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DOI: 10.1177/17427665070030030104
2007 3: 260 Global Media and Communication
Divina Frau-Meigs
Cultural diversity and global media studies

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Cultural diversity and global media studies
Divina Frau-Meigs
University of Sorbonne, Paris, France
Divina.Frau-Meigs@univ-paris3.fr
Media studies are under pressure to internationalize because the area of
media itself is subject to massive transformations due to ICT changes,
population fluxes and power struggles. Under the pressure of cultural
studies and anthropology, the recent tendency has been to place culture,
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especially via diasporas and hybrid identities, at the centre of interna-
tional media studies. In this context, the issue of cultural diversity is a
good entry to examine the new ways media studies can and could
internationalize because it also places culture at the crux of the debates,
but with added political, legal and economic dimensions.
Since the 1970s, three crises or moments of intense international
controversy and negotiation have shaken the world system of media
control: the New World Information and Communication Order
(NWICO, 1980), the Cultural Exception Debate (GATS, 1993), and
finally Cultural Diversity (UNESCO Convention, 2005 and WSIS, 2005).
They all share the notion of cultural diversity as a core value or a sore
value (according to the point of view considered). The evolution of these
three crises shows that the old system of legal control by national
governments has subsided under the shock of ICT-driven globalization.
A new system of transnational governance or co-regulation has emerged,
trying to solve problems by convening a variety of actors (state and non-
state) around the resolution of a specific issue. The most recent of the
media crises, with its two strands (the Cultural Diversity Convention
and action line C8 of WSIS), shows clearly the ascendancy of this new
system over the world order. But this new order of governance is hardly
understood and its relation to the old one needs to be clarified.
Cultural diversity is the litmus test of this transition phase between
government and governance, as internationally binding instruments like
treaties, arguably obsolete, evolve together with multi-partnership
platforms. The stakes are not only the meaning of national sovereignty
or state control but also the organization of a field that recombines old
and new actors and networks with transnational policies and post-
national rights. The tension between the two contains a definite risk of
the bifurcation of political cultures as co-regulation vies with regulation
(state) and self-regulation (industry). There is also a risk of the bifurca-
tion of media models as information providers (industry) vie with public
services (state) and free and open uses (civil society).
Where is the locus of control of the media? There are two sets of
contradictory interests at work: the US and the corporate world on one
side, other interests (European, Canadian, developing countries and civil
society entities) on the other side. In this power struggle, one side stands
to win, the other to lose. However, closer analysis shows that the
dividing lines are not that clear. In the case of the cultural diversity
treaty, the US lost the rhetorical battle, but maybe not the economic
one. Conversely the European Union won the rhetorical battle but not
necessarily the commercial one.
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The temptation of some researchers is to apply a political linear
perspective on the issue, reinforcing a nationalist reading and mini-
mizing the transnationalist changes. Such is the fate of globalization of
media as seen by French researchers like Alain Touraine or Armand
Mattelart. They consider it as an economic means for corporations to
continue doing business as usual and maintain their power. This
perspective, important as it is, only partly encompasses the breadth of
the issue. New notions have entered the field, like the idea of the
network society (Manuel Castells), the idea of flows (Arjun Appadurai),
not to mention post-colonial and post-feminist views on identity
formation and deconstruction. There seems to be the need for a
cosmopolitical perspective as Ulrich Beck would say in his distinction
between globalization and globalism, globalization being a reticular,
process-oriented multipolar approach.
Such a perspective makes it possible to consider the new actors, the
new networks and the new political strategies beyond the frontiers of
traditional states and nations. The policies and strategies used by
different countries or regions of the world as regards media and ICTs
bring to the fore the different interpretations of cultural diversity that
co-exist today: a shift toward an economy of culture (Europe and Asia); a
form of indigenous expression (Africa and the Arab world); and a tool
for sustainable development and peace (Latin America). The instrumen-
talization of media and ICTs appears as subject to different temporalities,
power dynamics and forms of embedded uses, despite the pressure of
globalization and convergence.
Global media studies should take advantage of the notions proposed
by other fields of research like political sciences (with its special focus on
post-colonial and post-communist transformations), anthropology (with
its focus on population movements and diasporas), or even urban
studies (with its focus on networks and infrastructures). Ultimately it
seems that the approaches by Giddens, Appadurai and Castells are too
optimistic and celebratory of dynamic transnational cultures, whereas
those by Mattelart and Touraine are too pessimistic and bound to
alienation due to circulation and flux. Interesting as they are, these
perspectives do not place media, communication and information per se
at the basis of their analysis. They relate culture to spatial relationships,
immigration fluxes and identity, not to specifically communicative
processes in a transnational dimension.
What can media studies contribute? They can contribute a double
focus, both at national level and at transnational level. Researchers in
the field of information and communication sciences which for me, as
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for many French people, is wider and more encompassing than media
studies are ideally placed to use a multidisciplinary approach and
claim that space as an investigative territory. They need to focus the
locus of media control on the specificity of the information-
communication paradigm around notions of representation and
reception, taking into account the production of semiotic resources
(sound, image, script, etc.) and its regulation.
These notions appear in the cultural diversity debate, dominated as
it is by questions of national sovereignty and independence, ownership
and control, personal identity and community participation. These
notions need to be analysed in the light of the tension between
government and governance, as it is partly fuelled by the fight for media
control. New international actors have emerged, like NGOs and dynamic
partnerships, global corporate alliances, lobbying coalitions and
alliances mobilized both online and off-line. These new actors offer a
variety of perspectives on the conduct of foreign policy focused on the
control of access and production of cultural industries (and, increasingly,
knowledge industries). They stand for the various publics involved in
the process (national, transnational, indigenous, diasporic, etc.). Some of
them are concerned by the implications of international economic
integration for global governance in the audiovisual and ICT sectors and
their impact on the representation of their values and contents.
Beyond these specific notions, information and communication
sciences can also contribute to a better understanding of the cos-
mopolitical processes that are at work in mediation by the media. There
is the need to elaborate a complex understanding of how our cognitive
and semiotic resources have elaborated media representations,
receptions and regulations within a given culture. In this dynamic
systemic perspective, the locus of media control places representation
and reception in an open-ended process of distributed intelligence and
exchange with the environment. Plasticity, portability, responsiveness,
connectivity such are the new keywords attached to these cognitive
advances. They have been associated with forms of mediation
characterized by virtuality, disembeddedness and disembodiment, with
online/off-line circulation and reception that shift perceptions of reality,
community and identity, as Don Slater and others would say.
In this phase of cosmopolitical transition, there is a strange bi-
stability that takes place, in terms of representation and reception, as
much as in terms of government and governance. In physics, bi-stability
is an attribute of certain optical devices where two resonant transmis-
sion states are possible and stable, dependent on the input (Wikipedia).
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In media, the current socio-cognitive configuration is characterized by
the bi-stability of two types of communication means in relation to the
environment and reality: Eye-Nature and Brain-Information, in Gilles
Deleuzes terms. The first relation refers to representation as analogical
and mimetic (audiovisual communication), with the sense that history
is an irreversible experience, that social relations are objective and the
result of the presence of the other, and that government is located in the
nation-state. The second relation refers to representation as digital and
poietic (computer information), with the sense that temporality (if not
history) is reversible, that social relations can be made of multiple,
temporary, non-territorial, long-distance loyalties, in co-presence with
the other, and that governance transcends the nation state. The new
communications means, around information networks, have permitted
new means of symbolic negotiation with reality and its politics. These
do not eliminate past ones, they are superimposed on to them (though
Deleuze sees the latter as progressively eliminating the former).
Globalization via media is none other than the result of these two
resonant transmission states in contact, in relative dependence, where
they are in mutual dynamics and change each other.
In cultural diversity, this bi-stability is played out in the defence of
the cultural industries of audiovisual and cinematographic represen-
tation (Eye-Nature) and the emerging need to monitor the internet
strands of representation and the emerging knowledge-industries (Brain-
Information). The defence of analogical representation is resonant with
notions of history, memory, patrimony and identity so important to the
cultural exception debate in GATS. The need to monitor digital networks
is resonant with notions of multiple loyalties and diffracted identities, so
present in WSIS (especially through civil society entities). Such bi-
stability modifies the lens with which we should analyse globalization,
away from the dialectics between the global and the local, that prevent
us from embracing a more systemic view, towards what I call a logic of
situations, context-specific and focused on figuring out the right scale
for interaction and sustainability, where connectedness (more than
connectivity) can become a shared, common purpose of universal value.
This bi-stability is an additive process that is especially visible in the
sphere of media reception. The public of the Eye-Nature relation is a
public of citizens and consumers; the public of the Brain-Information
relation is a public of players and designers. The same person can be any
of these personas in his/her own experience, as is visible in newly-coined
words like spectactor or avastar whose hybrid nature tries to connote
the multimodality of use. I follow Michel Foucault in this, who thought
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that the object of study is constructed from singular practices and their
connection to the discourse that conforms them. It is a process in which
the individuals take charge of the discourse they use and build the
mental space that allows them to participate in culture. In that sense
they cant escape the socio-cognitive space in which they evolve. Bi-
stability is thus achieved, performed by the users themselves. In cultural
diversity, it redefines the notion of culture, not to be comprehended any
more (if it ever was) as an organic and bounded relationship to others,
but as a distributed, multi-modal and highly mediated process. Cultural
diversity takes place in the shaping of both online and off-line social
relationships.
This bi-stability accounts for the new transfrontier spatiality and
temporality of governance, in co-presence with the old geography and
history of government. It also accounts for a sense of dispersion in the
locus of media control: it can be reticular and immaterial, with other
forms of power besides the nation state, whose capacities for resistance
are yet quite present and not to be underestimated. Maintaining a
national perspective makes it possible to take into account the pressure
of infrastructures and economics on the individual, whose capacity for
empowerment by singular practices is thus constrained. To forms of
mediation such as disembodiment and disembeddedness, one must add
the dematerialization and disintermediation of economic relations and
flows. The political economy of such processes and its powerful regu-
latory forces (that are not all nation-based) needs to be re-injected in the
analysis. Access, ICT and media skills and competence, the material and
symbolic power that enables participation, all structure the forms of
sociability that are possible and the cultural diversity that follows.
Hence the necessity, in this logics of situations, to analyse accul-
turation phenomena in the material conditions of their production,
keeping in mind the attendant mental space they generate. Two levels of
interaction need to be considered, as suggested by Gavriel Salomon: 1st-
order interaction (international media affect national culture) and 2nd-
order interaction (national and international media are affected in
return). Their combined analysis then shows the reality of dissymmetric
power relations, in its context-specificity and conditions of media use.
They preserve the researcher from the naive thought that flows and
diasporas are subversive and capable of transforming national power
structures on their own.
Acculturation is thus tightly connected to cultural diversity as it
examines what happens when two or more cultures are in contact. The
action of gate-keepers in acculturation then needs to be monitored as
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such filters are key to the evolution of cosmopolitical processes. Some
are technological (search engines, rating systems, etc.); some are human
(buyers, corporate managers, translators, web moderators, etc.); some are
legal and institutional (IP rights, treaties, recommendations, etc.). The
action of these filters is intensified by information capacity and social
connectivity as social software (emails, weblogs, wikis, etc.) and tools
that can connect several collective intelligence pools (knowledge
networks, free software communities, etc.) expand and interrelate on the
web (databases, webfiles, semantic search, etc.). These filters of cosmopo-
litical processes should place cultural diversity and acculturation at the
centre of international media studies. Such studies need to monitor
these evolutions to propose scenarios for the future, to identify the new
seats of power in the 21st century, as well as the new nodes of resistance,
in this phase of cosmopolitical transition.
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