freedom that it offers to communicate across time and space and with 'everyone' is not a simple offer. Engaged social enquiry requires that we critically examine both the structures that frame that offer and the subjectivities that desire it. It is in that spirit of public communication and reflexivity that this book is produced and this introduction is presented.