Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over the past few decades the relationship between media and nationalism has rapidly developed from a rather marginal topic to one of the most prominent issues in the field of media and communication studies. Developments in communication technology, especially the introduction of satellite television and the World Wide Web, have fueled hopes about the gradual weakening of nation-states and national attachments and the creation of an interconnected worldwide community. Yet nation-states, nations, and nationalisms are alive and well despite – and perhaps because of – the dense communication flows circumventing national borders and challenging the national order of things both from above and from below. As with many other social scientists, media and communication scholars have proved to be ill-equipped to account for the proliferation of overt nationalist sentiments after the end of the Cold War, and more specifically for the role of media and communications in these changes. Tacitly accepting the main assumptions of the modernist vision of the world, they have long been accustomed to an understanding of modern society inside which nations and nationalisms were only marginal phenomena, bound to dissipate with the advancement of modernization and globalization. By and large, communication was seen as a crucial means of attaining higher levels of development and social integration, ... log in or subscribe to read full text