The Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization

Dal Yong Jin, Dal Yong Jin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000383133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

In this comprehensive volume, leading scholars of media and communication examine the nexus of globalization, digital media, and popular culture in the early 21st century.

The book begins by interrogating globalization as a critical and intensely contested concept, and proceeds to explore how digital media have influenced a complex set of globalization processes in broad international and comparative contexts. Contributors address a number of key political, economic, cultural, and technological issues relative to globalization, such as free trade agreements, cultural imperialism, heterogeneity, the increasing dominance of American digital media in global cultural markets, the powers of the nation-state, and global corporate media ownership. By extension, readers are introduced to core theoretical concepts and practical ideas, which they can apply to a broad range of contemporary media policies, practices, movements, and technologies in different geographic regions of the world—North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia.

Scholars of global media, international communication, media industries, globalization, and popular culture will find this to be a singular resource for understanding the interconnected relationship between digital media and globalization.

1

Introduction

Dal Yong Jin

Globalization has become more complicated than ever as several actors, such as nation-states, international agencies, transnational corporations, and consumers, whether Western-based or non-Western based have become increasingly involved, in recent years. Globalization and media are especially well-connected because media, both traditional media like broadcasting and digital media, such as social media and smartphone technologies, have greatly facilitated the globalization process. While several significant dimensions, including economy, culture, migration, and consumption, have played pivotal roles in globalization, media, and in particular, digital technologies, are always facilitating and expediting the process. From the invention of the internet to the expansion of smartphones and to the dominant role of platform technologies, digital media in addition to traditional media are fundamental tools and means to actualize globalization, which is the integration and/or interdependence of the globe. In the early 21st century, there are some signals that globalization as an economic and geopolitical reality may be coming to an end, as can be seen in Brexit (Sharma, 2016); however, digital media have redirected the contour of current affairs in relation to globalization.

Using digital technology has indeed helped many corporations and individuals create global networks, new ways to work, and more data than ever. Digital technology also brings people together in newfangled ways, allows them to get insights that were never before possible, and enables massive disruption across the supply and demand chains of multiple industries (Forrester, 2020). During the COVID-19 era starting in late 2019, for example, several videoconferencing technologies, including Zoom, have fundamentally changed people’s interactions from face-to-face to virtual gatherings, both nationally and globally, and therefore “there are signs that the relatively free movement of ideas”—called “Zoom globalization”—might persist in our contemporary society (Staley, 2020). Of course, this new trend provides broad benefits to many but at the cost of others who lose their jobs (Forrester, 2020).

As such, in the early 21st century, with the rapid growth of digital technologies and relevant socio-economic dimensions, including political, economic, and cultural elements, globalization has continued to become one of the most popular concepts in all academic fields. In other words, with the rapid growth of digital media, such as the internet, satellite, social media (e.g., Facebook and YouTube), search engines (e.g., Google), digital games, smartphones, and Netflix, the global economy and cultural markets have been more closely connected and interdependent than ever (Kerr and Flynn, 2003; Miller and Kraidy, 2016; Flew, 2018; Jin, 2019). Digital technologies have especially played a key role in the realm of popular culture as cultural producers and cultural distributors, although the boundary between production and distribution is getting blurry.

Due to the significance of digital media for both the national economy and global integration, several countries, both in the Global North like the US and the UK and the Global South, including Brazil, South Korea, and China, have developed their own digital technologies, and consequently tensions between the Global North and the Global South in the realm of digital media have continued or even intensified in recent years. On the one hand, digital media like the internet, iPhone, YouTube, and Facebook in the US have substantially increased their market shares to continue and extend their hegemonic dominance around the globe. On the other hand, several emerging markets in the Global South like India, China, and Korea have developed their local-based digital media to become major actors of the global society. The majority of countries around the globe, including these countries mentioned above, however, utilize American-based digital media to disseminate their popular culture to both regional and global markets, and therefore, they are still under American influences in most cases. As Goggin and McLelland (2017, 5) point out, “a further problem is that dominant notions of the Internet… are still modeled on a limited range of experiences, deployments, and conceptions of the Internet, largely based on the perspectives of Anglophone users, especially North Americans, who featured prominently among early pioneers (as well as some European nations).” Regardless of shifting power dynamics in politics and economy, globalization brings about continuing disparities between the Global North and the Global South.

How to comprehend globalization and media in the 21st century, therefore, relies on people’s understanding of several major dimensions in conjunction with the natures of the flow of people, culture, and capital in the globalization process. Most of all, as digital media partakes in its increasing role in facilitating and expediting globalization, global networks provide unfathomable opportunities to many people. As availability spreads, people use digital media to their advantage to begin a social and global movement (Bieber, 2014). Therefore, it is crucial to comprehend the close relationships between globalization and media, in particular digital media.

This edited volume discusses global transformations in tandem with media, both traditional and new media with its emphasis on digital media, including social media, smartphone technologies, and digital platforms, in historical and contemporary terms. It begins the discussion by interrogating globalization as a critical and intensely contested concept, and then proceeds to explore how digital media have influenced “a complex set of globalization processes” in broad international and comparative contexts (Giddens, 1999). During the process, it addresses a number of key political, economic, cultural, and technological issues relative to globalization, such as the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement starting in 2018)—a new regional free trade agreement in North America—vs. Brexit (the British exit from the European Union starting in 2016), cultural imperialism (H. Schiller, 1976; also see Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees, 2019) vs. heterogeneity, contra-flow of media products vs. increasing dominance of American digital media in the global cultural markets, the powers of the nation-state, and global corporate media ownership.

Purpose and Scope

The Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization contains nearly 30 chapters providing an empirically rich analysis of globalization processes, histories, texts, and state policies as they relate to the global media. Its goal is to introduce researchers and students to core theoretical concepts and practical ideas which they should apply to a broad range of contemporary media policies, practices, movements, and technologies in different geographic regions of the world—North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia—with a view to determining how they shape and are shaped by globalization. It examines the nexus of globalization, media, and popular culture in the early 21st century. This book especially maps out the increasing role of digital media as they have shifted the contours of globalization in that they are not only distribution channels but also production tools, which greatly influence people’s daily activities.

More specifically, this volume aims to provide an overview of globalization theories and stories as analytical frameworks for understanding globalization and media. It also examines our contemporary world surrounded by the use of digital media, while discussing the evolution of media technologies in conjunction with globalization. This means that this volume addresses the role of digital media in the globalization process so that readers are able to compare several different media technologies and cultures with each other. In addition, it addresses several examples from different regions and/or countries, both in the Global North and the Global South, to illustrate how globalized has influenced and has been influenced by historical, political, economic, and social factors. The power relations between global media and information technologies are ambiguous at local, regional, and international levels. Therefore, it illustrates these relations by giving regional examples from North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Last, but not least, it is to help undergraduate and graduate students envision their careers in the communication industries in the globalized society. In other words, I expect that this book will help researchers, students, and policy makers who study of and work in the global media industries by discussing the relation between labor and the industries, and academic discourses and industrial discourses on the global media industries.

There have been several monographs and edited volumes on globalization and media; however, only a few books have touched on the shifting milieu occurring due to digital media. Several existing books (Hafez, 2013; Mirrlees, 2013; Birkinbine et al., 2016; Lechner and Boli, 2014; Lule, 2015; Miller and Kraidy, 2016; Flew, 2018; Jin, 2019) address terrain similar to what will be covered in this book. However, there are no direct competitor titles for this reference work. Although the books mentioned above are valuable sources, and many scholars and students have learned the concept and scope of globalization and media through these fine books, none of them analyzed the entire scope of digital media and globalization trends. Also, none of them seriously analyzed the significance of digital platforms and mobile communication, given that they are new technologies developed in the early 21st century. This may be a reflection of the short history of digital media technologies, like blockchain, digital platforms, and smartphones. Therefore, the current volume makes a significant contribution to the literature, primarily due to its comprehensive analysis of the emergence of the digital media. I also believe that the book puts new ideas on the agenda. The comprehensive and significant analyses of the dynamic changes and persistent features of digital media in the global context within the broader notion of global modernity will make this book an ideal selection for such disciplines.

Overall, this Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization will provide an authoritative overview of the maturing scholarly area of globalization and digital media. It will be international in its scope as it includes contributors, examples, or cases from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Africa. It balances distinguished, established, and leading scholars with emerging, next-generation researchers and students.

Overview of the Volume

The organization of the book is as follows. To encourage the reading of the chapters alongside other cognate areas, I have organized the contents across six broad thematic points. Part I documents history and theory in the context of globalization, consisting of four chapters. To begin with, Chapter 2 written by Dwayne Winseck identifies the core elements of global communication in the late-19th and early-20th centuries and shows that they were more global and organized as a system than previously thought. These elements included investment and ownership, corporate identity, international and national laws, the careers of experts and engineers, views of modernization, and imperial strategy. The onslaught of World War I threw all of this into disarray, however. The chapter concludes by pointing to efforts after the war’s end to reconstruct the earlier “belle époque of liberal internationalism” that had seized the minds of a small group of “communications experts” in the US State Department and a few other countries, including Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. As this chapter concludes, they were not enough to keep the mounting nationalism and the economic collapse of the late 1920s and 1930s at bay—all of which put the final nail in the coffin of “the empire of capitalist modernity” and led to incessant struggles for control over resources that bequeathed to us the calamity of another World War.

Chapter 3 by Joseph Straubhaar explores the evolution of the theory referred to as cultural proximity, which predicts that audiences will prefer national or, secondly, regional television. It also empirically examines it in terms of preferences for national and regional programming in Latin America during 2004–2014, based on a series of annual surveys conducted in eight Latin American countries. The first major prediction of cultural proximity—that audiences will tend to prefer local or national programming—is confirmed from the strong, fairly stable preference that the overall audience shows for national programming in the years studied. However, counter to the second major prediction of cultural proximity, that Latin American audiences would favor regional programming next, study found instead that US programming was their second choice. The chapter examines why that seems to be the case and why it has become stronger in the cable TV era.

Chapter 4 by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller discusses environmental media materialism, which seeks to understand the history of communications technologies from cradle to grave, paying special attention to their environmental effects. The chapter asks questions about the labor process, extractive industries, and the manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal of devices and texts. This is particularly important for understanding globalization. When it looks at the entire commodity chain, the life history, of our favorite genres or technologies, it uncovers uncomfortable material truths, with serious environmental implications.

In Chapter 5, Tanner Mirrlees examines how the US Department of Defense (DoD) assisted Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel (2019), a film whose production, storyline, and marketing exemplify a 21st century “DoD–Hollywood complex” militainment product. The chapter probes Captain Marvel’s production (as assisted by the DoD), content (the story, plot, characters, and themes), and marketing (publicity and cross-promotion), and shows how Captain Marvel helped the US Air Force to promote itself, and helped Hollywood turn a global profit. The chapter critiques the notion that Captain Marvel is a “progressive” and “feminist” film and considers its significance to US “cultural imperialism.”

Part II mainly discusses capitalism, structure, and institutions, with three chapters. Chapter 6 by Sergio Sparviero defines ethical capitalism as a philosophy connecting a variety of institutions supporting a shared idea of good society. The good society is shaped by the values of sustainability: equality, harmony, and self-determination. Ethical capitalism institutions include abstract ideas of general economic systems, theories of organizational design, principles of management, but also “real-world” legal frameworks for enterprises that are “purpose-driven”. This chapter explains how ethical capitalism is permeating local and global media and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I History, Theory, and Globalization
• Part II Capitalism, Structure, and Institutions
• Part III Popular Culture and Globalization
• Part IV Digital Platforms and Globalization
• Part V Digital Media, Social Media, and Globalization
• Part VI Globalization, Migration, and Mobility
• Index