ABSTRACT
How is media research to be conducted in a globalized world? Are new paradigms and methodologies needed when the nation state is no longer an unproblematic measure of everything, or a presupposed conceptual frame, in a world where global interdependencies and transborder exchanges are supposedly more significant than structures and processes contained within national borders? The geopolitical and geo-cultural consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union in conjunction with the ICT revolution have changed the terms of everything ‘international’ and raised academic concerns about ‘space’ in general. Not only media systems, but also political and economic systems generally, are in flux in the new millennium. There is an often-noted new instability in the world after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the crackdown in Beijing in 1989 and, not least, after 9/11 in 2001. Media studies shares with sociology and political science difficulties in coming to grips with the realities of a transnationalized and transforming world. One explanation is a certain, lingering ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2002), implying that the nation state still provides the presupposed and mostly implicit conceptual frame, even when the focus is on phenomena beyond the nation state. Considerable thinking is called for and much is also going on, not least in the field of globalization studies, with its notorious problematization of all kinds of borders, including disciplinary ones. For many decades, media and communication studies have contributed substantially to our general knowledge of international conditions and processes. There may be a problem with the older disciplines, from which communication research originated, in that they have not incorporated this body of knowledge into their own thinking, modern media and modern media studies now often being a white spot (in sociology, political science, literary theory, etc.). This may also explain what seems to be a diminishing inflow into media studies from its ‘founding’ disciplines. It should be remembered that a series of original, path-breaking thinkers in our field came from outside media and communication studies: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Raymond Williams and many others. On the other side of the North Atlantic, we find many other scholars coming from the ‘outside’ and producing modern classics in our field – from Robert Park and Paul Lazarsfeld to Herbert Schiller.3
