Globalization of Media Industries
In the 1960s, Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan predicted that television media would create a "global village" where "time ceases, space vanishes." McLuhan's prophecies have come true, but even he could not have predicted the degree of globalization and convergence of technology that now exists throughout media communications. Since the 1960s, the rise of global media and multinational media companies has greatly influenced—if not transformed—the ways in which people think and interact, as well as how they gain access to and communicate information. With globalization, constraints of geography are reduced, but social and cultural interconnectivity across time and space is increased. Media are obviously important to globalization; they provide an extensive transnational transmission of cultural products, and they contribute to the formation of communication networks and social structures.
The manner in which media have expanded globally, yet converged technologically since the mid-1970s, is quite remarkable in its scope and integration. Millions of people now listen to "local" radio from a computer anywhere in the world. Modern television has changed the way that world affairs are conducted. Online users can access video graphics on any one of millions of websites. U.S. films are "greenlighted" (i.e., given the go-ahead for production) based on theirpotential to attract a global audience.
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