Reaction Paper 5: The global media marketplace

The rise of a global marketplace of media production has been the result of many factors. It has been shaped by processes of liberalization and deregulation of the sector, internationally, and by the development of new technologies such as the satellite and the cable technologies. Throughout this chapter, the authors address the way media and technology have converged, the process of “vertical integration” that has happened in the media industry, and finally the way media power is concentrated in the hands of a few number of people, which is threatening to global democracy.

What I will focus on, while reacting at the fourth chapter of the book, is the idea of convergence, which has happened with media and technologies. Globalisation has been correlated with convergence, as before it, most media corporations were focusing on specific areas, or fields of work. The textbook gives examples such as: Disney being only focused on cartoons and theme-parked industry; and Viacom being only concerned with cable outfit and TV syndication.

Since the mid 80s, we could observe media companies broadening their interests and fields of business. This translated into a wave of mergers and acquisitions (e.g Disney buying Capital Cities/American Broadcasting Systems (ABC), in 1995, which opened a new field of business for Disney, which was until then only concerned with pure entertainment).These processes of convergence have led to the media industry being owned by a few numbers of media conglomerates, and the textbook predicts that the 21st century will see this number growing even smaller.  

For what is my personal opinion, I think the convergence of media has been a key process in the media industry becoming what it is today. The convergence of media has been a result of the free flow of information policies, of the liberalization of media technologies (e.g. satellite industry owned by the US and France led European consortium (cf Chapter 3)) and of the merging of major global media conglomerates. The processes of media convergence have in my opinion had both beneficial and negative impacts on the industry.

On one hand,  I think that media convergence has considerably helped in the increase of the of the quantity and variety of media production around the world. It has contributed to globalization of local cultural products, and made the media production process a more efficient one, in terms of productivity. On the other hand, it has had ‘negative’ impacts in the sense that Western domination has become even more powerful, and therefore limits the spread of different non-western ideology (which is part of pluralist principles).