Prospects and Limitations of World System Theory for Media Analysis

This article points out the potential of applying the world system theory to global communication- and media analysis as a `humanocentric' enterprise covering both the present and the past. It attempts to identify the world's core countries using a weighted index of a country's size of the economy (GNP) and of its exports. It applies the index to rank order the countries in the Middle East and North Africa region to ascertain the likelihood of a core-periphery structure within the region itself and to test whether media freedom and media penetration follow the pattern of that structure. It concludes that such symmetry is unlikely to exist in a regional core-periphery configuration where the scores separating the countries are relatively negligible. It also suggests that under informational capitalism, economic power blocs should replace individual countries as the unit of analysis for configuring the global core-periphery structure.