Page 185 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 175
activities, most important of which are advertising agencies, market survey and
opinion polling services, public relations firms, government information and
propaganda services and traditional media.
It is perhaps significant that traditional mass media are relegated to such a low
position in this hierarchy (with the implication that they are mere creatures of
advertising agencies) and that some other forms of sociocultural imperalism are
barely considered. This is partly explicable in terms of the rhetorical usefulness
of highlighting the less familiar features of cultural dependency, but Schiller’s
agenda may also, in its ordering of issues, serve to underemphasize the role of
state regulation.
A second major expansionary pressure upon the framework of analysis is
represented by the pace of technological change, which may in turn be related to
the development and commercialization of innovations in the defence and
aerospace industries of the major economies (Mattalart, 1979). Satellite
communication, for instance, introduces the growing potential for direct
broadcast television and greatly complicates the task of global allocation of
communication space. The rapid but uneven pace of satellite development
intensifies the conflict between those countries that lag in technology but wish to
preserve access for future use, and those which believe that existing capacity
should be fully exploited by those with the means to do so. Developments of
computer technology and digital communication greatly intensify the capacity
for ‘transborder data flows’ at a pace possibly beyond the ability of international
bodies to regulate. The ‘electronic’ revolution in the dissemination of
information, whereby the same digital signal can be transformed into a number
of different final formats requires that equivalent attention be given to both
‘traditional’ media (for example, newspapers, television) and more recent
dissemination technologies (for example, home terminal publishing, videotext)
(Hamelink, 1979; Marvin, 1980). The task presented by the need for
international regulation of these developments itself represents a further pressure
on the framework of analysis, one that requires consideration not simply of the
socio-economic structures of dependency, but also of the highly legalistic
contexts in which much international bargaining on such matters tends to occur
(cf. the proceedings of the World Administrative Radio Conference, 1979, or the
UNESCO debate on the final report of the International Commission for the
Study of Communication Problems, 1980).

The benefits and costs of ‘totalization’
There can be little question as to the generally beneficial impact that these trends
towards ‘totalization’ have had on the quality of media-related theory and
insight. For instance, they brilliantly de-neutralize the concepts of ‘development’,
‘media’, ‘technology’, etc., so that the signification of each of these is shown to
be profoundly political. Among other things, they alert researchers to the danger
of uncritical adoption of western assumptions about which particular vehicles of