Lule, Jack. Globalization and Media: Global Village of Babel.

McAnany, Emile

Lule, Jack. Globalization and Media: Global Village of Babel. Lantham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012. Pp. xi, 175. ISBN 978-0-74256835-8 (cloth) $84.00; 978-0-7425-6836-5 (paper) $27.00; 978-0-7425-6837-2 (eBook) $25.99.

It may come as a surprise, but Jack Lule's book is a not an afterthought in our field. In fact, what is surprising is that it has taken so long for a book like Lule's to be published. Globalization has been around for two decades and media studies for many more. What this book does that no one has quite done until now is to make a direct case for media's role in globalization studies. The book makes the argument quite explicitly what many theories of globalization have done over the years only in passing (think of Giddens, 2001, for example; or Robertson, 1992). Rantenen (2005) has come the closest to making the case for media's central role in the globalizing project, but not in the compelling way that Lule's book has done. Lule is a journalist who writes for a wider reading audience, but he does not write down to his audience since he also brings into the chapters of this brief book a wide range of academics who bolster his thesis. The thesis is that communication media of all sorts, contemporary and ancient, have a central role in globalization that needs to be recognized.

Lule opens his book with three vignettes of people who have changed the world through use of media--Wael Ghonim (Egypt's Arab Spring), Martin Luther, and Oprah Winfrey--to argue that their influence was due to Facebook, the printing press, and television. He makes his case early and directly in this chapter as well: "I will argue that globalization could not occur without media, that globalization and media act in concert and cohort, and that the two have partnered throughout the whole of human history" (p. 5). The last phrase calls for clarification which Lule makes almost immediately:

   Could global trade have evolved without a flow
   of information on markets, prices, commodities,
   and more? [Think information theory in economics.]
   Could empires have stretched across
   the world without communication throughout
   them? [Think of Harold Innis' last two books 60
   years ago.] Could religion, poetry, film, fiction,
   cuisine, and fashion have developed as they have
   without the intermingling of media and culture?
   Globalization and media have proceeded together
   through time. (p. 5)

Here I, and perhaps other readers, may begin to feel uncomfortable: Are the claims too large to argue in this brief space of 175 pages? But the author anticipates this concern and makes it clear that he will bring scholarship and theory into the argument, but he also wants readers to focus on the fact that these two abstract words "globalization" and "media" are human creations and have a history. A final point he makes in this opening chapter is that globalization and media are not without a shadow side. Here he quotes McLuhan with his Global Village claim and the Bible and the parable of the Tower of Babel. He is critical of what the media and globalization have done ("We will recognize that globalization and the media have failed to keep their promise to humankind," p. 12) but adds that "We will suggest ways forward for a better world" (p. 12).

In Chapter 2 we begin to understand Lule's approach: he uses news stories that illustrate his method of analyzing discourse about globalization and media's role in this discourse. For example, he states:

   This chapter focuses on the discourse, the conversation,
   the language of globalization. The
   economic, political, and cultural processes that
   make up globalization--the objective processes--will
   be discussed later. The focus now in on
   language of--and about--globalization"(p. 17).

He goes on to trace the recent origin of the term globalization with a reference to Theodore Levitt's early article on "The Globalization of Markets" in the 1983 Harvard Business Review. He notes that from that date until now growth in the use of the term has been exponential (a Google search in 2012 found 15.1 million cites). He makes a claim that from his perspective globalization is as old as human prehistory when humans left Africa, but he admits that there is a case to made by people like Appadurai and Giddens that globalization is perhaps very recent. He finishes the chapter with an analysis of metaphors about globalization in the current discourse because he believes that metaphors "can organize people's thinking" and that "leaders, groups, and institutions often try to control metaphoric language" (p. 30).

The author devotes Chapter 3 to a history of media in globalization. The difference from what usually passes as a history of media with stops at Guttenberg , the telegraph, film, radio, TV, etc. is that Lule takes up the debate on technological determinism first with a brief but well documented review where he comes down on the side of human agency vs. technological or social determinisms in society's outcomes. Still, he notes that in some ways both kinds of determinisms have some compelling data for their positions. In his review of media history, Lule looks at media in a very broad sense of human communication beginning with speech, invention of writing, print, etc., all with the interest of seeing how these different forms of human communication came to influence humankind's increasing movement and interchange that he calls globalization. The one question that comes up here is the claim that human speech is a medium, but it is only a passing question. The author makes a compelling case for the latter and does a good summary of the role of writing as well before getting to Gutenberg.

The premise for an original Chapter 4 in a media book is stated simply:

   This chapter looks at one of the crucial but
   sometimes overlooked dimensions of globalization
   and media. Globalization is made possible
   by the work of imagination. That is, people have
   needed to be able to truly imagine the world--and
   imagine themselves acting in the world--for
   globalization to proceed. (p. 51)

Some globalization scholars like Robertson (1992) and Appadurai (1990) had made more of this than others, and someone like Anderson (1983) with his "imagined communities" makes reference to print media, but the media scholars have not done enough to exploit this insight. What the author focuses on in this chapter are two writers who took media technology seriously and imaginatively, Marshall McLuhan and the historian Lewis Mumford, to grasp how they understood the role of media in creating a Global Village or a dystopian Global Village of Babel as Mumford at the end of a long career in 1970 seemed to think of it. These two imaginaries of the world of media technology are contrasted, but Lule seems to agree more with Mumford's view. At the end, however, he concedes that "globalization and the media result from the actions of people, and those actions can be halted or altered" (p. 65).

Chapter 5 on media and economic globalization seems the least original chapter in the book. Lule goes over a number of old controversies relatively well known to our field: Telling the story of inequality and the oligopoly by using Nestle or Nike is to summarize old expose stories from the news of the last three decades. The brief examination of Disney, Murdoch, or Time Warner as big and bad oligopolies again seems to recount what has been said by many in the communication field as it has examined economic globalization. Still, the author defines the dark side of media globalization before moving on to the politics of media globalization. Chapter 6isa somewhat longer treatment of politics because it focuses on the author's professional experience and identity as a journalist. The chapter covers the killing of journalists and other less direct means of censoring political news. Using both professionals working in international agencies like UNESCO to protect journalists as well as stories of journalists being killed or censored, Lule makes a point about the political side of global power by governments and businesses to limit the reporting of news that goes against their interests. He includes some positive stories of new media's power to counter the political power of governments to control journalists, but argues that the forces of political power mostly overwhelm the journalist who seeks to uncover abuses of that power.

Chapter 7 on culture and globalization turns out to be somewhat less dark than the previous one. The thesis centers on the theory of Jan Nederveen Pieterse that argues that there are three positions on the influence of globalization on culture: cultural convergence (where cultural imperialism takes over); cultural hybridity (where cultural blending and mixing creates a melange) and cultural differentialism (where strong cultures are destined to clash and struggle to maintain their identities--sometimes at great cost). Using the global spread of McDonald's restaurants as an enduring example, Lule seems to clearly choose the hybridity theory of cultural negotiation though he gives a nod to convergence. At the end of the chapter he uses the example of the "tank man" in Tiananmen Square as a case of disputed interpretations to argue that negotiation of meaning in media may depend on the eye of the beholder, whether western/U.S. perspectives or that of nationalist Chinese.

Finally, the author concludes his brief book with two examples of positive use of media for helping the poor in Pakistan and Africa. Roshaneh Zafar, a U.S. trained economist, was inspired to return to her country to found a successful non-profit to make micro loans to women. Ken Banks was a hi-tech specialist in the U.K. who went to Africa to found a non-profit to use cell phones for many good causes. It seems from the ending that the author is more the optimist than the pessimist after an interesting and enlightening tour of globalization and the media.

References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York, NY: Verso.

Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global culture economy. Theory, Culture, and Society, 7, 295-310.

Giddens, , A. (2001). Runaway world: How globalization is reshaping our lives. New York: Rutledge.

Rantenen, T. (2005). The media and globalization. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications.

Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications.

--Emile McAnany

Santa Clara University