Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

THE PRESS AND FOREIGN POLICY' IT IS a defect of some of the studies of the diplomatic background of the Great War that they tend to ignore the influence on pre-war diplomacy of public opinion in general and of the press in particular. Based primarily on official documents such studies unconsciously tend to overemphasize the parts played by the leaders with whose activities the documents are so largely concerned and to neglect some of the less obvious forces that affected the course of events. The influence of the press, it is true, can never be measured accurately. \"No diviniiig rod can locate it,\" says Miss Salmon, \"no plummet sound its depth, no instrument of precision measure it, no astronomer compute its orbit.\"2 And yet that influence in pre-war Europe was very real and very considerable. Professor Fay goes so far as to list \"the poisoning of public opinion by the newspaper press in all the great countries\"3 as one of the chief underlying causes of the war. If the influence of the press cannot be exactly determined, however, it can at least be roughly estimated; and even where no attempt is made to estimate influence, a kniowledge of newspaper views on questions of foreign policy is of assistance in clarifying the atmosphere out of which the Great WYar came.

The Press and Foreign Policy

The Information Revolution and Developing Countries. By Ernest J. Wilson, III. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 431p. $49.95. This book provides a comprehensive theoretic framework explaining the “strategic restructuring” of government policies and institutions associated with policies promoting the adoption of new information and communications technologies (ICTs). It also provides detailed case study chapters on Brazil, Ghana, and China, concluding with two chapters placing ICTs in a global perspective. The Chinese case study should be of interest to many readers, given China's political and economic importance. Brazil has a long history of state-guided and supported development strategies in this sector, combining import substitution and partnerships with transnational corporations. Ghana occupies a more peripheral position in global political economy, lacking the size and industrialization of the other countries examined.

The Information Revolution and Developing Countries

Policies shaping the production and distribution of electronic broadcasting or audiovisual services in India have undergone tremendous changes from the 1980s to the 1990s. The number of channels and programming carried by Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, has grown. Private companies both from within and outside India now produce television programming and distribute it through direct broadcast satellites or cable television systems. The dominant account of the liberalization of audiovisual services policies in India focuses almost solely on the role of global economic forces and technical change. While policy choices have been constrained, many of these limitations arose from Indian decisions made about the role of broadcasting in the 1970 and 1980s, and from social and economic developments within India in the 1990s.

Globalization and policy choice: television and audiovisual services policies in India

The internet has evolved to have a complex top-level domain name system, in which generic top-level domains such as .com and .org coexist with country-code top-level domains such as .UK and .JP. In this article, the history and significance of this hybrid naming system is examined, with specific attention directed to the manner in which it simultaneously reproduces claims to globalism, state sovereignty, and the presumption of United States hegemony. It is found that the domain name system affirms the centrality of the sovereign state while concurrently challenging its underlying basis in an idealized nexus of nation, government, and territory. These themes are explored through case studies of two Pacific island microstate domains: .PN (Pitcairn Island) and .NU (Niue).

Mutiny on the bandwidth: the semiotics of statehood in the internet domain name registries of Pitcairn Island and Niue

Pakistani government circles consider policies of the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) to be responsible for the unprecedented progression of the media industry in the country, which paved the way for the concentration of ownership and the unbridled political influence enjoyed by the owners of media organizations. In fact, successive Pakistani governments have endeavored to revisit their previous policy vis-a-vis media regulation and licensing of electronic media in the country, and an erstwhile inefficient PEMRA has recently been instructed by the government to reconsider a few policy initiatives related to the cross-media ownership and licensing of new television channels. In this article, we explore the relationship between media regulation and concentration of ownership in Pakistan through the lens of the political economy of communication and conclude that owner-friendly policies of PEMRA and its inefficiency in implementing its mandate have resulted in the concentration of ownership, which facilitated diagonal growth of a handful of companies that control the airwaves in the Pakistani media industry.

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Consolidation in the Name of Regulation: The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) and the Concentration of Media Ownership in Pakistan

Stephen D. McDowell

Papers

The Information Revolution and Developing Countries

Globalization and policy choice: television and audiovisual services policies in India

Mutiny on the bandwidth: the semiotics of statehood in the internet domain name registries of Pitcairn Island and Niue

Consolidation in the Name of Regulation: The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) and the Concentration of Media Ownership in Pakistan

India's experiments in mobile licensing☆