Blackwell Reference Online

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While in everyday language “globalization” usually refers to economic and political integration on a world scale, it also has a crucial cultural dimension in which the media have a central role. Indeed, in sociology and other disciplines that focus on the media, the concept of globalization has had to be adopted so as to take account of a new reality in which global institutions, especially the media, impact upon the structures and processes of the nation-state, including its national culture. In that sense, media globalization is about how most national media systems have become more internationalized, becoming more open to outside influences, both in their content and in their ownership and control. This is a cultural phenomenon, one with implications for our contemporary sense of identity, but it is closely linked also to the economic and political factors driving globalization, notably the deregulation of national markets and the liberalization of trade and investment, which in turn facilitate the inroads of global corporations. The corporations which characterize global capitalism today are privately owned institutions with their origins in large nationally based companies that were the “transnational corporations” of the 1960s and 1970s, and which since have globalized themselves. That is, they have become more complexly interpenetrated with other companies, and more decentralized ... log in or subscribe to read full text