1744-6716 Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 1744-6716 University of Westminster Press 10.16997/wpcc.238 Commentary Where is the Global in Media Theory (and When)? Morley David d.morley@gold.ac.uk Goldsmiths, University of London, GB 30 01 2017 12 1 7 8 15 12 2016 15 12 2016 Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s) 2017 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

What are the premises of the major questions in media theory? Arguing for better questions this contribution notes the persistence of eurocentricism, mediacentricism and technological determinism and the dominance of the experience of what Jared Diamond calls the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies) nations in framing the terms of debate and study.

Anthropology in works such as Larkin (2008) may help defamiliarise the presumptions of western media theory and more clearly address the question of ‘Where is the global “Greenwich Mean Time” of Media Theory?’ Arguing for the need to place the technological present in historical perspective (cf Edgerton, 2008) this contribution makes the case for the primacy of historical and spatial contexts over the immediate moment of technological invention – on which so much attention is customarily focussed. To focus on media technologies and ‘inventions’ without considerations of their context runs the risks of embracing such dangerous simplifications as the idea that their socio-cultural effects can be deduced from their presumed technological ‘essences’ – whereas any given technology may very well come to have quite different significance in varying cultural contexts.

 Eurocentricism media theory media technologies

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Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

 Author Information

David Morley is currently Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London and begun his career as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. At Goldsmiths he co-founded the Transnational Research Unit and the Pacific Asia Cultural Studies Forum. He is the editor of Routledge’s Comedia book series and the author of books including Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (1992), Media Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New (2007) and Communications and Mobility: The Mobile Phone, the Migrant and the Container Box (forthcoming, 2017). He currently serves on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of a number of journals, including The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Television and New Media and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

 Edgerton D. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 2008 London Profile Books Larkin B. Signal and Noise: Media, Infastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria 2008 Durham, NC Duke University Press