Globalization and Communication in Canada PDF

As has been evident throughout the book, the communication practices of Canadians, gov ernment 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 communica tion systems can be seen...

As has been evident throughout the book, the communication practices of Canadians, gov ernment 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 communica tion 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 informa tion 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 com munication in Canada” are not, and never have been, exclusively Canadian. In television, radio, and magazines, and on the web, foreign, particu larly American, media abound in Canada. Simi larly, 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 con tinued 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 par tially shielded one nation’s communication sys tem from those of other nations, have become increasingly porous. Distance is less an impedi ment 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 com municative 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, polit ical, 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 associ ated 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 influ ences 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 ser vice 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 increas ingly compelled to aid countries many of us can not easily locate on a map. Canada, for example, had by 2018 accepted an estimated 40,000 refu gees fleeing the civil war in Syria (Issawi, 2018). Globalization has added further layers of supra national 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 con sumption. 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 Carib bean, Egypt, India, and Sri Lanka. Similarly, people around the world consume Canadian cultural exports, from films and television pro grams 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 increas ingly 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 inter national 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 organ izations, 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 mil lion people who claimed more than 250 ethnic ori gins (Statistics Canada, 2016, 2017). Diversity, of course, consists of much more than ethnicity; dif ference can be based on skin colour, maternal lan guage, 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%) self- identify 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, espe cially 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 experi ence? This is a matter of great concern because, 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). 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 marginal ized in mainstream society at large, “many white people rely almost entirely on media for their infor mation about minorities and the issues that con cern 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 (NEP MCC), 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 indigen ous 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 particu larly important issue for Canadians, because the communication media have been assigned such a central role in creating a sense of national commun ity, 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 lar ger 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. 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 REUTERS/Andy Clark. What we consider to be Canadian art and cultural performance are increas ingly 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. different aspects of our lives operate at local, regional, provincial, and national scales. Global ization 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. of cultural products. What is new about globalization is its inten sity: the expanded reach, facility, and immediacy of contemporary social interactions. The migration of people, whether regional, intra- national, or international—whether voluntary or forced—has become a more common experience, and many of those who migrate return fre quently to their countries of origin. T here is a greater circulation today of people seeking to improve their lives, whether they are refugees fleeing intolerable conditions, youths seek ing 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 uncom petitive 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 busi ness. 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, sub sidies, and regulatory conditions. Recent Holly wood films shot at least partly in Canada include T he Shape of Water, Star Trek Beyond, Deadpool 2, and Skyscraper. 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 migra tion, for instance, is not new, nor is the mobility of investment capital or the global circulation Nowhere has capital been more successful at penetrating world markets than in the cul tural sphere. The geographer Warwick Murray (2006: 232) cites six factors explaining this: the emergence of new global technological infra structures, a rise in the velocity of cross-border 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 cul ture industries, the rise of business culture as the main driver of cultural exchange, and a shift in the geography of cultural exchanges. David Mor ley 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, how ever, 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 pro viding an international forum, support, and pro gram exchange network for indigenous cultural producers who often work in minority languages and serve minority populations in their home juris dictions. 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 numer ous other channels for indigenous media interven tions, 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-indigen ous 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 Obom sawin (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 best known 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 pub lic 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. T he screen metaphor also applies to global ization 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 par ticular. 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, saw mills are closed in British Columbia and auto motive 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 pro mote 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 meet ing in another city and to return home in time for dinner. Frequent email or text messaging connects friends and colleagues in remote loca tions, minimizing the implications of their actual separation. Since the end of World War II, globalization has prompted a new layer of international gov ernance 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 South east Asian Nations (ASEAN), the African Union, the Group of Seven, the Latin American Integra tion Association (LAIA), the European Union, and many others. T he flip side of this international cooper ation 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). Global ization means that national governments no longer enjoy uncontested sovereignty within their own borders. This has significant policy implications when issues such as Canadian- content regulations, subsidization of cultural production, enforcement of online hate-speech laws, or enforcement of copyright laws are raised. Countries can choose to ignore inter national law—something of which China has been accused with respect to international copy right agreements—or they can exert their pol itical and economic might to derail legislation. T he United States uses this latter tactic with any country’s attempt to protect its domestic f ilm industry against Hollywood’s dominance of commercial theatre screens. 11 Globalization | 281 11.3 Second Thoughts about Globalization The governments of some countries are having second thoughts about the increased interdepend ency that globalization portends. The United King dom, 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 presi dent Donald Trump has adopted an America First foreign policy, prioritizing the country’s own pol itical 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 par ticular, have been criticized for their refusal to see climate change as a global crisis (see The Guardian, 2018). In Canada, the federal government has pro posed 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). T he 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 mes saging, social media, or so on. Second, they are the media of governance, enabling the central ized 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 regu lar 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 busi ness in and of themselves, conducting trade in information and entertainment products. Taken together, these roles alter fundamentally the geo graphical parameters within which we live our lives. While face-to-face interaction remains inte gral 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. Com munication technologies like the cellular tele phone and personal computer bind social spaces and enable people to maintain contact across dis tance, 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 nation state 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 gov ernance would be virtually impossible without modern communication and transportation technologies. T he scale on which governments and organiz ations function today can also, paradoxically, iso late 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 import ant political constituency or a viable market (see Castells, 1999, 2001). On a global scale, Murray 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 compan ies 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; Grey hound’s route between Winnipeg and Calgary, for instance, featured 46 stops in small communities (Lambert & Graveland, 2018). T he 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 judg ments, 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, Trademarks of Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited used under license. advertisements often seek to portray “typical” Canadians engaged in “normal” Canadian activ ities, 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. Con sider, too, the portrayal of the family in Canadian Tire commercials, the representation of Can adian males in Molson beer ads, or the gender roles assigned to men and women in commercials for any number of household cleaning products. Advertisements often seek to portray “typical” Canadians engaged in “nor mal” 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? Finally, the media have become a central constituent of globalization in what is called the information age or the network society. T his 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 cul tural products, such as books, magazines, DVDs, and music and video downloads. Instead of trad ing regionally or nationally, these goods and ser vices 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. T he economic role that the mass media play has considerable implica tions for how we define communi cation as commodity or as cultural form (see Chapters 2 and 9), for who gets to speak (on both the individ ual 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 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 com munication technologies for quite different purposes—perhaps to combat economic global ization 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 non- commercial media model that emphasizes “the promotion of public dialogue, the exchange of ideas, and the promotion of social action” (Skin ner, 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, Vancou ver 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 intensi f ication 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 twenti eth century as trade flows became increasingly concentrated; 20 countries accounted for 75 per cent of international trade in merchandise and f ifteen 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 hand ful of European news agencies—Havas, Reuters, Wolff—began to dominate global news coverage in the mid-nineteenth century, and the develop ment of the telegraph and submarine telegraph cables during those years meant that, for the f irst 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 Scandinav ian countries. Hollywood’s hegemony in the film world continues to the present day. Such developments have been criticized as instances of media imperialism—the exploit ation 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 palat ably as media globalization, concerns nevertheless remain that the mediasphere has come to be dom inated 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 Cen tury 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 qual ity of their productions, the power of their corpor ate 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 com piled 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 spend ing on media and entertainment was US$1.6 tril lion 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 Com pany, 2016: 8-9). The point is that the interdependence inher ent in globalization is rarely symmetrical. The decidedly uneven flow of information and enter tainment 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 popu lar music scene is somewhat more diverse, even if the bulk of music flows from transnational media companies based in the West, and particu larly 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 increas ing demands on CBC/Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster has had its parliamentary appropri ation reduced repeatedly since the early 1990s, 11 Globalization | 285 prompting a series of job cuts. The Liberal gov ernment 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 McChes ney, 1997: 52). In recent decades, for example, Can ada 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 execu tion of animation projects originally conceived in Los Angeles (Breen, 2005; Lent, 1998). T he large, transnational media companies are particularly interested in the world’s most afflu ent audiences because these audiences have the money to spend on advertised products and ser vices. 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. T hat 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 Bra zil’s domestic market, and their telenovela pro ductions are major exports (Hopewell, 2014). Canada, too, has begun to tap export mar kets in both the film and television industries, and it has quickly become a significant inter national video games producer (see ESAC, 2017). A renaissance in Canadian feature-film pro duction since the mid-1980s means that dir ectors 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 (Polytech nique, Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, Arrival, Blade- runner 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 f in du monde, The Death and Life of John F. Don ovan), 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 epi sodic, 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 communi cation 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, f ilms, 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 web sites, through social media, or their own YouTube channels. © 2017 JCardinal Productions Inc. & Sienna Cardinal Productions Inc. 286 | Part IV An Evolving Communication World The TV crime drama Cardinal, which is broadcast in French and English, has been sold to more than 100 international television markets. T hat said, it is still all about markets; to sus tain the production of a diverse array of cultural materials, content producers need to be compen sated. The corporate structuring of the media privileges the production and distribution of the most commercially viable products and ser vices. 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 threaten ing 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 T here 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. T heorists agree, first of all, that globalization is part of a long history of societal integration (dat ing 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 disagree ment among theorists, however, on whether globalization consti tutes 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 global ization as an economic phenom enon 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 econ omy 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, char acterized 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-econ omy 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, 11 Globalization | 287 access to resources, and access to investment cap ital and government support. The world system’s asymmetry, particu larly 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 imperial ism 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 annex ation for the purpose of formal political control,” Boyd-Barrett (1996: 174–84) maintains that cul tural 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. T he 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 short comings of the media imperialism thesis. Like media imperialism, Vincent Mosco (2009: 101–3) argues, the concept of cultural dependency cre ated homogeneous portraits of both the source and the target countries. It concentrated almost exclusively on the role of external forces and over looked “the contribution made by local forces and relations of production, including the Indigenous class structure.” Cultural dependency also por trayed 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 else where. 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 global ization remains an important issue for research ers 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, dis persed population, as well as its shared major ity 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 globaliza tion has transformed our sense of time and space, “disembedding” social relations from their local contexts and restructuring them across “indefin ite 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 rela tions between local and distant social forms and events become correspondingly ‘stretched’” (Gid dens, 1990: 64). This “stretching process” is what we mean by globalization. Departing from Wal lerstein’s exclusive focus on economics, Giddens provides a four-dimensional model of globaliza tion, 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 tech nologies 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, pla cing 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 pro cesses, so that the “space of flows” creates “a dis tributed 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 concen trated 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 net work society “a new economic geography of cen trality” in which certain global cities concentrate economic and political power and become “com mand 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 con straints 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, cap italism transforms itself” (2009: 157) by becom ing increasingly mobile and, following Castells, by clustering together certain communicative activities in “agglomeration” zones (169). One of the oldest and clearest examples of such spa tial 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 cos tume 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 com munication 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 tele vision (Carey, 1998: 28). Carey underscores the point here that this new media ecology requires a cultural level to complement its global infra structure; that is, an imagining and an articula tion 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 sub- national) boundaries are obsolete. They may be more porous, but the governments within those boundaries remain primarily responsible for creat ing the economic, political, and cultural conditions for globalization’s various activities. National gov ernments establish the supporting infrastructure, laws, policies, incentives, and the health, edu cation, and safety standards that businesses— including those in the cultural industries—require. Similarly, governments determine through policy measures what communication is for, and deter mine and protect the freedoms citizens enjoy in engaging in communication activities. Nation states 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 sys tem 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 hemi sphere 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 Com munications Order (NWICO), which sought com promise between the US advocacy of the free flow of information and the Global South desire for a balanced flow. T he free-flow doctrine met its stiffest oppos ition 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 free f low 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 Inter national Telecommunication Union—all included majorities of Global South countries and sympa thetic totalitarian states. T he 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 pol itical and economic power. Second, the economies of scale in information production and distribu tion 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 Com munication Order coalesced around the final report of the 16-member International Com mission for the Study of Communication Prob lems (the MacBride Commission), established by UNESCO in December 1977 (UNESCO, 1980). T he MacBride Commission advocated “free, open and balanced communications” and con cluded that “the utmost importance should be given to eliminating imbalances and disparities in communication and its structures, and particu larly 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. Free dom of information—and, more specifically, the right to seek, receive, and impart information— is a fundamental human right; indeed, a pre requisite for many others” (253). 290 | Part IV An Evolving Communication World The MacBride Commission pointed to an essential conflict between the commercializa tion and the democratization of communication and thus clearly favoured a movement for dem ocratization. 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 dem ocracy: “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 com municate” (265). From NWICO to WSIS T he MacBride Report proved to be a better mani festo 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 free dom, “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 indus tries, the United States and the United Kingdom pulled out of UNESCO in 1985, severely under mining the organization’s budget and making the recommended reforms impossible (34). Even Canada, which was one of the affluent industrial ized nations identified by the MacBride Com mission 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 inter national communications have been written in such treaties as CUSMA and the Treaty on Euro pean Union. The New World Information and Com munication Order, in other words, was almost immediately supplanted by what Herman and McChesney (1997: 35) call the “new global corpor ate 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 infor mation networks, the creation and expansion of cyberspace, issues pertaining to internet gov ernance, and the financing of digital activities (Masmoudi, 2012: 25). The International Tele communication 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 signifi cant 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 inter net access compared to 44.9 per cent of women. T here is a comparable gulf in penetration rates for mobile broadband subscriptions: 98 per cent in the developed world, 49 per cent in the develop ing world, and 22 per cent in the least-developed countries. Further, the cost of access to informa tion 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, communica tion 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.) T he 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 servi ces—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). T his dominance is enhanced by a general with drawal from international news coverage by most daily newspapers and national television networks. T he Geneva declaration expressed the desire to create an information society “where every one can create, access, utilize and share infor mation and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable develop ment and improving their quality of life” (WSIS, 2010). Sadly, though, as Robert Savio (2012: 237) argues, what has emerged instead is a “New Infor mation Market Order” character ized by corporate concentration and commercialization. © IMNATURE/iStockphoto. Appadurai argues that the world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination of social life; globalization comprises distinct processes rather than a coherent system. How could Appadurai’s five ’scapes appear in a crowded subway car? Changing Notions of Place A number of scholars have attrib uted to the communication media a significant role in how we imagine, define, understand, and experi ence place. The Canadian phil osopher Charles Taylor (2005: 23) refers to this as the “social imagin ary,” which he defines as “the 292 | Part IV An Evolving Communication World 11.4 The Digital Divide The digital divide refers to the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor; it can be measured on both a global scale (between the regions and countries of the world) and a national scale (between individuals based on where they live, their access to digital networks, and demographic characteristics like household income, education level, age, and sex). The existence of this divide is a clear reminder that not everyone, even in our own communities, enjoys the same access to digital communication technologies. Given the importance of information and connectivity in modern society, the digital divide represents a measure of inequality that can have a serious impact on quality of life. Jan A.G.M. van Dijk (2005: 15) captures the significance of the digital divide and at the same time explains why, as a negative feedback loop, it persists and worsens: 1. Categorical inequalities in society produce an unequal distribution of resources. 2. An unequal distribution of resources causes unequal access to digital technologies. 3. Unequal access to digital technologies also depends on the characteristics of these technologies. 4. Unequal access to digital technologies brings about unequal participation in society. 5. Unequal participation in society reinforces cat egorical inequalities and unequal distribution of resources. At stake here is full participation in, or exclu sion from, contemporary society. The digital divide also provides a measure of the economic health of nations and peoples. Van Dijk (2012: 196) describes four types of access to computer networks: motivation; material or physical access; digital skills; and usage. Motiv ation affects an individual’s decision “to purchase a computer and network connection, to learn the requisite skills, and to use the interesting applica tions” (197). Motivation can be influenced by a per son’s available time, by affordability, by need, and by a person’s inclination to learn and use the internet (198). Material or physical access refers to the afford ability and availability of computer hardware and network connections, whether in the home or in a public place. Van Dijk notes that the material access divide between haves and have-nots is decreasing in developed countries like Canada, but widening in developing countries (198–9). Digital skills are “the collection of skills needed to operate computers and the internet, to search and collect information in them, to communicate with them, and to use them for one’s own purposes” (2012: 199). Usage, finally, refers to the need, opportunity, obligation, time, and effort that govern whether those with other kinds of access actually use computer networking (201–2). Even if Canadians are among the best- connected people in the world, clear and persistent distinctions in internet usage remain, depending on income and educational levels, age, and community size. The most recent Canadian Internet Use Survey conducted by Statistics Canada in 2012 found that, overall, 83 per cent of Canadian households had internet access, up from 79 per cent in 2010. This ranged from a low of 77 per cent in New Brunswick to a high of 86 per cent in both Alberta and British Columbia. Among households with internet access, 97 per cent had a high-speed connection. Access figures ranged considerably based on income, however: 98 per cent of households with income of $94,000 or more had internet access, compared to 58 per cent of house holds with income of $30,000 or less. Similarly, only 28 per cent of Canadians 65 and over in the lowest income quartile used the internet, compared to 95 per cent aged 16 to 24 in the same income category (Statistics Canada, 2013). Internet Penetration Rates (Selected Countries) Country Iceland Norway Canada United States Russia Brazil China South Africa Chad Niger Penetration (percentage of population) 96.5 95.0 90.9 84.2 76.1 70.7 54.6 53.7 5.0 4.3 Eritrea 1.4 Source: Internet World Stats, 2013. 11 Globalization | 293 ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expect ations.” The widespread commercialization of cultural production, communication, and infor mation exchange, and the extent to which we rely on these media for our communicative activities, raise a number of questions about the relation ship between communication and culture. The perpetual flows of people, capital, goods, servi ces, and images that characterize globalization carry significant implications for how we experi ence and imagine place, how we define commun ity, and how we constitute identity. T he social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) argues that the world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination of social life, and he perceives globalization as comprising distinct processes rather than a coherent system. The imagination, for Appadu rai, is a “social practice,” and he proposes five “’scapes” that create fundamental “disjunctures” between economics, culture, and politics (1996: 31–3). The ethnoscape is the “landscape of per sons who constitute the shifting world in which we live.” Technoscapes are formed by the global configuration of technology. Finanscapes are “the disposition of global capital.” Mediascapes are “image-centered” and “narrative accounts of strips of reality.” Finally, ideascapes are “con catenations of images” that reflect dominant ideologies and counter-ideologies (33–6). These f ive ’scapes form the “building blocks” of our “imagined worlds; that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (1996: 33; see also Appadurai, 1990; Jones, 2010: 209–26). These contending ’scapes have profound implications for how we situate ourselves in the world, for how we relate to our own immediate community and other parts and peoples of the world. Doreen Massey (1991: 24) asks, “How, in the face of all this movement and intermixing, can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity?” Globalization has intensified struggles over the meaning of place. This is par ticularly the case in countries like Canada, whose citizens tend to be more familiar with cultural imports than with the ideas and expressions of their own artists and intellectuals. This strug gle also owes something to Canada’s policy of multiculturalism, as Canada—urban Canada, especially—becomes a mixing ground for peoples of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and traditions. Benedict Anderson defined the nation as “an imagined political community” and depicted eighteenth-century newspapers and novels as implicated in the projects of nation- building and nationalism. The nation, he wrote, “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their commun ion” (Anderson, 1983: 15). In a similar vein, John Hartley maintains that publics are created by institutions and dis courses, arguing that “the media are simultan eously creative and participatory. They create a picture of the public, but it goes live, as it were, only when people participate in its creation, not least by turning themselves into the audience” (Hartley, 1992: 4). Audiences, thereby, are “dis cursive productions” (Hartley, 1996: 67). But Hartley points out that media can exclude as well as include, creating divisions between those who belong and those who don’t. Communities, that is, are largely defined by their distinction from other communities and by specific membership criteria. For example, the news, Hartley argues, is organized around strategies of inclusion and exclusion from our community, creating domains of Wedom and Theydom, dividing people into “us” and “them” (Hartley, 1992: 207). As noted above, the various flows we asso ciate with globalization are not new. What globalization has done, however, has been both to increase the traffic—human, material, electronic—across some borders and to recon figure others (see Box 11.5). This heightened 294 | Part IV An Evolving Communication World permeability of borders has been met, among some, by the desire for a more rooted, or more secure, sense of place. Places, and the experien ces we associate with places, both as individuals and as members of a group, inform memory and our sense of belonging. This sense of belong ing is critical to understanding the relationship between identity and a particular locale (Rose, 1995). We might, therefore, detect a very differ ent sense of belonging between native residents of a place and migrants. Migrants such as refu gees and exiles, who have not moved of their own free will, may feel little sense of belonging to their new place of residence. Culture is another means by which identities of place are constructed and sustained. Stuart Hall argues that we tend to imagine cultures as “placed” in two ways. First, we associate place with a specific location where social relation ships have developed over time. Second, place “establishes symbolic boundaries around a cul ture, marking off those who belong from those who do not” (Hall, 1995: 177–86). At the same time, Hall explains, “There is a strong tendency to ‘landscape’ cultural identities, to give them an imagined place or ‘home’, whose characteristics echo or mirror the characteristics of the identity in question.” 11.5 The Age of Migration The movement of people, both across and within national borders, has been one of the most visible features of globalization in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller have dubbed this period “the age of migration,” situating the phenomenon within the larger context of globalization. “Migra tions are not isolated phenomena: movements of commodities, capital and ideas almost always give rise to movements of people, and vice versa” (Castles et al., 2014: 7). The United Nations put the number of inter national migrants worldwide in 2017 at 258 mil lion; if this figure includes those who immigrate for work or family reasons, it also includes 25.9 mil lion asylum seekers and refugees fleeing war (e.g., from Syria or South Sudan), political turmoil (e.g., the Democratic Republic of Congo) or some form of persecution (e.g., the flight of Rohingya from Myan mar into Bangladesh). The vast majority of asylum seekers and refugees (82.5%) are being hosted by developing countries (United Nations, 2017: 4-8). The UN Refugee Agency reported 68.5 mil lion displaced people worldwide (those forced to migrate, both within and across borders) by the end of 2017, setting a new high for the fifth straight year (UNHCR, 2018). More than half of them (53%) were children. Of the total, 40 million were internally displaced, 25.4 million were refugees (defined as people forced from their homeland), and 3.1 million were asylum seekers (defined as those claiming refugee status, but whose cases await evaluation). Two-thirds of the refugees came from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia. Canada describes itself as a country of immi grants, meaning “most of its people originated from another country and moved to Canada in their generation or in previous generations” (Li, 2003: 9). Canada has a long history of immigration; only its 1.7 million indigenous peoples can truly claim not to be immigrants. Immigration, from Europe, was a central plank of Canada’s National Policy in the late nineteenth century, in recognition of the need to populate the West’s agricultural regions, build a national economy, and ward off feared annexation by the United States. And immigra tion has continued to be a central part of federal government policy to the present day (Li, 2003: 14–37). As we have noted, almost 22 per cent of Canadians are immigrants who report more than 250 ethnic origins or ancestries (Statistics Can ada, 2016, 2017). As with other aspects of globalization, migra tion can be welcomed by some— migrants’ fam ilies, humanitarian relief agencies, businesses in need of workers—and opposed by others—those with concerns, legitimate or otherwise, over the social and cultural integration of migrants into the host society. 11 Globalization | 295 The widespread migration of peoples so prevalent in our time brings together people with very different roots, histories, traditions, and values. In some instances these differences are embraced. But at other times they can be perceived as threatening to our sense of com munity, of place, of culture, of identity. If much of our engagement with our community takes place through the media, and our understand ings of Canadian histories, traditions, and val ues come not only from news reports but from music, film, television, and printed sources (e.g., books, magazines), then it is through media that we often first meet those who are different from ourselves, and where our understandings of those people originate. If one impact of globalization has been to call into question the notion of “place” as the basis for identity or culture, postmodernism and improved networks of transportation and communication facilitate the imagination of communities based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, and so on. Prox imity, in other words, is not a necessary element of identity formation. If culture and identity are not confined to a particular place, it follows that SUMMARY any one place is not confined to a single culture or identity—hence the Quebec conundrum of interculturalism and of its being a distinct soci ety. This issue of identity formation has precipi tated localized struggles over immigration and language as well as over urban development, architecture, and foreign investment. T he conventional container of identity and culture that has come under greatest challenge from the reimagining of community prompted by globalization has been the nation-state. Questions of citizenship and questions of iden tity have been increasingly dissociated (Morley and Robins, 1995: 19). We should not overreact to these changes, however. Canadians still have democratically elected national, provincial, and municipal governments, which, as we discussed in Chapters 7 and 8, continue to pass laws and pursue policies that form the basic framework within which media organizations operate in Canada. No media industry is untouched by them. Globalization alters the context in which mass communication takes place, but local conditions of cultural production remain both pertinent and central to the ways in which it is undertaken. We hear the term globalization used all the time, such that we can be unclear about its precise meaning and unaware of the implications this has on our lives, and particularly on how we communicate. This chapter began with an extended definition of globalization and showed how it is not simply an eco nomic phenomenon but an intensification of social rela tions across time and space that touches every aspect of our lives, from how we shop to what we see on our television and computer screens. We then outlined four roles the communication media play in the globalization process: as media of encounter; as media of govern ance; as media situating us within the world; and as globalized businesses in and of themselves. We sub sequently reviewed the predominant theories to explain international communication flows and their implica tions, beginning with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory, touching briefly on media imperialism and cultural dependency, and concluding with Manuel Castells’s notion of the network society and Vincent Mosco’s discussion of spatialization. On this conceptual groundwork, we traced the his tory of international communication exchanges, con centrating particularly on the period from the 1940s to the present. We discussed the doctrine of free flow promoted by the United States, and then we explained 296 | Part IV An Evolving Communication World the rise, and subsequent downfall, of the New World Information and Communication Order, whose propon ents sought to alleviate communication imbalances between national communities in the 1970s and to promote the “right to communicate” as a fundamen tal human right. Instead, the period from the 1980s onward has been characterized by further trade liberal ization and the reinforcement of the commercial view of communication as commodity exchange. We sum marized briefly the 2003 and 2005 conferences of the KEY TERMS World Summit on the Information Society as the latest coordinated efforts to democratize communication on a global scale. We concluded the chapter with a discussion of the impact of globalization on how we think about place, community, and identity, given the importance of communication and cultural exchange to our sense of belonging, and we expanded on Castells’s ideas about the new forms of sociability and the new global geography that characterize our time. Canada–US–Mexico Agreement, p. 275 cultural dependency, p. 287 information flows, p. 288 media geography, p. 275 media imperialism, p. 283 mediascape, p. 293 mobility, p. 275 RELATED WEBSITES network society, p. 282 proximity, p. 281 sovereignty, p. 280 spatialization, p. 288 world systems theory, p. 286 World Trade Organization, p. 275 European Union: europa.eu/index_en.htm The official site of the European Union includes an insti tutional overview, regular news dispatches, and official reports. International Telecommunication Union: www.itu.int/ The ITU is an international organization through which governments and private corporations coordinate tele communications networks and services. UNESCO: www.unesco.org/ The principal objective of the United Nations Edu cational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is to contribute to global peace and security by promoting FURTHER READINGS international collaboration through education, science, culture, and communication. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS): www. itu.int/wsis/index.html Taking the form of two international conferences, WSIS is a coordinated effort to democratize the institutions of mass communication and to eradicate communicative inequalities between peov