Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 214

long this distinction between old and new media will remain adequate
and useful in media analysis, as the borders between old and new are
increasingly blurred when weblogs and newspapers get increasingly
intermingled and television becomes more and more interactive and
related to the PC. But, still, it is relevant to analyse what will be the
consequences of the emergence of the new media around Internet for
the mediascape. Has the emergence of this new media given birth to a
new world media order, or will the new media in the end be encapsu-
lated in the 'conventional' media and information structure? George
Barnett ( 2004 ,asquoted in McPhail, 2006 ), for instance, draws our
attention to some of the similarities between the Internet and the old
media, such as the central and dominant position of the United States
as the nucleus of Internet traffic and the fact that direct communica-
tions between informational peripheries are rare, as most communica-
tions go via the United States or other information hubs. Boyd-Barrett's
( 2004 ) analysis of the U.S. hegemony in global cyberspace also follows
this line of analysis.
Our purpose here is not to answer these questions as that would
require a full-fledged media analysis and evaluation. We will restrict
ourselves to the role of the media in the emergence of informational
governance of the environment. We will start our analysis with a review
of what I would label conventional environmental studies on the media.
In concluding that most of these approaches have been useful but lim-
ited, we extent our analyses to the transformations of the media and
the consequences of that for informational governance. We start that
analysis by a more fundamental exploration of what the media does to
information and experiences, to be followed by an analysis of the major
media transformations that can be witnessed during the past decade
or so. Subsequently, we will analyse what this means for informational
governance of the environment and the shift of environmental battles
to the media.
2. Mediated environment
Environmental arguments and positions have never played a too strong
role in debates on the media, neither in the debate on the NWICO
nor in other media debates. Most of the environmental studies and
research on the media have been much more focused. Traditionally,
environmental research on the media has strongly concentrated on