Culture, globalization, mediation

This chapter reviews the literature on media and globalization. It develops the argument that this literature foregrounds a problem that, ironically, it also largely disavows: namely, the question of mediation as a general foundation of social life. I explore the origins of this contradiction in the emergence of globalization studies out of earlier traditions in media and cultural studies. I suggest that the failure to move beyond this impasse has perpetuated a surprising and debilitating reliance on substantialist and essentialist models of culture, models that are both at odds with the critical thrust of globalization studies and fully complicit with the agendas of public and commercial bureaucracies. The review tracks the recurrence of such thinking in several key strands of globalization studies and proceeds to outline an alternative ethnographic and theoretical strategy on the basis of a general theory of media and mediation.