Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 217

and political processes, their analysis and assessment of that differs (as
they did in the former paradigm/era). The environmental scholar Bill
McKibben ( 1993 )ismost strong in blaming the media for the age of
'missing information', where all kinds of conventional learning, com-
munication and information exchange processes have been replaced by
an inferior substitute: the global media with its commercials and poor
informational substance. Other scholars join this criticism by blaming
the commercialisation and capitalist mode of media production for the
poor informational qualities of the current media. In his environmental
criticism of what he labels electronic capitalism Robert Paehlke ( 2003 :
28) is quite straightforward:
Electronic media are a dominant industry in their own right and the prin-
cipal means by which all other products are branded and sold globally.
The ownership of communication capacity is increasingly centralized within
large private corporations and is a rapidly growing component of wealthy
economies. Global competitiveness, communicated pervasively through the
media, threatens to become a universal core sociopolitical value.
But at the same time others are more positive or even enthusiast about
the time-space bridging properties of the media (cf. McLuhman and
Fiore, 1967 ; Meyrowitz, 1985 ), and also on the role these media play in
environmental learning processes, in communicating and disseminat-
ing environmental information and knowledge across great distances,
and in getting environmental messages across to a wide ignorant and
mostly indifferent audience in no time with limited effort. And also
Robert Paehlke ( 2003 )isless critical of the 'new' media, the Internet,
while condemning the 'old', capitalist media.
Before turning our attention to the major changes of the media dur-
ing the past decade and what this means for informational governance
on the environment, we elaborate more theoretically on mediated infor-
mation.
3. Media and mediated information
For most people globalisation is not felt through their travelling but
rather when they stay at home, through the information and com-
munications that come to them via various media. It is what Giddens
( 1991 ) calls the centrality of mediated experience that distinguishes late
modernity from its earlier time periods. Mediated experience is then