Untitled - socium.ge

Television, the Internet, and identity 389COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: AN OLDDEBATEThompson (1995) examines the beginning of the globalization of communicationby focusing on three key developments of the late nineteeth and earlytwentieth centuries: the development of underwater cable systems by theEuropean imperial powers; the establishment of international news agenciesand their division of the world; and the formation of international organizationsconcerned with the allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum. I wouldadd a fourth development: the speed of information and communication technologiesand the birth of the Internet during the 1960s.In the 1970s, concern about cultural imperialism underpinned a growingperception across the Third World of imbalances in international news reportingand worldwide media flows. In 1977, UNESCO sponsored an internationalcommission for the study of communication problems known as the McBrideCommission after its chairman, the Irishman Sean McBride. The Commissionspent two years examining questions about the communication gap betweenthe developed and the developing worlds. Concern that most countries in thedeveloping world were merely passive receivers of news and fiction from thedeveloped world inspired calls for the creation of a “new more just and moreefficient world information and communication order” known as NWICO. Infact, the demand for a new international economic order and the quest for anew world information and communication order of the 1970s have beentransformed into a new global economic competitiveness. Since the McBrideReport, both the world and the communication flows have changed. In LatinAmerica, Brazil and Mexico have built strong audiovisual industries and havebecome successful exporters of media products (specially soap operas), butthey still import an average of more than 30 percent of their broadcasts fromthe United States. 1The 1993 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between theUnited States, Canada, and Mexico worried Mexican identity scholars becauseof the cultural impact of a free trading zone. Moreover, controversy aboutwhether to include audiovisual products in the GATT Treaty indicates thatvariants of arguments about cultural imperialism have continued to be putforward. These arguments have been displaced by the notion of globalizationand a recognition that the concept of globalization suggests interconnectionand interdependency and that it is not exactly a synonym for imperialism.Neither does globalization mean universalism.It is interesting to observe that European intellectuals and politicians usedthe same discourse of dependency deployed and used by Latin American intellectualsin the 1970s during the concluding phase of the GATT negotiation in1993, trying to protect European audiovisual production from the United