Page 36 - Communication Theory and Research

McQuail(EJC)-3281-03.qxd 8/16/2005 11:58 AM Page 25

The Mythology about Globalization 25

systems and markets. In the information industries, for example, Reuters
Holdings plc is paradigmatic of global empire building on the back of new tech-
nologies and services. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the organization metamor-
phosed from being a respectably low-key, non-profit-making international news
agency to high-profile market leadership. In 1990, the ‘world’s foremost electronic
publisher’ recorded revenues of £1396 million and profits of £287.9 million. 2
Similarly, in the entertainment field, Hollywood’s film and television producers
have been global traders almost from their inception. 3
These data also indicate an exploding world audience for television news,
spurred in part by the spread of a genre here called ‘television verité: that is, the
live, raw video eye as recorder of instant history and shared video experiences
of ‘live’ television news – protests in China, revolution in Eastern Europe, war in
the Middle East. All serve to reinforce political, popular and scholarly percep-
tions of globalization as social and media-defined reality. [...]

The Problem of Evaluation

Notwithstanding the repertoire of meanings and material indicators noted
above, there is a significant aspect of globalization that goes relatively unre-
marked: its rhetoric is as much concerned about what should be as what is.
Globalization conflates the normative and descriptive, and consequently carries
ideological as well as temporal, spatial, historical and geopolitical implications.
Thus, if powerful nation states and corporate interests promote globalization
as a self-fulfilling prophecy for political or profit ends, it is incumbent on us to
examine not only what is being hawked by whom, but who stands to lose or gain
materially, politically, culturally or militarily.
As a conceptual notion, then, ‘globalization’ offers mixed messages. It sounds
like a relatively value-neutral descriptor of a supranational universe of media
interconnectivity and material and symbolic goods exchange. But on closer
examination it reveals extensive causal assumptions, normative intentions and
value judgements.
What is important here are the overtones of historical inevitability embedded
in inferences of globalization as a unidirectional process or a fait accompli. Such
rhetoric, far from being value-free, implies reification and carries ideological
baggage whereby globalization becomes the new dynamic, the motor of world
change. What this suggests, and what this article argues, is that this concept has
taken on a life of its own: as a sine qua non for our age, its status may be moving
from that of mythology to ideology.

Globalization as Mythology

Myth, in the context of globalization, is not used here in the sense of an untruth,
but rather as a way of classifying certain assumptions about the modern world