Globalisation is one of the most potent concepts informing academic debates across many disciplines on the threshold of the 21st century. Issues of communication, culture and media lie close to the heart of this contested concept which variously refers to the collapse of time and space as obstacles to human activity, to processes of economic and cultural expansion, to the undermining of the nation state as a critical building block for any transnational activity, to parallel tendencies towards both uniformity and fragmentation.

This Reader combines classic work in the field with a series of overview essays written by leading scholars, to offer a comprehensive and illuminating overview of this key area in contemporary media studies.