Book Description

In this comprehensive volume, leading scholars of media and communication examine the nexus of globalization, digital media, and popular culture in the early 21st century. The book begins by interrogating globalization as a critical and intensely contested concept, and proceeds to explore how digital media have influenced a complex set of globalization processes in broad international and comparative contexts. Contributors address a number of key political, economic, cultural, and technological issues relative to globalization, such as free trade agreements, cultural imperialism, heterogeneity, the increasing dominance of American digital media in global cultural markets, the powers of the nation-state, and global corporate media ownership. By extension, readers are introduced to core theoretical concepts and practical ideas, which they can apply to a broad range of contemporary media policies, practices, movements, and technologies in different geographic regions of the world—North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Scholars of global media, international communication, media industries, globalization, and popular culture will find this to be a singular resource for understanding the interconnected relationship between digital media and globalization.