This article takes issue with three central ideas in contemporary writing on communications and change – postmodernity, the ‘digital revolution’ and cultural globalization – arguing that they overvalue the ‘new’ and take insufficient account of historical continuities, structural inequalities and the scale and scope of economic restructuring. It suggests that analysis needs to start from the globalization of capitalist imperatives and its shifting relations to state logics and go on to explore the variable and contradictory ways this process is reconstructing communications systems as industries, cultural formations and everyday resources.
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