Media policy after regulation?

Abstract

An apparent truism holds that the Internet and, more broadly, interoperable digital media represent the end of media policy history. This consensus rests on an erroneous reduction of media policy to broadcasting policy. Even as this reductionism makes the rounds, a new prototype for media policy is taking shape, which here is called the ‘promotional state’. The promotional state emerges at the intersection of infrastructure regulation and the new forms of intervention created to act upon media content in a space of global flows. How do governments cope with media policy when media actively reconfigure national jurisdictions? To what extent do the media and cultural industries cohere when symbolic and material economies collide? How does the promotional state modulate media policy as a way of building the media and cultural industries into its project of reshaping public spaces as particular topographies? These questions describe a particular context in which the promotional state has taken form. The article addresses those questions in describing that context.