Archive for: Globalization and the Media

The proccess of spreading knowledge and ideas through new media platforms is erasing the ethnic, cultural, religious, political and any other borders. While the globalists underline benefits from uniting diversity, anti-globalists see the cultural diversity as being slowly extinguished. The global trade or non-commercial brands that are present in the new media override the space as we know it, using a new language of the postmodern era. The integrative and interactive communication proccess is taking place on the new media platforms, accesible equally to individuals and to numerous homogenous symphatizer communities. These new media are considered alternative as long as they have critical approach and the freedom to create new ideas, which is an advantage of financialy independent sites. The possibilities of media communication platforms are overtaking all the other forms of gathering people and making them participate in group actions. Comparing live and electronic communication, we see the trap in the fact that the electronic data are there to stay forever. The idealized self-presentations tend to move the individuals away from their own selves. It’s just as easy to get an emotional support from virtual friends as loosing it. Internet users can either choose to stay anonimous or give it up. Either way they are expanding their personal and cultural identity. The cultural globalization is, together with the technological grounds of the new media, the main condition for all other globalization dimesions. There is an ongoing proccess of creating one global cultural entity covering our distinctiveness and making the borders more permeable than ever.

The circumstance of having the media ardently serving various sorts of globalization processes is neither new nor unknown. However, it is less obvious how the system of the media growingly mimics global corporative ways of organizing and leading business, which includes multinational and planetar widespread of not only media influences but capital influences as well. People who work for the media, just as those who work in other social fields, are also facing challenges of a new age.

Revolutionary changes in the area of communication lead mass media to the crossroads of democracy and the tyranny of propaganda, while capitalist corporatism reduces the number of successful news producers discretely creating invisible information monopolies. At the global level, masses are being ideologically bewitched by fine spinning of filtered and meticulously created messages with pre-designed effects, which causes disappearance of objectivity, equality and social solidarity from the dominant discourse. The battle of ratings and circulation comes to the forefront; in the eyes of media management journalists are considered an expense, while participation of citizens as subjects of political life is minimized. Direct, blatant, arrogant pressure of government media owners and advertisers, results in putting the consumer at the center of interest, so the fun, individualism and narcissism dominate the mass media flows, “tabloidizing” the public arena. Private profit and public interest have never been in love and only with the critical re-examination of the developments can we point to the possible directions for expansion of journalism. The paper states that the role of audience changes in the age of digital media, because after a period of traditional passiveness and consumerism, the audience has been given a chance to assume an active and creative position. The time of multimedia services has brought a number of communication applications, allowing cultural and political diversity and the birth of a global digital policy, networked and open to everyone. This is a great opportunity for the survival of democracy, where journalism itself changes, reverting to its original mission of serving the common man.