Art and Global Media. Symposium. Virtual. Real.

The aim of the symposium is to investigate and name the effects that the global media have on culture and economy as a phenomenon of the nineties.

One of the fundamental effects of information technology on the world of today is the global economy that is characterised by an almost instantaneous flow of information capital and cultural communication. Information economy and the process of globalisation cannot be divided. The outlines of the previous "world order", characterised by North-South relations and which resulted in a political landscape of three worlds, have undergone a fundamental transformation in the age of the information society and global media. We are experiencing the disintegration of the Three-World Theory, observing the emergence of a fourth world excluded from the global information flow and which, as such, can be found both in the former First and Second Worlds. The affluence of the industrialised nations of the First World is more than ever before dependent on an informational and economic network that is also linked with Asia. This explains the trend of the so-called free market towards globalisation.

The architecture of the global economy goes hand in hand with the development of a network of media globalisation. The rise of a global media market in the late eighties took place accordingly. The new missionaries of capital increasingly became aware of the significance of a global media culture for the liberal economic market. Global telecommunications systems and the world wide web thus do not serve the previous cultural, instructional purposes of public media companies, but rather – as can be seen by example of US media systems – the negative consequences of media globalisation for the public sphere can be recognised. Thus, it will be all the more important that we are informed about the social construction mechanisms of media and the media construction mechanisms of society. This is why media critique and social critique can no longer be divided.

We have invited the following social and media theorists, who were the first to introduce data, facts and theoretical concepts into their writings allowing a critique of global media culture: Edward S. Herman, Diana Johnstone, Bruno Latour, Robert McChesney, Vincent Mosco, Dan Schiller and others.

Parallel to the real-world symposium in Graz, there will also be a virtual symposium in the print media with Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Kluge, Immanuel Wallerstein and others.