London, Oct 1 (IANS) The exponential growth of the Indian media has led to some hand-wringing among many who bemoan the lowering of standards of content, but Western media research is increasingly taking note of what is becoming one of the largest culture industries in the world.
For decades India and other countries of what is considered the 'South' figured intermittently on the Western media research radar. But India and China featured prominently at a major conference at the University of Westminster recently.
The conference, titled 'Internationalising Media Studies: Imperatives and Impediments', was attended by academics and researchers from across the globe, including leading lights such as Annabelle Sreberny, Robin Mansell, Jeremy Tunstall, John Downing, Peter Golding, Joseph Straubhaar and Kaarle Nordenstreng.
Straubhaar of the University of Texas, Austin, said the US remained pre-eminent in finance, production and distribution of cultural goods globally. But research had shown that while audiences preferred local news, they exercised different and varied choice for entertainment.
"We are reaching the point where formats are becoming more important than programming," Straubhaar said, and cited the examples of Big Brother, Brazilian telenovellas, 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire', 'Pop Idol' and so forth.
Speakers at the conference said the curricula of media studies needed to be revised to incorporate the experiences of international students and the rapid changes in the media industries across the globe.
Daya Kishan Thussu, professor at the University of Westminster, said in his keynote address: "The economic growth of India and the 'peaceful rising' of China - the two ancient civilisations with huge potential to influence the emerging global 'knowledge society' - are likely to affect the way media studies is theorized."
Several case studies and new perspectives on global dimensions of media research were presented at the two-day conference. At several panel discussions, experts highlighted the burgeoning media strengths of India and China and called for going beyond Western perspectives in media research.
"It is important to remind ourselves that an international approach to studying and researching media would acknowledge that it has a global history, that printing was invented in China not in Frankfurt, that the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire was established in 1511 and the first printing press in the Americas was not in the US but in Mexico, in 1535," said Thussu, the first professor of Indian origin in the field of media studies in a British university.
"India had a daily newspaper in 1780, while by 1870s more than 140 newspapers in Indian languages were circulating there. The first Arabic newspaper was launched in 1789 while the first overseas Chinese newspaper was founded in San Francisco in 1854.
"There is a long history of media outside the standard Anglo-American or European version of it."
Thussu said that the globalisation of the media meant that media studies should be internationalised. Another reason to incorporate international or non-Western perspectives in media studies curricula was the increasing numbers of students from across the globe enrolling on media courses.
In a robust intervention, Sreberny, professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the doyenne of international communication research, said the recent recognition of 'the other' in media research was a new and welcome development.
Sreberny said: "Media research has been internationalising for a long time, but the significance and recent recognition of regionality is new. There is recognition of the cultural consistency of Asia and Africa.
"Western domination in the field has now fractured. Globalisation collapses spatiality and the nation-state becomes diasporic".
