The empires of communications moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Silvio
Berlusconi are undeniably potent forces in the world, and it is not really
surprising that many observers attribute them with absolute powers. Thus, it
is argued by Richard Peet that ‘the tendency is towards the production of
one world mind, one world culture, and the consequent disappearance of
regional consciousness flowing from the local specificities of the human past’
(1986:169). The global media are seen as unproblematically capturing the
hearts and minds of their audiences and producing an increasingly
homogeneous global consciousness and culture. We are, according to Peet
now in an era of ‘ultra-culture’ in which the world’s people have been
transformed into ‘latent cogs in the capitalist production and consumption
machine’ (1982:298).
The power and influence of transnational media conglomerates we take
as given. The really significant question, for us, concerns how we think of
the functioning and effectivity of this power. What is the nature of the
relationship between communications, culture and identity? In the prevailing view, this relationship is conceived (with varying degrees of technological
determinism) in terms of the ‘impact’ of new communications technologies
upon culture and cultural identities. It is precisely this approach that informs
Richard Peet’s account of the creation of a ‘world-synthetic consciousness
and culture’ by the global communications industries. Such a formulation is
fraught with difficulties. The power of the media is assumed and never
demonstrated. Such an assumption is grounded in the model of the
communication process that informs this approach, what James Carey (1977)
has referred to as the ‘transmission view of communication’. Within this
model, communications technologies are the active and determining forces,
whilst culture and identity are passive and reactive. Communications
technologies are the causal forces, and identities are the effect, shaped and
modified by the ‘impact’ of the technologies. It is also the case—and this
will be a major focus of the subsequent discussion—that there is no
theoretical understanding of cultural identity within this perspective: cultural
identity is a black box. The only real issue that is raised concerns the
vulnerability of cultural identity to attack from the exogenous forces of
‘foreign’ communications empires. The problem then is one of resisting
cultural invasion and fortifying indigenous identity. Change is seen as
problematical, a matter of cultural erosion and even extinction. The great fear,
apparent in the work of Peet, for example, is that positive national identities
are being replaced by a global non-identity. This kind of thinking is also
apparent in those strategies which, in response to the perceived threat of
‘colonisation’, seek to sustain and defend ‘a sense of European identity’—
strategies which easily succumb to a protective ‘Fortress Europe’ mentality.
From that perspective, cultural identity is both an unproblematical and a
residual category. If we are really to understand the relation between
communication, culture and identity, then we must move beyond this
deterministic model of the communication process. Within this prevailing
framework, cultural identities can only ever be responsive and reactive to
the controlling stimulus of communications technologies. What is needed is
a better formulation of the problem, one that takes cultural identity as a
problematical and a central category. As Philip Schlesinger argues, in the
context of a discussion of national identity:
 
We now need to turn around the terms of the conventional argument:
not to start with communication and its supposed effects on national
identity and culture, but rather to begin by posing the problem of
national identity itself, to ask how it might be analysed and what
importance communicative practices might play in its constitution.
(1987:234)
 
The challenge is to understand how social and cultural identities are
constituted and to consider the parameters within which cultural identities  and orientations might be reconstituted in the present period. Within this more
fundamental agenda, we can then begin to ask questions, theoretical and
political, about the power and the potential of new communications
technologies.
Our concern is with collective cultural identity. Against the static and fixed
conception in the dominant communications model, we need to develop an
alternative which emphasises the active, dynamic and contested nature of
collective identities. Collective identity involves the achievement, by individual
actors or by social groups, of a certain coherence, cohesion and continuity.
Such bonding will always be provisional and more or less precarious. As
Alberto Melucci argues,
 
Collective identity formation is a delicate process and requires
continual investments. As it comes to resemble more institutionalised
forms of social action, collective identity may crystallise into
organisational forms, a system of rules, and patterns of leadership.
In less institutionalised forms of action its character more closely
resembles a process which must be continually activated in order
for action to be possible.
(1989:34–5)
 
The cohesion of collective identity must be sustained through time,
through a collective memory, through lived and shared traditions, through
the sense of a common past and heritage. It must also be maintained
across space, through a complex mapping of territories and frontiers,
principles of inclusion and exclusion that define ‘us’ against ‘them’. At
certain moments the established and normative bases of collective identity
enter into crisis. Coherence and continuity are threatened by fragmentation
and discontinuity; the emotional investments that inform the sense of
identity are disconnected. Symbolically, 1992 was the date that identified
one such critical moment. The question is how we manage this crisis:
whether it will be regressively through the reassertion of ‘traditional’
identities and allegiances, or whether it will be possible to imagine new
forms of cohesion and collectivity.