Media, diversidade e globalização na era digital

Francisco Rui Cádima

doi:10.26619/1647-7251.8.2.7

Abstract

The issues of cultural diversity and the plurality of voices in the current digital and global environment are raising new challenges beyond those already identified in the context of migration from classical media to the internet galaxy. If, with traditional media, a closing logic under “the same” prevailed, with digital media we started to believe in the “apotheosis of the dream of diversity” (Curran, 2008). But the truth is that the elimination of the old filters of information and distribution does not seem to be happening. New “gatekeeping” surrounds human intervention, with current information dissemination systems having an algorithmic basis and artificial intelligence, biasing access to news and reducing space for cultural diversity or even censuring the plurality of voices and cultural expressions.

Highlights

What does it mean today, at the height of the great digital platforms and the internet, to analyse the problem of diversity – cultural diversity, diversity of cultural expressions and pluralism – in the global context? At first it seems a contradiction, it seems to make little sense considering the mass of information circulating in the internet galaxy
In a second approach (Cádima, 2016), we thought about the European context and the dynamics of the European Union, demonstrating that the lack of cohesion of the European project, especially since the creation of Television without Frontiers Directive (1989), was largely based on the collapse of the spirit of law and the European strategic project and ideology, originally set out in the directive. From both the point of view of communication strategies and of public policies for the European audio-visual sector, in particular the policies and monitoring directed at public radio and television systems in Europe, it is evident – and we will try to prove it in this article – that Europe succumbed to its own contradictions, being unable to claim in a space of excellence – the public service of media – its cultural heritage and its project of transboundary unity and cohesion for the diversity of its experiences and cultures
Misinformation, polarisation, disorientation and uncertainty are some of the recurring concepts that are characterising the present times, the “ethnic landscapes” of the present, as referred to by Appadurai (2004). If this is the configuration of the politics of the age, in terms of culture and information, we see, on the one hand, the issue of diversity and plurality of voices being indexed to algorithmic logics, filtered and tracked by complex internet control systems and/or network operators, which mainly determine a censorship of the voices and not freedom of expression

Summary

Introduction

What does it mean today, at the height of the great digital platforms and the internet, to analyse the problem of diversity – cultural diversity, diversity of cultural expressions and pluralism – in the global context? At first it seems a contradiction, it seems to make little sense considering the mass of information circulating in the internet galaxy. In a second approach (Cádima, 2016), we thought about the European context and the dynamics of the European Union, demonstrating that the lack of cohesion of the European project, especially since the creation of Television without Frontiers Directive (1989), was largely based on the collapse of the spirit of law and the European strategic project and ideology, originally set out in the directive From both the point of view of communication strategies and of public policies for the European audio-visual sector, in particular the policies and monitoring directed at public radio and television systems in Europe, it is evident – and we will try to prove it in this article – that Europe succumbed to its own (and apparently insurmountable) contradictions, being unable to claim in a space of excellence – the public service of media – its cultural heritage and its project of transboundary unity and cohesion for the diversity of its experiences and cultures. In this research I have sought, in a complementary way to the previous works, to find answers to two issues: first, to know if a true alternative model to what is called the “mainstream” media – sometimes referred to more critically as the “hegemonic media” – was found at a global level since the emergence of the internet, and since the mid-90s; second, to understand the post-media phenomenon as a whole, in the global context, and to think if this whole complex system of post-media communication – from local systems from the analogue age to global digital networks and platforms, including transcontinental broadcasting systems – has been compatible with this other idea/model of globalisation and cultural convergence that has, to a certain extent, reached everyone on this planet in the last decades

Globalisation and regression

Diversity in the digital age

Dataism and polarisation

Conclusion

Findings

Institute for the