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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Peter Steven, The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media (Toronto: Between the Lines 2004)
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| TO WRITE a comprehensive introduction to the global media is a highly ambitious task; to do it in a slender volume of less than 150 pages is virtually impossible. Yet Peter Steven's No Nonsense Guide to Global Media succeeds in providing readers with a useful snapshot of the contemporary mass media as well as a good feel for the main schools of thought that have emerged in the study of culture and communication. Accessible, interesting, well-written and generally well-organized, Steven does an admirable job of balancing criticism of the corporate structures that dominate the production and distribution of commodified culture with a laudable sensitivity to the contradictory qualities of global media that open up spaces for cultural diversity and political struggle. Yet the book's strengths as a survey text also account for its principal shortcoming, namely a failure to develop a consistent, coherent or unified set of arguments about the contemporary significance of the media. Ultimately, Steven's constant oscillation between condemning the centralized power of dominant media on the one hand, and celebrating the virtues of active audiences and hybrid cultural forms on the other, leaves us somewhat unsure about what he (and we) are to make of the global media and their ambivalent effects upon individuals and society. In addition, the highly condensed and often fragmentary style of the book makes it difficult to engage with its content at any level other than as a set of interesting and well-researched but also compartmentalized (and often contradictory) facts and observations. |
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The book opens, for example, with a brief chapter composed entirely of statements from people around the world describing their own unique experience with local and global media. "I have recently read The Life of My Choosing, by Wilfred Thesiger, The Fall of the House of Saud, by Said Aburish and Alice in Exile by Piers Paul Read," writes one correspondent. "The book-publishing mergers are a problem and getting more so. Also the swallowing of independent bookstores by chains ..." (12) Such a stark juxtapositioning of multinational cultural diversity with cautionary words about capitalist restructuring sets the stage for the contradictory tone that characterizes much of the book. For Steven, such contradictions are reflective of a global media environment that is dominated by a homogenized, commercial monoculture yet simultaneously also provides the space for more creative, cosmopolitan encounters with alternative and even oppositional cultural forms. Yet insofar as the pleasures of the latter are constantly invoked, the dangerous tendencies of the former are, in effect, minimalized. Indeed, if the range of cultural practices described by Steven's acquaintances in the first chapter are at all representative of the offerings that globalization brings in its wake, then we seemingly have little to worry about. |
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Yet, as he often suggests in separate chapters on global media, political economy, technology and media and society, we actually have a great deal to worry about. In a boxed vignette from the section on global media, for example, Steven offers a brief description of the global reach of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, one of five or six media behemoths that control much of what we now see, hear, and read. He cites Roy Greenslade, a columnist for The Guardian, who observes that every single one of Murdoch's 175 newspapers worldwide offered editorial support for the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. Steven's chapter on political economy nicely locates this exemplary anecdote within the restructuring of the global media that has occurred over the last two decades. In rapid succession, he offers succinct descriptions of key elements of the "howling, brawling global marketplace," including the concentration of ownership, formation of integrated media conglomerates, and the gutting of media policy and regulatory regimes at both the national and international levels. However, in an accompanying discussion of the emancipatory potential of new digital technologies, he makes the puzzling claim that "although the infrastructure of megacomputers, data switchers and satellite relays comprising the internet is as tightly controlled by largely US, political, military and corporate elites as any media form ever invented, the flow of content remains as anarchic and potentially disruptive as in its early days." (52) Thus tight corporate control of the infrastructure seemingly has no effect at all upon the content? Such utopian optimism clearly flies in the face of the rapid commercialization of the Internet in the late 1990s. Once 'anarchic' patterns of use have been displaced, marginalized, or, more precisely, mapped over dense clusters of shopping and entertainment sites that are, as often as not, affiliated with corporate media. |
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Subsequent chapters on technology, mass culture as aesthetic practice and the effect of media upon society are equally schematic, ranging widely over the principal themes in each area, yet generally failing to deliver much of a synthetic narrative to bind these themes into a coherent unity. The treatment of technology —probably the best chapter in the book —offers a whirlwind tour through the many different perspectives on media technologies, from McLuhan's technological determinism to the diversity that 'blogging' allegedly brings to contemporary journalism. However, the limits of space condemn Steven to providing little more than a cursory summary of each point without any sustained attempt to assess their competing merits or develop a broader, more inclusive narrative about the relationship between media and technology. The social dynamics that drive technological change, for example, are condensed into ten separate themes — technology as solutions to problems, for realism, for spectacle, for privacy, for crowds, for consumption, for surveillance, for war, for globalization, for democracy — which are each dealt with in a single, short paragraph. Within the limits of such constraints, Steven does an admirable job and he certainly has a knack for condensing complex ideas into a few accessible and lively sentences. But it is ultimately a Pyrrhic victory, probably leaving the reader better informed about the range of debate on technology but ill-equipped to integrate those positions into a more coherent analytic framework. A later discussion of media violence — the principal case study in the media and society chapter — repeats the same pattern: we learn, for example, that some maximize the negative effects of violence and others minimize them, but are left with little guidance as to which perspective is more convincing. |
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On a more positive note, the great strength of the book is its truly global focus. Taking his cue from the cosmopolitan cultural habits of his correspondents in the first chapter, Steven draws upon a wealth of examples from around the world, a refreshing change from most media studies texts that are rooted almost exclusively in the North American and European experience. This comes out most clearly and convincingly in a chapter on art and audiences that considers different ways of thinking about media content. Brief commentaries on Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Brazilian telenovelas, Chinese rock stars, and Nigerian video films remind us of the diversity of local culture that often survives and occasionally even prospers within corporate media. Conversely, Steven relentlessly hammers home how coverage of the global South remains a glaring blindspot in the mass media: "in the US and Britain the Survivor series, set in Africa, took up most of the air-time for African coverage in 2001!" (125) |
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In sum, The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media covers a lot of ground in a very short space, producing a text that is valuable as a cursory introduction to both the mass media and the multitude of contradictory perspectives that dominate its study and analysis. Yet this ambitious agenda ultimately compromises the book's narrative coherence, limiting its utility for readers looking to develop a sustained, critical understanding of global media. |
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Shane Gunster
Simon Fraser University |
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