Chapter II: Globalisation Flows

“But I don’t quite understand the big deal about it,”

To most of us, a statement like this directed at any of our favourite television shows is likely to cause varying degrees of frustration. Fortunately, while discussing The Walking Dead with my mother, she was questioning the importance of the show being aired in Australia so soon after it airs in the US or UK.

In the past, Australia has been subject to significant delays in the airing of television content originally being shown in the US or UK, with seasons being shown here months or even years after their original air date. However this practice is becoming less common and we are seeing a trend in episodes being “fast-tracked”; resulting in same-week (such as FOX8’s Falling Skies), same-day (like Channel Ten’s Under The Dome) or even within a few hours of its premiere (either through television like Showcase’s Game Of Thrones or digitally, like ABC chose to do via its iView service with the first half of Doctor Who’s seventh season).

In reference to globalisation, these near-instantaneous releases help to prevent the slowing or breaking of the various forms of globalisation ‘flows’. When it takes months for a show to reach its audience in Australia, the spread of culture, information, media (and even that of capital) is reduced and runs the risk of lessening its impact thanks to the power of things like social media (for the record, I’m yet to find someone who wasn’t aware of a certain character death in the first season of Game Of Thrones before they saw it).

Rantanen (2005, pp. 2-3) makes the point of noting that international communication neglected to focus on people themselves, and that while intercultural communication was established in order to rectify this imbalance, neither recognised how the people were using the media they had access to. With this in mind we can see that the international communication of television has begun to recognise how the public is consuming media in modern times and that a staggered release results in a jagged effect on its audience and globalisation as a whole.

For my generation, with its access to instantaneous information, is almost required to have these television shows at the ready lest we fall behind in global trends (or worse; get spoiled!). While my mother, who barely uses the computer let alone social media, is content with watching ABC’s Hustle despite the time lag, for someone like myself who is fully subject to the effects of social media keeping the flows of globalisation moving is definitely a ‘big deal’.

References
Rantanen, T 2005, ‘Theorizing media globalization’, The media and globalization, Sage, London, pp. 1–18.