Media and Society

James Curran, David Hesmondhalgh, James Curran, David Hesmondhalgh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501340741
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media and Society is an established textbook, popular worldwide for its insightful and accessible essays from leading international academics on the most pertinent issues in the media field today. With this updated edition, David Hesmondhalgh joins James Curran and a team of leading international scholars to speak to current issues relating to media and gender, media and democracy, sociology of news, the global internet, the political impact of the media, popular culture, the effects of digitisation on media industries, media and emotion, and other vital topics. The media are in a state of ferment, and are undergoing far-reaching change. The sixth edition tries to make sense of the media's transformation, and its wider implications. Purely descriptive accounts date fast, so the emphasis has been on identifying the central issues and problems arising from media change, and on evaluating its wider consequences. What is judged to be the staple elements of the field has evolved over time, as well as becoming more international in orientation. Yet the overriding aim of the book - to be useful to students - has remained constant. This text is an essential resource for all media, communication and film studies students who want to broaden their knowledge and understanding of how the media operates and affects society across the globe.

Part I

MEDIA AND SOCIETY: GENERAL PERSPECTIVES

Chapter 1

THE GLOBAL INTERNET¹

Jack Linchuan Qiu

Introduction

What constitutes the global internet? How did it begin, under what circumstances, with what politico-economic and spatial patterns that to this day continue shaping this planetary media system, the largest of its kind that humanity has come to possess? Is the internet really global? Does it contribute to a truly global community of peoples, cultures and nations? Or is it just another shopping mall, with more grandeur and faster pace, but selling age-old commodities of privilege and exploitation, myopia and bigotry? What social forces influence the global internet, leading to what consequences, including new existential threats that jeopardize sustainable development?

This chapter attempts to offer a panoramic overview that critically examines the structural and historical dynamisms of the global internet from several anchor points: infrastructure, labour, culture and governance. As conventional wisdom has it, the internet is a seamless web of digital information flows that are instant, inexpensive, and weightless. It respects no boundaries, political or social, while furthering the norms of western liberal democracy, especially the norms of market economy as embodied in the corporate champions of the Silicon Valley such as Google and Apple. These are private firms enjoying abundant investment from and reporting to the Wall Street. Hence, we are told, the internet as a global project is the favourite child of neoliberal capitalism (McChesney 2013), and by extension, of the American Empire (Fuchs 2016b).

This popular view is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. As I shall contend in this chapter, the global internet is not a consistent and unitary entity that can be defined in simple terms. In lieu of a single US-dominated system, the global internet has multiple origins and is full of disparities, contradictions, and conflicts. So much so that the global internet risks becoming a misnomer in the future if it is torn apart by the centrifugal tendencies at play as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, and if humanity and our planetary ecology cannot continue sustainably. I, therefore, would like to submit that, more than anything else, the global internet is better defined by its internal and external crises. These have triggered numerous struggles around the world to reclaim the internet as a public good, and as the most important resource of our digital commons.

The great diffusion

The internet has become the most global media system in human history. As of December 2017, there are 4.16 billion internet users around the globe, comprising 54.4 per cent of the world’s 7.63 billion total population (https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). Fully 74 per cent of the internet’s user population reside in the Global South, including Asia (48.7 per cent), Africa (10.9 per cent), Latin America (10.5 per cent) and the Middle East (3.9 per cent). Only 26 per cent of the world’s internet users live in the Global North: Europe (17 per cent), North America (8.3 per cent) and Oceania (0.7 per cent). In terms of total user population, the internet has further de-westernized since 2010 when Northern countries had 40 per cent of all users globally (ITU 2010). By 2017 their share has decreased to slightly more than 25 per cent. This is certainly a notable development for the Global South, which has become home to most of the world’s internet users. But still, 45.6 per cent of humanity are not connected, and the great majority of non-users reside in the ‘archipelago of disconnection’ such as Sub-Saharan Africa (Straumann and Graham 2016). Even bearing this in mind, we can still consider the internet the most global media system compared to its predecessors.

While oral communication, writing and printing have long been central to the functioning of human society, for centuries these processes did not travel long distances easily. They gave rise mostly to local and national media, for which covering the globe would sound like a fairy tale. This started to change with the invention of electronic media that allowed message delivery at the speed of light, first via wired telegraph or ‘the Victorian internet’ (Standage 1998), then wireless radio, communications satellites and fibre optics (Starosielski 2015). The internet is another reiteration of the electronics revolution not only through digitalization of analog content but, most importantly, through its functioning as the web of webs. Most other media channels – print or broadcast, local or national, human or increasingly non-human (as in the internet of things) – were then subsumed into this ever-growing, global network.

Not only is the internet more global due to its capacity to link up and encompass other media, it also includes many more functioning and dysfunctional terminals – computers, mobile phones, a wide variety of smart devices – that are visible in the small towns of the Global South as well. One key reason for this is mobility – and not only that related to hand-held mobile devices, but also of the internet itself. As Jonathan Donner reflects on his research in Africa and Asia: ‘It is only through mobile technologies that the internet has become pervasive, everyday, and inexpensive enough to be truly global and, thus, it is only through mobile technologies that many people have been able to use the internet for anything at all’ (Donner 2015: 178).

Two decades ago, prior to the wide dissemination of the internet, many ordinary families across much of the world probably had only one TV and one radio used collectively by many family members. Today, the shared use of legacy media has declined because, in many cases, each family member is equipped with her own smartphone or tablet (not to mention the old phones stuffed in the drawer and the outmoded laptops hidden at the bottom of the wardrobe). Although the internet has a much shorter history than television, it has generated a larger quantity of techno-objects than all the TV sets put together. The reason: most people do not replace their TV every other year, whereas the expected norm in the internet industry is to ‘upgrade’ every year or so at ‘an unprecedented speed of built-in obsolescence and product abandonment’ (Wajcman 2015: Loc 3048). As a result, the mountains of equipment being connected to or ‘retired’ from the internet may have well surpassed historical levels.

Another dimension of the internet’s globality is its close affinity with US-dominated financial capitalism, not only as conveyor of symbolic content but as the essential infrastructure of transaction. Hence, the architecture of the global internet has its central nodes in the United States, home to the epicentres of global finance, although ‘core elements of the internet infrastructure … are tilting toward the EU and BRICS countries’ (Winseck 2017). A notable development is the BRICS fibre-optic cable system, although it has not yet materialized in any way that would pose realistic challenge to the dominance of the US over global internet infrastructure (Zhao 2015). It is likely that such an architectural shift will not occur before Shanghai and Tokyo surpass New York and Chicago as the key links for financial capitalism.

At the organizational level, newspapers, TV, radio broadcast, film studios and so on are some of the legacy media listed on stock exchanges under the control of entities such as News Corp. But overall, most such media operate within their municipal, regional and national contexts. Many, such as public service broadcasters, receive government subsidies or membership fees. They do not need to produce quarterly reports and are not subject to daily pressure generated by the fluctuation of stock prices. But this is not true for the internet, where most of the major players are publicly listed, and where the logic of financial accumulation is more pronounced than in legacy media. The subsequent result is a greatly intensified version of what Ben Bagdikian calls ‘the new media monopoly’ (2004). As Graham Murdock points out:

The absence of effective regulatory oversight, coupled with network effects as people converge on sites with the largest number of other users, has produced the most concentrated sector within advanced capitalism, with a popular internet commanded by a handful of companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple.

2018: 361

As a designator, ‘global’ is about spatiality as much as temporality. The results of ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989), of the quarterly reports required by stock market, of the cycles of Moore’s Law, have all conspired to increase the global inclusiveness of the internet in absorbing our time. In the past, most people spent at most a few hours each day reading news, watching TV, listening to music. But with the expansion of the internet especially through mobile devices such as the smartphone and associated wearable accessories, we are now hooked to the Web through at least potentially ‘perpetual contact’ anytime, anywhere (Katz and Aakhus 2002). Never before has any media system been able to capture so much of our time, quotidian and pedestrian, awake or asleep, stationary or on the move. According to my conservative estimate, in 2015 Facebook was able to extract 652.9 billion hours from its 1.04 billion daily active users around the globe (Qiu 2016: 172). The internet, as such, is a global regime of time, whereby the leisure and social time of people around the world is converted into advertising revenue and into ‘free labour’ (Terranova 2012) that ultimately benefits the major corporate players of the internet.

According to ITU statistics, it took the fixed-line telephone 130 years to reach 20 per cent of the world’s population. Yet it took the internet less than three decades to reach 54 per cent of all humanity. This is undoubtedly a great diffusion with extraordinary speed, global scope, reaching into the depth of Glob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Media and Society: General Perspectives
• Chapter 1 The Global Internet
• Chapter 2 Popular Culture
• Chapter 3 Media, Gender and Feminism
• Chapter 4 Neoliberalism and the Media
• Chapter 5 Communication Power: Mass Communication, Mass Self-Communication and Power Relationships in the Network Society
• Part II Media Systems, Production and Platforms
• Chapter 6 Have Digital Communication Technologies Democratized the Media Industries?
• Chapter 7 The Mediations of Data
• Chapter 8 Approaches to the Sociology of News
• Chapter 9 Western Media Systems in Comparative Perspective
• Chapter 10 Global Screen Industries
• Chapter 11 Digital Platforms, Globalization and Culture
• Part III Problems and Challenges
• Chapter 12 Journalism, Online and Offline
• Chapter 13 Media, Race and the Infrastructures of Empire
• Chapter 14 The Politics of Reality TV
• Chapter 15 Democ ratic Functions of Entertainment
• Chapter 16 The Political Impact of Media
• Chapter 17 Media, Emotions and Affect
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright