Drawing on scholarship aimed at theorizing globalization from a cultural perspective, this chapter employs community media in an effort to trace the global through the local (see Ang 1990; Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997). Specifically, I use community media as a lens to examine the dialectical (if uneven) process between global forces and conditions and the everyday lived experience of local communities. Throughout, I take up the argument laid out in Chapter 1 related to issues of cultural imperialism. That is, I want to challenge the notion that local populations are simply subject to, or dominated by, national, regional, and increasingly transnational political and economic arrangements, structures, policies, and prerogatives.

That said, I am keenly aware of the dangers associated with overstating popular resistance to global incursions on local economies, social relations, and cultural sensibilities. Media scholar David Morley sums up this quandary as “a question of steering between the dangers of an improper romanticism of ‘consumer freedom’ on the one hand, and a paranoiac fantasy of ‘global control’ on the other” (1991: 1).