11 - The Implications for Cultural Policies

Summary

A massive body of evidence has documented the growth of cosmopolitan communications. The international market for cultural goods and services expanded rapidly during the late 20th century, and these changes contributed to faster and denser flows of information across national borders. Until the early 1980s, the contents of mass communications in most countries were still mostly domestically generated, conveyed by local, regional, or national newspapers, magazines, television stations, and radio networks. The globalization of mass communications was driven by the spread of satellite and cable TV, cellular mobile telephones, the Internet, and multimedia convergence. Privatization, deregulation, and liberalization of the broadcasting and telecommunication sectors, and a relaxation of the rules limiting foreign media ownership, also played major roles, causing a decline in the number of people tuning in to state or public service broadcasting, a proliferation of commercial, privately owned radio and television stations, and cross-media ownership of newspapers and magazines. These developments encouraged the growth of international advertising companies and the market research sector, producing revenue for commercial media outlets. New TV channels fueled a growing demand for entertainment content, much of which was imported from a few core Western producer countries. As Chapter 3 demonstrated, far from decreasing, America's market share of the global cultural trade in audiovisual goods and information services has expanded in recent decades.