Tracing the global through the local: perspectives on community media

Abstract

Globalisation can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity Drawing on scholarship aimed at theorizing globalization from a cultural perspective, this chapter employs community media in an effort to trace the global through the local (see Ang 1990; Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997). Specifically, I use community media as a lens to examine the dialectical (if uneven) process between global forces and conditions and the everyday lived experience of local communities. Throughout, I take up the argument laid out in Chapter 1 related to issues of cultural imperialism. That is, I want to challenge the notion that local populations are simply subject to, or dominated by, national, regional, and increasingly transnational political and economic arrangements, structures, policies, and prerogatives. That said, I am keenly aware of the dangers associated with overstating popular resistance to global incursions on local economies, social relations, and cultural sensibilities. Media scholar David Morley sums up this quandary as “a question of steering between the dangers of an improper romanticism of ‘consumer freedom’ on the one hand, and a paranoiac fantasy of ‘global control’ on the other” (1991: 1).