Media regulation in the digital age poses distinct challenges. Many national governments are seeking to assert control over what their citizens can access online, whereas intermediaries such as Facebook and Google strive to turn the internet into a global platform. This chapter discusses how national and global forces intersect in distributing media across territorial boundaries.
Introduction
It has long been a truism of communication and media studies that the media are global. The Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan spoke of a ‘global village’ that was increasingly unified through broadcast technologies, and a variety of media events have sought to enact this globality, including the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup sporting events, concert events such as Live Aid (1985) and Live Earth (2007), and charity singles such as 1984's famous ‘We Are the World’. Chris Rojek has described the global media event as ‘the most heart-warming goodwill newsletter of modern times’, where ‘we are conscious of being part of an international community in which pre-ordained divisions of race, class, religion, sexual orientation, politics and the vulture logic of capitalism appear to magically vanish’ (Rojek, 2012, p. vi).
The spirit of the global ecumene invoked by global media has carried over into the digital space. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg termed his 2017 mission statement on how Facebook can be a force for good in the world ‘Building Global Community’ (Zuckerberg, 2017). Addressing his statement to ‘our community’, Zuckerberg describes Facebook's mission as being on ‘a journey to connect the world’, as a company that ‘stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community’. Understanding Facebook as a company that ‘can […] develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us’, he proposed that:
Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community. […] My hope is that more of us will commit our energy to building the long term social infrastructure to bring humanity together. The answers to these questions won't all come from Facebook, but I believe we can play a role (Ibid.).
