A matter of time and space (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: A, Stockholm University (JMK), course: Global Media Studies I, language: English, abstract: [...]
Whether something is a myth or not, is hard to define as the perception of a myth - the evaluation if a certain situation is exaggerated or not (Hafez 2007: 1) - is always something very subjective and depending on the judge's viewpoint. So it is not surprising that in his book Kai Hafez comes to the conclusion that media globalization is a myth. He links strict requirements1 to the state of globalization and seems to be analyzing mainly German media products under this perspective. He is also largely focusing on the receiving end of media content - the spectator (Hafez 2007: 14) - and emphasizing the role of the medium television within the globalization debate. Although the comparatively minor role the internet plays in this work could be due to the fact that this medium first started its unprecedented exponential grow around 20072. Nevertheless he is neither emphasizing qualitative data to confirm his assumptions of a non-globalized media audience, nor is he presenting a broad range of quantitative figures to support his conclusion of a lack of globalization in the structure of media industry, policy and distribution. Although Hafez is referring to globalization as a process (Hafez 2007: 23), his high expectations of system change (Hafez 2007: 2) are leading to the rather utopian idea of the final state of a entirely globalized world - a situation which he describes has already happened in other sectors, such as economy of industrial goods (Hafez 2007: 4). Especially when dealing with such an all-encompassing question as globalization, it is crucial to dare a glimpse out of the box, not letting one-self be deluded by the West-European media culture one was born into and the wishful thinking of an ideal state of globalism, where all media content is accepted equally among the world's public (Hafez 2007: 12). In order to challenge such a human terminology like 'myth' I consider it appropriate to look at the phenomenon of globalization and media at eye level with the human part of media -its users3. By doing this, the following text will clearly reveal that Hafez's 'myth' isn't actually reality.
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