Media and the Global Divide A Bottom-up and Citizen Perspective

Abstract

When addressing media and global divides, the focus of the problem is often on the overall global trends in media and cultural production – identifying current developments in different regions of the worlds, and illustrating the complexity of these developments within the media and communications panorama in general and cultural production in particular. However, with the present paper, I wish to complement such meta perspectives by offering a bottom-up and more grounded perspective upon globalization and the role of media in articulating, or not articulating, divides. Consequently, as my commentary to the overall theme for the 2008 IAMCR conference, here I reflect upon media and global divides from the perspective of how these divides are experienced in everyday life, by ordinary citizens. Particular emphasis is put upon people who are marginalized in the societies where they live. My brief examples are from rural Malawi, low-income urban Brazil and amongst ethnic minorities in Denmark. The lived divides are approached from three perspectives, that of the material divides, the socio- cultural divides and the symbolic divides. Following an account of these different lived divides, I assess the ‘citizen tactics’, that is, the different attempts to overcome the identified divides, suggesting that by understanding the character of such citizen tactics, we can also understand the (re-)configuration of political identities in times of global divides.