ABSTRACT
Despite its extraordinary expansion as a field within higher education, media studies still remains a largely nationally bound and inward-looking area of academic enquiry. For an outsider to the field – in more ways than one – with a PhD in International Relations and experience of journalism and teaching and researching international aspects of media for nearly two decades, I would argue that such parochialism untenable in the age of globally mediated connectivity. Emerging at the fringes of university life and therefore sometimes denied
the status it deserved, media studies has often struggled to be taken seriously, partly because of this parochialism. Whatever the status of media studies within academe, though, there is little debate about the primacy of media in contemporary societies. Mass media, therefore, are an important arena for research in our media-saturated lives: they might influence in varied ways – cognitively, behaviourally, emotionally – the way we think about the world, socialize, vote in an election or go to war. Why Study the Media?, Roger Silverstone asked in his well-known book, and answered that it was ‘because the media are central to our everyday lives that we must study them. Study them as social and cultural as well as economic and political dimensions of the modern world. Study them in their ubiquity and complexity. Study them as contributors to our variable capacity to make sense of the world, to make and share its meanings’ (Silverstone, 1999: 2). This formidable media power has been globalized in the era of multimedia
conglomerates, deregulated and privatized communication systems (hard and software) and massive technological advances (Thussu, 2006; Thussu, 2007a; Arsenault and Castells, 2008). With the globalization of media and communication, media technologies and industries have created a culture in which people all over the world can watch and share experiences of media events, from sports and entertainment to war and humanitarian disasters, and, through advertisements, become consumers of free-market capitalism. This book aims to contribute to the continuing debate in international
communication studies on the imperative to broaden the discourse on the globalization of media and communication, going beyond what historian Niall Ferguson has called ‘Angloblization’. The contributors to the book suggest
that there is a pressing need for innovative research methodologies that fully take account of regional and national specificities, as well as the pedagogic necessities warranted by the growing internationalization of students and researchers and the unprecedented growth of media in the non-Western world, notably in such large Asian countries as China and India. Rather than ‘globalizing media studies’, the book is called ‘internationalizing
media studies’, indicating the continuing importance of the nation state in the contemporary media world. Despite exaggerated and premature obituaries of the nation state, it is fair to say that it is alive and well and more active today than it has ever been – whether it is invading Iraq or passing new international treaties or conventions or bailing out the corporate excesses of crony or casino capitalism, as evidenced in 2008. The nation states continue to be crucial in the study of media, though transnational networks are emerging that challenge and, in some cases, even subvert the nation state, particularly the weaker ones. From its inception in Anglo-American academia nearly half a century ago,
media studies has grown and matured as an academic field. The study of media has long been central to courses in communication studies in the US, with its various variants – from health, development, intercultural, political, international, global and participatory – to the more ‘culturalist’ approaches, associated with the European tradition of research. In much of the rest of the world, the dominant paradigm, emanating from the elite US media and communication studies departments, has been adopted or at least adapted. However, as media studies has expanded, it has included first feminist and, later, multicultural perspectives in its research agendas.
