Globalisation and Media

This paper was presented during the “Women and Globalisation” event organised by the Women’s Movement Caucus of India during the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India in January 2004.

In this paper, Susanna George attempts to examine globalisation and media in ways that will help the readers make connections between these two phenomena and how these affect women’s lives.

Excerpt from "Globalisation and Media":

"As media and communications structures and systems become increasingly corporatised and globalised, we take on the challenge of scrutinising their inter-linkages, and trying to show up, in sharp relief, the face of our common enemies—patriarchy, corporate hegemonies, ascendant rightwing ideological regimes, and the U.S. empire in its fullest meaning.

In order to do this, we need to do the following:

Firstly, we need to explore new frontiers in Media that take into account its rapidly evolving state. When we speak of Media, we can no longer speak of newspapers, television and radio alone. The links between media corporations and new technologies such as the Internet and the IT industry need to be fully understood. We also need to see the connection in the ways that corporate media works hand in glove with the state, and corporate and military regimes, not just to provide the infrastructure for normalising and rationalising these powers, but also, in so doing, strengthening its own power.

Secondly, we need to look for the Devil in the Details. Today, if we want to find out what is really happening in the world, we have to look in every page of a newspaper. The connections are in the business pages, the special pages on the IT industry, in the advertisements, in the sports and health pages, and perhaps most pertinently, in the culture and lifestyle supplements. We need to read into the meaning behind the messages because otherwise, we will miss the inter-linkages that are both potent and dangerous."

In conclusion, Susanna presents a list of 6 steps she believes are necessary in order to "strengthen a broad, non-sectarian resistance that can draw in more people into the struggle against an unjust, violent and oppressive system." These items are:

1. "We need to keep our minds open to being challenged, and to be willing to give up our familiar analytical lenses and known platforms for advocacy and action. This is the challenge of Porte Alegre, and now Mumbai, to feminists around the world—the demand that we stay aware of the multiplicity of the platforms of struggle for change. We can no longer speak of sexist portrayal in the media without taking on the ways in which media misrepresents the most dispossessed and marginalised in society to maintain the moral, social and cultural authority of dominant classes. All of us from various social movements need to be aware of the struggles of other social movements, their analyses and sites of resistance, and be willing to give support to struggles that have not been our traditional spaces.
2. Communication activists have long struggled to make visible the ways in which neo-liberal globalisation is built on the backbone of globalised and corporatised media, information and communications systems. Working shoulder to shoulder are community radio and other community-based media and communications activists that seek to preserve, if not expand, what little space exists for non-commercial and community based alternatives. It is time that the different social movements recognise the importance of these different sites of struggle and support these efforts.
3. While the onslaught of global commercialised media systems has been reshaping the landscape of national, local and alternative media, this is by no means a finished project. There are many groups, including feminist and cultural activist groups using various media and communication tools to create, revitalise, energise and renew cultural expression and folk communication without recreating the ‘noble savage’ nor romanticising the tribal nor essentialising the past.
4. We need to recognise to the important demands made by indigenous peoples and marginalised communities for greater cultural diversity, autonomy and access and control over cultural resources. More often than not, poor, marginalised and indigenous communities are absent in programming equations since they do not form a powerful consumer bloc and have little purchasing power. Observe the trend of television programming and how it is geared toward audiences that have the greatest consumptive power (including children of the middle and upper middle classes for whom the cartoons are created).
5. There is a need for a more vocal and visible force monitoring the movements of large multinational media conglomerates such as AOL Time Warner, Disney, Sony and NewsCorp that already command vast shares of the media and communications market. We should also be alert to their impact on smaller regional, national and local media. We need to update our critique and resistance to media monopolies since they are antithetical to democratic discourse. Resistance needs to come from strengthening the minds of our young and old alike so that they can discern through various levels of media savvy.
6. A reality that feminists have had to contend with around the question of sexually exploitative imagery of women in the media is that sometimes, those who protest the impact of globalised media systems and the overwhelming influx of cultural content from the West tend to be the most rabid nationalistic, jingoistic or religious fundamentalists. We need to resist knee-jerk reactions and most of all, resist at all levels any unholy alliance with right-wing forces that take up positions that seem progressive on some issues, but are completely conservative around others, including women’s reproductive rights and the rights of sexual minorities. Our responses to globalised media and communications need to be far more nuanced and deliberate.