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Globalization is the increased movement of people, capital, commodities, information, and images in our current post-industrial stage of capitalism. Globalization impacts Canadians economically, politically, socially, culturally, and environmentally, and these factors influence the ways Canadians communicate. Mass media play four roles in the globalization process: as media of encounter; as media of governance; as media situating us within the world; and as a globalized business in and of themselves. The chapter outlines a number of theories that offer different conceptualizations of international communication flows and describes their implications. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory traces the global capitalist economy to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while concepts such as media imperialism and cultural dependency help explain audience media consumption patterns. Manuel Castells’ notion of the network society and Vincent Mosco’s concept of spatialization offer additional perspectives.
Following this conceptual groundwork, the chapter then discusses the history of international communication exchanges, concentrating particularly on the period from the 1940s to the present. The free flow doctrine, promoted by the United States, was followed by the rise and subsequent downfall of the New World Information and Communication Order, whose proponents sought to alleviate communication imbalances between national communities in the 1970s and to promote the “right to communicate” as a fundamental human right. The 1980s and 1990s led to further trade liberalization and the reinforcement of the commercial view of communication as commodity exchange, and in the early 2000s the World Summit on the Information Society provided the latest coordinated effort to democratize communication on a global scale.
The chapter also discusses the “digital divide” in terms of what contributes to its creation, as well as suggestions as to how it can be better addressed on a global and national scale. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of globalization on how we think about “place,” “community,” and “identity,” given the importance of communication and cultural exchange to our sense of belonging, and expands on the new forms of sociability and the new global geography that characterize our time.