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26 Communication Theory & Research
found in sets of ideas (myths) about world history, politics, economics, culture,
communication and ecology.
Myths, then, are stories we are told, tell to others and ourselves; tales that
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explain, adapt and evolve as their context changes. Typically, myth has a com-
plex relationship to social reality. It builds on what is already at work.
Combining the real with the ideal, it produces something of an ideal type that
stretches beyond what the evidence will show. Being both ‘real and sacred, the
myth becomes exemplar, and consequently repeatable, for it serves as a model,
and by the same token as a justification, for all human actions’ (Eliade, 1968: 23).
By guiding decisions and justifying events, myths help to structure our sense of
belonging to a particular culture, to the ‘our’ world that is also the ‘whole world’.
It is the all-inclusive spatiality and explanatory aspects of myths that make them
so appropriate for this study. These are not myths of globalization as such but
myths about the objectives of and relationships between the disparate interests and
institutions seeking to ride on the back of the globalizing momentum. 5
The mythology about globalization also reveals how old myths adapt and new
ones arise. Some are familiar, others not. Some serve particular interests or
groups. But taken together they explain and justify much about the topography
of a shifting global political and cultural economy. Nothing is finite about this
structuring of social reality. Like all the best mythologies, this too is fluid, as new
myths emerge to explain a changing world so old ones adapt or fade away.
At this point in the globalization mythology’s life history, seven myths are
identified: ‘Big is Better’, ‘More is Better’, ‘Time and Space Have Disappeared’,
‘Global Cultural Homogeneity’, ‘Saving Planet Earth’, ‘Democracy for Export
via American TV’ and ‘The New World Order’. Individually and collectively
they interact with one another; some emphasize the journey of becoming, while
others focus on the destination, the globalized state; and some represent both the
process and the result.

Seven Myths about Globalization

The Myth of ‘Big is Better’

As political ideology, public policy or corporate strategy, ‘Big is Better’ serves the
doctrine of market liberalism. Considered together with the ‘More is Better’
myth (discussed below), ‘Big’ is invoked to present the classic Adam Smith case
for expansionist, competitive capitalism. Its spatial-economic logic has driven
international trade and transnational corporate expansion ever since, and in the
easy credit, deregulatory 1980s, ‘Big’ spurred the worldwide migration of capital,
mergers and takeovers.
The business of ‘going global’ was notable in the media industries as print,
film, broadcast, cable, satellite, music, marketing and advertising organizations
made the more interrelated universe a commercial reality and a technological
fact. Although less remarked upon outside communication circles (see, for example,
Bagdikian, 1989; Murdock, 1990), there has also been an escalation of ownership