Contra-Flow in Global Media: An Asian Perspective

The focus of this paper is on the global flows and contra-flows of visual media, mainly television and film as, despite the exponential growth of the Internet in the last decade, it was being used only by about 15 per cent of the world’s population in 2006, while television and film had a much larger audience base. The paper proposes a typology to divide the main media flows into three broad categories: global, transnational and geo-cultural. It then goes on to examine what it terms as the “dominant flows”, largely emanating from the global North, with the United States at its core; followed by contra-flows, originating from the erstwhile peripheries of global media industries—designated “subaltern flows”. While celebrating the global circulation of media products from a wider range of hubs of creative and cultural industries, the paper emphasises the disparities in the volume and economic value of such flows in comparison to the dominant ones and cautions against the tendency to valourise the rise of non-Western media, arguing that they may reflect a re-figuring of hegemony in more complex ways.