The congress addresses relationships between media and contemporary global divides, be they historical or emergent phenomena. It will explore the pivotal yet under-researched roles of the media with regard to today’s global inequalities.

In recent decades the world has undergone fundamental changes related to geopolitical, economic, cultural, religious and other conditions. New divisions, no longer based on territory, have complicated or partially replaced the old East-West and North-South dimensions of the world system, generating differences and distinctions that cut through local life worlds, between cities and suburbs, between the expanding metropolis and the countryside. We have witnessed the globalization of traditional group identities and affiliations along ideological, religious, class, gender and ethnic lines, at the same time that new transnational affiliations are being formed.

Different media and media genres are related in different ways to these developments. The most common media representations, it seems, simply ignore global cleavages, by masking them or framing them in “Western” terms. This is most evident in the context of an emerging new world order. This in turn is related to a range of other divides, the digital divide being perhaps the most frequently noted, with its repercussions for transnational media structures. These divides can be characterized as simultaneously technological and social, generated by markets and socio-political orders. They are further reflected in an array of media genres and formats, as well as in the segmentation of national, regional and worldwide audiences, as seen for example in divisions between elite and popular media productions. There are at the same time cases where these distinctions are increasingly blurred, particularly in the most rapidly modernizing and expanding media systems, which often place commercial and transnational media forms in the service of political governance. Challenging this trend, we see the expansion of democracy movements around the world, placing inequality on the agendas of both mainstream and alternative media.

These transformations point to media as increasingly significant actors and as establishing new arenas on a global scale. Comparative and in-depth study of these developments, both as distinct phenomena and as intrinsically interdependent, both as factors internal to media and as they affect the media’s increasingly complex relationships to other factors, together constitute a major challenge for media and communication research as we face the second decade of the new millennium.