ICA Presentation, and more on Neoliberalism

I presented my ICA paper this morning in Montreal. Too many paper, not enough time, as tends to happen at ICA, with six papers in just over one hour. The paper was called "Rethinking Global Media: Creative Diversity and Media Dispersal". The final paper will be sent to the International Journal of Communication shortly, but a draft is available from the ICA web site. An earlier version presented in Seoul last year can be found at the QUT ePrints web site.

It was in a session that also had papers on the Lineage online games from Korea and on the Nigerian video boom, both of which fitted the theme of my paper well.

In the question time, the all embracing trope of "neoliberalism" appeared again. The final question was "Aren't we missing the elephant in the room here, which is the global dispersal of neoliberal ideology by the dominant Western powers?". Before I could say "No", the session came to a close with that question.

I had the good fortune to meet Simon Ellis, the Head of Section for Science, Culture and Communication Statistics at the session, and we had coffee afterwards. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics is headquartered in Montreal. Among the issues we discussed, we agreed that I should have said no to the last question, as the dispersal of global media production and distribution is supported by the UNESCO data. He also pointed to some flaws with the recent UNCTAD Creative Economy report, which I have referenced in a previous post.

UNESCO are hosting a session tomorrow that I am looking forward to. There is also a session on the impact of NAFTA on the cultural and creative industries.