1. Introduction.

McAnany, Emile G.

The debate about making the world into a global village began with McLuhan's thesis 40 years ago (McLuhan, 1960). One could argue, however, that the real debate did not begin in earnest until the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the retreat of the socialist bloc in 1990. Only then did the globe seem ripe for a "new world order," something to replace the First, Second and Third Worlds from the Cold War era. In those previous decades, a number of economic and technological changes took place that would extend beyond the Western market economies to incorporate all nations into a single world of international (free) trade, modern information and communication technologies (ICTs), and increasing pressure for interconnectivity. All of this portended profound changes in peoples' everyday lives. Almost all thinking about globalization that emerged in the 1990s paid attention to the role of the electronic media in this process.

For purposes of simplicity, we will define globalization as a process to include the increasing interconnection of the world through the flow of capital, goods, services, people, information, and culture across borders. Apart from this working definition, there is nothing simple about this phenomenon nor about the positions of all kinds of people concerning its consequences. The debate over globalization involves a number of values that we need to recognize in order to properly understand the discourses in the academic and in the policy/political realms. Though often left unstated, these values are debated hotly by a large group of people working across a number of disciplines and policy arenas like economics, politics, culture, and personal identity. The debates often lie open to exaggeration precisely because they involve peoples' values and sense of worth that make the issues that much more intense. These strong value positions characterize ordinary people living in a globalizing world as well scholars and politicians. The field of Communication also has important historical roots in this debate that this review needs to define. Biernatzki, in a previous issue of Communication Research Trends (Vol. 17, No. 1, 1997) laid out a number of issues and provided some historical context for the globalization of communication technologies. The present review will include several of the references from Biernatzki's review but will update the debate and sort through some of the methodological, theoretical, and policy issues that seem most urgent at the beginning of this new century.

Communication has been called a field rather than a discipline because it stands at the intersection of so many policy and scholarly interests. The globalization debates by economists, social theorists, policy makers, and others have all acknowledged that one of the critical elements in the current trend toward global interconnectedness are the ICTs that have made the flows of capital, trade, people, etc. possible. Therefore, we will first examine some areas that define the larger debate in order to situate communication within the discourse on globalization. Section Two below gives a brief summary of recent positions in the economics of globalization; Section Three will review some important social theories that attempt to explain how globalization affects people. In Section Four, we will deal with the literature on global media and pick up on the issues raised in the preceding sections; in Section Five, we will make some comments on those issues most urgent to pursue in future work.

Emile G. McAnany

Santa Clara University

Email: emcanany@scu.edu