 Global
Media Governance
A
Beginner's Guide
Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers
By Seán Ó
Siochrú and Bruce Girard with Amy Mahan
Series:
Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture
This book is about media and
communication governance
at a global level and its key influencing forces, elements and organizations, such
as ITU, WTO, UNESCO, WIPO, and ICANN. Governance oversees regulation, and
questions addressed here include: Why do we regulate the media? What are the major forms of global regulation, and how
do they work? Who participates in, and who benefits from, media governance structures? What are the trends?
Anyone interested in
the media and its progressively rising influence over so many dimensions
of society will sooner or later find themselves confronted with these questions.
This book does not claim to answer all the questions, but it raises key
ones and points in directions where more complete answers can be found.
Published by Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers in cooperation with the United
Nations Resesarch Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).
Introduction
|| Table of Contents
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the publisher's site
"The global nature of the media system has given rise to
a whole new set of institutions to address fundamental policy and regulatory
issues. Global Media Governance is unquestionably the best introduction
and overview to this area that has ever been published. The book fills
an enormous void and makes one wonder how we got by without such a book
for so long. It will be mandatory reading for scholars, policy makers,
students, activists, and concerned citizens for years to come."
Robert W. McChesney, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"This extremely useful book documents the
struggle for control of media and communication. On the one hand, the corporate
globalization of media fractures the public sphere, silences voices of
diversity, and leads to a narrow, undemocratic global governance regime.
On the other, the rise of global civil society--particularly networks of
NGOs--enables demands for participation in the development of global media
governance regimes. The authors put it all together brilliantly."
--Saskia Sassen, author of The Global
City
"Global Media Governance is presented
as 'a beginner's guide,' and the text is indeed written in very accessible
language. However, the book is much more than a textbook for 'dummies.'
It is the essential guide for all who wish to understand which actors shape
the future of global communication and how they do it. Urgently needed,
very timely, and well documented, this book provides excellent material
for students, policy makers, and practitioners in the emerging information
society… a pleasure to use in courses on global communication."
--Cees J. Hamelink, University of Amsterdam
“The ICT revolution has made the rapid growth
of global media possible. But policy and regulation relating to public interest
objectives in media remains at the national level with ever declining influence.
To the extent there is governance of global media, it arises from an
uncoordinated hodgepodge of specialist activities at a variety of international
organizations that are poorly understood and far from transparent. This primer
maps the global media governance scene in a clear and straightforward manner
that will be valuable to both students and practitioners in the field.”
--William. H. Melody, LIRNE.Net, World
Dialogue on Regulation and
Delft University of Technology.
"This book has strong international appeal
in undergraduate media and communication studies as well as allied specialist
areas in law, business, politics, government, and education. It could definitely
be required reading in a unit on media globalization and is also a good
resource for media and policy practitioners and activists."
--Christina Spurgeon, Queensland University
of Technology
About the authors
The authors have worked on international
communication governence issues for over a decade. Together they
recently formed Comunex, to focus on international media and
communication issues.
- Seán Ó Siochrú
is a researcher, writer and activist in media and communication. As
a director of NEXUS
Research Cooperative in Dublin, he works for international
agencies in media and ICTs, and on community issues in Ireland. A
founder of the Platform for Communication Rights, he also
initiated Community
Media Network in his home country, Ireland. He has
published several books.
- Bruce Girard is
a journalist, researcher, and educator. Currently at Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands, he is originally
from Canada and has lived for many years in Latin America and
Europe. He
has been highly involved in development communication and
communication rights issues, most recently with the Communication
Rights in the Information Society campaign and with Comunica,
a network supporting use of ICTs by independent media in the South.
He has lectured and taught on broadcasting, information and
communication technologies, and communication rights in more than 25
countries.
- Amy Mahan is
a researcher in the Economics of Infrastructures Programme at Delft
University of Technology. She was production editor and
co-editor of book reviews for Telecommunications
Policy, and coordinates the online journal TelecomReform.net.
She has lived and worked in Canada (Centre for Policy Research on
Science and Technology); Australia (Centre for International
Research on Communication and Information Technology); and Ecuador
as a private consultant.
Global Media Governance is
published in co-operation with the United Nations Research Institute
for Social Development (UNRISD), an autonomous agency engaging in
multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems
affecting development.
Paper $19.95, €25.65,
£14.95 || ISBN 0-7425-1566-4
Cloth $65.00, €85.77,
£50.00 || ISBN 0-7425-1565-6
202
pages || Order
online at RowmanLittlefield.com
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