1.2: A Gateway to Global Media Issues

This book, as an Open Educational Resource, draws from two texts in order to impart to students the conceptual, the practical, and the industrial of global media. The first two chapters, devoted to media production and media audiences, comes from the Media Hack Team, the University of Otago, and others via Creative Commons. A key focus of these two chapters is understanding the terms and concepts of global media, particularly as they pertain to political economy and technology. But this focus on the labor, the business models, and the "machinery" of modern media is complemented in the following chapter by a focus on media as cultural practice. Thus, students will bridge their understanding of media as a political economy of communication to a cultural economy that encompasses fandom, identity, and consumer cultures. The idea here is to provide students with the language and terminology of media, before they engage with the essays about global media that follow.

These articles comprise the second half of the book, which are included from the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson. Much of their focus is on the global dimensions of film and television, including not only the global inclinations of the Hollywood machine, but also powerful media geographies such as India's Bollywood. The issues of capital and labor that dominate the international film industry are reflective of the larger economy, immersed as they are in profit motivations but also advances in technology and evolving tastes of national and regional audiences. They also are compelling sites for examining media labor. As Curtin and Sanson note, when Hollywood producers choose a remote, offsite, or offshore location, "they are often welcomed as a fresh source of skilled jobs in a glamorous industry, but the jobs they create tend to be temporary, and the workplace pressures are often more intense than in Southern California." 

This tension in the production of commercial cinema extends into other areas that are examined in subsequent chapters, including India's aforementioned focus on film production locations, the labor complexities of television production in Latin America, and Australia's video gaming sector. Ultimately, what these chapters impart to students of media is the idea that mass communication and entertainment represents more than canned products to be consumed and discarded. Rather, as dynamic entities that shape-shift across international borders, these industries are transformers of politics, economy, and culture. This OER gateway to global media issues is therefore a useful snapshot in time, and hopefully a helpful reference. But, if politics is indeed downstream from culture, and that relationship is realized through media, then we are also seeing a version of the interconnected world, with all of its possibilities, opportunities, and challenges.