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, or a 'bipolar opposition between the
Net and the Self' (Castells, 1996, p. 3), rests upon two related dichotomies
that have proven to be less and less tenable or sustainable over time. The first
is the idea that there has been both a greater global concentration of control
over media distribution and at the same time a growing diversification in the
tastes and preferences of media users/audicnces, so that 'we are not living in a
global village, but in customised cottages globally produced and locally
distributed' (Castells, 1996, p. 341). The counter-trends to greater global
media concentration will be discussed in later chapters, but it is important to
note that arguments that we are at the end of the age of mass media may both
overstate the success of broadcast television in aggregating populations
around particular media consumption patterns, and at the same time greatly
underestimate the continued pull of media that can reach large segments of the
population simultaneously and therefore act as a magnet for associated advertising
revenues. As Garnham (2004) observes, there is the real danger here of
conflating arguments concerning the perceived - and often overstated - threat
of imported media content and cultural imperialism, with claims that there
has been a substantive de-n~assification of the media audience. Garnham finds
such arguments indicative of a tendency in theories of new media and its
impacts where:
There is a failure to distinguish between the effects of new ICTs on the economy in
general, which then may or may not have significant effects in the spheres of politics
and culture, and the effects directly on politics and culture themselves - for
instance the claims made for the Internet as an agent of democratic renewal and the
'reinvention' of government or the supposed de-massification and globalization of
the media. (Garnham, 2004, p. 179)
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Theories of Global Media 65 l
Tile second set of concerns are about the relationship between the 'real' and
tile 'virtual'. In their detailed ethnographic study of uses of the Internet among
~rinidadiarlsM, iller and Slater (2000, p. 5) presented a con~pellinga rgument
that 'we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in
other social spaces', rather than identifying Internet use as happening within
a 'virtual world' that is somehow disconnected from the everyday, the hereand now, and interactions with pre-existing forms of community. How peopleengage with the multiple forms of communications associated with theInternet - which range from playing in MMOGsS to browsing websites and
reading e-mail, and from being a consumer to a userlparticipant, as is
promoted on blog sites and file-sharing sites such as Flickr and YouElbe - issomething best understood empirically and in a detailed sense, rather thanread off from the intersection between particular technological developmentsarid modish assumptions derived from recent cultural theor