Global Media and Communication

Audience segmentation is generally associated with strategic communication (such as advertising and public relations), where content is manipulated to suit reader preferences. News has generally been considered truth-telling unvarnished by such concerns. This article compares how news of the same humanitarian crisis was designed by 10 news organizations in seven countries for different market segments. Comparisons showed statistically significant differences in representation, influenced in part by what the audience-market was. Like advertising, news seemed to share an attribute with the strategic design of advertising and public relations. Increasingly carried online, news will be vulnerable to click-based customization of content like advertising is, taking us beyond currently observed geopolitical influences on segmentation to advertiser and market-based differences.

While Nollywood, Nigeria’s video industry, is largely separate from dominant global cultural industry networks of production inputs and distribution, it is an industry that is still globally linked in a number of ways. In this article, I investigate the nature and layout of these connections via interviews with those populating these networks, from key Nollywood producers to shop owners thousands of miles from Lagos. I conclude that, instead of the formal links of dominant cultural industry networks, these links are mostly via alternative global networks, forged on the flipside of – or the gaps between – the connections that link the Network Society. Some formal international institutions have a presence, but these are largely mediated through Nollywood’s situation in global cultural industry networks. I argue that this renders Nollywood as situated in an alternative media capital, central to alternative networks, while too informal to integrate into dominant networks, and it is from this position that we can best understand Nollywood’s position in global media flows.

In the field of citizen media research, considerably less attention has been paid to countries other than the US and those in Western Europe. This article is a case study that focuses on citizen media in Beijing – specifically, the Dazhalan Project. Combining in-depth interviews and textual analysis, the article demonstrates the uniqueness of citizen media under China’s state-party media system. The article also suggests that it was the collaboration among ordinary citizens, professionals and journalists that made it possible for citizen media to influence the mainstream media frame-building process.

This article examines the role of violence in Shabash and ‘History of the Freedom Movement in India: The Ghadar Movement, 1913–1918’, two key texts of the Gadar Party, a US-based political party of South Asians that campaigned for Indian independence in the early twentieth century. In these texts, violence operates both as universal communication and as a critique of the possibility of universal communication. Acts of violence allow oppressed societies to secure the status of civilized nations. Violence also operates as a historiographic principle that enables the writing of universal history, linking present with past and incorporating national histories into global narratives. On the other hand, violence fails to sustain communities beyond a narrow conception of political community. The body that suffers violence negates the very possibility of communication. I also argue that violence in these contradictory roles brokers a relationship between national identity and global belonging in Gadar thought.