Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 225

corporations and - to a lesser extent today - state bureaucracies, the
Internet is believed to have grown more organically in relation to sci-
ence and civil society. Although we have seen in former chapters that
this is indeed to some extent correct, the role of multinationals as
Microsoft, Google and AOL balances a too black-and-white division
in the mediascape. With respect to cyberspace and the Internet, the
struggle over power and control has only just started, and it remains
to be seen to what extent the current democracy and relative lack of
monopolisation of the Internet will endure in the future. Some see
similar dangers for Internet as what they identify for the current con-
ventional media: state-control in nondemocratic societies and capital
control in the OECD market economies (cf. Paehlke, 2003 ; Downing,
2005 ). Goldsmith and Wu ( 2006 ) even conclude that within democratic
societies there is increasing state control over the Internet, making a
borderless Internet an illusion. Others are less pessimistic and witness
also innovative developments, whereas the new media challenge the
existing conventional media in their monopolies: Indymedia (cf. Chap-
ter 8 ), the Korean Internet newspaper OhmyNews 5 or the diffuse fluid
of webloggers.

The media as battleground

Overall, over the past two decades, the media “have become more pow-
erful than ever technologically, financially and politically as their global
reach allows them to escape from strict political controls” (Blumer
and Gurevitch, 1995 ). Increasingly, the media have managed to move
beyond political control, not only through privatisation and monopo-
lisation but also through the globalisation of media and informational
flows, making nation-state institutions ill-equipped to govern transna-
tional flows. In that sense, the 1970s ideas of the NWICO on state con-
trol of incoming and outgoing information flows would sound naive

5

This Internet newspaper, established in 2000, is produced by thousands of
citizen-reporters, who write articles that are corrected, verified and edited by the
publishing house, which also has the right to refuse articles
(http://english.ohmynews.com). Similar experiments in other countries have
followed this example (e.g., http://www.janjan.jp in Japan;
http://www.mymissourian.com in the United States), often with less success in
challenging the conventional media because of the lack of the specific Korean
historical backgrounds of information self-censorship in the 1980s.