Exploring the African view of the global 

Winston Mano 

University of Westminster, London, UK 

The global expansion of the media is an outgrowth of colonial capitalism, which dates back to the 19th century. Rønning suggests that media culture is transnational: it operates on a global scale and is being produced by transnational media-conglomerates (1997:13–15).

In today’s world under the background of globalization and arising from liberalization and privatization programmes orchestrated by the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the African communication and mass media environment has getting more and more market oriented. African media must formulate correct communication policies to face the challenges brought by globalization to African mass media, so as to resist the power of global media, so that to service the demands of the majority of Africans.\

World communication affects people’s daily life. The most important trend of world communication is to lose people’s rights. They make people lose control of their lives. They create a culture of silence in which people exist for others.

In Africa and other developing countries around the world, what is needed is to empower people globally. This means that local communities must transcend the boundaries of local space and work together to create a global public sphere in which people can freely express themselves, share information, opinions, ideas and cultural experiences, challenge the responsibilities of power owners and take responsibility for the quality of this sphere.

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Media globalization: an Indian perspective 

Ravi Sundaram 

Centre for Studies of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India 

For a long time, Indian media was basically limited to national boundaries and an old concept of closely following Indian nationalism. In the 1990s, the transformation of Indian media network and industry was quite critical. Indian films have great influence in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Indian state television has created a new large TV audience, and the cassette tape culture has changed the music industry.

The media explosion of the 1990s.Media ownership is extremely diverse. The new empire developed from satellite TV to development industry, and later to film production industry. To a large extent, TV distribution is still extremely fragmented; cable TV is mainly retailed by smaller independent operators in neighboring regions, which has thwarted the efforts of corporatization like other countries.

Media and film research in India, which for many years remained within the models of ideologikritik, and they are now open to historical and contemporary research, as well as to the participation of new industrial forms of digital networks and media themselves. The research is in a very early stage, and there should be some exciting progress in the next few years.