Globalization in Canadian Communication PDF

As has been evident throughout the book, the communication practices of Canadians, government policy formation, and the activities of our cultural industries are in no way confined by municipal, provincial, or national borders. In an era of globalization, national communication systems can be seen a...

As has been evident throughout the book, the communication practices of Canadians, government policy formation, and the activities of our cultural industries are in no way confined by municipal, provincial, or national borders. In an era of globalization, national communication systems can be seen as subsystems within an increasingly integrated global communication system, influenced and shaped by extra-national social, political, and economic currents, as well as by the everyday practices of media users, whether they are downloading music or video, accessing social networking sites, or reading news from abroad. In fact, the development of new information technologies has been very much part of the global reorganization of the capitalist economy since the mid-1970s. In this chapter, we examine globalization in broad terms and consider what globalization means for how each of us lives and communicates. The activities and institutions we have described under the heading of "mediated communication in Canada" are not, and never have been, exclusively Canadian. In television, radio, and magazines, and on the web, foreign, particularly American, media abound in Canada. Similarly, Canadians' communicative practices have always been tied into international circulation. Federal and provincial cultural policy always has been informed both by universal covenants (e.g., freedom of expression, the sharing of the radio broadcast spectrum) and by the policies of neighbouring jurisdictions. Canadian media institutions were established and have continued to evolve in the context of other national media (particularly those of the United States). What distinguishes the current epoch is that the reach and speed of the media have increased so dramatically that borders, which in the past partially shielded one nation's communication system from those of other nations, have become increasingly porous. Distance is less an impediment to communication, and the distinctions between "here" and "there" are increasingly fuzzy. Globalization has altered our media geography, shifting dramatically the parameters of the world in which we live and in which we engage in communicative activities. Many are tempted to look at technological innovation as the principal determinant of this global integration. But, as we have discussed, if technology has played an undeniably significant role in enabling global communications, so, too, have communication law and cultural policy, trade liberalization, and changing social and cultural conditions. We explain at length what globalization means, describe the ways in which the mass media serve as agents of globalization, and document briefly the general patterns of global information and communication flows. We follow with a discussion of how theorists have come to understand the importance and impact of globalization, and then we focus on policy debates surrounding the New World Information and Communication Order in the 1980s and the World Summit on the Information Society in the 2000s. Finally, we consider how our globalized communicative activities have affected our sense of place. Defining Terms While the term globalization is often used to refer to the world's increased economic interdependence---formalized by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Canada--US-- Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), and the ASEAN Free Trade Area---we define globalization as the set of processes by which social, cultural, political, and economic relations extend farther than ever before, with greater frequency, immediacy, and facility. More specifically, globalization refers to the increased mobility of people, capital, commodities, information, and images associated with the post-industrial stage of capitalism; with the development of increasingly rapid and far-ranging communication and transportation technologies; and with people's improved--- though far from universal or equitable---access 276 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World to these technologies. Simply put, globalization means we are more closely integrated with the rest of the world than ever before, even if these connections have significant gaps and are not shared equally by all Canadians, let alone by all citizens of the world. The central questions explored here are how globalization changes the world in which we live and how this process influences the way Canadians communicate. In economic terms, globalization means that many of us work for companies with operations in a number of countries around the world and that we consume products and services in a global marketplace. When we shop, we buy clothes made in China, wine made in Chile, and furniture made in Sweden. When we go out to eat, we choose among Chinese, Japanese, Thai, French, Italian, Lebanese, and Indian foods. The specific job we do may be part of a production process organized as a transnational assembly line, coordinated from a distant head office, and the product or service we offer likely is destined for export markets. Nike shoes, for example, are produced through a global supply chain, comprising 150 factories in 14 countries, among them Vietnam, China, and Indonesia (Soni, 2014). Those countries, their business leaders, and especially their workers compete with other governments, investors, and workers from all over the world to attract or maintain local economic activity. Globalization also means that Canadian media producers and distributors participate in an increasingly global marketplace. In the political arena, globalization means that governments are increasingly implicated in events that occur well beyond their own borders, whether through international governing bodies like the United Nations or on their own initiative. Whether the misfortune is famine, disease, war, or natural disaster, political leaders feel increasingly compelled to aid countries many of us cannot easily locate on a map. Canada, for example, had by 2018 accepted an estimated 40,000 refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria (Issawi, 2018). Globalization has added further layers of supranational governance, which means that Canadian communications and cultural policy must respect a growing list of international covenants. In the social sphere, globalization means that friendships and family ties extend around the world and that our neighbours come from half a dozen different countries, speak different languages, wear different clothes, and worship within different religions. This means that, on a personal level, we are increasingly implicated in world affairs, in large part through our leisure and consumption activities, including media consumption. During the men's 2018 World Cup in Russia, for instance, the English, Croatian, and French teams were followed as closely in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver as they were in London, Zagreb, and Paris. In the cultural sphere, globalization means that some Hollywood movies are as popular in Tokyo and Madrid as they are in Los Angeles. It also means that we come into contact with more and more cultures through social media links, vacation travel, and foreign-language acquisition. The internet connects us to a global newsstand, and to online radio stations and podcasts from places we've never been. What we consider to be Canadian art and cultural performance are increasingly infused by an array of international influences. Indeed, many of Canada's leading writers and performers have their roots in the Philippines, the Caribbean, Egypt, India, and Sri Lanka. Similarly, people around the world consume Canadian cultural exports, from films and television programs to popular music; Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for an oeuvre of short stories set primarily in small-town southwestern Ontario. In the environmental sphere, we are increasingly aware that how we use natural resources--- air, water, land, minerals, plants, fish---in one corner of the world has significant implications for the rest of the planet. Debates over international climate-change agreements and oil pipeline expansion symbolize both the difficulty and importance of collective struggles to come to terms with how we are degrading the global 11 Globalization \| 277 11.1 Canada's Changing Profile It should be clear by now that serving Canada, with its vast geography and its scattered population, is one of the greatest challenges facing media organizations, whether their content is music, news, or dramatic entertainment. But that task is even more formidable in an era of globalization when the Canadian population is more diverse than at any time in its history, meaning media audiences may affiliate with any number of communities. The 2016 census conducted by Statistics Canada reported a Canadian population of just over 35 million people who claimed more than 250 ethnic origins (Statistics Canada, 2016, 2017). Diversity, of course, consists of much more than ethnicity; difference can be based on skin colour, maternal language, religious belief, and sexual orientation, as well as on age, sex, education, and income levels. Immigrants to Canada accounted for almost 22 per cent of the population in 2016. The largest share of recent immigrants---arriving between 2011 and 2016---came from Asia (62%), primarily from the Philippines, India, and China (Statistics Canada, 2016, 2017). More than one in five Canadians (22%) selfidentify as belonging to a visible minority group, and 6.2 per cent of Canadians are indigenous (2016). English remains the mother tongue of more than half of Canadians (55%), 20 per cent report French as their first language, and another 21 per cent have a first language other than English or French (2016). Canada's changing demographic profile is of great significance for media organizations, especially when media managers try to imagine, and ultimately serve, their target audiences. How do they account for such differences of background, language, religion, culture, belief, and life experience? This is a matter of great concern because, as Henry et al. (2000: 296) note, the media "are major transmitters of society's cultural standards, myths, values, roles, and images." Because racial-minority communities tend to be marginalized in mainstream society at large, "many white people rely almost entirely on media for their information about minorities and the issues that concern their communities" (296). This applies to all media forms because they all participate in the practice of representing, or offering us a depiction of, Canadian society, through advertising, music, art, video games, films, news reports, blogs, and television dramas and sitcoms. One response to Canada's increasing diversity has been the establishment of media dedicated to serving these distinct communities. The National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada (NEPMCC), for example, reports that 400 ethnic and community newspapers and magazines serve 12 million Canadians in a variety of languages besides French and English (NEPMCC, 2018). Canada has a national television network serving the indigenous population---the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network---and newspapers devoted to the gay and lesbian population (e.g., Xtra, Pink Triangle Press). A second response---albeit much slower---has been the conscious attempt by mainstream media organizations to diversify their staffs, to normalize the depiction of Canadian society as multicultural, multi-racial, multi-faith, and so on. Diversity, however it is defined, is a particularly important issue for Canadians, because the communication media have been assigned such a central role in creating a sense of national community, a theme that permeates federal cultural policy. The media are a principal source of images of our country, our fellow Canadians, our place in the larger world, and they play, therefore, a central role in our understanding of who we are as a society. As a socializing institution, either the media can continue to exclude people of colour and exacerbate racism and xenophobia or they can become more inclusive, reflecting Canada's changing demographic profile and facilitating this ongoing social transformation. environment. Diseases, too, travel globally and quickly. A 2018 measles outbreak in Europe, for example, prompted health officials to encourage Canadians to ensure their vaccinations were up to date (Crowcroft, 2018). The term globalization can be misleading, however, if it implies that all significant social relations now occur on a global scale. Clearly, this is not so. For one thing, we do not all share in the mobility that globalization affords. Second, 278 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World different aspects of our lives operate at local, regional, provincial, and national scales. Globalization more properly refers to an intensified relationship between social activity on local and global scales (Massey and Jess, 1995: 226). Once predominantly local, face-to-face, and immediate, social interactions now commonly stretch beyond the borders of our local community so that "less and less of these relations are contained within the place itself" (Massey, 1992: 6--7). While we still talk to our neighbours when we meet them on the street, we also communicate regularly with friends, relatives, and associates---by text messaging, social media, Skype---at the other end of the country and on the other side of the world. Globalization has altered dramatically the nature of human mobility as our travels, whether for business, school, or pleasure, carry us farther and farther afield, expanding the bounds within which most of us live. Many of the features of globalization are not new. In fact, some theorists argue that the process of globalization is as old as humankind itself (see Lule, 2012: 22--3). International migration, for instance, is not new, nor is the mobility of investment capital or the global circulation of cultural products. What is new about globalization is its intensity: the expanded reach, facility, and immediacy of contemporary social interactions. The migration of people, whether regional, intranational, or international---whether voluntary or forced---has become a more common experience, and many of those who migrate return frequently to their countries of origin. There is a greater circulation today of people seeking to improve their lives, whether they are refugees fleeing intolerable conditions, youths seeking educational and employment opportunities away from home, or executives conducting business in markets around the globe. Investment capital, too, has become increasingly mobile as companies seek business opportunities wherever they can be found and flee from regions deemed uncompetitive or hostile to free enterprise. Regions of the world are seen primarily as markets---sales markets, resource markets, labour markets--- and corporate executives demonstrate less and less loyalty to their traditional places of business. American automakers, for instance, do not need to confine their operations to the Detroit area if cars and trucks can be made more cheaply with comparable quality standards in Canada or Mexico. Similarly, if Hollywood producers seek to reduce costs, they can film in places like Canada or Australia that may offer advantages in terms of currency exchange rates, labour costs, subsidies, and regulatory conditions. Recent Hollywood films shot at least partly in Canada include The Shape of Water, Star Trek Beyond, Deadpool 2, and Skyscraper. Nowhere has capital been more successful at penetrating world markets than in the cultural sphere. The geographer Warwick Murray (2006: 232) cites six factors explaining this: the emergence of new global technological infrastructures, a rise in the velocity of cross-border What we consider to be Canadian art and cultural performance are increasingly infused by an array of international influences. Similarly, people around the world consume Canadian cultural exports; Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for an oeuvre of short stories set primarily in small-town southwestern Ontario. REUTERS/Andy Clark. 11 Globalization \| 279 cultural exchanges, the rise of Western culture as the central driver of global cultural interaction, the rise of transnational corporations in the culture industries, the rise of business culture as the main driver of cultural exchange, and a shift in the geography of cultural exchanges. David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995: 1--11) refer to a "new media order" in which the overriding logic of media corporations is to get their product to the largest possible number of consumers. Media images also serve as a reminder of how far our social interactions stretch, the extent to which those relations are mediated, and the implications of such mediation. As Morley and Robins argue: The screen is a powerful metaphor for our times: it symbolizes how we exist in the world, our contradictory condition of engagement and disengagement. Increasingly, we confront moral issues through the screen, and the screen confronts us with increasing numbers of moral dilemmas. At the same time, however, it screens us from those dilemmas. It is through the screen that we disavow or deny our human implication in moral realities (141). 11.2 Indigenous Media Activity The World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Network was established in 2008 "to retain and grow indigenous languages and cultures" by providing an international forum, support, and program exchange network for indigenous cultural producers who often work in minority languages and serve minority populations in their home jurisdictions. Canada's Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) was a founding member, joining broadcasters from Australia, Hawaii, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, South Africa, and Taiwan. If the APTN may be considered Canada's most visible outlet for indigenous current-affairs and dramatic television programming, there are numerous other channels for indigenous media interventions, both within mainstream cultural institutions (e.g., CBC, the National Film Board) and beyond. Such interventions provide indigenous peoples an important voice as well as access for non-indigenous Canadians to perspectives that differ, and often run counter to, dominant media narratives (see Brady & Kelly, 2017). Examples available through mainstream media institutions include CBC Radio programs Unreserved and Reclaimed, and the NFB films of Alanis Obomsawin (e.g., Incident at Restigouche, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, Trick or Treaty?). High-profile indigenous journalists include Tanya Talaga of the Toronto Star, author of Seven Fallen Feathers and the CBC Massey lecturer for 2018; Duncan McCue, host of CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup; and freelancer Ossie Michelin (osmich.ca). Indigenous musical voices include Tanya Tagaq, A Tribe Called Red, Leela Gilday, Burnt Project 1, and Digging Roots. Among Canada's bestknown writers are Richard Wagamese (Indian Horse, Keeper'n Me), Tomson Highway (The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Kiss of the Fur Queen), and Thomas King (Medicine River, Green Grass, Running Water, The Truth about Stories). In their book about indigenous media tactics, Miranda J. Brady and John M.H. Kelly (2017) note as well the significance of the media-reported public statements during the hearings of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Chapter 1), the multimedia platform IsumaTV (Chapter 2), the disruptive paintings of artist Kent Monkman (89--98), and Toronto's annual imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (Chapter 4). Countering the photographic, literary, film, and television images widely circulated from the late nineteenth century to the present day, Brady and Kelly write: The cases we investigate illustrate the diversity of Indigenous media tactics as interventions into sites of power and a careful negotiation between mixed and pan-Indigenous audiences. They also illustrate the broader concerns important to contemporary Indigenous communities and the ways in which these concerns are placed firmly at the forefront of public consciousness (5). 280 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World Consider, for example, the stark images of war and displaced people that television and internet news channels screen for us daily and what this means for our experience of the people, places, and events depicted. The screen metaphor also applies to globalization itself, the processes of which filter out large segments of the population. This is a point easily ignored by those of us with easy, cheap, 24/7 access to communication technologies. We assume that everyone enjoys these advantages, but globalization's impact is in fact decidedly uneven, dividing people along class lines, in particular. While relatively wealthy, educated urban dwellers have considerable access to the fruits of globalization, those with less mobility and more immediate priorities---food, clean water, shelter, personal safety---are largely excluded, wherever they are in the world. Think of how often we have walked past a homeless person begging in the street while we are using our smartphone. Not all of us are in a position to reap the benefits of global interconnectivity because we don't all enjoy the same degree of mobility, even in a country like Canada. In fact, many Canadians have been hit hard by the new-found fluidity of investment capital---when, for example, sawmills are closed in British Columbia and automotive manufacturers leave Quebec and Ontario because their owners can simply move in search of more hospitable investment climates. In such instances, those who control global capital are the only true "global citizens." As Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 2) states, "Globalization divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites---the causes of division being identical with those which promote the uniformity of the globe." Mass Media as Agents of Globalization Sophisticated and accessible transportation and communication technologies are enablers of globalization. As we saw in our discussion of Harold Innis's ideas in Chapter 6, transportation and communication networks have the ability to "bind space," to bring people and places closer together. They enable people to maintain close contact in spite of their physical separation. Airline connections between major cities allow business leaders and politicians to fly to a meeting in another city and to return home in time for dinner. Frequent email or text messaging connects friends and colleagues in remote locations, minimizing the implications of their actual separation. Since the end of World War II, globalization has prompted a new layer of international governance to coordinate the increasing number of integrated spheres of activity. Initially this meant the creation of the United Nations in 1945, which addresses military, economic, health, education, and cultural affairs between states. Today, the list of international governing agencies includes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Trade Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the African Union, the Group of Seven, the Latin American Integration Association (LAIA), the European Union, and many others. The flip side of this international cooperation is international interference in cases where states' interests conflict, and there has been a recent backlash by some states against these integrating forces (see Box 11.3). Globalization means that national governments no longer enjoy uncontested sovereignty within their own borders. This has significant policy implications when issues such as Canadiancontent regulations, subsidization of cultural production, enforcement of online hate-speech laws, or enforcement of copyright laws are raised. Countries can choose to ignore international law---something of which China has been accused with respect to international copyright agreements---or they can exert their political and economic might to derail legislation. The United States uses this latter tactic with any country's attempt to protect its domestic film industry against Hollywood's dominance of commercial theatre screens. 11 Globalization \| 281 The mass media play four specific roles in the globalization process. First, they are the media of encounter, putting us in touch with one another, whether via mail, telephone, email, text messaging, social media, or so on. Second, they are the media of governance, enabling the centralized administration of vast spaces and dispersed places, whether by governments, businesses, or non-profit service organizations. Third, they situate us within the world, offering us a regular picture of where we are, who we are, and how we relate to other people and places in the world. Fourth, they constitute a globalized business in and of themselves, conducting trade in information and entertainment products. Taken together, these roles alter fundamentally the geographical parameters within which we live our lives. While face-to-face interaction remains integral to interpersonal relations in even the most globalized of environments---on the street, in the park, at work, at school---proximity no longer constricts our social interactions. Communication technologies like the cellular telephone and personal computer bind social spaces and enable people to maintain contact across distance, rendering the communication industry "a primary channel of social interaction" (Jackson et al., 2011: 56). There are perhaps no better examples of this than social networking sites like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. Often, of course, these media complement face-to-face interactions. At the same time, as communication theorist Harold Innis points out, communication media enable the centralized governance of a political community on the scale of the modern nationstate and the centralized administration of a transnational corporation that spans the globe. Both national forms of governance and global forms of capitalism require efficient means of communication to establish a coherent agenda, to disseminate instructions and information, to monitor the activities of remote departments, and to receive reports from local managers or governors in the field. If a country as large and diverse as Canada is difficult to govern, its governance would be virtually impossible without modern communication and transportation technologies. The scale on which governments and organizations function today can also, paradoxically, isolate nearby regions and peoples, if they are not deemed integral to the networks of governance or of commerce, or if they don't have a population base large enough to constitute either an important political constituency or a viable market (see Castells, 1999, 2001). On a global scale, Murray 11.3 Second Thoughts about Globalization The governments of some countries are having second thoughts about the increased interdependency that globalization portends. The United Kingdom, for example, held a referendum in 2016 on its future membership in the European Union, and a small majority (52%) voted in favour of withdrawal (known as Brexit). The administration of US president Donald Trump has adopted an America First foreign policy, prioritizing the country's own political and economic interests and stepping back from internationalist ventures. Perhaps most concerning is the reluctance of governments to work together to combat climate change. The US has announced it is withdrawing from the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change, and the governments of Australia and Brazil, in particular, have been criticized for their refusal to see climate change as a global crisis (see The Guardian, 2018). In Canada, the federal government has proposed a nationwide carbon pricing policy (while supporting the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline), but the governments of Ontario and Saskatchewan have vowed to contest the plan on constitutional grounds (see Giovannetti, 2018). 282 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World (2006: 225) notes that Tahiti is one of the most physically remote islands on earth but remains culturally connected to the industrial West, whereas the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea are much closer to Western nations but much more culturally isolated. Even in Canada, isolation can occur when transportation companies cut service to some cities and towns because those routes are deemed not economically viable. When, for example, Greyhound Lines cancelled all of its Western Canadian bus routes in the fall of 2018, it increased the isolation of people along the route who depend on that connection; Greyhound's route between Winnipeg and Calgary, for instance, featured 46 stops in small communities (Lambert & Graveland, 2018). The media also provide us with a sense of place and identity. They represent to us who we are, where we live, how we are connected to one another, and how we differ from other peoples and places. These depictions contain value judgments, sometimes expressed explicitly, but more often inferred. Media scholar Roger Silverstone describes media work as "boundary work"; this is "their primary cultural role: the endless, endless, endless playing with difference and sameness" (Silverstone, 2007: 19). For example, advertisements often seek to portray "typical" Canadians engaged in "normal" Canadian activities, offering us a definition of what typical and normal Canadian-ness is and suggesting what we look and act like. This is a key theme in, for example, Tim Hortons' corporate branding. Consider, too, the portrayal of the family in Canadian Tire commercials, the representation of Canadian males in Molson beer ads, or the gender roles assigned to men and women in commercials for any number of household cleaning products. Finally, the media have become a central constituent of globalization in what is called the information age or the network society. This means, first, that the cultural industries are conducting a greater proportion of global trade by serving as the conduits for the exchange of information and entertainment commodities, including trade in hardware, such as computers, television sets, and sound systems, and in cultural products, such as books, magazines, DVDs, and music and video downloads. Instead of trading regionally or nationally, these goods and services are increasingly traded on an international or global scale; the world is their market. Second, information and ideas are becoming increasingly important to an economy that now depends on innovation in all industrial sectors. Ideas that can lead to new product development, greater productivity, and the expansion of markets have become essential to maintaining growth in a capitalist economy. The economic role that the mass media play has considerable implications for how we define communication as commodity or as cultural form (see Chapters 2 and 9), for who gets to speak (on both the individual and the collective levels), and for what kinds of messages become privileged. By making information an exploitable resource, the democratic ideal of free speech and freely circulating information has been Advertisements often seek to portray "typical" Canadians engaged in "normal" Canadian activities, offering us a definition of what typical and normal Canadian-ness is and suggesting what we look and act like. What does this Canadian Tire ad convey about "typical" Canadians? Trademarks of Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited used under license. 11 Globalization \| 283 transformed---at least in many sectors---into the freedom of media proprietors to exploit world markets with that speech and with that information. This problem is offset somewhat by the emergence of individuals and public-service organizations seeking to employ the same communication technologies for quite different purposes---perhaps to combat economic globalization or militarism, to support environmental or human-rights measures, or simply to create their own cultural products. The question, Dave Sholle (2002: 3) points out, is whether new media technologies "will be an agent of freedom or an instrument of control." These technologies enable the emergence of alternative media organizations; they are alternative in the sense that they present a noncommercial media model that emphasizes "the promotion of public dialogue, the exchange of ideas, and the promotion of social action" (Skinner, 2010: 222). Such media include newspapers (the Georgia Straight in Vancouver, The Coast in Halifax, Le Mouton Noir in Rimouski), magazines (This Magazine, Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch), radio (Radio Centre-Ville in Montreal, Vancouver Co-operative Radio), podcasting (Indian and Cowboy, Canadaland), and, of course, online news services (Rabble.ca, TheTyee.ca). Global Information Trade Like other aspects of globalization, the cultural sphere is witnessing the expansion and intensification of a trend that already has a substantial history. This history reveals that international cultural exchanges have always been uneven, with a few sources of communication serving many destinations. This asymmetry intensified dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century as trade flows became increasingly concentrated; 20 countries accounted for 75 per cent of international trade in merchandise and fifteen countries accounted for 65 per cent of the international trade in services (Murray, 2006: 107--9). Murray argues that such economic flows form a "global triad," comprising the European Union, the United States, and East and Southeast Asia (110--1). He adds, however, that when we look closer at the global economy, "we see that most investment and trade actually takes place between specialized industrial spaces" (110--2). Terhi Rantanen (1997) points out that a handful of European news agencies---Havas, Reuters, Wolff---began to dominate global news coverage in the mid-nineteenth century, and the development of the telegraph and submarine telegraph cables during those years meant that, for the first time, information could reliably travel faster than people. Herman and McChesney (1997: 13--4) describe the film industry as "the first media industry to serve a truly global market." By 1914, barely 20 years after the advent of the motion picture, the United States had captured 85 per cent of the world film audience, and by 1925, US films accounted for 90 per cent of film revenues in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina, and over 70 per cent of revenues in France, Brazil, and the Scandinavian countries. Hollywood's hegemony in the film world continues to the present day. Such developments have been criticized as instances of media imperialism---the exploitation of global media markets to build political, economic, and ideological empires of influence and control. If what used to be called media imperialism is now usually described more palatably as media globalization, concerns nevertheless remain that the mediasphere has come to be dominated by the world's largest media companies, the majority of them based in Western Europe and North America. The resources of these large, global media companies (e.g., Alphabet, 21st Century Fox, Bertelsmann, Facebook, Baidu, CBS News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, Comcast) give them tremendous advantages over smaller, independent producers in terms of their ability to hire skilled professionals (including stars), the aesthetic quality of their productions, the power of their corporate brands, their access to distribution networks, 284 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World TABLE 11.1 Top Grossing Films, Selected Countries, May 2018 Germany Avengers: Infinity War Deadpool 2 Solo: A Star Wars Story USA USA USA France Avengers: Infinity War Solo: A Star Wars Story Deadpool 2 USA USA USA Italy Avengers: Infinity War Solo: A Star Wars Story Deadpool USA USA USA Finland Avengers: Infinity War Solo: A Star Wars Story Truth or Dare USA USA USA Australia Avengers: Infinity War Deadpool 2 Solo: A Star Wars Story USA USA USA Venezuela 12 Strong Avengers: Infinity War 7 Days in Entebbe USA USA USA/UK China Avengers: Infinity War How Long Will I Love You Us and Them USA China China Sources: Box Office Mojo (www.boxofficemojo.com), Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). Table compiled by Scott Baird. TABLE 11.2 Top Five Music Singles, Selected Countries, May 2018 Austria "Maserati"/RAF Camora "No Tears Left To Cry"/Ariana Grande "Friends"/Marshmello & Anne-Marie "Paradise"/George Ezra "Wake Me Up!"/Avicii Switzerland USA USA/UK UK Sweden United Kingdom "One Kiss"/Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa "No Tears Left To Cry"/Ariana Grande "Nice for What"/Drake "Freaky Friday"/Lil Dicky & Chris Brown "2002"/Anne-Marie UK USA Canada USA USA Denmark "Holder Fast"/Hennedub, Gilli & Lukas Graham "One Kiss"/Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa "Sydpa"/Bro "Better Now"/Post Malone "Friends"/Marshmello & Anne-Marie Denmark UK Denmark USA USA/UK Spain "Lo Malo"/Aitana Ocana & Ana Guerra "Te Bote"/Nio Garcia, Casper, Darell, Nicky Jam, Bad Bunny & Ozuna "X"/ Nicky Jam & J Balvin "Dura"/Daddy Yankee "Me Niego"/Reik, Ozuna & Wisin Spain Puerto Rico US/Colombia Puerto Rico Mexico/Puerto Rico New Zealand "Nice For What"/Drake "Psycho"/Post Malone & Ty Dolla \$ign "Freaky Friday"/Lil Dicky & Chris Brown "No Tears Left To Cry"/Ariana Grande "Love Lies"/Khalid & Normani Canada USA USA USA USA Source: Top40-Charts (www.top40-charts.com). Table compiled by Scott Baird. and their ability to advertise and promote their products worldwide (see McChesney, 2003). Their use of digital platforms has only enhanced their ability to penetrate global markets. Global spending on media and entertainment was US\$1.6 trillion in 2015 (the latest date for which figures are available), with broadband services and in-home video entertainment accounting for almost half of that amount. Three regions---Asia Pacific, North America, and Western Europe---accounted for 86 per cent of that spending (McKinsey and Company, 2016: 8-9). The point is that the interdependence inherent in globalization is rarely symmetrical. The decidedly uneven flow of information and entertainment products creates a situation in which a few countries, and relatively few companies, produce and profit from the vast majority of media content, leaving most of the world, to a great extent, voiceless. As shown in Table 11.1, Hollywood films dominate box offices around the world; theatre screens throughout the world have become a global market for the same Hollywood films we see in North America. Table 11.2, on the other hand, shows that the international popular music scene is somewhat more diverse, even if the bulk of music flows from transnational media companies based in the West, and particularly the United States and United Kingdom (see Murray, 2006: 252--8). Public broadcasting systems, which operate on a public-service model, are under siege in Canada and around the world. In spite of increasing demands on CBC/Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster has had its parliamentary appropriation reduced repeatedly since the early 1990s, 11 Globalization \| 285 prompting a series of job cuts. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau sought to reverse this trend in its 2016 budget, pledging an additional \$150 million annually through 2021 (Bradshaw, 2016). Even the venerable BBC, which has come to symbolize the best of public broadcasting, has adopted commercial strategies in some aspects of its operation (e.g., BBC World News Television, BBC Studios) (BBC Studios, 2018). What has emerged is a tiered global media market, dominated by US-based companies, which can capitalize on the competitive advantage of having "by far the largest and most lucrative indigenous market to use as a testing ground and to yield economies of scale" (Herman and McChesney, 1997: 52). In recent decades, for example, Canada became an important site of Hollywood film and television production, as US film companies took advantage of the lower Canadian dollar and comparable technical expertise of crews north of the border (see Elmer and Gasher, 2005; Gasher, 2002; Pendakur, 1998). The Hollywood animation industry has similarly taken advantage of the cheap yet stable labour markets of India, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and the Philippines for the time-consuming and labour-intensive execution of animation projects originally conceived in Los Angeles (Breen, 2005; Lent, 1998). The large, transnational media companies are particularly interested in the world's most affluent audiences because these audiences have the money to spend on advertised products and services. This means, for example, that the poorest half of India's 1.3 billion people is irrelevant to the global media market, and all of sub-Saharan Africa has been written off. The global media are most interested in markets in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. That said, the global media market does see some two-way traffic. The Globo and Televisa television networks in Brazil, for example, have succeeded in capturing a respectable share of Brazil's domestic market, and their telenovela productions are major exports (Hopewell, 2014). Canada, too, has begun to tap export markets in both the film and television industries, and it has quickly become a significant international video games producer (see ESAC, 2017). A renaissance in Canadian feature-film production since the mid-1980s means that directors like David Cronenberg (Crash, ExistenZ, A History of Violence, Maps to the Stars), Atom Egoyan (Ararat, The Sweet Hereafter, Where the Truth Lies, Chloe, The Captive, Remember), Deepa Mehta (Fire, Earth, Water, Midnight's Children, Anatomy of Violence), Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, Arrival, Bladerunner 2049), Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y., Café de Flore, Dallas Buyers Club, Demolition), and Xavier Dolan (J'ai tué ma mère, Mommy, Juste la fin du monde, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan), among many others, have made names for themselves in international film markets. And Canada is increasingly drawing attention as an exporter of television programming. If in the past it has been a leading exporter in the episodic, children's, and animation categories, it has more recently had international successes in the drama category, with such productions as Pure, Bad Blood, Mary Kills People, 19-2, Orphan Black, and Cardinal, the last of which has been sold to more than 100 markets worldwide (Wong, 2017, 2018; CMPA, 2018).. All of this commercial activity, of course, both opens up and limits the circulation of communication goods. What digital technology on the one hand enables is access to a greater variety of both commercial and independently produced cultural products and services. Chris Anderson (2006), the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, talks about the long-tail phenomenon, which allows companies to increase their inventory of books, films, and music as digitization reduces the costs of storage; iTunes, for example, can afford to offer older, more obscure, or less popular music because the costs of storing digital recordings for the handful of customers who might want to download them is minimal. Digital technology also allows budding musicians to distribute their music directly to listeners, via their own websites, through social media, or their own YouTube channels. 286 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World That said, it is still all about markets; to sustain the production of a diverse array of cultural materials, content producers need to be compensated. The corporate structuring of the media privileges the production and distribution of the most commercially viable products and services. It also grants media companies the power to inhibit, even prohibit, the production and circulation of products or services with limited appeal, or products that are critical or threatening in some way; Apple, for example, carries only those applications it approves in its App Store and restricts music downloaded from iTunes to Apple devices or software (see Murphy, 2017). Theories of Globalization There is a growing body of theoretical work on globalization, some celebratory, some critical. In a survey of the major thinkers, Andrew Jones (2010: 11--15) identifies three areas of consensus on globalization and three points of dispute. Theorists agree, first of all, that globalization is part of a long history of societal integration (dating at least as far back as the Roman Empire), that the contemporary period of globalization (since the 1950s) is qualitatively different from previous periods, and that globalization has a complex impact on nation-states. There is disagreement among theorists, however, on whether globalization constitutes a coherent system or whether it consists of several independent processes, whether it is ultimately positive or negative, and what the key drivers behind it are. The predominant account of globalization to date has been world systems theory, as articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 2007). Wallerstein's theory posits globalization as an economic phenomenon and, as the name of his theory suggests, he sees it as systemic. He argues that even though humans have engaged in trade for thousands of years (see Bernstein, 2008), a European, capitalist "world economy" emerged in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This extra-national economy involved long-distance trade that forged links between Europe and parts of Africa, Asia, and what came to be known as the West Indies and North and South America (Wallerstein, 1974: 15--20). World systems theory focuses on the relationship between nation-states---the world system---rather than on nation-states themselves, and demarcates three zones in the integrated world economy: the core states, characterized by industrialization and the rise of a merchant class; the periphery, comprising state economies based on resource extraction; and a semi-periphery, made up of in-between states whose economies share some characteristics of both the core and periphery (100--27). "Since this is a constantly changing phenomenon, not always for the better, the boundaries of a world-economy are ever fluid" (349). Wallerstein proposes that capitalism requires a world system (2007: 24) because its participants seek constantly to expand markets and to exploit the most favourable labour markets, regulatory regimes and infrastructure, The TV crime drama Cardinal, which is broadcast in French and English, has been sold to more than 100 international television markets. © 2017 JCardinal Productions Inc. & Sienna Cardinal Productions Inc. 11 Globalization \| 287 access to resources, and access to investment capital and government support. The world system's asymmetry, particularly with regard to trade in cultural materials, drew the attention of communication scholars in the post--World War II period and led to the development of two closely related theories: media imperialism and cultural dependency. Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1977: 117--8) used the term media imperialism to characterize the unidirectional nature of international media flows from a small number of source countries. Media imperialism research grew out of a larger struggle for decolonization in the aftermath of World War II (Mosco, 2009: 55). Cultural dependency is a less deterministic means of characterizing cultural trade. Whereas imperialism implies "the act of territorial annexation for the purpose of formal political control," Boyd-Barrett (1996: 174--84) maintains that cultural dependency suggests "de facto control" and refers to "a complex of processes" to which the mass media contribute "to an as yet unspecified extent." While both approaches contributed a great deal to documenting communication flows within the world economy and drew attention to an obvious problem, neither theory offered a sufficiently complex explanation of the power dynamics behind international cultural trade, nor did they provide satisfactory descriptions of the impact of such asymmetrical exchanges. The media imperialism thesis tends to be too crudely applied, assuming too neat a relationship between the all-powerful source countries and their helpless colonies. While slightly more nuanced, the cultural dependency thesis shared a number of the shortcomings of the media imperialism thesis. Like media imperialism, Vincent Mosco (2009: 101--3) argues, the concept of cultural dependency created homogeneous portraits of both the source and the target countries. It concentrated almost exclusively on the role of external forces and overlooked "the contribution made by local forces and relations of production, including the Indigenous class structure." Cultural dependency also portrayed transnational capitalism as rendering the target states powerless. Like media imperialism, cultural dependency did not adequately account for how audiences in the target countries used or interpreted media messages that originate elsewhere. Current research seeks to account for the heterogeneity of national cultures, the specificity of particular industries and corporate practices, and how cultural products are actually used by audiences (see Lessig, 2008). Nonetheless, the clear asymmetry of globalization remains an important issue for researchers who study cultural policy and the political economy of communication from a range of perspectives. And it is particularly pertinent to the Canadian case. Canada's relatively small, dispersed population, as well as its shared majority language and shared border with the United States, have made it an easy target for the US media powerhouse. A New Media Ecology Anthony Giddens studies globalization through the lens of sociology. He argues that globalization has transformed our sense of time and space, "disembedding" social relations from their local contexts and restructuring them across "indefinite spans of time-space" (Giddens, 1990: 21; see also Jones, 2010: 39). He writes, "In the modern era, the level of time--space distanciation is much higher than in any previous period, and the relations between local and distant social forms and events become correspondingly 'stretched'" (Giddens, 1990: 64). This "stretching process" is what we mean by globalization. Departing from Wallerstein's exclusive focus on economics, Giddens provides a four-dimensional model of globalization, with the world capitalist economy, the world military order, the nation-state system, and the international division of labour serving as its component parts. The media serve as the "global extension of the institutions of modernity" (70--1). Manuel Castells places communication technologies at the centre of global economic---and by extension, social and political---interactions. 288 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World Castells describes a "network society" that, as its name suggests, is an interconnected world, which is less international than internodal, placing major global cities, rather than nations, at the centre of its analysis. Castells argues that the internet has allowed people to forge a new kind of sociability--- "networked individualism" (2001: 127--9)---and a new global geography---"a space of flows" (207--8). Communication technologies form the "unifying thread" that links globalizing processes, so that the "space of flows" creates "a distributed network with clusters around nodes and hubs" (Jones, 2010: 55--9). This interconnected world, then, has considerable implications for the inclusion and exclusion of people and places from the network of global information flows. Internet use, Castells notes, is highly concentrated within a network of "metropolitan nodes" (2001: 228), which become the new dominant hubs of economics, politics, and culture. For this reason, Castells places a new onus on democratic governments to ensure political representation, participatory democracy, consensus building, and effective public policy (278--9). Saskia Sassen (1998:, p. xxv) sees in this network society "a new economic geography of centrality" in which certain global cities concentrate economic and political power and become "command centers in a global economy." If Sassen agrees with Castells that this new geography is produced by the internet's most prominent and active users (xxvii), she is nonetheless concerned with the conflict that necessarily ensues between "placeboundedness"---those peoples, activities, and institutions bound to a specific place, often in support of the network infrastructure---and "virtualization"---those peoples, activities, and institutions capable of exploiting Castells's virtual space of information flows (Sassen, 1998: 201--2). The political economist Vincent Mosco describes the process of overcoming the constraints of space and time as spatialization, and he attributes to communication a principal role as an enabling mechanism. He cautions that the global commercial economy does not annihilate space but transforms it "by restructuring the spatial relationships among people, goods, and messages. In the process of restructuring, capitalism transforms itself" (2009: 157) by becoming increasingly mobile and, following Castells, by clustering together certain communicative activities in "agglomeration" zones (169). One of the oldest and clearest examples of such spatial agglomeration is Hollywood, which clusters together companies and workers devoted to film and television production, from the writers, actors, and directors to the specialists in editing, lighting, set design and construction, and costume design. Clearly, what has emerged in the context of globalization is a new media ecology. James Carey has argued that the internet "should be understood as the first instance of a global communication system," displacing a national system that came into existence in the late nineteenth century with the development of, initially, telegraphy and railroad transportation, and later, national magazines, newspapers, radio, and television (Carey, 1998: 28). Carey underscores the point here that this new media ecology requires a cultural level to complement its global infrastructure; that is, an imagining and an articulation of community on a global scale, enabled, but not automatically produced, by communication or transportation technologies alone. All this is not to say that national (or subnational) boundaries are obsolete. They may be more porous, but the governments within those boundaries remain primarily responsible for creating the economic, political, and cultural conditions for globalization's various activities. National governments establish the supporting infrastructure, laws, policies, incentives, and the health, education, and safety standards that businesses--- including those in the cultural industries---require. Similarly, governments determine through policy measures what communication is for, and determine and protect the freedoms citizens enjoy in engaging in communication activities. Nationstates are also the representatives of their citizens' interests in international forums. 11 Globalization \| 289 New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) Cees Hamelink (1994: 23--8) observes that two features of international communication emerged in the last half of the twentieth century: the expansion of the global communication system and tensions in the system across both east-- west and north--south axes. East--west tensions (i.e., Cold War tensions between the totalitarian Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union and the Western democracies led by the United States) were most prominent in the 1950s and '60s. North--south tensions (i.e., tensions between the industrialized nations of the northern hemisphere and the post-colonial Global South) arose in the 1970s as the Global South took advantage of its new-found voice in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and they remain pertinent today. A number of United Nations initiatives led to a proposed New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), which sought compromise between the US advocacy of the free flow of information and the Global South desire for a balanced flow. The free-flow doctrine met its stiffest opposition from the Soviet Union, which insisted on the regulation of information flows and complained that the Americans' freedom-of-information position endorsed, in fact, the freedom of a few commercial communication monopolies. Nevertheless, the free-flow doctrine was largely endorsed by the United Nations, and Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights states, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers" (Hamelink, 1994: 152--5). The issue of communication flows was revisited at the behest of Global South countries in the 1970s when it became clear that the freeflow doctrine was a recipe for Western cultural hegemony, as the Soviets had anticipated. The major global institutions addressing communication issues at the time---the United Nations, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the International Telecommunication Union---all included majorities of Global South countries and sympathetic totalitarian states. The international debate at that time focused on three points, as it still does to some extent. First, historically, communication services together with evolved information technologies have allowed dominant states to exploit their political and economic power. Second, the economies of scale in information production and distribution threaten to reinforce this dominance. Third, a few transnational corporations had mobilized technology as a vehicle for the exploitation of markets rather than as a means of serving the cultural, social, and political needs of nations. Pressure from the Global South compelled the United Nations to broaden the concept of free flow to include "the free and balanced flow of information." International debate over the design of a New World Information and Communication Order coalesced around the final report of the 16-member International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (the MacBride Commission), established by UNESCO in December 1977 (UNESCO, 1980). The MacBride Commission advocated "free, open and balanced communications" and concluded that "the utmost importance should be given to eliminating imbalances and disparities in communication and its structures, and particularly in information flows. Developing countries need to reduce their dependence and claim a new, more just and more equitable order in the field of communication" (UNESCO, 1980: 253--68). The MacBride Commission's conclusions were based on "the firm conviction that communication is a basic individual right, as well as a collective one required by all communities and nations. Freedom of information---and, more specifically, the right to seek, receive, and impart information--- is a fundamental human right; indeed, a prerequisite for many others" (253). 290 \| Part IV An Evolving Communication World The MacBride Commission pointed to an essential conflict between the commercialization and the democratization of communication and thus clearly favoured a movement for democratization. The report stated, "Every country should develop its communication patterns in accordance with its own conditions, needs and traditions, thus strengthening its integrity, independence and self-reliance" (254). The MacBride Report also criticized the striking disparities between the technological capacities of different nations and described the right to communicate as fundamental to democracy: "Communication needs in a democratic society should be met by the extension of specific rights, such as the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to privacy, the right to participate in public communication--- all elements of a new concept, the right to communicate" (265). From NWICO to WSIS The MacBride Report proved to be a better manifesto on the democratization of communication than a blueprint for restructuring international communication exchanges. Even though UNESCO adopted its key principles---eliminating global media imbalances and having communication serve national development goals---the NWICO was poorly received in the West "because it gave governments, not markets, ultimate authority over the nature of a society's media" (Herman and McChesney, 1997: 24--6). Communication scholar Kaarle Nordenstreng argues that the NWICO was seen by its opponents as a curb on media freedom, "while in reality the concept was designed to widen and deepen the freedom of information by increasing its balance and diversity on a global scale" (Nordenstreng, 2012: 37). Western countries in the 1980s, led by the United States under Ronald Reagan and the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher, chose the more aggressive path of pursuing liberalized global trade. In the face of concerns over the ways NWICO reforms would affect their media industries, the United States and the United Kingdom pulled out of UNESCO in 1985, severely undermining the organization's budget and making the recommended reforms impossible (34). Even Canada, which was one of the affluent industrialized nations identified by the MacBride Commission as being dominated by cultural imports, began to pursue the neoliberal agenda of free trade and budget cutbacks in the 1980s. Very little has changed since in Canadian government policy. Such issues as deficit reduction and freer trade continue to dominate the political agenda, and the ministers of industry, international trade, and finance enjoy as much influence over cultural policy as the minister with the culture portfolio (see Gasher, 1995). International bodies like the World Trade Organization have become more important to the major cultural producers than the United Nations, and the rules of the game for international communications have been written in such treaties as CUSMA and the Treaty on European Union. The New World Information and Communication Order, in other words, was almost immediately supplanted by what Herman and McChesney (1997: 35) call the "new global corporate ideology." Nonetheless, as Mosco (2009: 178) puts it, the struggle continues to be to "build a more democratic process grounded in genuinely global governance." New concerns for the Global South arose in the 1990s with the emergence of digital information networks, the creation and expansion of cyberspace, issues pertaining to internet governance, and the financing of digital activities (Masmoudi, 2012: 25). The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) launched the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, 2010), which took the form of international conferences bringing together scholars, civil society groups, governments, and policy experts in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005. The Geneva conference laid out a 67-point declaration of principles and an action plan, and the Tunis conference 11 Globalization \| 291 addressed the financial implementation of the action plan, including the creation of the Digital Solidarity Fund. Three decades after MacBride, the digital divide between the information-rich and the information-poor remains a central concern. According to 2017 ITU figures, less than half (48%) of the world's population is online, with significant disparity between connection rates in the world's developed countries (94.3%), those of the developing countries (67.3%), and what the ITU terms the world's least-developed countries (30.3%) (ITU, 2017). Internet access in Europe, for example, is 95.7 per cent, while in Africa it is 21.8 per cent. And there remains a global gender gap as well, with 50.9 per cent of men with internet access compared to 44.9 per cent of women. There is a comparable gulf in penetration rates for mobile broadband subscriptions: 98 per cent in the developed world, 49 per cent in the developing world, and 22 per cent in the least-developed countries. Further, the cost of access to information and communication technologies remains inversely proportional to the economic wealth of a territory. For example, entry-level data plans range from an average of \$15.40 (in international dollars) in the developed countries to \$41.10 in the least-developed countries. Even more than access to digital networks, though, communication scholar Jérémie Nicey argues that computer literacy needs to be seen as a basic human right (2012: 172). (See Box 11.4 for more about the digital divide.) The international news agencies that were implicated in originating global information disparities continue to play a role in the digital divide. The world's three major wire services---Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse---have used the internet to reinforce their dominance and have developed audio-visual services to supply international all-news television networks like CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera (Laville and Palmer, 2012: 179--84). This dominance is enhanced by a general withdrawal from international news coverage by most daily newspapers and national television networks. The Geneva declaration expressed the desire to create an information society "where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life" (WSIS, 2010). Sadly, though, as Robert Savio (2012: 237) argues, what has emerged instead is a "New Information Market Order" characterized by corporate concentration and commercialization. Changing Notions of Place A number of scholars have attributed to the communication media a significant role in how we imagine, define, understand, and experience place. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2005: 23) refers to this as the "social imaginary," which he defines as "the