Television is perhaps the most global of all mass media, at times extending its services to vast audiences around the world regardless of age, gender, literacy, nationality, or income. By comparison, newspapers usually serve local or in some cases national subscribers. Magazines, although national or in some cases international in reach, tend to cater to niche groups of readers. Radio transcends the literacy barrier, which is especially important in poor countries, yet increasing access television in these societies tends to displace the primacy of radio, and consequently to fragment the audience. As for the Internet-a medium that provides rapid communication around the world, regardless of political or regulatory constraints-its explosive growth over the past decade has been restricted to elite, well-educated users. Only movies come close to television as a global competitor, yet even blockbuster movies are more commonly viewed on a TV screen (via broadcast, cable, videotape or DVD) than in a theater.

     Television is a pervasive presence in wealthy societies around the world, and even in relatively poor countries, such as India and People's Republic of China, TV viewing is now a common experience among the majority of the population. Television is also the popular medium of choice during historically significant moments, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. At such times, huge audiences tune to televi­sion news services both for information and for cultural engagement, seeking somehow to participate in momentous events with global significance. Furthermore, television is the purveyor of elaborately staged media events, including political campaigns, beauty pageants, the Olympics, and the Academy Awards. Some critics even include major military campaigns among such staged events, arguing that the Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan were elaborately choreographed in order to cater to global television audiences. For the first time in human history, vast numbers of people participate in such public events on a global basis. What is more, television facilitates the global circulation of performers, narratives, and program formats, thereby creating a loosely shared repertoire of popular cultural forms. Television heightens one's sense of connection to ideas and events from near and far, fostering tentative inklings of global connectedness, and perhaps even global community.

     No matter how inchoate these feelings may be, and despite the fact that this sense of community is fraught with cultural differences and political tensions, television nevertheless makes possible widespread awareness of the global context in which human events and cultural forms unfold. Yet it would be folly to contend that the technology of television is the driving force in globalization. It is instead one element in a complex process of social change that stretches back at least 500 years. Television at once is a barometer of change and a contributor to change. Furthermore, television has its own distinctive histories and institutional logics. Consequently, we might explore the significance of global television by examining it from three perspectives: institutional, historical, and intellectual.

     Institutionally, one can discern significant changes in the medium over the course of its history. Originally television, like radio before it, emerged as a quintessentially national medium. In almost every country, the state played an active role in its deployment, hoping that television would serve purposes of national integration, social development, public enlightenment, and popular entertainment. Using their power to grant broadcasting licenses and therefore limit the number of national network broadcasters, governments carefully controlled access to the air­ waves either by creating public-service broadcast systems that served the interests of the state or by licensing domestic commercial broadcasters who pledged to serve the national interest. In fact, with the exception of the Western Hemisphere, most nations around the world opted for public-service television during the early years of the medium. In countries like France, the government organized powerful, centralized television networks that focused on the promotion of national culture, while in poorer countries like India and China, television was mobilized to address pressing concerns related to economic and social development. Whether a commercial or public service, audiences in most countries had few channels to choose from during this classical era of national network television and broadcasters consequently placed their first priority on serving a mass audience.

     During the 1980s, however, television institutions began to change dramatically. For example, economic reversals in Europe put great pressure on the budgetsof public-service broadcasters as government subsidies and license revenues began to decline. Attempts to justify increased public expenditures to support these beleaguered institutions were met with challenges from groups who traditionally were marginalized by national networks. Women's organizations, labor unions, peace groups, environmental advocates, and ethnic and regional political movements all criticized state broadcast institutions for focusing on mass audiences and failing to represent a diverse range of perspectives.

     This crisis of legitimacy came at the very moment when transnational entrepreneurs with access to new sources of capital began to develop satellite/cable services that fell outside the domain of national broadcast regulation. Business leaders supported these initiatives since it would expand the availability of television advertising time and diminish government control over the airwaves. The resulting licenses for new commercial channels initially targeted two groups: transnational niche viewers (e.g., business executives, sports enthusiasts, and music video fans) and subnational niche groups who were not being served by public broadcasters (e.g., regional, local, or ethnic audiences). Similar trends emerged outside of Europe in countries such as India, Australia, and Indonesia. Meanwhile, in the countries dominated by commercial broadcasting systems, market forces drove the development of new services as the number of satellite/cable channels began to expand rapidly, challenging the hegemony of the existing national broadcast oligopolies.

     During this era of change, a new generation of corporate moguls-such as Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.), Ted Turner (CNN), and Akio Morita (Sony)­ aspired to build media empires that realized global synergies through horizontal and vertical integration of their television, music, motion picture, video game, and other media enterprises. These new conglomerates aim to serve a wide variety of mass and niche markets in both information and entertainment. Although national audiences continue to play an important role in their calculations, companies such as News Corp. increasingly strategize about transnational and subna­tional audiences, hoping to find new markets and potential synergies among their diverse operations.

     Besides contributing to the growth of global media conglomerates, this "neo-network era" of multiple channels and flexible corporate structures has also engendered new local services, such as Zee TV in India and Phoenix TV in China. It has also forced global television services to adapt their content for local and regional audiences. For instance, MTV now operates eight distinctive channels in Asia alone, offering various mixes of global, regional, and local programming.

     Thus, globalization has paradoxically fostered the production and promotion of transnational media products as well as localized niche products aimed at subna­tional audiences, such as teenage music fans. Unlike the classical network era, when television networks tended to focus exclusively on national mass audiences, media conglomerates today are flexibly structured to accommodate marketing strategies aimed at a variety of audiences, sometimes without regard to national boundaries. The scale and competitive power of these new television institutions have seriously undermined public broadcasting in some countries, such as Italy. But in other countries such as India, competition with satellite TV has encouraged Doordarshan-the public-service broadcaster-to improve program quality, conduct systematic audience research, and diver­sify its services, targeting new channels at local and niche viewers, many of whom were previously marginalized by the national broadcast monopoly. The globalization of television can in large part be explained by these changes in media institutions, audience configurations, and production practices. Yet it is also part of a broader historical transformation that has been going on for at least 500 years, beginning with the European voyages of discovery and conquest.

     From a historical perspective, television is but one component of an ongoing process of globalization. This process refers on the one hand to the increasing speed and density of interactions among people and institutions around the world, a trend that manifests itself in the dynamic interdependence of global financial markets, the transnational division of labor, the interlocking system of nation-states, the establishment of supranational institutions, and the interconnection of communication and transportation systems. On the other hand, globalization also refers to changing modes of consciousness, whereby people increasingly think and talk about the world as an entity. Sociologist Roland Robertson suggests that rather than the world just being itself, we increasingly imagine the world being "for itself." We speak of global order, human rights, nuclear disarmament, and world ecology as shared experiences and collective projects. We reflect upon information from near and far and we often deliberate as if we have a stake in both domains. Not everyone joins in these conversations, and certainly all voices are not equal, but these discussions nevertheless span greater terrain and include more people than ever before and the outcomes of these interactions often have effects that transcend local and national boundaries.

     All of the trends just outlined have accelerated in the past 150 years with the help of communication technologies like the telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, television, and computer. Moreover, the development and deployment of these technologies have been linked to specific historical projects-European expansion and colonization, the cold-war-era struggle between the superpowers, and most recently neoliberal, supranational capitalism. This last project, which emerged after the decline of authoritarian communist regimes, is most centrally concerned with trade liberal­ization, as countries around the world are being pressed to eliminate import tariffs on goods and services, as well as cultural products. Consequently, no society today can confidently say that it stands outside the field of global financial markets and transnational corporate operations. A similar observation might be made about popular culture and television, since the commercial flow of goods and ideas around the world has escalated dramatically in recent times. Thus the globalization of television is part of a longer historical trajectory. It builds upon previous developments, yet it also has contributed significantly to the escalating pace of change.

     Finally, from an intellectual perspective, one can see that debates about transnational flows of popular culture predate the emergence of global TV by almost a century. As early as the 1920s, national broadcast systems, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), were put in place as a bulwark against foreign media influences, particularly Hollywood films and U.S. popular music. Throughout the 20th century, preserving and promoting national culture over the air­ waves was characterized as a key element of national sovereignty in Europe, Latin America, and especially in the newly independent states of the postcolonial world, such as Ghana, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Scholars such as Herbert I. Schiller, Dallas Smythe, and Armand Mattelart were especially strong critics of the U.S. TV exports, claiming that they played an important role in sustaining an international structure of economic and political domination. They furthermore contended that the huge flood of media messages exported from the core industrialized countries specifically served the interests of a Western ruling class by squeezing out authentic local voices and instead promoting a culture of consumption that sustains the profitability of capitalist enterprise. This media imperialism thesis emerged in the 1960s and prevailed through the end of the 1980s. Although many scholars still adhere to its central tenets, others have commented upon significant changes in television institutions, audiences, and programs since the 1980s.

     Joseph Straubhaar, for example, questions the em­phasis on Western dominance of TV schedules around the world by pointing out that in Latin American countries and the Caribbean, national or local programs generally tend to draw larger audiences than imported products. Even though Hollywood continues to be the world's dominant exporter of television programs, most U.S. shows are broadcast in off-peak hours, with the heart of prime time reserved for local productions. Moreover, scholars point to the increasing amount of television trade within particular regions of the world, and note that when audiences tune to a foreign program, they generally prefer a show that has been imported from a country with a similar language and/or culture. In Venezuela, for example, viewers are most likely to prefer a show imported from a regional producer like Mexico's Televisa or Brazil's Globo rather than a Hollywood production. Likewise, Taiwanese audiences seem to prefer Japanese or Hong Kong serial dramas over Western fare, and Kuwaiti audiences prefer dramas from producers in Cairo. In recent years, the one-way program flow from Hollywood to the rest of the world has been displaced by more complicated patterns of distribution.

     One indication of these new patterns of TV flow can be gleaned from the emergence of global media capitals, such as Bombay, Cairo, and Hong Kong. Such locales have become centers of the global television industry that have specific logics of their own, ones that do not necessarily correspond to the geography, interests, or policies of particular nation-states. For example, Hong Kong television is produced, distributed, and consumed in Taipei, Beijing, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. The central node of all this activity is Hong Kong, but the logics that now motivate the development of the Hong Kong television are not necessarily governed by the interests of the Chinese state or even the Special Administrative Region. Likewise, Bombay, once the home of the national Indian film industry, is now the center for transnational enterprises that operate across the film, television, and music industries. For example, Zee TV-South Asia's most popular Hindi-language commercial satellite channel-also provides a satellite service to Europe, distributes music videos in Los Angeles, and mounts film productions targeted at audiences around the globe. As numerous critics have noted, Bollywood has gone global, seeking out new audiences, new financing, and fresh sources of creative talent. Although U.S. programs continue to play a powerful role in media markets around the world, their long-term domination of global markets is far less certain given the emergence of competing media capitals. Moreover, even in countries where Hollywood programs make their way into prime time, their impact on viewers is uncertain. Cultural studies researchers such as David Morley, Ien Ang, Marie Gillespie, and James Lull have shown how audiences make unanticipated uses of television programming, often reworking the meanings of transnational texts to accommodate the circumstances of their local social context. These findings raise questions about the presumed ideological effects of Hollywood television programs as they circulate around the world. Rather than simply absorbing U.S. capitalist ideology, "active audiences" fashion meanings and identities that are hybrid and complex. It is therefore difficult to argue that the medium is little more than an instrument of capitalist domination. Moreover, investigations of the institutional practices of media organizations find that, contrary to widespread anxieties about cultural homogenization, television services around the world increasingly compete with Hollywood imports by developing programming that is adapted to the needs and interests of specific local audiences.

     The media imperialism thesis has been challenged on other accounts as well. Critical studies of nationalism delineate the historical and contested qualities of modem nation-states, showing how power relations within countries are often as exploitative as power relations between countries. Consequently, the media imperialism thesis, which tends to venerate national media, may rush too quickly to the defense of countries with internal politics deserving of greater scrutiny. National media systems have often been insensitive to the interests of minority groups. In India, for example, Do­ordarshan, the national media monopoly, provided few benefits to Tamil or Telugu or Muslim populations prior to the introduction of satellite TV competitors. Indeed, pressures of globalization unexpectedly opened the door to new services, voices, and contexts for public deliberation. Likewise, in mainland China, the national television system has grown more responsive to local cultures and languages as it attempts to respond to the pressures of transnational television flows.

     Finally, although the media imperialism thesis claims that "authentic" local cultures are disappearing under the avalanche of American popular culture, recent research in the humanities and social sciences­ especially in the field of anthropology-questions the prior existence of "pure" or "authentic" cultures. Even before the advent of modern mass media, cultures were always in flux and often shaped, albeit more slowly, by outside influences. Rather than portraying local culture as an integrated, organic way of life that has only recently been violated by the intrusion of global television, recent scholarship suggests that it is more productive to understand culture as a dynamic site of social contest and interaction. Thus television should be understood as a site of struggle between competing social factions and forces. It is a terrain of interaction in which power relations clearly manifest themselves, yet it is also a dynamic sphere of discourse and social practice, with complex and often unintended outcomes. Consequently, careful attention must be paid to the diverse local contexts of television programming and institutions around the world.

     These challenges to the media imperialism thesis have formed the foundation of globalization studies of television, while opening the door to new critical perspectives. John Tomlinson suggests, for example, that a critique of global capitalist modernity is perhaps a more salient analytical project for television scholars. Such an approach would still be alert to questions of power and dominance, but it would no longer fetishize local cultures of the pre television era, nor would it make sweeping assertions about the function of the medium as an unqualified tool of capitalist domination. Television does not instrumentally shape or homogeneous human consciousness; rather, it alters the ways in which we reflect upon our environment-near and far-and the quotidian choices that we make. Tomlinson contends that the emergence of a "glocal" of popular culture may in fact lay the foundations for nascent transnational political movements around issues such as labor, ecology, and human rights.

     Similarly, Ien Ang advocates television research that explores the global/local dynamics of the medium, arguing that the very indeterminacy of communication processes in a world of media conglomerates is perhaps the central question that researchers must address. The play of power in global television is to be found in the ways that media conglomerates attempt to set structural limits on the production and circulation of meaning and contrarily on the ways in which viewers both comply with and defy these semiotic limits. This play of power requires an understanding of industries and audiences, as well as the diverse social contexts in which the contest over meaning arises.

     In conclusion, the study of global TV invites us to examine the emergence of transnational programming, audiences, and institutions, but it also encourages us to consider the longer trajectory of globalization as a social process and to reflect upon the relatively recent human encounter with a global communication medium. During the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan hyperbolically heralded the arrival of a "global village." Perhaps more modestly, one might suggest that television facilitates a process whereby villages around the world increasingly perceive their circumstances in relation to global issues, forces, and institutions, as well as local and national ones.