Global media and national policies: the return of the state

There has been a conventional wisdom in contemporary media studies that views the phenomenon of globalisation (economic, political, technological and cultural) as a process that diminishes the role of the nation-state. Extrapolating from the observation that each generation of media technologies has enabled more rapid transmission of messages from one place to another, and that the scale of technologies such as those associated with communication satellites and digital networks is global, it has been claimed that forces associated with globalisation weaken the capacity of nation-states to regulate media institutions and media content. These debates have become even more prominent in the twenty-first century with the shift towards convergent digital media, the associated rise of user-created content, multi-platform content distribution and moves away from the mass communications paradigm that dominated twentieth century media policy. Globalisation and the digital turn are often seen as being interconnected: the rise of the global Internet, the new focus on 'networked individualism' and participatory media, and the rise of hybrid and diasporic identities, are all seen as undermining both the mass communication media paradigm and nationally based media. As such, national media policies are seen as being either technologically redundant or symptomatic of what Ulrich Beck (2007, p. 286) termed 'methodological nationalism', which 'subsumes society under the nation-state'. By contrast, new media studies is seen as inherently global in its scope and focus, aligned to newer, more cosmopolitan paradigms of social theory, which highlight global flows of ideas, capital, media, technology and people (Appadurai, 1 9 9 0), rather than the 'statecentric trilogy' (Taylor, 1996) of national societies, national economies and the politics of nation-states