A Word on Process . . .

-Sumita Chakravarty-

In any scholarly undertaking, questions of process or the manner in which the object of study is presented needs to be addressed. What principle of selection underpins the essays and related materials? What perspectives and methodologies are adopted and why? Which case studies merit analytical review? Do individual contributions reinforce a broader point? A brief explanation of the process that informed this project is in order.

Given the enormous range of topics subsumed by the "globalization" framework, any selection can seem random or arbitrary. There is no Olympian position from which to assess which contemporary issues are urgent in the long run and hence deserving of critical attention, what trends are more promising than others, and which countries or regions are more central to the unfolding scenario, though a case can be made for a great number of such choices for consideration. Where, then, do the essays presented here fall in terms of representational validity? As stated elsewhere, this group's focus is on ways in which globalization as a phenomenon can be understood specifically through the lenses provided by communications media. This too is a large undertaking, well beyond the modest scope of this project. From the outset, therefore, we decided to focus less on what is by far the primary way in which media are discussed in relation to globalization, namely, (Western) media as giant corporations operating globally for a larger and larger share of the economic pie. Toby Miller, et al's Global Hollywood (2002) continues this long and venerable tradition of charting the pathways of dominant media programming as they crisscross our planet. These studies of the political economy of media in the global marketplace offer valuable but gloomy prognoses of a new international order that is strikingly like the old one: America/the West against the Rest. Without necessarily disagreeing with the need to be reminded of the hegemony of corporate media domination in the world, we have chosen to take a more diverse conceptual and empirical look at media forms and practices. Our approach has been more open-ended and 'observational', offering reports of control where applicable, finding comfort in alternative media uses where we find them. Given the pedagogical context of experimentation out of which this project has arisen, the contributors followed their interests or inclinations in the media (print, cinema, radio/tv, the Internet) they selected and the issues they chose to deal with. The methodologies range from content analysis to historical overview to qualitative analysis of trends, although the idea is less to be methodologically precise than to create unique juxtapositions of ideas and empirical material. The broader aim is to convey the minutiae of ongoing activity around and through media operating transnationally. If the results are somewhat eclectic, we submit that the nature of what is unfolding is also mixed in content and results.

One of the paradoxes of the global condition is that metaphor is always battling metonymy, the symbolic force of conceptualizing the-world-as-a-whole endlessly coming up short against the real limitations of habitation and individualized perspectives. As such, I raise the fraught issue of "positionality": the location from which one speaks or defines the global. What constitutes a privileged vantage-point from which to take stock of global processes? For as Dennis Altman astutely points out, "The very nature of writing about the 'global' means we must appear at home everywhere, yet at the same time none of us can know more than a small fragment of the world" (Global Sex: xi). It is thus that many anthologies of globalization are really about "other countries" in relation to a "home" country or region, rather than about a third space that is forever new, if dynamic and ephemeral, by virtue of being an intersection of several global actors, ideas or forces. We struggled with this issue but in the end were unable to resolve it. For, not surprisingly, our location in northeastern United States (rather than, say, in Europe, India or South Africa) means that we experience and "live" globalization as "Americans" (even 'temporary' Americans such as foreign students!), having access to certain media and not others, refracting the global through a particular local ethos and socio-political climate. The practical implications of our situation is that many of the examples that are cited are drawn from the U.S. Rather than deny the realities of such a position, we have engaged it, particularly by adopting a critical stance towards US-based media, and by pointing to alternatives wherever possible. To offset an unavoidable bias, we decided to render this course on globalization and media as a project accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. As the saying goes, "Its not where you're at, but where you're going."