Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Richard Collins

Description

An integrated analysis of the central issues in contemporary media policy. Chapters focus on technological change and its impact on cultural and political identities, the role of the cultural industries in the 'New Economy' and the impact of European integration on national institutions - public service broadcasting in particular. Because technological change in broadcasting has enabled us to open up media markets, the shape of media and of society has become more internationally-oriented. Indeed, modern international media has bought into question the very legitimacy of national communities and ideologies. And this is a phenomenon whose greatest impact has been in Europe. These studies address the future of public service broadcasting and the power of national regulators to shape trans-national media relationships. The author takes an empirical approach to analysis of these issues, exploring media and communication studies very much as a social science.

Sujets

• Mathematical
• Earth Sciences
• Sciences et techniques
• Earth science
• Geography
• Computational
• General officer
• Physics
• Media studies
• General
• Science
• Media
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841508665
• Langue: English

Extrait

Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe
Consequences of Global Convergence
Richard Collins
First Published in Great Britain in Paperback in 2002 by
Intellect Books ,PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in USA in 2002 by
Intellect Books , ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2002 Richard Collins
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Copy Editor: Peter Young Cover Design: Luke Collins Typesetting: Macstyle Ltd , Scarborough, N. Yorkshire

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-866-7 / ISBN 1-84150-044-5
Contents
1 Introduction
Europe
2 Challenges and Opportunities. Broadcasting in Multi-national States
3 Television, Identity and Citizenship in the European Union
4 Locked in a Mortal Embrace. The European Union Audiovisual Policies of the UK and France
Public Service Broadcasting
5 Public Service Broadcasting and Freedom
6 Two Types of Freedom. Broadcasting Organisation and Policy on both sides of the Atlantic
7 Public Service and the Media Economy. European Trends in the late 1990s
8 Supper with the Devil. A case study in public/private collaboration in broadcasting. The genesis of Eurosport
Policy and Regulation
9 Cultural Development in an Open Economy. Trading in Culture: the role of Language
10 Paradigm Regained? Where to in Media and Communications Regulation
11 Back to the Future. Digital Television and Convergence in the UK
Bibliography
The Author
Richard Collins, is Professor of Media Studies at the Open University. Formerly, he was Deputy Director and Head of Education at the British Film Institute. He has worked as a teacher and researcher in leading departments of media and communication studies: notably at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), Goldsmiths College University of London and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His tenure of fellowships in Australia, Canada, South Africa and the USA, his experiences as research director of the media and communications programme at one of the UK s leading think tanks, the Institute for Public Policy Studies (IPPR), and as advisor on broadcasting and convergence issues to Don Cruickshank, when he was Director General of Telecommunications at Oftel, give these essays strongly international and practical policy perspectives.
Richard Collins books include: Culture Communication And National Identity: The Case Of Canadian Television . (1990b) University of Toronto Press. Toronto. p. 388. (Nominated for the Smiley Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association 1991, reprinted 1994). New Media, New Policies . [With Cristina Murroni]. (1996) Polity Press. Cambridge. p. 243. From Satellite to Single Market: The Europeanisation Of Television 1982-1992 . (1998) LSE Books/Routledge. London. pp. xiv and 297.
1 Introduction
The social sciences have never given the media so much attention. In geography, sociology, economics, social psychology and in political science the media are increasingly taken as an object for study, not least because globalisation is conditional upon communication between locations, identities, trading partners and communities that were hitherto separate. By definition, if people and places are connected - as is axiomatic in globalisation - they are communicating. And if they are not communicating, they are not connected. Formerly, communication was slow, expensive and of limited practicability. New technologies have changed all this. To take two convenient examples: satellite communication has abolished the customary interdependence between cost and distance in communication; and the Internet is paradigmatic of both the convergence of hitherto distinct media and, increasingly, of the decoupling of duration and price of communication.
This is not to assert that location is unimportant and that everything and everyone is globalised, or to deny the robust continuing existence of the recognisably distinct and different media of radio, television, film, book and newspaper publishing, etc. But their importance has declined. Less and less does location define the limits of markets and possibilities of co-operative working relationships. The new media are growing faster than the old and reshaping the time honoured relationships, identities and structures of power that grew around the old media.
Hence the prominence of the two new buzzwords, Globalisation and Convergence. These terms signify the re-orientation and new foci of concern of contemporary social sciences and media studies. Globalisation and Convergence both signal themes of integration. Once, media studies could address separate media - film, television, telecommunications, the press - each in a distinct national context. Now, the national context has given way - through globalisation - to a wider international connectedness (in Europe, particularly interestingly, by Europeans choice to create a trans-national economic, political and - perhaps - cultural community) and the media themselves are increasingly hybridised, substitutable and interdependent - through convergence.
None of this is unprecedented. Steinberg (1969), for example, showed how rapidly printing changed the diffusion of knowledge across Europe and accelerated the integration of markets (not least in printed books themselves). Marvin (1988) develops this theme in her well-named When old technologies were new. But, putatively at least, the scale and pace of change has itself changed. That is why the phenomena and processes that we identify as Globalisation and Convergence demand attention. But how much? How much? is the question that lies behind much of what follows.
Convergence and Globalisation are more than contingently connected. For media and communication are central to globalisation for two reasons.
First, there can be no division of labour without communication between those who divide their labour. And the integration and interdependence of economies, which constitute one of the principle themes of globalisation, is a re-structuring of established patterns of labour division. The cost, functionality and accessibility of means to produce, store, process, transmit and receive information have all changed dramatically. Moore s Law, (which asserts that the price of a given quantity of computing power halves every eighteen months), is paradigmatic of these changes. Now it s cheaper and easier to communicate globally than ever before. Indeed, new communication technologies have decoupled price and distance. Globalisation is intimately interdependent on global communication systems. As communicative networks grow, their utility increases exponentially as Metcalfe s law states (see Chapter 11 for a discussion of Metcalfe s Law ). The growth of global systems of communicative interconnection is thus self-reinforcing.
Second, information has itself become an increasingly important traded commodity - the media and its contents are themselves traded internationally more and more. They constitute one of the components of the increasingly weightless international economy (see, inter alia, Coyle, 1997 and Quah, 1996). Here too there is a fundamental law at work. Because information is non-rival, it is not exhausted by consumption (you read this work and it remains available for others to read), development of cheap and effective reprographic technologies (technological change again), tends to extend and integrate markets across time and space. This trend is characteristic of the weightless economy but is more marked for information than for other elements of the weightless economy.
Again, there is nothing particularly new about this. Writing is a technique and printing a technology which permit partial realisation of this intrinsic potentiality of information. Through these technologies information is captured, recorded and made available for consumption through time. As written and, a fortiori, printed works were transported from place to place so the same information was made available for consumption through space. But what is new is the acceleration and intensification of the realisation of this inherent potentiality of the information economy. Electronic communication - telegraphy, telephony, radio, television and the contemporary convergence of all these formerly distinct media of communication into interactive multimedia - have further contributed to realisation of the inherent potentiality of information to be consumed by many across time and space at zero marginal cost.
But though these integrative trends are so salient - both in the academic literature of media and social sciences and in the daily experience of all of us - they are realised and experienced in highly situated ways. The past lies heavily - but weighs differently - everywhere. Realisation of the potential of modern media and communications to call into existence a seamless, integrated, global communicative community has been, and continues to be, conditional not only on technological change but also on the context, historical, political and cultural, in which media and communication operate. It is not only that the past shapes and situates the present but also the extent to which the future is realisable.
My evaluations of policies, institutions and informing ideologies centre on two themes: the role and future of one of the most distinctive features of media and communications in Europe, and of what Louis Hartz (1964) called the daughters of Europe - public service broadcasting (Chapters 5-8). And on the power and limits of the nascent integrative regulatory paradigm for media and communications in the era of convergence - competition policy (Chapters 1