Introduction

For the past two decades, ‘globalization’ has been the buzz word within and beyond media and journalism studies. Globalization has decisively unmade the coherence that the modernist project of the 19th-and 20th-century nation-states promised to deliver — the neat marriage between territory, language, culture, and identity. As Geertz noted, ‘All modern nations — even Norway, even Japan — contradict themselves: They contain multitudes’ (Geertz 1973, p. 122). Scholars have generally acknowledged the multiple trajectories to and dimensions of globalization, as reflected in its various histories, processes, and forms of interconnectedness. The multidimensionality of media globalization was exemplified, for example, in the way in which mobile phone video footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein rapidly circulated around the world within hours of the event via a combination of mobile phone cameras, Internet access, and transnational media organizations. Audiences as far afield as Australia, Bangladesh, and Chile awoke to grainy images of the noose around Hussein’s neck as he argued with his executioners. Each media culture, however, reserved the right to disseminate the information as it saw fit: media in the United States largely shied away from showing any of the gory footage; meanwhile, media in India and Al Jazeera, broadcasting throughout the Middle East, ran the majority of the video.