OBSERVARE

Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 8, Nº. 2 (November 2017-April 2018), pp. 88-100

MEDIA, DIVERSITY AND GLOBALISATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Francisco Rui Cádima

frcadima@fcsh.unl.pt

Professor at Department of Communication Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities,

Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH/NOVA, Portugal). Researcher in charge of CIC.Digital –

Centre for Research in Communication, Information and Digital Culture. Coordinator of the PhD

course in Communication Sciences and member of the Scientific Council of FCSH/NOVA.

Abstract

The issues of cultural diversity and the plurality of voices in the current digital and global

environment are raising new challenges beyond those already identified in the context of

migration from classical media to the internet galaxy. If, with traditional media, a closing logic

under “the same” prevailed, with digital media we started to believe in the “apotheosis of the

dream of diversity” (Curran, 2008). But the truth is that the elimination of the old filters of

information and distribution does not seem to be happening. New “gatekeeping” surrounds

human intervention, with current information dissemination systems having an algorithmic

basis and artificial intelligence, biasing access to news and reducing space for cultural diversity

or even censuring the plurality of voices and cultural expressions.

Key Words

Media, Culture, Diversity, Globalisation, Digital.

How to cite this article

Cádima, Francisco Rui (2017). "Media, diversity and globalisation in the digital age".

JANUS.NET e-journal of International Relations, Vol. 8, Nº. 2, November 2017-April 2018.

Consulted [online] on the date of last consultation, DOI: https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-

7251.8.2.7

Article received on June 1, 2017 and accepted for publication on July 4, 2017

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 8, Nº. 2 (November 2017-April 2018), pp. 88-100

Media, diversity and globalisation in the digital age

Francisco Rui Cádima

MEDIA, DIVERSITY AND GLOBALISATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Francisco Rui Cádima

The power we will gain in the twenty-first century

may well upgrade us into gods,

but we will be very dissatisfied gods.

Yuval Noah Harari

Introduction

What does it mean today, at the height of the great digital platforms and the internet, to

analyse the problem of diversity – cultural diversity, diversity of cultural expressions and

pluralism – in the global context? At first it seems a contradiction, it seems to make little

sense considering the mass of information circulating in the internet galaxy. However, in

this age of reproducibility and automatism of algorithmic techniques, new problems

emerge, including “fake news”, which had never been a cause of great concern in the

media age.

On the other hand, post-media and the new and complex contexts of the digital age,

when thought about globally – in all extensions of the concept – show, for example, the

emergence of what we can call the “cybercitizen” – that is the cyberspace citizen, or at

least a “produser” of the digital world, which is generally characterised by not being

subject either to physical boundaries or to old, mitigated and reconverted models of

production or distribution. This also happens to space and territory in an increasingly

unrestricted manner, be it in economy and finance, in politics, in the context of climate,

or even in the general (mis)information that spreads and short-circuits the mediation

process, be it in traditional or digital media.

Our starting point has previous milestones: in two previous articles in the generic scope

of this theme, we analysed, in a first approach (Cádima, 2010), cases demonstrating

different fractures of a hypothetical global communication media model, namely in the

television sphere, a model that, in terms of content itself, does not exist, especially since

it is, in practice, fundamentally local or regional – in signal distribution, geopolitical and

geostrategic logic. In other words, even when technological conditions allow it, political

conditions, political pressure and interest groups preclude a clearly autonomous and

independent local/global publishing strategy.

The translation of this article was funded by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e

a Tecnologia - as part of OBSERVARE project with the reference UID/CPO/04155/2013, with the aim of

publishing Janus.net. Text translated by Thomas Rickard.

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Media, diversity and globalisation in the digital age

Francisco Rui Cádima

In a second approach (Cádima, 2016), we thought more specifically about the European

context and the dynamics of the European Union, demonstrating that the lack of cohesion

of the European project, especially since the creation of Television without Frontiers

Directive (1989), was largely based on the collapse of the spirit of law and the European

strategic project and ideology, originally set out in the directive. From both the point of

view of communication strategies and of public policies for the European audio-visual

sector, in particular the policies and monitoring directed at public radio and television

systems in Europe, it is evident – and we will try to prove it in this article – that Europe

succumbed to its own (and apparently insurmountable) contradictions, being unable to

claim in a space of excellence – the public service of media – its cultural heritage and its

project of transboundary unity and cohesion for the diversity of its experiences and

cultures.

In this research I have sought, in a complementary way to the previous works, to find

answers to two issues: first, to know if a true alternative model to what is called the

“mainstream” media – sometimes also referred to more critically as the “hegemonic

media” – was found at a global level since the emergence of the internet, and more

specifically, since the mid-90s; second, to understand the post-media phenomenon as a

whole, also in the global context, and to think if this whole complex system of post-media

communication – from local systems from the analogue age to global digital networks

and platforms, including transcontinental broadcasting systems – has been compatible

with this other idea/model of globalisation and cultural convergence that has, to a certain

extent, reached everyone on this planet in the last decades.

Globalisation and regression

To contextualise the emergence of globalisation and its cultural contexts in history, let

us turn to one of the founding texts of the 1980s and the debate by Fredric Jameson

(1984). His proposal, a criticism of the trends of that time related to the crisis of the

great narratives as a trend of postmodernism, led him to characterise the new concept

as something that would have emerged in the context of a historicity crisis:

There no longer seems to be any organic relationship between the

American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived

experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of

the newspapers and of our own everyday life” (Jameson, 1984: 22).

The question for him was paradoxical and somewhat ambivalent, that is he considered

cultural evolution in the framework of “late capitalism” as both catastrophe and progress.

This is a duality that reappears in other texts of his approximately twenty years later,

now approaching the theme of political resistance to globalisation and its analysis in its

economic, political and technological interdependencies, warning about the dilution of the

cultural in the economic, or by summoning this “historical dissociation” between two

See especially Fredric Jameson (2000). “Globalization and Political Strategy”. New Left Review 4, July-

August 2000; and (2004) “The Politics of Utopia. New Left Review 25, January-February 2004.

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Francisco Rui Cádima

distinct worlds: one that exposes what it considers to be the “social disintegration”, and

the other, the one of the societies of abundance, largely fuelled by technology.

The consequences of an open market, especially for employment and democracy, were

already identified at the end of the last century by several authors, such as Schumann

and Martin (1998). It was obvious then that global markets were generating more and

more unemployment, leaving serious doubts about the type of economic development

generated. In a sense, for the first time in the history of capitalism, employment was not

being generated, thus appearing the first human costs of globalisation. In this free trade

logic, economic-financial systems arose, but the distribution of wealth of the global

economic machine left out the new disowned of the land. In addition, faced with the crisis

of the old social structures and with the crisis of solidarity, waves of aversion against

foreigners and the economically weak emerged. It was just a short step from this point

to the emergence of protectionism and nationalism. The European project seeks to

rebuild itself from this first clash in the post-Brexit era. For this reason, it would be useful

to recall Bourdieu, remembered by Schumann and Martin (1998: 241):

We can only effectively combat technocracy if we challenge it in its

field of choice, the economic sciences, and if we put up knowledge

that respects the people and the reality they face against the

mutilated thinking technocracy resorts to.

In this context, it was obvious that the transformation of the globalisation of injustice

into a process of mutual compensation, thus seeking to achieve efficiency gains for all

citizens, could also aim to legitimise the advantages of the open market. The problem is

that on top of this wave of late capitalism there was a new technological dynamic, whose

impacts were not completely recognised in the beginning.

For Vidal-Beneyto, the association between wealth creation and the increase of inequality

is also a consequence of a deregulated technological development and, above all, the

evident economic dysfunctions and structural determinations of the global system in the

emergence of the new century. In any case, according to Beneyto, transnational citizens’

movements and citizenship initiatives, which, in a global context, constitute spaces with

some autonomy – spaces of interaction and promotion of solidarity – emerge as a new

perception in this global world of fragile and precarious equilibria, forming what he calls

a “global civil society” (2004: 22). Vidal-Beneyto considers, however, that it is through

the new globalised systems of mediation that this global civil society can be strengthened

and consolidated in the context of policies de-legitimised by the “markets” and faced with

an unregulated globalisation process.

Appadurai (2004) presents a point of view that is different from that of Jameson or

Beneyto, considering, in his anthropological perspective, that taking into account the new

contexts of globalisation and the complex interactions between global, national and local

contexts, cultural homogenisation is not necessarily established; nor can it be considered

that through the new mediation processes (electronic or digital), any type of hegemonic

media is configured, and therefore the globalisation of culture is mainly determined by

the “cannibalisation” of similarity and difference, which interact reciprocally, and by the

deterritorialisation of cultural identities, which is not exactly the same as the

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Francisco Rui Cádima

homogenisation of global flows. It is obvious, for Appadurai, that although nation-states

still offer some resistance in seeking to maintain unified and continuous identities in their

territorial spaces, the truth is that this reality is now surpassed either by intercontinental

migratory dynamics or new technological systems of intermediation, or even by digital

platforms. Thus, basically we are mainly in the face of communicational transversalities

and hybrid identities, being that, in the digital context, identity traits of communities that

reconfigure and recycle themselves do not have a precise territorial belonging. Neil

Barrett (1997) saw this in his work on “cybernation”, in which he proposed precisely that

the “old” modern specificity of the nation-state would irreparably be confronted with its

own limits in the age of the internet.

The updating of the problem of globalisation made by Appadurai in a text entitled Une

fatigue de la démocratie (Appadurai et al., 2017) reinstates the question of the loss of

economic and/or political sovereignty by modern states, reconverted again into a

principle of exclusion and a strategy for conquering an “ethnonational” sovereignty,

asphyxiating internal, intellectual and cultural dissent. In the same work, Zygmunt

Bauman considers, however, that the sphere of culture tends to progressively become a

definitive character as a “cultural heterogeneity” without this meaning the end of the

exclusion or social regression of this age of uncertainty. Other proposals in this reference

work of these agitated times, from Krastev to Van Reybrouck, from Streeck to Nancy

Fraser, among others, refer fundamentally to what seems to be a preliminary refusal of

the global market model instituted, given the populist reversal that has been established,

the refusal of the “other”, of the foreigner, refusal of the participation in electoral

processes by a public that is increasingly victimised by its own cultural, religious,

demographic and labour fears, which in a way has been transforming the vote into a kind

of weapon against democracy. Thus, new hegemonies of the old majorities are

consolidated in new contexts, whether resulting from “democratic fatigue syndrome” or

those that are reconfigured in the “post-truth” era and in political fraud, which already

subsume this hegemony as a “post-democratic” age, in the words of Wolfgang Streeck.

New data from the recent World Values Survey

make this scenario a bit more chilling:

less than half of young Europeans do not consider it essential to live in a democracy . . .

to deconstruct this globalisation, considering the evident ongoing crisis of the European

project and the current context of “post-truth” and “global regression”. But the great

question of uncertainty, that is to know if radicalisms and populisms are in fact a new

trend that is already questioning the continuity of liberal democracy as we have known

it since the eighteenth century.

Diversity in the digital age

Our perspective in this research is to assess, above all, the dimension of the

communicational and cultural diversity of globalisation – not losing sight of the

dimensions of cultural and post-media pluralism – and to understand the context that is

essentially marked by the new digital age and its impacts. First, let us look at how this

complex impasse in the domain of pluralism and diversity cultures arose during digital

emergence, trying to establish the model of globalisation based on what we might call

the “algorithmic turn” – big data, AI, machine learning, etc., with very complex

WVS, Wave 6 (2010-2014). http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org

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implications at different levels of society, but especially in the spheres of

economy/employment and science/knowledge and information.

First, let us consider the question of the genealogy of pluralism and diversity in the

European context, particularly in the context of the mission and practices of public

television services, which are responsible for making a difference in view of what general

television offers. The culture of duality or “tension” verses economy/commerce (Lowe &

Bardoel, 2007; Cádima, 2007; Novak, 2014) has always been onerous in the European

audio-visual experience and has been highly critical, especially for the developing

countries. The recognition of diversity has never risen to the dignity of either “common

heritage of humanity” or of European cultural heritage in the audio-visual context of the

EU. In general, even in the community context, cultural and media diversity have always

been relatively quite, subject to the laws of free trade and not so much to identities,

values and senses; in other words, they have rarely been able to promote effectively a

diversity of cultural expressions, including in the public media systems. In fact, and

according to Mattelart (2006: 16),

[Unesco’s] views of culture, identity and cultural heteronomies

challenge the conservative and patrimonial vision of “European

values” that marked the construction of the single market.

Therefore, cultural and media policies cannot be separated because the basic principle of

both still is the diversity of sources of information, of media ownership and of the

independence of public service.

Will digital media be different from classic media regarding cultural diversity (using the

concept in a broad sense) on the cultural, socio-economic and political spectrum? More

specifically, in the context of the diversity of voices in the network, of political diversity

and “polarisation”, of the degree of concentration of news platforms on digital media,

and in what is already strictly digital, but which seriously interferes with the issues of

freedom and human dignity, in the issue of tracking, in the control of the digital footprint

and finally in the (un)protection of personal data.

In summary, it could be said that in terms of the diversity of voices, thinking first and

foremost of the social movements of the “indignant” and the Arab revolutions, we agree

with Castells (2012) that the fundamental thing is to recognise the social and historical

nature of these movements and their impacts; that is in our perspective, to realise the

extent to which we can speak of “liberated voices” or of openness to the plurality and

diversity of voices of the communities of citizens in these new contexts. In networks,

there will always be an imperfect form of representativeness, if not for the fact that we

are faced with platforms filtered by algorithms. And, therefore, they are still “conditioned

voices”. As mentioned (Cádima, 2015), they are conditioned by access – the digital

divide, on the issue of net neutrality, but also because they are monitored by tracking

systems, bots, analytical information devices and because they intersect fake profiles,

fake news, censorship, etc., making these voices more quickly trapped in virtual control

than free in the internet galaxy.

Also regarding the concentration of ownership of media companies and digital platforms

on the internet, the first known data was not at all favourable. Hindman (2009: 18)

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Francisco Rui Cádima

referred to the existence of “powerful hierarchies” that shaped the digital media, not only

its barriers and who can enter, but also economic concentration and content, traffic,

search engines, software, etc. Therefore, he concluded, “news and media consumption

is more concentrated online than off-line” (2009: 96). Still in terms of concentration, and

given the known data, it can be said that the diversity of media and content in the context

of migration to new media, together with the consolidation of a broad and autonomous

“inclusive” public sphere and the issue of citizen participation and collaboration in the

context of an “open” internet, which is framed by the principles of “net neutrality”, are

topics that still are not completely assimilated by current network practices.

It should also be pointed out that net vigilance and other intrusive forms of virtual control

have increased dramatically in recent years, exposing, sometimes publicly, the private

information of citizens, thus denouncing mainly the weaknesses of democratic societies

(Mattelart, 2010) that were shattered when faced with the new global security logics and

their links to interest groups and to less transparent political and economic powers. Thus,

new data capture and control logic converts the user, the cybercitizens of the world, into

a kind of amorphous “internet of things” terminal, that is a dehumanised physical

receptacle exposed to a complex and invisible system of control. The consequences of

this reconversion of the “human” into a statistical subject in the age of big data is

therefore extremely critical.

Dataism and polarisation

Today, at the global level and regarding media, digital platforms and information, we

discuss and try to understand the impacts of fake news, distorted information as well as

bots and the consequences of social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, but also

Google and Microsoft, who effectively have a responsibility for formatting and “editing”

current public discourse and its impact on the political and electoral sphere. In any case,

despite the siege imposed by the new speeches encapsulated in the “post-truth” age,

according to scholars such as Jonhattan Zittrain, we are still in time to rethink what is

truly at stake and, so to speak, in time to take a step back:

There are thoughtful proposals to reseed the media landscape of

genuine and diverse voices, and we would do well to experiment

widely with them as the clickbait architecture collapses on its own

accord (Zittrain, 2017).

Computing, information, biotechnology, data and artificial intelligence are dramatically

recomposing human landscape and geopolitics, leading scientists such as Stephen

Hawking

to dramatically shorten their predictions of humanity’s “life expectancy” in this

new context. The estimate for the next hundred years is that the planet will go through

difficult trials, namely dangers caused by climate change, overpopulation, epidemics,

underemployment, possible nuclear wars and even asteroid strikes on earth. This is the

reason why the colonisation of other planets is fundamental to ensure the survival of the

See: “Stephen Hawking now says humanity has only about 100 years to escape Earth”. Chicago Tribune,

May 5, 2017. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/science/ct-stephen-hawking-escape-

earth-20170505-story.html

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Francisco Rui Cádima

species. This is one of the revisions of the story by Hawking, although his predictions

have been quite different in the recent past. In 2017, in a documentary for the BBC series

Tomorrow’s World – Expedition New Earth, he says that he believes that humankind has

already created enough technology to destroy the planet, but not to escape it.

The same happens in the field of computing: technology, algorithms and machine

learning progressively make their way without any real regulation or clear guarantees

that this path is ever closed to the “creator” or at least that humankind can rest easy and

comfortable in the face of any unforeseen event. In fact, this is already happening in

areas as important as information, especially when we think of news rankings that the

feeds of digital platforms, news aggregators or search engines organised according to

the profile of each user. “Dataism” will be a new legitimation narrative in the post-truth

age (Harari, 2017), a comprehensive and “sacrosanct” fiction that, according to the

author of Homo Deus (2017a), will have as a discursive clutch the “non-conscious

algorithms”: “If you leave it to market forces to choose between intelligence and

consciousness, the market will choose intelligence”. These “unconscious” algorithms, or

at least “market-conscious” algorithms, are a subject for reflection and, above all, of

concern, since they are configuring what some authors call the “algorithmic turn” in

science and knowledge; in other words, a “physics of culture” (Slavin, 2011) that can

range from entertainment to finance, from retail to journalism.

The term “dataism” was first coined by an American analyst, David Brooks (2013). It was

Steve Lohr, of the New York Times, who published a book on the subject in 2015. Based

on case studies and not neglecting a reflexive assumption – which constitutes a critique,

though veiled, of the big data phenomenon – Lohr essentially describes this new age in

which vast data sets are used by science or markets, enhancing forecasting and decision-

making in virtually every field, analysing the challenges, hazards and impacts that

dataism contains. In an already fully digital context, this extension or “remediation” of

computational information announces a new level of algorithmic inflexion that means that

the power of computing in the management of large masses of biometric data is no longer

dependent on human being in such sensitive matters as electoral processes, financial

flows, or in the management of news information, that is human “processing” of such

databases is progressively becoming a mirage:

Nobody understands the global economy, nobody knows how

political power functions today, and nobody can predict what the job

market or human society would look like in 50 years. (Harari,

2017a).

It is precisely this shift, this tension between the creator and his Frankenstein, between

computing and its algorithms, that today must deserve the full attention of science and of

the legal-political system in general, preventing dramatic consequences – which would

result from the loss of that control – for the whole of humanity. This is because technology

gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a “universal narrative”, or even a “creed”,

which has legitimised big data’s intrinsic logic:

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Just as free-market capitalists believe in the invisible hand of

the market, so Dataists believe in the invisible hand of

dataflow (Harari, 2016).

One of the most dramatic current effects of dataism regards what is called the polarisation

in the sphere of politics and civic participation, the antithesis of diversity in politics. Thus,

thinking about politics today means starting with the consequences of new online

communication strategies that have come to use so-called “filter bubbles”, opinion filters,

“echo chambers”, etc., as well as the entire toxic field of fake news, whose sources are

very diverse. The new North American political landscape (such as Brexit or the

presidential election in France in 2017) is thus involved in this complex whirlwind of

(mis)information, in which social networks, search engines, information aggregators and

online platforms in general are clearly involved.

These echo chambers of social networks are a very strong point of attraction for users

that end up corresponding naturally to the algorithms that reorganise information

according to profiles, interests and beliefs of those users. This means that there is a strong

tendency for users to fundamentally promote and redistribute their favourite narratives

and thus form polarised groups through what may be called the continuous creation of

polarised or thematic “information cascades”. And once inside the “bubble” it will be very

difficult to get out of it. In research conducted by IMT’s Advanced Studies Group in Lucca

(Bessi, 2016) that analysed the behaviour of 12 million Facebook and YouTube users

between 2010 and 2014, the research team followed the “likes”, shares and comments

on YouTube videos, which were incorporated into 413 different Facebook pages. There

were fundamentally two types of categories: “conspiracy” and “science”, and in general

almost all users became highly polarised; that is more than 95% of the comments, shares

and likes were in a single category of content, in an ideological echo chamber, and once

polarised, users became even more polarised; that is the user no longer has any adverse

opinions or any kind of discussion about the issues at stake that may bring other

perspectives.

We can identify various types of asymmetries in information and news in the context of

the initial convergence of traditional media and in the digital age. Basically, we speak of

the various profiles and mutations that the “spiral of silence” of the media age presents

in its eternal struggle with the open forms of freedom of expression and information, with

pluralism, diversity of contents and voices as well as censorship. From false news and

counter-information to fait-divers, sensationalism and “alternative facts”, all these themes

of the classical media age reappear in the digital age, and it is now largely through social

media that false news is validated. This is a new fact, which is shifting from the classical

“source” to the origin of sharing – that is the original source of news seems to be

increasingly subordinated to the author, to “popularity” and to the number of online shares

(AAVV, 2017). Even more interesting is that, in general, at the time of confirming and

sharing, people do not distinguish between known and unknown sources, or worse,

invented ones. For example, some studies about diversity in the context of traditional

news information point to a decrease in pluralism and diversity when supply has grown

exponentially, especially after the massification of the internet in the late 1990s. This is

the case of a study on newspapers in Flanders, Belgium (Walgrave et al., 2017). Based

on an analysis of the longitudinal content of nine Flemish newspapers at four periods, it

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has been verified that, over time, similar newspapers or newspapers belonging to the

same media groups have become less diversified regarding the news they cover.

The problem of diversity and pluralism is dramatically re-emerging in the current context

of the new asymmetries of the digital age, in which social networks and digital

“gatekeepers” are replacing old press editors, reorganising information through the logic

of “clickbait”. It is also problematic that 51% of internet users prefer social networks to

access the news, usually via mobile phones, to the detriment of traditional media,

according to a study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (Newman, et al.,

2016), University of Oxford, based on more than 50,000 interviews in 26 countries, where

Facebook is the most used platform in news consumption since many users prefer the

selection of news made by algorithms.

In the case of the polarisation of information, which is more specific to electoral periods,

it generally ends up existing throughout the whole news production/reception cycle. And

in the case of media, particularly in its relationship with new digital intermediaries, access

to information by the user/reader acquires new complexity, although the polarisation here

is the same determined by the algorithms of the same platforms, now transformed,

therefore, into news “gatekeepers”. This intermediation entails new risks for the

democratic system, not only in the political or electoral sphere, as we saw before, but in

the informational daily life of the population in general.

Nielsen and Ganter (2017) point specifically to traditional media relations with digital

intermediaries, noting that the information cycle is increasingly dependent on platforms,

and therefore these intermediaries, such as Facebook and Google, given the power they

currently have in this domain, have increased responsibilities. In their study, it was

concluded that the relationships between media companies and platforms are generally

characterised by a tension between short-term operational opportunities and long-term

strategic concerns, but more specifically marked by a balance of forces and an asymmetry

that highlight the risk of the mainstream media becoming secondary to digital

intermediaries.

Conclusion

Misinformation, polarisation, disorientation and uncertainty are some of the recurring

concepts that are characterising the present times, the “ethnic landscapes” of the

present, as referred to by Appadurai (2004). If this is the configuration of the politics of

the age, in terms of culture and information, we see, on the one hand, the issue of

diversity and plurality of voices being indexed to algorithmic logics, filtered and tracked

by complex internet control systems and/or network operators, which mainly determine

a censorship of the voices and not freedom of expression. On the other hand, the old

agenda-setting model, due to the recycling and realignment of informative material by

digital platforms, spread according to the profile of each user, appears to be a process

with an increasingly limited impact in the context of global information flows.

In terms of information, the strong penetration of the internet on a global level and the

exponential growth of news websites and digital platforms since the late 1990s ended up

not being an alternative communication model to the traditional media discourse since

the evolution established began by indexing the information according to the model of

“winner takes it all” (Hindman, 2009), passing through the model of “filter bubbles”

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(Pariser, 2010) to end with the gatekeeping of algorithms of big platforms such as Google

and Facebook (Bessi, 2016).

On the side, reception by publics, and in particular by younger audiences, especially in

more developed countries, there has been a gradual shift towards digitalisation and not

only a decrease in politicisation (Prior, 2007), but also a critical trend of greater political

polarisation. This is even more serious in the younger age groups, especially among

adolescents and young adults, where there is another problematic trend: attributing

greater credibility to friends on social networks and largely shared posts than to credible

sources of information.

Cosmopolitanism and global interconnectivity (Woodward, 2008), coupled with the

experience of citizenship and its physical and virtual networks also expose other digital

fractures, for example, at the individual level, in the peripheral community or in

geographically isolated cultures (Norris, 2008), through forms of identification,

behaviours and belongings that transcend borders, by cultural rupture or convergence

between local and global contexts, and especially by large groups of threats to some of

the opportunities discussed in the course of this reflection.

Although the media and digital landscape is full of black clouds on the horizon, the truth

is that the potential of the digital age must be considered as strategic for global

citizenship. Threats are a fact, but there are also some “opportunities”, some interstices

of freedom, precisely in the field of cultural diversity, so that different communities come

to know each other and interact in a global context. It is important not to overlook this

potential for the permanent safeguarding of cultural diversity, tolerance and intercultural

citizenship (Zayani, 2011) at this critical stage of globalisation. It may still be utopian,

considering the dystopias of the globalisation and the digital age, now recovered from

Orwell or Huxley, but if, as Jameson (1984) says, there is still a social function for this

peculiar entity which is utopia, it is so that the historical dissociation between two distinct

worlds – the duality of catastrophe/progress – which globalisation may have accentuated,

may also have its inflection. The truth is that, by the “archaeology” known up to now,

this inflection will certainly be in an individual or local context, it will hardly be global.

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