Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Consequences of Global Convergence

By Richard Collins

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2002 Richard Collins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-044-7

Contents

1 Introduction,
Europe,
2 Challenges and Opportunities. Broadcasting in Multi-national States,
3 Television, Identity and Citizenship in the European Union,
4 Locked in a Mortal Embrace. The European Union Audiovisual Policies of the UK and France,
Public Service Broadcasting,
5 Public Service Broadcasting and Freedom,
6 Two Types of Freedom. Broadcasting Organisation and Policy on both sides of the Atlantic,
7 Public Service and the Media Economy. European Trends in the late 1990s,
8 Supper with the Devil. A case study in public/private collaboration in broadcasting. The genesis of Eurosport,
Policy and Regulation,
9 Cultural Development in an Open Economy. Trading in Culture: the role of Language,
10 Paradigm Regained? Where to in Media and Communications Regulation,
11 Back to the Future. Digital Television and Convergence in the UK,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The social sciences have never given the media so much attention. In geography, sociology, economics, social psychology and in political science the media are increasingly taken as an object for study, not least because globalisation is conditional upon communication between locations, identities, trading partners and communities that were hitherto separate. By definition, if people and places are connected – as is axiomatic in globalisation – they are communicating. And if they are not communicating, they are not connected. Formerly, communication was slow, expensive and of limited practicability. New technologies have changed all this. To take two convenient examples: satellite communication has abolished the customary interdependence between cost and distance in communication; and the Internet is paradigmatic of both the convergence of hitherto distinct media and, increasingly, of the decoupling of duration and price of communication.

This is not to assert that location is unimportant and that everything and everyone is globalised, or to deny the robust continuing existence of the recognisably distinct and different media of radio, television, film, book and newspaper publishing, etc. But their importance has declined. Less and less does location define the limits of markets and possibilities of co-operative working relationships. The new media are growing faster than the old and reshaping the time honoured relationships, identities and structures of power that grew around the old media.

Hence the prominence of the two new buzzwords, 'Globalisation' and 'Convergence.' These terms signify the re-orientation and new foci of concern of contemporary social sciences and media studies. 'Globalisation' and 'Convergence' both signal themes of integration. Once, media studies could address separate media – film, television, telecommunications, the press – each in a distinct national context. Now, the national context has given way – through globalisation – to a wider international connectedness (in Europe, particularly interestingly, by Europeans' choice to create a trans-national economic, political and – perhaps – cultural community) and the media themselves are increasingly hybridised, substitutable and interdependent – through convergence.

None of this is unprecedented. Steinberg (1969), for example, showed how rapidly printing changed the diffusion of knowledge across Europe and accelerated the integration of markets (not least in printed books themselves). Marvin (1988) develops this theme in her well-named 'When old technologies were new.' But, putatively at least, the scale and pace of change has itself changed. That is why the phenomena and processes that we identify as 'Globalisation' and 'Convergence' demand attention. But how much? 'How much?' is the question that lies behind much of what follows.

'Convergence' and 'Globalisation' are more than contingently connected. For media and communication are central to globalisation for two reasons.

First, there can be no division of labour without communication between those who divide their labour. And the integration and interdependence of economies, which constitute one of the principle themes of globalisation, is a re-structuring of established patterns of labour division. The cost, functionality and accessibility of means to produce, store, process, transmit and receive information have all changed dramatically. 'Moore's Law,' (which asserts that the price of a given quantity of computing power halves every eighteen months), is paradigmatic of these changes. Now it's cheaper and easier to communicate globally than ever before. Indeed, new communication technologies have decoupled price and distance. Globalisation is intimately interdependent on global communication systems. As communicative networks grow, their utility increases exponentially as 'Metcalfe's law' states (see Chapter 11 for a discussion of 'Metcalfe's Law'). The growth of global systems of communicative interconnection is thus self-reinforcing.

Second, information has itself become an increasingly important traded commodity – the media and its contents are themselves traded internationally more and more. They constitute one of the components of the increasingly 'weightless' international economy (see, inter alia, Coyle, 1997 and Quah, 1996). Here too there is a fundamental 'law' at work. Because information is non-rival, it is not exhausted by consumption (you read this work and it remains available for others to read), development of cheap and effective reprographic technologies (technological change again), tends to extend and integrate markets across time and space. This trend is characteristic of the 'weightless' economy but is more marked for information than for other elements of the 'weightless' economy.

Again, there is nothing particularly new about this. Writing is a technique and printing a technology which permit partial realisation of this intrinsic potentiality of information. Through these technologies information is captured, recorded and made available for consumption through time. As written and, a fortiori, printed works were transported from place to place so the same information was made available for consumption through space. But what is new is the acceleration and intensification of the realisation of this inherent potentiality of the information economy. Electronic communication – telegraphy, telephony, radio, television and the contemporary convergence of all these formerly distinct media of communication into interactive multimedia – have further contributed to realisation of the inherent potentiality of information to be consumed by many across time and space at zero marginal cost.

But though these integrative trends are so salient – both in the academic literature of media and social sciences and in the daily experience of all of us – they are realised and experienced in highly situated ways. The past lies heavily – but weighs differently – everywhere. Realisation of the potential of modern media and communications to call into existence a seamless, integrated, global communicative community has been, and continues to be, conditional not only on technological change but also on the context, historical, political and cultural, in which media and communication operate. It is not only that the past...