One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Media, States, and the Global Dimension

Increasing levels of global economic integration, and the increased international mobility of some social groups, have not been accompanied by identical developments in symbolic interaction, at least outside the directly economic sphere. We can identify three trends which have contradictory consequences for the relationship between national states and the global circulation of commodities. The first of these, particularly important in entertainment media, is the increasing domination of commercial forces over cultural production. While this does produce tendencies towards global trading of cultural commodities, it also increases the importance of the international enforcement of intellectual property rules. These latter are governed by laws and courts that are determined by national states, within a framework of treaties to which the contracting parties are national states, and whose judgements are enforced (or not) by national states. The second trend is a growing emphasis in international news towards the establishment of international television broadcasters, almost all of which are more or less direct extensions of national states: today CNN looks an exception in a world populated by the BBC (financed by the British state), Russia Today (financed by the Russian state), Press TV (financed by the Iranian state), Al Jazeera (financed by the Qatari state), CCTV News and China Xinhua News Network Corporation (financed by the Chinese state) and so on. The third trend, the rise of new media, is more complex and contradictory. There are clear ways in which these developments represent a challenge to the national state, compared to earlier technologies like satellite transmission, which states have proved able to manage without too much trouble. On the other hand, the both the potential of the technologies for the construction of an `electronic panopticon’ and the actual patterns of usage and preferences, suggest that claims for their corrosive effect on state power are exaggerated. This paper provides a sketch of a theoretical framework that can account for these contradictory tendencies.