Global Media and Communication-2007 Frau Meigs

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DOI: 10.1177/17427665070030030104

2007 3: 260Global Media and Communication Divina Frau-Meigs

Cultural diversity and global media studies

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Giddens, Anthony (2001) Entfesselte Welt. Wie die Globalisierung unser Leben verndert .Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Kommunikation durch die Privatwirtschaft. ber den Zusammenhang zwischenMediatisierung und konomisierung, in M. Karmasin, M. Knoche and C. Winter(eds) Medienwirtschaft und Gesellschaft 1, pp. 197217. Mnster: LIT.

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Cultural diversity and global media studies

Divina Frau-MeigsUniversity of Sorbonne, Paris, France [email protected]

Media studies are under pressure to internationalize because the area of media itself is subject to massive transformations due to ICT changes,population fluxes and power struggles. Under the pressure of culturalstudies and anthropology, the recent tendency has been to place culture,

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especially via diasporas and hybrid identities, at the centre of interna-tional media studies. In this context, the issue of cultural diversity is agood entry to examine the new ways media studies can and couldinternationalize because it also places culture at the crux of the debates,but with added political, legal and economic dimensions.

Since the 1970s, three crises or moments of intense internationalcontroversy and negotiation have shaken the world system of mediacontrol: the New World Information and Communication Order(NWICO, 1980), the Cultural Exception Debate (GATS, 1993), andfinally Cultural Diversity (UNESCO Convention, 2005 and WSIS, 2005).They all share the notion of cultural diversity as a core value or a sorevalue (according to the point of view considered). The evolution of thesethree crises shows that the old system of legal control by nationalgovernments has subsided under the shock of ICT-driven globalization.A new system of transnational governance or co-regulation has emerged,trying to solve problems by convening a variety of actors (state and non-state) around the resolution of a specific issue. The most recent of themedia crises, with its two strands (the Cultural Diversity Conventionand action line C8 of WSIS), shows clearly the ascendancy of this newsystem over the world order. But this new order of governance is hardlyunderstood and its relation to the old one needs to be clarified.

Cultural diversity is the litmus test of this transition phase between

government and governance, as internationally binding instruments liketreaties, arguably obsolete, evolve together with multi-partnershipplatforms. The stakes are not only the meaning of national sovereigntyor state control but also the organization of a field that recombines oldand new actors and networks with transnational policies and post-national rights. The tension between the two contains a definite risk of the bifurcation of political cultures as co-regulation vies with regulation(state) and self-regulation (industry). There is also a risk of the bifurca-tion of media models as information providers (industry) vie with publicservices (state) and free and open uses (civil society).

Where is the locus of control of the media? There are two sets of contradictory interests at work: the US and the corporate world on oneside, other interests (European, Canadian, developing countries and civilsociety entities) on the other side. In this power struggle, one side standsto win, the other to lose. However, closer analysis shows that thedividing lines are not that clear. In the case of the cultural diversitytreaty, the US lost the rhetorical battle, but maybe not the economicone. Conversely the European Union won the rhetorical battle but notnecessarily the commercial one.

Internationalizing media studies 2 6 1



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The temptation of some researchers is to apply a political linearperspective on the issue, reinforcing a nationalist reading and mini-mizing the transnationalist changes. Such is the fate of globalization of media as seen by French researchers like Alain Touraine or ArmandMattelart. They consider it as an economic means for corporations tocontinue doing business as usual and maintain their power. Thisperspective, important as it is, only partly encompasses the breadth of the issue. New notions have entered the field, like the idea of thenetwork society (Manuel Castells), the idea of flows (Arjun Appadurai),not to mention post-colonial and post-feminist views on identityformation and deconstruction. There seems to be the need for acosmopolitical perspective as Ulrich Beck would say in his distinctionbetween globalization and globalism, globalization being a reticular,process-oriented multipolar approach.

Such a perspective makes it possible to consider the new actors, thenew networks and the new political strategies beyond the frontiers of traditional states and nations. The policies and strategies used bydifferent countries or regions of the world as regards media and ICTsbring to the fore the different interpretations of cultural diversity thatco-exist today: a shift toward an economy of culture (Europe and Asia); aform of indigenous expression (Africa and the Arab world); and a toolfor sustainable development and peace (Latin America). The instrumen-

talization of media and ICTs appears as subject to different temporalities,power dynamics and forms of embedded uses, despite the pressure of globalization and convergence.

Global media studies should take advantage of the notions proposedby other fields of research like political sciences (with its special focus onpost-colonial and post-communist transformations), anthropology (withits focus on population movements and diasporas), or even urbanstudies (with its focus on networks and infrastructures). Ultimately itseems that the approaches by Giddens, Appadurai and Castells are toooptimistic and celebratory of dynamic transnational cultures, whereasthose by Mattelart and Touraine are too pessimistic and bound toalienation due to circulation and flux. Interesting as they are, theseperspectives do not place media, communication and information per seat the basis of their analysis. They relate culture to spatial relationships,immigration fluxes and identity, not to specifically communicativeprocesses in a transnational dimension.

What can media studies contribute? They can contribute a doublefocus, both at national level and at transnational level. Researchers inthe field of information and communication sciences which for me, as




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for many French people, is wider and more encompassing than mediastudies are ideally placed to use a multidisciplinary approach andclaim that space as an investigative territory. They need to focus thelocus of media control on the specificity of the information-communication paradigm around notions of representation andreception, taking into account the production of semiotic resources(sound, image, script, etc.) and its regulation.

These notions appear in the cultural diversity debate, dominated asit is by questions of national sovereignty and independence, ownershipand control, personal identity and community participation. Thesenotions need to be analysed in the light of the tension betweengovernment and governance, as it is partly fuelled by the fight for mediacontrol. New international actors have emerged, like NGOs and dynamicpartnerships, global corporate alliances, lobbying coalitions andalliances mobilized both online and off-line. These new actors offer avariety of perspectives on the conduct of foreign policy focused on thecontrol of access and production of cultural industries (and, increasingly,knowledge industries). They stand for the various publics involved inthe process (national, transnational, indigenous, diasporic, etc.). Some of them are concerned by the implications of international economicintegration for global governance in the audiovisual and ICT sectors andtheir impact on the representation of their values and contents.

Beyond these specific notions, information and communicationsciences can also contribute to a better understanding of the cos-mopolitical processes that are at work in mediation by the media. Thereis the need to elaborate a complex understanding of how our cognitiveand semiotic resources have elaborated media representations,receptions and regulations within a given culture. In this dynamicsystemic perspective, the locus of media control places representationand reception in an open-ended process of distributed intelligence andexchange with the environment. Plasticity, portability, responsiveness,connectivity such are the new keywords attached to these cognitiveadvances. They have been associated with forms of mediationcharacterized by virtuality, disembeddedness and disembodiment, withonline/off-line circulation and reception that shift perceptions of reality,community and identity, as Don Slater and others would say.

In this phase of cosmopolitical transition, there is a strange bi-stability that takes place, in terms of representation and reception, asmuch as in terms of government and governance. In physics, bi-stabilityis an attribute of certain optical devices where two resonant transmis-sion states are possible and stable, dependent on the input (Wikipedia).




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In media, the current socio-cognitive configuration is characterized bythe bi-stability of two types of communication means in relation to theenvironment and reality: Eye-Nature and Brain-Information, in GillesDeleuzes terms. The first relation refers to representation as analogicaland mimetic (audiovisual communication), with the sense that historyis an irreversible experience, that social relations are objective and theresult of the presence of the other, and that government is located in thenation-state. The second relation refers to representation as digital andpoietic (computer information), with the sense that temporality (if nothistory) is reversible, that social relations can be made of multiple,temporary, non-territorial, long-distance loyalties, in co-presence withthe other, and that governance transcends the nation state. The newcommunications means, around information networks, have permittednew means of symbolic negotiation with reality and its politics. Thesedo not eliminate past ones, they are superimposed on to them (thoughDeleuze sees the latter as progressively eliminating the former).Globalization via media is none other than the result of these tworesonant transmission states in contact, in relative dependence, wherethey are in mutual dynamics and change each other.

In cultural diversity, this bi-stability is played out in the defence of the cultural industries of audiovisual and cinematographic represen-tation (Eye-Nature) and the emerging need to monitor the internet

strands of representation and the emerging knowledge-industries (Brain-Information). The defence of analogical representation is resonant withnotions of history, memory, patrimony and identity so important to thecultural exception debate in GATS. The need to monitor digital networksis resonant with notions of multiple loyalties and diffracted identities, sopresent in WSIS (especially through civil society entities). Such bi-stability modifies the lens with which we should analyse globalization,away from the dialectics between the global and the local, that preventus from embracing a more systemic view, towards what I call a logic of situations, context-specific and focused on figuring out the right scalefor interaction and sustainability, where connectedness (more thanconnectivity) can become a shared, common purpose of universal value.

This bi-stability is an additive process that is especially visible in thesphere of media reception. The public of the Eye-Nature relation is apublic of citizens and consumers; the public of the Brain-Informationrelation is a public of players and designers. The same person can be anyof these personas in his/her own experience, as is visible in newly-coinedwords like spectactor or avastar whose hybrid nature tries to connotethe multimodality of use. I follow Michel Foucault in this, who thought




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that the object of study is constructed from singular practices and theirconnection to the discourse that conforms them. It is a process in whichthe individuals take charge of the discourse they use and build themental space that allows them to participate in culture. In that sensethey cant escape the socio-cognitive space in which they evolve. Bi-stability is thus achieved, performed by the users themselves. In culturaldiversity, it redefines the notion of culture, not to be comprehended anymore (if it ever was) as an organic and bounded relationship to others,but as a distributed, multi-modal and highly mediated process. Culturaldiversity takes place in the shaping of both online and off-line socialrelationships.

This bi-stability accounts for the new transfrontier spatiality andtemporality of governance, in co-presence with the old geography andhistory of government. It also accounts for a sense of dispersion in thelocus of media control: it can be reticular and immaterial, with otherforms of power besides the nation state, whose capacities for resistanceare yet quite present and not to be underestimated. Maintaining anational perspective makes it possible to take into account the pressureof infrastructures and economics on the individual, whose capacity forempowerment by singular practices is thus constrained. To forms of mediation such as disembodiment and disembeddedness, one must addthe dematerialization and disintermediation of economic relations and

flows. The political economy of such processes and its powerful regu-latory forces (that are not all nation-based) needs to be re-injected in theanalysis. Access, ICT and media skills and competence, the material andsymbolic power that enables participation, all structure the forms of sociability that are possible and the cultural diversity that follows.

Hence the necessity, in this logics of situations, to analyse accul-turation phenomena in the material conditions of their production,keeping in mind the attendant mental space they generate. Two levels of interaction need to be considered, as suggested by Gavriel Salomon: 1st-order interaction (international media affect national culture) and 2nd-order interaction (national and international media are affected inreturn). Their combined analysis then shows the reality of dissymmetricpower relations, in its context-specificity and conditions of media use.They preserve the researcher from the naive thought that flows anddiasporas are subversive and capable of transforming national powerstructures on their own.

Acculturation is thus tightly connected to cultural diversity as itexamines what happens when two or more cultures are in contact. Theaction of gate-keepers in acculturation then needs to be monitored as




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such filters are key to the evolution of cosmopolitical processes. Someare technological (search engines, rating systems, etc.); some are human(buyers, corporate managers, translators, web moderators, etc.); some arelegal and institutional (IP rights, treaties, recommendations, etc.). Theaction of these filters is intensified by information capacity and socialconnectivity as social software (emails, weblogs, wikis, etc.) and toolsthat can connect several collective intelligence pools (knowledgenetworks, free software communities, etc.) expand and interrelate on theweb (databases, webfiles, semantic search, etc.). These filters of cosmopo-litical processes should place cultural diversity and acculturation at thecentre of international media studies. Such studies need to monitorthese evolutions to propose scenarios for the future, to identify the newseats of power in the 21st century, as well as the new nodes of resistance,in this phase of cosmopolitical transition.

References

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Beck, U. (1999)What Is Globalization?Cambridge: Polity Press.Castells, M. (1997) La era de la informacin. Economa, sociedad y cultura. La sociedad red ,

vol. I. Madrid: Alianza.Deleuze, G. Cinma: Image-Temps(vol 2). Paris: Minuit, 1985.

Foucault, M. (1966) Les Mots et les Choses: une archologie des sciences humaines. Paris:Gallimard.Frau-Meigs, D. (2007) Convergence, Internet governance and Cultural diversity

Tanja Storsul and Dagny Stuedahl (ed.) Internet. The Ambivalence of Convergence,pp. 3453. Oslo: Nordicom.

Frau-Meigs, D. (2007) Minding the Gatekeepers: Search engines for young people andthe regulatory riddle of harmful content an environmental cognition perspective.Marcel Machill and Markus Beiler (eds) The Rising Power of Search Engines/Die Macht der suchmaschinen, pp. 30826. Cologne, All.: Herbert von Halem Publishers.

Frau-Meigs, D. (2006) Big Brother in Europe: toward a theory of situatedacculturation, European Journal of Communication21(1): 3356.

Giddens, A. (1991) The Global Third Way Debate. London: Routledge.Habermas, J. (1962) Lespace public . Paris: Payot.Lash, S. (2002)Critique of Information. London: Sage.Mattelart, A. (2005) Diversit culturelle et mondialisation. Paris: PUF.Salomon, G. (1993) Distributed Cognitions. Psychological and Educational Considerations.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Slater, D. (2002) Social Relationships and Identity, Online and Offline. L. Lievrouw

and S. Livingstone (eds) Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICT s. London: Sage.

Touraine, A. Pourronsnous vivre ensemble? gaux et diffrents. Paris: Fayard, 1997.


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