ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the vexed question of the relationships between mediatization and globalization. The charge of media-centrism hangs heavy over accounts of the ways in which different communication media inflect and influence social life. To suggest that an approach is media-centric questions its empirical worth when used as a way to describe and evaluate the independent (or sometimes conjoint) influence of media on social outcomes. Early theories of globalization pronounced continuity and correspondence between post-Enlightenment modernity and late twentieth century globality, with a strong, indeed systemic, impetus to homogenization and convergence. The digital communication as a form of connectivity is privileged as the lens through which emergent globalities can be conceptualized and observed. The chapter examines a tranche of more empirically grounded arguments that dispute, and sometimes modify the claim that new communications technology is the real driver of information-based globalization.