Post Americana: Twenty-First Century Media Globalization

Abstract

This article shows how neoliberal deregulation, speculation, and financialization unleashed the unfathomable potential of global media, thereby disrupting prior assumptions about the scope, scale, and practices of media industries. After almost a century of American hegemony, the topographies of media industries are today growing more plastic and complicated as media institutions scale their ambitions and operations in an increasingly porous and dynamic environment. This article critically examines the features of US hegemony, the forces that are undermining it, and the emergence of a post-American era that is ineluctably global.

Netflix, Spanish television, and La casa de papel: Growing global and local TV together in the multiplatform era

“…Back in February 1941, Life magazine publisher, Henry Luce, famously christened the 20th century, ‘The American Century’ (1941: 61). Michael Curtin (2020) utilised this metaphor to assert that the global media landscape of the 21st century has entered a decidedly ‘post-American era.’ He explains how ‘today we are experiencing a proliferation of new media options that decenter, disperse, and erode cultural hierarchies and spatial boundaries so that the very concept of singular global leadership seems curiously outré.’ In the realm of television in particular, growing patterns of radical convergence, increasing consolidation, and heightened financialisation (which refers to determining a corporation’s success by its stock market valuation and speculation about its future prospects) have become commonplace and normative in TVIV.…”