"Featuring specially commissioned chapters from experts in the field of media and communications law, this book provides an authoritative survey of media law from a comparative perspective. The handbook does not simply offer a synopsis of the state of affairs in media law jurisprudence, rather it pr ... ovides a better understanding of the forces that generate media rules, norms, and standards against the background of major transformations in the way information is mediated as a result of democratization, economic development, cultural change, globalization and technological innovation." (Publisher description) more

"This essay argues against reducing the recent history of global television to an oversimplified transition between ‘statist’ and ‘consumerist’ dispensations. As apparently irreconcilable ideologies of television, the statist and consumerist models represent two ways of imagining the relatio ... n between the deployment of media and the project of modernity. Despite their surface differences, both share a tendency to imagine television in primarily ‘representative’ rather than ‘constitutive’ terms: they both evaluate television according to its ability to represent or address supposedly pre-existing publics, as opposed to its power to help constitute those very publics. I develop the question of the constitutive potential of television by reconsidering a decade of Indian television history – the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s – that is generally dismissed as a transitional phase between statist and consumerist paradigms. Through a discussion that is empirically grounded in the Indian experience, I propose categories that might inform comparative explorations of media and modernity in an age of globalization." (Abstract) more