The New Communications Landscape

Book excerpt: The innovative and rapid growth of communication satellites and computer mediated technologies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, combined with the deregulation of national broadcasting, led many media commentators to assume that the age of national media had been lost. But what has become clear is that, whilst there has been a limited growth in global media, there has been an emergence of a strong localised television and communications industry. Mapping the world media market, and using examples of programming from countries as diverse as Thailand, Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan, Spain and Britain, this volume explores theories of media globalization, examines the local culture of television programming and analyses the blurring of distinctions between the global and the local.