Digital peripheries : the online circulation of audiovisual content from the small market perspective

Abstract

The global reach of online platforms and services as well as the globally synchronized flows of audiovisual content might suggest that the global media market is now fully integrated. This book argues contrariwise that the global digital market is far from united and that national borders, center-periphery hierarchies and differences in scale still matter, and perhaps they matter even more than in the analog broadcast era. Indeed, if we live in the era of “post-globalization” (Flew 2018), its defining features include consumers’ continuing gravitation toward local content as well as national governments’ continuing primacy in the supranational regulation of multinational media corporations and the Internet in general (Michalis 2016). To formulate the central claim of the book more radically: as material processes, the digitalization and globalization of audiovisual distribution actually take place through the work of negotiating borders, peripheral positions, differences in scale, cultural distances and all the “friction” that comes with them (Tsing 2005). The epistemological starting point of this book is that to understand the internal workings of the global digital market in the era of the “return of the state” (Flew et al. 2016) and of populist nationalisms, we need to start from the local barriers and places remote from the global